Less and More

Adam Begley, 15 September 1988

Elephant, and Other Stories 
by Raymond Carver.
Collins Harvill, 124 pp., £9.95, August 1988, 0 00 271912 6
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The Tidewater Tales 
by John Barth.
Methuen, 655 pp., £12.95, August 1988, 0 413 18770 5
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... and authority of his prose.If Raymond Carver ranks among the great American short-story writers, John Barth is a master of the out-sized Post-Modern novel. They belong at opposite poles of the American literary spectrum. In ‘On Writing’, Carver mentions an essay by Barth in which the latter regrets the lack of interest his students express in ‘formal ...

Use your theodolite

Rosemary Hill: Stone Circles, 26 December 2024

Stone Circles: A Field Guide 
by Colin Richards and Vicki Cummings.
Yale, 494 pp., £30, September 2024, 978 0 300 23598 2
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... cold. Pepys looked at the megaliths in 1668 and shrugged: ‘God knows what their use was.’ John Aubrey, the first person to make a serious study of stone circles, put his finger on the problem: ‘These Antiquities are so exceeding old that no Bookes doe reach them.’ He developed a more effective method. Using measurements and comparative surveys of ...

Inclined to Putrefaction

Erin Maglaque: In Quarantine, 20 February 2020

Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City 
by John Henderson.
Yale, 363 pp., £30, July 2019, 978 0 300 19634 4
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... the pressures of a deeply unequal society released. But what emerges from the tangle of stories in John Henderson’s book is a sense that for many the world stood still during the plague. The disease waned in the early summer of 1631 and, in June, Florentines emerged onto the streets to take part in a Corpus Christi procession, thanking God for their ...

Take a Cold Bath

Lucy Wooding: Chastity or Fornication?, 6 March 2025

Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity 
by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
Allen Lane, 660 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 241 40093 7
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... of saints’ stories by Jacobus de Voragine – and the late medieval English sermon collection of John Mirk. The Orthodox Church, concerned to regulate monastic communities, severely penalised any behaviour that compromised masculine identity: shaving off one’s beard, and thereby appearing feminine, received a worse punishment than soliciting another man ...

Lumps of Cram

Colin Kidd: University English, 14 August 2025

Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain 
by Stefan Collini.
Oxford, 648 pp., £35, April, 978 0 19 880018 7
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... of political science in That Noble Science of Politics (1983), cowritten with his late colleagues John Burrow and Donald Winch, which rejected the notion that a unidirectional, single-subject narrative was an adequate way of recounting a discipline’s history. The authors instead immersed themselves in unresolved contradictions: between deductive procedures ...

Carrion and Earth

Niamh Gallagher: Ireland’s Great Famine, 20 November 2025

Rot: A History of the Irish Famine 
by Padraic X. Scanlan.
Little, Brown, 340 pp., £25, March 2025, 978 1 4721 4687 8
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... political event – a symbol of colonial exploitation and neglect. In 1861 the radical nationalist John Mitchel published The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), in which he blamed the British government for the devastation. ‘The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight,’ he wrote, ‘but the English created the Famine … and a million and a half ...

Loafing with the Sissies

Colm Tóibín: The Trials of Andy Warhol, 10 September 2020

Warhol: A Life as Art 
by Blake Gopnik.
Allen Lane, 931 pp., £35, March, 978 0 241 00338 1
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... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not known for ...

Cadmus and the Dragon

Tom Paulin, 8 April 1993

... plenty men whose heads resemble nothing so much as the head of a dick which is how I came to see John Cadmus III sitting at the wheel of his pickup truck in a parking lot outside a Safeway foodstore in Tucumcari New Mexico – he looked a tad like Norman Schwarzkopf the day he turned back on the road to Baghdad and though I spotted – or say I spotted his ...

Bored Hero

Alan Bell, 22 January 1981

Raymond Asquith: Life and Letters 
by John Jolliffe.
Collins, 311 pp., £10.95, July 1980, 9780002167147
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... When Raymond Asquith died in the Battle of the Somme, Winston Churchill grieved for ‘the loss of my brilliant hero-friend’, and the Prime Minister’s son became a symbol of the talent of a whole generation. He is mentioned in countless memoirs, but until the publication of this volume Asquith has never possessed any definite literary personality to give documentary substance to the legend of tragically sacrificed brilliance ...

Seventh Eighth Men Uncovered

Humphery Spender, 7 May 1981

... publicity to my brother Stephen in some sensationally farfetched connection with Guy Burgess, John Lehmann and other names they hoped to involve.) ‘Ah that rings a bell,’ and significant looks passed between uniformed men at desks and with telephones. Our identity was doubted until Tom Hopkinson (then editing Picture Post) and the Art Editor of the ...

Signs of Affection

J.Z. Young, 1 October 1981

The Oxford Companion to Animal Behaviour 
edited by David McFarland.
Oxford, 657 pp., £17.50, July 1981, 0 19 866120 7
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... the avoidance of these topics is due to their common subjective uses. Behaviourists, ever since John B. Watson, have been determined to avoid the use of subjective terminology, holding that this is proper only to humans. This is certainly a difficult topic, but surely if we are to see signs in animals that we classify as indicating ‘fear’, we can also ...

The Unholy One?

Tom Paulin, 11 December 1997

... you as a smiling machine both a purring cat and a fixture – and then in a letter rejecting John Bull’s Other Island said you had for the first time ‘a geographical conscience’ – which means your other island savoured of the earth had even the oily tremor of bogland – I guess he meant to imply that all the rest – all your other plays ...

Short Cuts

Andrew O’Hagan: Scotland's hirsute folk hero, 17 August 2006

... cabinet has that kind of pull, and the ones who are spoken of in the same manner – Donald Dewar, John Smith – are as dead as the Scottish kings. In the end Sheridan won his case and relieves the News of the World of £200,000. The fate of possible perjurors is still unknown, but it will be some time before the country is so riveted by a trial, one that has ...

Short Cuts

Daniel Soar: The vexed issue of Labour Party funding, 19 October 2006

... members as there had been when Blair won the 1997 election, and nowhere near the million members John Prescott used to boast of as being the party’s achievable goal. People are leaving Labour in droves. To anyone outside the present administration the explanation is simple: New Labour lies, and is craven, and has failed. To senior party figures and ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: 10,860 novels, 23 August 2001

... I’d like to think it doesn’t bother them unduly. As Browning put it, ‘What porridge had ...