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Psychodisney

Peter Robins: Gary Indiana, 25 July 2002

Depraved Indifference 
by Gary Indiana.
HarperCollins, 336 pp., $24.95, January 2002, 0 06 019726 9
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... exuberantly invented or appropriated names – Ikea, Asraboth, Otis Lemming – ambush you into reading the documentary account of a murder as if it were simply another overplayed punch line. The switch can be interpreted in several ways. You could assume that you are coming under satirical attack – that Depraved Indifference is a sly exposure of the ...

The Antagoniser’s Agoniser

Peter Clarke: Keith Joseph, 19 July 2001

Keith Joseph 
by Andrew Denham and Mark Garnett.
Acumen, 488 pp., £28, March 2001, 9781902683034
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... it required a great deal more moral courage than I had at the time.’ What was needed, on this reading, was a more courageous Redeemer than Joseph, not one who was cleverer. Here are the implicit terms on which Joseph deferred to Thatcher’s superior claims as leader, while she deferred to his as prophet. Two further points help to establish Joseph’s ...

I shall be read

Denis Feeney: Ovid’s Revenge, 17 August 2006

Ovid: The Poems of Exile: ‘Tristia’ and the ‘Black Sea Letters’ 
translated by Peter Green.
California, 451 pp., £12.95, March 2005, 0 520 24260 2
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Ovid: Epistulae ex Ponto, Book I 
translated and edited by Jan Felix Gaertner.
Oxford, 606 pp., £90, October 2005, 0 19 927721 4
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... the exilic corpus as entitled to the same degree of scholarly attention as Ovid’s earlier work. Peter Green was in at the beginning of the boom when he published his spirited and sympathetic translation in 1994, now reissued with a new foreword and updated bibliography; any quotations from Ovid in this piece are taken from his excellent versions. Green ...

Collapses of Civilisation

Anthony Snodgrass, 25 July 1991

Centuries of Darkness 
by Peter James.
Chatto, 434 pp., £19.99, April 1991, 9780224026475
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... yet we can see that the two halves would actually fit together. The gap should not be there. What Peter James – the main author and incidentally the designer of the jacket – and his four collaborators seek to prove is, put simply, that the entire early history of the civilised world has been similarly distorted. An intrusive, imaginary gap, partly of ...

Hoping to Hurt

Paul Smith, 9 February 1995

The Cultivation of Hatred 
by Peter Gay.
HarperCollins, 685 pp., £25, April 1994, 0 00 255218 3
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... Peter Gay’s The Cultivation of Hatred completes his Freudian psychoanalysis of the bourgeois 19th century by bringing aggression to bear alongside the forces of sexuality which form the subject of the preceding volumes, Education of the Senses and The Tender Passion. That aggression and sexuality are intimately associated, at once intermingled and opposed, Gay has no doubt, pointing to the ‘provocative oxymorons like “sweet cruelty”, the “voluptuousness of revenge” and “cruel tenderness” ’, in which Heine and others registered their sense of the ambiguity of the relationship ...

Fallen Idols

David A. Bell, 23 July 1992

The Fabrication of Louis XIV 
by Peter Burke.
Yale, 242 pp., £19.95, May 1992, 0 300 05153 0
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... harder than their English counterparts to win lasting admiration. The efforts of Louis XIV, which Peter Burke chronicles in his new book, were truly staggering, even by the standards of Early Modern monarchy. Images of the King were commissioned, Burke recounts, in paint, bronze, stone, tapestry, pastel, enamel, wood, terracotta and wax. The royal treasury ...

Aunt Twackie’s Bazaar

Andy Beckett: Seventies Style, 19 August 2010

70s Style and Design 
by Dominic Lutyens and Kirsty Hislop.
Thames and Hudson, 224 pp., £24.90, November 2009, 978 0 500 51483 2
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... Early on in this book there is a photograph of the British architect Peter Cook’s living-room ‘circa 1970’. Cook is now Sir Peter, co-designer of the rather bland main stadium for the 2012 London Olympics. But he was a young adventurer back then, a founder of the archetypal 1960s and 1970s avant-garde architects’ collective Archigram, which came up with never built but influential schemes for futuristic ‘walking’ buildings and ‘plug-in’ cities ...

