London Review of Books

Primeval Bach

Basil Lam, 18 June 1981

Bach and the Dance of God
by Wilfrid Mellers.
Faber, 324 pp., £15, November 1980, 0 571 11562 4Show More

“... Passion the named persons can have only their Gospel words. So Ach mein Sinn (No 19) cannot be ‘Peter’s Aria’ (‘Part 1, centred on Peter, climaxes in his great aria’), quite apart from the fact that it is for tenor and Peter is a bass. ‘Its agony, being formalised in a da capo ...”

Crusoe and Daughter

Patricia Craig, 20 June 1985

Crusoe’s Daughter
by Jane Gardam.
Hamish Hamilton, 224 pp., £8.95, May 1985, 0 241 11526 4Show More

The Tie that Binds
by Kent Haruf.
Joseph, 246 pp., £9.95, May 1985, 0 7181 2561 4Show More

Hannie Richards, or The Intrepid Adventures of a Restless Wife
by Hilary Bailey.
Virago, 265 pp., £8.95, May 1985, 9780860683469Show More

A Fine Excess
by Jane Ellison.
Secker, 183 pp., £8.95, May 1985, 0 436 14601 0Show More

Victory over Japan
by Ellen Gilchrist.
Faber, 277 pp., £9.95, May 1985, 0 571 13446 7Show More

“... is at present something of a fashion for novels reflecting other novels, ironically and obliquely (Peter Ackroyd’s The Great Fire of London comes to mind, with Little Dorrit behind it; or even Flaubert’s Parrot, though biography, fiction and all inform that eccentric piece of writing). These, at best, are neither extensions nor offshoots, but playful and ...”

The Story of Joe

Craig Raine, 4 December 1986

The Orton Diaries
edited by John Lahr.
Methuen, 307 pp., £12.50, November 1986, 0 413 49660 0Show More

“... with a rather endearing forelock’ and Halliwell’s difficult personality improved. One person, Peter Willes, then head of drama at Rediffusion, is prepared to say of Orton that ‘he did not have a heart’ – only to continue, ‘but I loved what was there instead, which was infinite kindness and good manners.’ And the diaries record several ...”

Unconditional Looking

David Trotter: Mrs Dalloway’s Demons, 23 October 2025

The Inner Life of ‘Mrs Dalloway’
by Edward Mendelson.
Columbia, 137 pp., £20, September, 978 0 231 22171 9Show More

‘Mrs Dalloway’: Biography of a Novel
by Mark Hussey.
Manchester, 222 pp., £18.99, May, 978 1 5261 7681 3Show More

Mrs Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Edward Mendelson.
NYRB, 208 pp., £15.99, September, 978 1 68137 998 2Show More

Mrs Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Trudi Tate.
Oxford, 224 pp., £7.99, May, 978 0 19 285985 3Show More

“... vividly in Clarissa’s thoughts on the novel’s opening page, is her old friend and admirer Peter Walsh. In their youth, Peter, too, had been at Bourton, where on a particularly fraught occasion he proposed to her. He’s always felt that she betrayed her best self by settling instead for a cosseted life as Mrs ...”

Lotti’s Leap

Penelope Fitzgerald, 1 July 1982

Collected Poems and Prose
by Charlotte Mew, edited by Val Warner.
Carcanet/Virago, 445 pp., £9.95, October 1981, 0 85635 260 8Show More

“... a flight of stairs away. ‘Oh, my God! the down, The soft young down of her, the brown The brown of her – her eyes, her hair, her hair!’ ‘Sexual sincerity is the essential of good emotional work,’ complained Wilfred Scawen Blunt, who, predictably, didn’t like the personae and was ‘often left in ...”

Beloved Country

R.W. Johnson, 8 July 1993

“... mirror. Last week as I tore past these rocks, I saw, lying on the margin of the motorway, a large brown horse, its hoofs sticking straight out and skywards, a fine glossy beast with flowing mane and large muscles. As I whipped past it I saw what was wrong. Its head had been torn off. Its neck ended half-way up in a jagged red mess; no clean execution there. A ...”

Nazi Votes

David Blackbourn, 1 November 1984

The Nazi Machtergreifung
edited by Peter Stachura.
Allen and Unwin, 191 pp., £12.50, April 1983, 0 04 943026 2Show More

Stormtroopers: A Social, Economic and Ideological Analysis 1929-35
by Conan Fischer.
Allen and Unwin, 239 pp., £20, June 1983, 0 04 943028 9Show More

The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders 1919-1945
by Michael Kater.
Blackwell, 415 pp., £22.50, August 1983, 0 631 13313 5Show More

Beating the Fascists: The German Communists and Political Violence 1929-1933
by Eve Rosenhaft.
Cambridge, 273 pp., £24, August 1983, 9780521236386Show More

“... idea of a Hitler cult among women. Jill Stephenson, writing in the collection of essays edited by Peter Stachura, disposes effectively of what one recent writer has called ‘the sacrificial willingness of women to be Hitler’s devotees’. The complex and changing position of women in the Third Reich admits of no such conclusion, while it is certain that ...”

