You are the we of me

Joyce Carol Oates: The Autobiography of Carson McCullers, 2 September 1999

Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers 
edited by Carlos Dews.
Wisconsin, 256 pp., £19.95, September 1999, 0 299 16440 3
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... who praised McCullers for her complex, realistic portraits of Negroes; the American composer David Diamond, who had a triangular love affair with McCullers and Reeves that ended unhappily for all; the film director John Huston, who directed the film version of Reflections in a Golden Eye, and the younger playwright Edward Albee who adapted, with limited ...

Mooching

Nicholas Spice: Dreaming of Vikram Seth, 29 April 1999

An Equal Music 
by Vikram Seth.
Phoenix House, 381 pp., £16.99, April 1999, 1 86159 117 9
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... fearfully good-looking and I fancy I see a resemblance between him and the rabbit boy’s brother David, once a very naughty schoolboy, but now, I believe, a historian of art patronage in the 17th century at Edinburgh University. I have come to put a question to the Minister about W.H. Smith and its dominance in the magazine market, but I would much rather ...

No Man’s Mistress

Stephen Koss, 5 July 1984

Margot: A Life of the Countess of Oxford and Asquith 
by Daphne Bennett.
Gollancz, 442 pp., £12.95, May 1984, 0 575 03279 0
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... say or do’. That tendency was heightened with the passing years of adversity until, as Lord David Cecil concluded, she betrayed an ‘inability to distinguish between reality and fancy’. Her immediate impressions of people were sometimes alarmingly acute, but her impressions of events were more often faulty and never more so than when she strenuously ...

Orpheus in his Underwear

Harold James, 1 November 1984

My Life 
by Richard Wagner, translated by Andrew Gray, edited by Mary Whittall.
Cambridge, 786 pp., £22.50, November 1983, 0 521 22929 4
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Untimely Meditations 
by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R.J. Hollingdale, introduced by J.P. Stern.
Cambridge, 256 pp., £15, December 1983, 0 521 24740 3
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Wagner: A Case-History 
by Martin von Amerongen.
Dent, 169 pp., £8.95, September 1983, 0 460 04618 7
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... polemic directed against the popular Biblical exegist and inventor of a modern Hegelian religion, David Strauss, was written at Wagner’s request; the other three frequently cite Wagner’s works. They are ‘untimely’ in that they provide a powerful criticism of those seeking to derive a set of guidelines, political or moral, from the past or from a ...

Bevan’s Boy

John Campbell, 20 September 1984

The Making of Neil Kinnock 
by Robert Harris.
Faber, 256 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 571 13266 9
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Neil Kinnock: The Path to Leadership 
by G.M.F. Drower.
Weidenfeld, 162 pp., £8.95, July 1984, 0 297 78467 6
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... Students’ Union at Cardiff (where his wife Glenys was a full-time NUS official) Kinnock, like David Steel, whose beginnings in the Student Representative Council at Edinburgh were very similar, is a standard-bearer of the Sixties generation of student politicians. But NUS politics, different entirely from the debating-society politics of the Oxbridge ...

From Sahib to Satan

Keith Kyle, 15 November 1984

The British Empire in the Middle East 1945-1951 
by William Roger Louis.
Oxford, 818 pp., £45, July 1984, 0 19 822489 3
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... caused the British, sickened by such Jewish terrorism as Menachem Begin directed against the King David Hotel and alarmed by the danger of a revival of anti-semitism, to throw in their hand. The result was chaos. Professor Louis describes America displaying herself at her worst and in response Britain doing likewise; both showed scant regard for the ...

Who should own what?

John Dunn, 18 October 1984

Property and Political Theory 
by Alan Ryan.
Blackwell, 198 pp., £15, August 1984, 0 631 13691 6
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... the principal intellectual progenitors of modern legitimations of capitalist property rights, David Hume and Adam Smith, and at least regrettable that he should ignore entirely the intellectual background to their thinking so powerfully reconstructed recently by Istvan Hont in Wealth and Virtue. We begin with Locke, and with Locke more or less in ...

Barbarians

Stuart Airlie, 17 November 1983

Medieval Germany and its Neighbours 900-1250 
by K.J. Leyser.
Hambledon, 302 pp., £18, February 1983, 0 907628 08 7
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TheFrankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians 751-987 
by Rosamond McKitterick.
Longman, 414 pp., £9.95, June 1983, 0 582 49005 7
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Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies presented to J.M. Wallace-Hadrill 
edited by Patrick Wormald, Donald Bullough and Roger Collins.
Blackwell, 345 pp., £27.50, September 1983, 0 631 12661 9
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... rest on such evidence as we do possess. The contributors to this volume fulfil both requirements. David Ganz’s deciphering of bureaucratic shorthand in seventh-century Gaul enables him to cast light on the replacement of the Merovingian dynasty by the Carolingians, one of the major shifts in European political history. Patrick Wormald, in an ambitious and ...

