London Review of Books

Yeats and the Occult

Seamus Deane, 18 October 1984

The Mystery Religion of W.B. Yeats
by Graham Hough.
Harvester, 129 pp., £15.95, May 1984, 0 7108 0603 5Show More

Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry
by Cairns Craig.
Croom Helm, 323 pp., £14.95, January 1982, 9780856649974Show More

Yeats. Poems 1919-1935: A Selection of Critical Essays
edited by Elizabeth Cullingford.
Macmillan, 238 pp., £14, July 1984, 0 333 27422 9Show More

The Poet and his Audience
by Ian Jack.
Cambridge, 198 pp., £20, July 1984, 0 521 26034 5Show More

A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats
by A. Norman Jeffares.
Macmillan, 543 pp., £35, May 1984, 0 333 35214 9Show More

Poems of W.B. Yeats
by A. Norman Jeffares.
Macmillan, 428 pp., £17, August 1984, 0 333 36213 6Show More

“... his subject is less clearly focused. But it is an engrossing one. He sets out, in the footsteps of John Harrison, Harvey Gross, William Chace and others, to explain and explore the connections between Modernist literature, as practised by Pound, Eliot and Yeats, and reactionary politics. Others – Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis – could have been included, but ...”

Whirring away

P.N. Johnson-Laird, 18 October 1984

The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology
by Jerry Fodor.
MIT, 145 pp., £15.75, January 1984, 0 262 06084 1Show More

“... the same way that heart, lungs and other physical organs grow to maturity. And the psycholinguist John Marshall has drawn attention to the resemblance between this ‘new organology’ and aspects of phrenological thinking. The educational psychologist Howard Gardner has refurbished the old idea that there are distinct forms of intellectual ability, not just ...”

My Granny

Patrick Wall, 20 May 1982

The Monkey Puzzle
by John Gribbin and Jeremy Cherfas.
Bodley Head, 279 pp., £8.50, April 1982, 0 370 30469 1Show More

Darwinism Defended: A Guide to the Evolution Controversies
by Michael Ruse.
Addison-Wesley, 356 pp., £6.95, April 1982, 0 201 06273 9Show More

The Aquatic Ape: A Theory of Human Evolution
by Elaine Morgan.
Souvenir, 168 pp., £7.95, March 1982, 0 285 62509 8Show More

The Neck of the Giraffe, or Where Darwin went wrong
by Francis Hitching.
Pan, 288 pp., £2.50, April 1982, 0 330 26643 8Show More

“... line a mere four million years ago, whereas paleontologists tend to conclude that this event took place 20 million years ago. The arguments between the two schools are fascinating, but I suspect the reliability of both. The paleontologists are short of fossils and long on guesswork. The molecular clock needs its reliability questioning. In this book, it ...”

The Case for Negative Thinking

V.S. Pritchett, 20 March 1980

Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in his Context
by Marilyn Butler.
Routledge, 361 pp., £10.95, October 1979, 0 7100 0293 9Show More

“... comedy of ideas, not the comedy of character, and seems to have said as much to Shelley when he took him to the theatre and vainly tried to persuade him of the superiority of comedy to tragedy and to the portentous gloom of the time. Peacock’s operetta-like ‘novels’ or conversation pieces had a revival in the Twenties and Thirties of this century and ...”

Beyond Discussion

Neal Ascherson, 3 April 1980

The Last Word: An Eye-Witness Account of the Thorpe Trial
by Auberon Waugh.
Joseph, 240 pp., £6.50, February 1980, 0 7181 1799 9Show More

“... word. Trial by ordeal has a long history, even in England. And the judicial carnival which took place at the Old Bailey produced less certainty about who really did what to whom than if Jeremy Thorpe, George Deakin, David Holmes and John Le Mesurier had been invited to take off their shoes and socks and walk along a ...”

Booker Books

Frank Kermode, 22 November 1979

“... best-selling writers, their business is not in the main literary, and in 1972 the prizewinner, John Berger, made a speech in which he expressly deplored what he regarded as the exploitative nature of the donor’s principal interest; indeed he gave half his prize to a revolutionary movement. Other writers have shown some embarrassment but have not, so far ...”

