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What is Tom saying to Maureen?

Ian Hacking: What We Know about Autism, 11 May 2006

The Science and Fiction of Autism 
by Laura Schreibman.
Harvard, 293 pp., £17.95, December 2005, 0 674 01931 8
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Send in the Idiots, or How We Grew to Understand the World 
by Kamran Nazeer.
Bloomsbury, 230 pp., £12.99, March 2006, 0 7475 7910 5
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... autism all around us. The criteria for being autistic have radically expanded since Kanner’s day. This is not just a conceptual change, but also a discovery that took time. When there was no diagnosis of autism, you could not be said to have grown out of it, or recovered, or been cured. Kanner followed up his first patients. None recovered; two survived ...

Aubade before Breakfast

Tom Crewe: Balfour and the Souls, 31 March 2016

Balfour’s World: Aristocracy and Political Culture at the Fin de Siècle 
by Nancy Ellenberger.
Boydell, 414 pp., £30, September 2015, 978 1 78327 037 8
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... Tennant. In her portraits she is usually looking away, eyes lifted or lowered, but on Christmas Day 1883, aged 21, she stopped to consider herself: What am I? A little woman with grey eyes with corners to them … & a nose with a lump in the middle, & a square jaw and a nameless complexion with small ears almost round & an ordinary neat figure & next to no ...

How not to do it

John Sutherland, 22 July 1993

The British Library: For Scholarship, Research and Innovation: Strategic Objectives for the Year 2000 
British Library, 39 pp., £5, June 1993, 0 7123 0321 9Show More
The Library of the British Museum: Retrospective Essays on the Department of Printed Books 
edited by P.R. Harris.
British Library, 305 pp., £35, June 1993, 0 7123 0242 5
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... through the year of better than 60 per cent. It will be the opening night of Jurassic Park every day at BL 2000. There will be ticket touts in the Euston Road offering desperate American scholars seats for arm-and-a-leg prices. Young women with thesis deadlines will be prostituting their bodies for a carrel. If you want a foretaste of what the BL of the ...

Slices of Cake

Gilberto Perez: Alfred Hitchcock, 19 August 1999

Hitchcock’s Secret Notebooks: An Authorised and Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of Alfred Hitchcock 
by Dan Auiler.
Bloomsbury, 567 pp., £20, May 1999, 0 7475 4490 5
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... popular entertainment to have a moral, metaphysical or ideological content. The high-minded critic Robin Wood responded to Houston’s article with the kind of righteousness his mentor F.R. Leavis directed against Bloomsbury, dismissing it in Hitchcock’s Films, his classic auteur study of 1965, as the product of a snobbish, dilettante establishment that ...

Giacometti and Bacon

David Sylvester, 19 March 1987

Giacometti: A Biography 
by James Lord.
Faber, 592 pp., £25, June 1986, 0 571 13138 7
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... about. During Giacometti’s visits to London in 1955, 1964 and 1965 I saw him practically every day, whereas Lord, who saw him much more regularly in Paris than I did, was not around much, if at all. So the treatment of those London visits provides a clue to the quality of Lord’s research. I go into the detail that follows with some reluctance: the ...

Scruples

James Wood, 20 June 1996

The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 213 pp., £15.99, September 1995, 0 571 17562 7
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The Spirit Level 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 71 pp., £14.99, May 1996, 0 571 17760 3
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... Door into the Dark (1969). It begins: ‘When you have nothing more to say, just drive / For a day all round the peninsula.’ Heaney extols this landscape, and suggests that when you return home you will uncode all landscapes by this one: ‘things founded clean on their own shapes’. The poem, without strain, describes itself. Like the entranced ...

Ghost Ions

Jonathan Coe: AA-Rated Memories, 18 August 2022

Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems 
edited by Julian Upton.
Headpress, 595 pp., £22.99, April, 978 1 909394 93 3
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The Magic Box: Viewing Britain through the Rectangular Window 
by Rob Young.
Faber, 500 pp., £12.99, August, 978 0 571 28460 3
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... in a sleazy, sex-filled prequel to James’s novella. Young rightly devotes several pages to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, but Offbeat passes over it as being too well known and moves straight on to The Appointment, a completely forgotten horror film from 1980 in which ‘Edward Woodward comes the closest he ever would to reprising one of his most ...