Wharton the Wise

D.A.N. Jones, 4 April 1985

The Missing Will 
by Michael Wharton.
Hogarth, 216 pp., £10.95, November 1984, 0 7011 2666 3
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... is cruelty in it.’ At Oxford he made friends with two other able autobiographers, David Thomson, the future BBC producer, and Denis Hills, the African explorer, destined to be rescued by James Callaghan from the clutches of Idi Amin. Michael Wharton spent much of his term-time practising West Riding Knife Throwing with his mates, or drinking ...

The Big Store

Norman Hampson, 21 January 1982

The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store 1869-1920 
by Michael Miller.
Allen and Unwin, 266 pp., £12.50, September 1981, 0 04 330316 1
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Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the 19th Century 
by Bonnie Smith.
Princeton, 303 pp., £15, November 1981, 0 691 05330 8
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Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France 1789-1880 
by Maurice Agulhon, translated by Janet Lloyd.
Cambridge, 235 pp., £18.50, June 1981, 0 521 28224 1
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... more cheerfully plebeian than the austere embodiment of vertu that appealed to Robespierre or David. Marianne came into her own when it was necessary to find something to replace the portraits of the fallen Emperor, Napoleon III, which had adorned official places. Presidents of the Republic were no substitute. To enthrone them in effigy might give them ...

Fundamentalisms

Malise Ruthven, 1 July 1982

Two Minutes over Baghdad 
by Amos Perlmutter, Michael Handel and Uri Bar-Joseph.
Corgi, 192 pp., £1.75, April 1982, 0 552 11939 3
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Inside the Middle East 
by Dilip Hiro.
Routledge, 471 pp., £12.50, April 1982, 0 7100 9030 7
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America Held Hostage: The Secret Negotiations 
by Pierre Salinger.
Deutsch, 349 pp., £10.95, May 1982, 0 233 97456 3
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... away from the eyes of the international community. The ‘autonomy’ envisaged by the Camp David agreements is unlikely to extend beyond garbage collection. Ostensibly Two Minutes over Baghdad is a True Life Adventure Story in the ‘Entebbe’ tradition, in which an author trades his skills as a publicist against ‘inside’ information supplied by ...

Distance

Raymond Williams, 17 June 1982

... service. For a moment the conflict became real, past the coarse official confrontations. Yet when David Frost repeated one of his characteristic programme models, with a British studio audience and several Argentines present by satellite, no communication of any value occurred. There was jeering from some in the British audience, before arguments were fully ...

Andropov’s Turn

Philip Short, 19 May 1983

Khrushchev 
by Roy Medvedev, translated by Brian Pearce.
Blackwell, 292 pp., £9.50, November 1982, 0 631 12993 6
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Soviet Policy for the 1980s 
edited by Archie Brown and Michael Kaser.
Macmillan/St Antony’s College, Oxford, 282 pp., £20, December 1982, 0 333 33139 7
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... the Russians will refuse him a visa. Two of the essays deal with Soviet relations with the West. David Holloway rightly attributes the troubles of détente to the two sides’ inability to agree on what it should mean and, in particular, to the Americans’ insistence that the Soviets ‘restrain their efforts to increase Soviet influence in the world’, a ...

Travelling

Elaine Jordan, 21 April 1983

The Viaduct 
by David Wheldon.
Bodley Head, 176 pp., £5.95, March 1983, 0 370 30519 1
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Rates of Exchange 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Secker, 310 pp., £7.95, April 1983, 0 436 06505 3
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Milena 
by Maggie Ross.
Collins, 280 pp., £8.95, April 1983, 0 00 222602 2
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No Place on Earth 
by Christa Wolf, translated by Jan van Heurck.
Virago, 110 pp., £6.95, March 1983, 9780860683636
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Look at me 
by Anita Brookner.
Cape, 192 pp., £7.50, March 1983, 0 224 02055 2
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Not Not While the Giro and Other Stories 
by James Kelman.
Polygon, 207 pp., £3.95, March 1983, 9780904919653
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... The 19th-century novel was the great forum for writing about life – from sanitation to the condition of women, from politics to love. All the novels reviewed here are very much of the 20th century: whatever else they are concerned with, they are always about writing itself, that curious, aberrant occupation which the writer above all needs to explain to himself ...

The company he keeps

C.H. Sisson, 6 August 1981

Experiences of an Optimist 
by John Redcliffe-Maud.
Hamish Hamilton, 199 pp., £10.95, July 1981, 0 241 10569 2
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... fellows living in college. Who more suitable than young Maud? The name had only to be mentioned to David Lindsay Keir and the job was done. Politics was to be his subject, it seems suddenly to have been decided. ‘But why politics?’ Why indeed? Anyhow, G.D.H. Cole put him on to the subject of local government; the Home University Library wanted a book on it ...