A Messiah in the Family

Walter Nash, 8 February 1990

Kingdom come 
by Bernice Rubens.
Hamish Hamilton, 312 pp., £12.99, February 1990, 0 241 12481 6
Show More
The Other Side 
by Mary Gordon.
Bloomsbury, 337 pp., £13.99, January 1990, 0 7475 0473 3
Show More
The Alchemist 
by Mark Illis.
Bloomsbury, 244 pp., £13.95, January 1990, 0 7475 0468 7
Show More
The way you tell them: A Yarn of the Nineties 
by Alan Brownjohn.
Deutsch, 145 pp., £11.95, January 1990, 0 233 98496 8
Show More
Show More
... contrast) with Christian counterparts: Sabbatai’s father and mother, Mordecai and Clara, with Joseph and Mary; his harlot-wife, Sarah, with Mary Magdalen; his homosexual lover and 12th apostle, Saul, with Judas; the Vizier and Sultan with Pilate. For the reader, the recurrent awareness of one story slumbering inside another curiously disturbs the temporal ...

Strutting

Linda Colley, 21 September 1995

All the Sweets of Being: The Life of James Boswell 
by Roger Hutchinson.
Mainstream, 238 pp., £17.50, May 1995, 1 85158 702 0
Show More
James Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ 
edited by Marshall Waingrow.
Edinburgh, 518 pp., £75, March 1995, 0 7486 0471 5
Show More
Johnson and Boswell: The Transit of Caledonia 
by Pat Rogers.
Oxford, 245 pp., £30, April 1995, 0 19 818259 7
Show More
Show More
... also places the journey in the context of the great Pacific explorations of Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks, and not just because they were personally known to Boswell and Johnson on the London celebrity circuit. Just as Cook and his crew scoured the Pacific islands with scientific and anthropological as well as colonial intent so, Rogers argues, Johnson ...

Ostentatio Genitalium

Charles Hope, 15 November 1984

The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion 
by Leo Steinberg.
Faber, 222 pp., £25, September 1984, 0 571 13392 4
Show More
Show More
... include both the Virgin and Christopher. It also explains why in many polyptychs, especially in North Italy, the Virgin is painted holding the child in the main panel, while the dead Christ is shown in another panel above. The changes that Steinberg describes in the representation of the child must therefore be understood as reflections of changing ...
... this year all the trade, literary and political figures present at the opening in Budapest travel north on the following day to the coalmining town of Salgotarjan. A crowd has gathered outside the arts centre; there are speeches, poetry, a choir performance and a band playing Country and Western, with Hungarian lyrics. It is raining again, but the crowd is ...

Where structuralism comes from

John Sturrock, 2 February 1984

Course in General Linguistics 
by Ferdinand de Saussure, translated by Roy Harris.
Duckworth, 236 pp., £24, March 1983, 0 7156 1738 9
Show More
Semiotic Perspectives 
by Sandor Hervey.
Allen and Unwin, 273 pp., £15, September 1982, 9780044000266
Show More
Show More
... one can suppose, run foul of that opinionated, jealous and vindictive theorist of language, Joseph Stalin. In this country, whatever future lay open for Saussure early on was blighted by the remarks made about him by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards in The Meaning of Meaning, where he is dead and buried by page six, charged with having ‘concocted’ the ...
Selected Poems 
by James Merrill.
Carcanet, 152 pp., £9.95, April 1996, 1 85754 228 2
Show More
Show More
... spoke in an accent of his own devising, a blend of his mother’s Tidewater drawl and an ancient North-East boarding-school dialect; depending on the listener’s predisposition, during his readings he would sound either affected and bratty or elevated, even Orphic, especially when speaking of or for the dead. Although he was one of the most philosophical ...

The Fire This Time

John Sutherland, 28 May 1992

... civilian cars slowed down to watch, and in full view of apartment houses. As the police novelist Joseph Wambaugh put it, this was not brutalisation, it was street theatre. Finally, after at least two minutes of beating, electrocution, kicks and, as he claimed, ‘racial slurs’, King was handcuffed and bundled into a police cruiser. On their way home the ...

Shockers

Jeremy Treglown, 6 August 1992

Writers on World War Two: An Anthology 
edited by Mordecai Richler.
Chatto, 752 pp., £18.99, February 1992, 0 7011 3912 9
Show More
Legacies and Ambiguities: Post-war Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan 
edited by Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer.
Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins, 323 pp., $35, February 1992, 0 943875 30 7
Show More
Show More
... confidently say what tone they themselves would have adopted. But even twenty years later, when Joseph Heller’s ‘unedifying tale’ of the Italian campaign, Catch-22, first appeared, the TLS thought it helpful to warn that there is ‘no shadow of nobility’ in Yossarian’s behaviour, as if this were something the author might have wanted to correct ...