Cunt Art

Jo Applin: Ten Rounds with Judy Chicago, 9 June 2022

The Flowering: The Autobiography of Judy Chicago 
by Judy Chicago.
Thames and Hudson, 416 pp., £30, July 2021, 978 0 500 09438 9
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... bin overflowing with blood-soaked tampons viewed through a gauzy curtain, while Vikki Hodgett and Robin Weltsch covered the walls and cupboard doors of their Nurturant Kitchen with moulded foam breasts. Sandy Orgel’s Surrealist-inspired linen closet had a female mannequin trapped between its shelves. Faith Wilding’s Crochet Environment, known as the ...

Diary

Rose George: Travels in the Sewers, 11 May 2006

... because when he got up – climbing the ladder one-handed – they’d all disappeared. The next day, a policeman phoned to ask Smith why he’d done that. ‘I said, I didn’t have a choice. I asked him if it had been live, and he said, “You don’t want to know,” so I presume it was.’ Mostly, though, other than sewage or toilet paper the sewers ...

The Way of the Warrior

Tom Shippey: Vikings, 3 April 2014

Vikings: Life and Legend 
edited by Gareth Williams, Peter Pentz and Matthias Wernhoff.
British Museum, 288 pp., £25, February 2014, 978 0 7141 2337 0
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The Northmen’s Fury 
by Philip Parker.
Cape, 450 pp., £25, March 2014, 978 0 224 09080 3
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... as like as not. We know what they did: rape and pillage. Along with the Crusaders, King Arthur and Robin Hood, they form a major part of our medieval imaginary. For fifty years now specialists in Viking studies have been trying to convince us, without much success, that ‘Viking’ is a job description, not an ethnic category, that behind the generic figure ...

Blame Robert Maxwell

Frederick Wilmot-Smith: How Public Inquiries Go Wrong, 17 March 2016

... seven years to do it. (The Bloody Sunday inquiry took 12 years to investigate the events of one day.) More than 150 witnesses gave evidence, and more than 150,000 documents have been examined. Even Chilcot seems to have underestimated the scale of the task. In 2012, he told David Cameron that the report was ‘likely to be more than a million ...

Bad Times

Andy Beckett: Travels with Tariq Ali, 20 February 2025

You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024 
by Tariq Ali.
Verso, 799 pp., £35, November 2024, 978 1 80429 090 3
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... all it is an account of how Ali – who, like comrades such as Perry Anderson, Richard Gott and Robin Blackburn, is now in his eighties – has sustained a particular kind of political life, which younger leftists are unlikely to be able to enjoy.Ali’s first volume of memoirs, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties, was published in ...

Where are all the people?

Owen Hatherley: Jane Jacobs, 27 July 2017

Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs 
by Robert Kanigel.
Knopf, 512 pp., £34, September 2016, 978 0 307 96190 7
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Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs 
edited by Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring.
Random House, 544 pp., £16.99, October 2016, 978 0 399 58960 7
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... which looked messy but functioned well, in favour of pointless greensward where ‘Christopher Robin might go hippety-hoppety.’ It destroyed human networks and replaced them with emptiness and formality. Jacobs’s alternative wasn’t a new proposal but something, she claimed, that already existed, and needed only to be helped along: the ‘ballet of ...

Art of Embarrassment

A.D. Nuttall, 18 August 1994

Essays, Mainly Shakespearean 
by Anne Barton.
Cambridge, 386 pp., £40, March 1994, 0 521 40444 4
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English Comedy 
edited by Michael Cordner, Peter Holland and John Kerrigan.
Cambridge, 323 pp., £35, March 1994, 0 521 41917 4
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... in contrast, provided exactly what was sentimentally required by the audience. In the England of Robin Hood and Coeur de Lion, commoner and King find themselves united in manly accord, if ever they can, with the help of a disguise kit, elude the net of intervening ceremony (traditionally the King is ‘a regular guy’ though his courtly advisers are ...
Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot 
by Michael Rogin.
California, 320 pp., $24.95, May 1996, 0 520 20407 7
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... music which is ‘perhaps, the misunderstood utterance of prayer’. It is erev Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on New York’s Lower East Side and 13-year-old Jakie, son of Cantor and Sarah Rabinowitz, is to chant Kol Nidre in his father’s synagogue. Cut to Jakie performing ‘My Gal Sal’ in a local saloon. The cantor arrives, drags him home by his ...

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