Knowledge Infinite

D.J. Enright, 16 August 1990

The Don Giovanni Book: Myths of Seduction and Betrayal 
edited by Jonathan Miller.
Faber, 127 pp., £6.99, July 1990, 0 571 14542 6
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... and the eternal’, where the stone figure of the Commendatore is undeniably a case in point. Peter Gay explores the opera’s ‘hidden agenda’, long ago exposed to the light of Freudian day: in this Oedipal reading, Mozart’s ‘unconscious rage against his father, disciplinarian and exploiter’, is reflected in ...

Keeping mum

Stephen Sedley, 2 March 1989

The Spycatcher Trial 
by Malcolm Turnbull.
Heinemann, 228 pp., £12.95, October 1988, 0 434 79156 3
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Reform of the Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911: Government White Paper 
HMSO, 16 pp., £2.60, June 1988, 0 10 104082 2Show More
Official Secrets Bill 
HMSO, 14 pp., £3, December 1988, 0 10 300989 2Show More
Security Service Bill 
HMSO, 8 pp., £2.60, November 1988, 9780103007892Show More
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... him through, laced with a partly affected Aussie contempt for British toffs, doesn’t make good reading. Nor, of course, does official prose as a rule. Official prose tends to be thought of as clumsy and slightly weak on grammar, the sort of thing that goes: ‘Applications are required to be submitted not later than the 1st April with the exception of ...

At the British Museum

Nick Richardson: The Scythians, 19 October 2017

... Slavic name), provided rich pickings for grave-robbers until looting them was made illegal by Peter the Great in the early 18th century. It was Peter the Great who commissioned the first archaeological excavations of Scythian tombs and his Siberian Collection, on which much of our knowledge of Scythian material culture ...

Like a row of books by Faber

Peter Porter, 22 January 1987

Other Passports: Poems 1958-1985 
by Clive James.
Cape, 221 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 224 02422 1
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... cabaret at the ICA during Poetry International, 1973. ‘Bob Lull’ was first encountered there reading his newly composed ‘Notes for a Sonnet’. Later in the evening, he appeared, unable to leave well or ill alone, with the poem rewritten – ‘Revised Notes for a Sonnet’ – and then in a third appearance provided an anguished coda entitled ‘Notes ...

How to Read Aloud

Irina Dumitrescu, 10 September 2020

Voices and Books in the English Renaissance: A New History of Reading 
by Jennifer Richards.
Oxford, 329 pp., £65, October 2019, 978 0 19 880906 7
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Learning Languages in Early Modern England 
by John Gallagher.
Oxford, 274 pp., £60, August 2019, 978 0 19 883790 9
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... includes a scene in which he is tricked into having sex with some sooty pots and pans. Acting or reading out plays helped pupils connect to a second language. It taught them to deliver Latin speeches clearly and meaningfully. Learning a language was also training in the effective use of voice.It is easy to overlook how loud premodern education was. Most of ...

Asking to Be Looked at

Wayne Koestenbaum, 25 January 1996

Mapplethorpe: A Biography 
by Patricia Morrisroe.
Macmillan, 461 pp., £20, September 1995, 9780333669419
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Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe 
by Arthur Danto.
California, 206 pp., £20, October 1995, 0 520 20051 9
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... of its namesake, seems consecrated to the unusual and the mortifying. The current show – Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, amputees and hermaphrodites – holds a grotesqueness sufficient to remind the visitor of how sweet, how antique already, the infamous Mapplethorpe images have become. At least his models were alive. Circumstance has ...

Modernity

George Steiner, 5 May 1988

Visions and Blueprints: Avant-Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early 20th-century Europe 
edited by Edward Timms and Peter Collier.
Manchester, 328 pp., £29.50, February 1988, 0 7190 2260 6
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... Others are crumbly or empty or both. The editing is lazy. Some articles are followed by potted reading-lists, others not. There is no description of the contributors. Edward Timms writes usefully about Benda and Gottfried Benn. He notes accurately that the Dreyfus Affair lies at the very roots of the relations between intellect and power, between the ...

Virgin’s Tears

David Craig: On nature, 10 June 1999

Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times 
by Peter Coates.
Polity, 246 pp., £45, September 1998, 0 7456 1655 0
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... backed off and charged again, while the nanny waited nearby, a seemingly dispassionate spectator. Peter Coates’s study of the evolving meanings of ‘nature’, in Europe and North America, is preoccupied with the human tendency to invade nature, altering, exploiting and ‘reinventing’ it. He culls a telling image from the Guardian for 9 August ...

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