A Little Holiday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Ben Hecht’s Cause, 23 September 2021

A Child of the Century 
by Ben Hecht.
Yale, 654 pp., £16, April 2020, 978 0 300 25179 1
Show More
Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures 
by Adina Hoffman.
Yale, 245 pp., £10.99, April 2020, 978 0 300 25181 4
Show More
Show More
... meant providing the scenario and captions for silent pictures). Mank’s younger brother, Joseph, followed four years later, also on a Paramount contract, and went on to write and direct movies including A Letter to Three Wives and All about Eve, which won him two Oscars. Mank’s own career wasn’t quite so dazzling, but his work on the screenplay ...

‘The A-10 saved my ass’

Andrew Cockburn: Precision Warfare, 21 March 2024

The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers 
by Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr.
Yale, 549 pp., £35, May 2023, 978 0 300 23409 1
Show More
Show More
... Britain, because it deterred the German surface fleet from further attempts to break out of the North Sea and attack Britain’s Atlantic supply lines. But the German submarine fleet suffered no such inhibitions, wreaking havoc on unescorted merchant ships and bringing Britain to the brink of starvation and defeat. An honest review of the record casts the ...

What Universities Owe

Vincent Brown, 24 July 2025

Yale and Slavery: A History 
by David W. Blight.
Yale, 432 pp., £14.99, April, 978 0 300 28184 2
Show More
Show More
... of captives and shipped them to the English colony of St Helena. Blight cites the historian Joseph Yanielli, who found that Elihu Yale ‘participated in a meeting that ordered a minimum of ten slaves sent on every outbound European ship’; at least 665 slaves were exported in a single month from Fort St George. Yale enforced the quota until the end of ...

Dropping Their Eggs

Patrick Wright: The history of bombing, 23 August 2001

A History of Bombing 
by Sven Lindqvist, translated by Linda Haverty Rugg.
Granta, 233 pp., £14.99, May 2001, 1 86207 415 1
Show More
The Bomber War: Arthur Harris and the Allied Bomber Offensive 1939-45 
by Robin Niellands.
Murray, 448 pp., £25, February 2001, 0 7195 5637 6
Show More
Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War 
by Frances FitzGerald.
Touchstone, 592 pp., $17, March 2001, 0 7432 0023 3
Show More
Show More
... through mass destruction from the air was already in place before the first bomb was dropped.’ Joseph Conrad was describing the British naval bombardment of African coastal settlements when, in An Outcast of the Islands (1896), he wrote of ‘the invisible whites’ who ‘dealt death from afar’. In Lindqvist’s history, too, aerial bombardment appears ...

The devil has two horns

J.G.A. Pocock, 24 February 1994

The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke 
by Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Minerva, 692 pp., £8.99, September 1993, 0 7493 9721 7
Show More
Show More
... role, rejoicing at American military successes and cast down by British; and when the North ministry tell apart after Yorktown and the Rockinghams could return to power, he took part in imposing the condition that the King ‘must not’ use his veto to forbid a formal recognition a American independence. O’Brien applauds this on two grounds: it ...

Bardbiz

Terence Hawkes, 22 February 1990

Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe 
by Andrew Gurr and John Orrell.
Weidenfeld, 197 pp., £15.95, April 1989, 0 297 79346 2
Show More
Shakespeare and the Popular Voice 
by Annabel Patterson.
Blackwell, 195 pp., £27.50, November 1989, 0 631 16873 7
Show More
Re-Inventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present 
by Gary Taylor.
Hogarth, 461 pp., £18, January 1990, 0 7012 0888 0
Show More
Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare 
by Michael Bristol.
Routledge, 237 pp., £30, January 1990, 0 415 01538 3
Show More
Show More
... of actors ranged anoraked bodies against the pile-drivers. Guggenheims of scholars jumboed in from North America. There was weeping and wailing and the gnashing of clapperboards for the TV cameras. The air thickened with pronouncements about culture, art, our ‘national heritage’.It’s worth reminding ourselves during the present lull in hostilities that a ...

Japan goes Dutch

Murray Sayle: Japan’s economic troubles, 5 April 2001

... the current business customs of English-speakers, is a cloudy concept; but most authorities follow Joseph Schumpeter in seeing credit creation by, or through, a banking system as its distinctive feature. Historical experience suggests that pioneering, credit-based capitalism is effective on frontiers, before competitors have arrived and whittled profits below ...