Manly Love

John Bayley, 28 January 1993

Walt Whitman: From Moon to Starry Night
by Philip Callow.
Allison and Busby, 394 pp., £19.99, October 1992, 0 85031 908 0Show More

The Double Life of Stephen Crane
by Christopher Benfey.
Deutsch, 294 pp., £17.99, February 1993, 0 233 98820 3Show More

“... the first anything – unstudied, unelaborated, untouched by rules.’ That would be horribly like Peter Pan if it were not for the slyness in the sweetness. It shows how crafty the most ‘spontaneous’ art invariably is – if it succeeds as art. At the same time Whitman’s jottings and MS do reveal more disturbed and even distracted feelings and ...”

I am not a world improver

Christopher Turner: Building Seagram, 6 February 2014

Building Seagram
by Phyllis Lambert.
Yale, 306 pp., £45, January 2013, 978 0 300 16767 2Show More

Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography
by Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst.
Chicago, 493 pp., £25, April 2013, 978 0 226 15145 8Show More

“... shafts hidden behind massive travertine panels. The svelte column, its steel trimmed in deep-brown bronze, rises over you with tremendous force: the overall effect is of discreet power.[watch]The British architect Peter Smithson, for one, admired the elegance of the skyscraper, then the most expensive ever ...”

The Buffalo in the Hall

Susannah Clapp: Beryl Bainbridge, 5 January 2017

Beryl Bainbridge: Love by All Sorts of Means, a Biography
by Brendan King.
Bloomsbury, 564 pp., £25, September 2016, 978 1 4729 0853 7Show More

“... in stocking) by her teenage daughter and her daughter’s chum. The case was the subject of Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures. It is one of the few things Bainbridge had in common with her contemporary Angela Carter, who in the 1980s wrote a screenplay about the murder. An early version of Bainbridge’s novel was turned down by several ...”

Cyberpunk’d

Niela Orr, 3 December 2020

Such a Fun Age
by Kiley Reid.
Bloomsbury, 310 pp., £12.99, January, 978 1 5266 1214 4Show More

“... Chamberlains, who live in Washington Square West, are recent transplants from New York City. Peter, a fortysomething local news anchor and Alix, a 33-year-old writer and Instagram influencer, are parents to Catherine, a newborn, and Briar, an inquisitive three-year-old. Their mother pretends she is still living in NYC, a trick maintained by means of ...”

Lost Empire

D.J. Enright, 16 October 1980

Earthly Powers
by Anthony Burgess.
Hutchinson, 650 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 0 09 143910 8Show More

“... him. His lifetime takes in a lot – World War One, the Easter Rising, the aviators Alcock and Brown. Prohibition, Fascism, Nazism, World War Two, the death camps, the history of modern literature, the history of cinema, a case of homosexual-style blasphemy (which precedes the Lady Chatterley case), homosexual marriage blessed by autocephalic ...”

On Thatcher

“... long, new right ideology has been translated into policy: but no one calls it Thatcherism.Gordon Brown, 2 February 1989I realise it’s too much to expect a sense of our common lot from this government (‘you common lot’ more often the note), but since Mrs Thatcher has schooled half the nation to put its foot in the face of the other half it’s not so ...”

Under the Staircase

Karl Whitney: Hans Jonathan, Runaway Slave, 19 October 2017

The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan
by Gisli Palsson, translated by Anna Yates.
Chicago, 288 pp., £19, October 2016, 978 0 226 31328 3Show More

“... by a man who worked in a local shop. The surveyor wrote in his journal that his guide was ‘very brown skinned, with coal-black woolly hair. His father is a European, but his mother is a negress … He is from the West Indies, and has no surname … but calls himself Hans Jonathan.’ Hans Jonathan left only a few traces of himself in the historical ...”

Diary

Andrew O’Hagan: Grief and the Cameras, 3 December 2009

“... I’m a Celebrity … Get Me out of Here! will be on later, followed by a documentary about Peter Andre, a previous contestant on I’m a Celebrity who recently split up with the nation’s most frightening glamour girl, Jordan. ITV2 has been running a lot of ads for an album called Coming Home by The Soldiers. The singers are Sergeant Major Gary ...”

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