Post-Bourgeois Man

Peter Jenkins, 1 October 1981

Arguments for Democracy
by Tony Benn, edited by Chris Mullin.
Cape, 257 pp., £6.95, September 1981, 0 224 01878 7Show More

Manifesto
by Francis Cripps, John Griffith, Frances Morrell, Jimmy Reid and Peter Townsend.
Pan, 224 pp., £1.95, September 1981, 0 330 26402 8Show More

“... a rival élite, a new interest, a putative power structure. It was these people, by and large, who took over the moribund Labour Parties in the constituencies and who are now advancing their power within the corrupt and rotten Trade Union movement. And most of what Benn has said in the years of his power bid has been directed, not at the general public who ...”

Prince Arthur

Paul Addison, 21 August 1980

Balfour
by Max Egremont.
Collins, 391 pp., £12.95, June 1980, 0 00 216043 9Show More

“... of most country house society. The emotional ties proved enduring but also unequal. Balfour always took more than he gave, inspiring love but granting only friendship in return. The pattern was set early on, and for the rest of their lives brother and sister danced to his tune. George was eventually promoted to the Cabinet, but when the time came to sack him ...”

Helluva Book

Mark Lawson, 3 September 1987

Love is colder than death: The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder
by Robert Katz and Peter Berling.
Cape, 256 pp., £12.95, June 1987, 0 224 02174 5Show More

“... classic slob biography – to be compared with Bob Woodward’s Wired, about the grossed-out comic John Belushi, and almost any book about Elvis Presley – and Mr Katz is a first-rank slob biographer. A vital element in such a project is the contrast between subject and biographer: the dull, ascetic and probably jogging yuppy sees in the fluid-spilling and ...”

Alma’s Alter

Gabriele Annan, 11 June 1992

Oscar Kokoschka: Letters
translated by Mary Whittall.
Thames and Hudson, 320 pp., £24.95, March 1992, 0 500 01528 7Show More

“... War. He insisted that every detail of Alma’s anatomy should be correct, and when he finally took delivery of her replica, it accompanied him everywhere: to restaurants and even to the theatre, where he would book a seat for it. This weird episode is relevant to a letter of 17 April 1928 to Anna Kallin: My friends in Morocco tried various arguments to ...”

George’s Hand

Dinah Birch, 7 March 1996

A Son at the Front
by Edith Wharton.
Northern Illinois, 223 pp., $26, November 1995, 0 87580 203 6Show More

“... charity worker. She created jobs for unemployed women, ran restaurants to feed refugees, took responsibility for six hundred orphans fleeing occupied Belgium. France awarded her the cross of the Legion of Honour. The literary establishment was not so grateful. Her writings about the war were less successful than the earlier novels of manners. A Son ...”

Diary

Christopher Hadley: The Lake Taupo Stamp, 18 September 1997

“... at an alarming rate. Much later, he wrote in Philately magazine about the find: One evening ... I took down from its shelf my old schoolboy collection of stamps, wondering and hoping that the whole lot might make a couple of pounds. Turning over the pages I came across one which had a solitary stamp mounted in the middle of it. Why it was stuck on a page to ...”

On Thatcher

“... what she liked, and her own part in the Heathite reign of error only magnified her disgust. As John Ranelagh, who once worked for her at the Conservative Research Department, says, she was no intellectual. His book purports to be about the people who did her intellectual work for her, and what they undoubtedly had in common was the conviction that the ...”

Tasty Butterflies

Richard Fortey: Entomologists, 24 September 2009

Bugs and the Victorians
by J.F.M. Clark.
Yale, 322 pp., £25, June 2009, 978 0 300 15091 9Show More

“... John Lubbock, Liberal MP and social reformer (he introduced the bank holiday into law in 1871), was also the founding father of scientific anthropology and an obsessive entomologist. Of his many books, the most successful, Ants, Bees and Wasps, ran to 18 editions. In 1872, he presented a wasp that he had tamed (allegedly) to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science ...”

Pound & Co.

August Kleinzahler: Davenport and Kenner, 26 September 2019

Questioning Minds: Vols I-II: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner
edited by Edward Burns.
Counterpoint, 1817 pp., $95, October 2018, 978 1 61902 181 5Show More

“... Davenport ended up teaching at Haverford College in Pennsylvania for two years and then took a job at the University of Kentucky, ‘the remotest offer with the most pay’. He taught there for 27 years; in 1973 Kenner moved on to Johns Hopkins for 17 years, and finally, in 1990, to the University of Georgia for a decade. By 1977, the exchange of ...”

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