The End of the Future

Jeff McMahan, 1 July 1982

The Fate of the Earth 
by Jonathan Schell.
Cape/Picador, 256 pp., £7.95, June 1982, 0 224 02064 1
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The Two-Edged Sword: Armed Force in the Modern World 
by Laurence Martin.
Weidenfeld, 108 pp., £5.95, March 1982, 0 297 78139 1
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Zero Option 
by E.P. Thompson.
Merlin, 198 pp., £10, June 1982, 0 85036 288 1
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Disarming Europe 
edited by Mary Kaldor and Dan Smith.
Merlin, 196 pp., £10, May 1982, 0 85036 277 6
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... devastating critique of that case that I have yet encountered. There is also an excellent paper by David Holloway on the Soviet view of theatre nuclear weapons. The contributors to this volume claim to know of a better ’ole than nuclear deterrence – at least where European security is concerned. The papers by Ben Dankbaar and Anders Boserup explore and ...

Priapus Knight

Marilyn Butler, 18 March 1982

The Arrogant Connoisseur: Richard Payne Knight 1751-1824 
edited by Michael Clarke and Nicholas Penny.
Manchester, 189 pp., £30, February 1982, 0 7190 0871 9
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... the ‘principles and practice’ of the leading painter of the French Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, as he was of Repton and Brown. In discussions of painting Knight professed himself a colourist. He disliked the contemporary fashions for heroic subjects, statuesque figures, the rigidities of planar composition and line, while he praised painters like ...

Super-Real

Peter Campbell, 18 March 1982

The Pre-Raphaelites 
by Christopher Wood.
Weidenfeld, 160 pp., £18, October 1981, 0 297 78007 7
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The Diary of Ford Madox Brown 
edited by Virginia Surtees.
Yale, 237 pp., £15, November 1981, 0 300 02743 5
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Eric Gill: Man of Flesh and Spirit 
by Malcolm Yorke.
Constable, 304 pp., £12.50, November 1981, 0 09 463740 7
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... to dwell on the horrid actuality of crucifixion, or draw less than perfectly pneumatic flesh. David Jones was right when he spoke of the ‘toyishness’ of Gill’s sculpture, of ‘lack of weight and volume’ and of ‘a linear grace ... not always foiled enough so that too often elegance and sometimes a positive slickness harmed his work’. The ...

Dishonoured

Michael Wood, 5 May 1983

The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformation 
by Ian Donaldson.
Oxford, 203 pp., £15, October 1982, 0 19 812638 7
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The Rape of Clarissa 
by Terry Eagleton.
Blackwell, 109 pp., £10, September 1982, 0 631 13031 4
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Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters 
by Carol Houlihan Flynn.
Princeton, 342 pp., £17.70, May 1982, 0 691 06506 3
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... the lighter cavalry (Mlle de Scudéry, Voltaire, Alfieri, Nathaniel Lee, Gavin Hamilton, J.-L. David). However, Donaldson sharply registers the enormous popularity of the myth across the centuries, and the ways in which controversy has enlivened and enlarged it rather than killing it off. Readings of a myth become part of the myth, as Lévi-Strauss said of ...

Appreciating Paisley

Charles Townshend, 22 January 1987

God save Ulster: The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism 
by Steve Bruce.
Oxford, 308 pp., £15, November 1986, 0 19 827487 4
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Children of Wrath: Political Violence in Northern Ireland 
by Michael MacDonald.
Polity, 194 pp., £19.50, September 1986, 0 7456 0219 3
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... in public sophistication. Public banding, which articulates the contractarian spirit identified in David Miller’s Queen’s Rebels (1978), has taken varied forms. An unexpected aspect of the present crisis has been the non-emergence of this respectable vigilantism despite Paisley’s repeated efforts to flourish a ‘third ...

A Republic of Taste

Thomas Crow, 19 March 1987

The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: ‘The Body of the Public’ 
by John Barrell.
Yale, 366 pp., £16.95, October 1986, 0 300 03720 1
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... of discussion, and there were intermittent episodes of excitement around a Watteau, Greuze or David. When an artist had something revelatory to say, when he found ways to represent previously latent perceptions and structures of feeling, an audience was ready to respond. But in the absence of such exceptional art, the business of painting and sculpture ...

Conspiratorial Hapsburger

Michael Hofmann, 5 March 1987

Hotel Savoy 
by Joseph Roth, translated by John Hoare.
Chatto, 183 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 7011 2879 8
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... best of the old seemed to me Desmond Vesey’s Confession of a Murderer, and of the new I liked David Le Vay, who is responsible for Weights and Measures, Flight without End, and Roth’s uncompleted ‘Trotsky-novel’ The Silent Prophet. The most disappointing is John Hoare, whose version of The Emperor’s Tomb contains awkwardnesses, and a few bad ...

On the Rant

E.P. Thompson, 9 July 1987

Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians 
by J.C. Davis.
Cambridge, 208 pp., £22.50, September 1986, 0 521 26243 7
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... is Frank McGregor, whose unpublished thesis on the Rangers (Oxford, 1968) has been pillaged by David wholesale, yet who gave to him the most interesting part of his case. For McGregor, in several articles, has himself developed the argument that George Fox and others used the odium of Ranterism as a useful disciplinary control, and, in the case of early ...

Knowledge

Ian Hacking, 18 December 1986

How institutions think 
by Mary Douglas.
Syracuse, 146 pp., $19.95, July 1986, 0 8156 2369 0
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... religion, or at least venerable, immutable, perfect, distant. Principles of justice, for example. David Hume enters, not for the first time, as an ally here. ‘The sense of justice and injustice is not derived from nature,’ he argued, ‘but arises artificially, though necessarily, from education and human inventions.’ People resent this. It is all right ...

War Book

C.K. Stead, 18 December 1986

The Matriarch 
by Witi Ihimaera.
Heinemann, 456 pp., £10.95, July 1986, 0 434 36504 1
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... lecturer in the early Sixties. He was one of a generation of Auckland students which included David Lange and a number of his present Cabinet. A few years later Ihimaera’s fiction began to appear. He was the first Maori writer to give an account from the inside of tribal life and rituals. His novel Tangi was widely read and admired, and it was followed ...

Hattersley’s Specifics

Michael Stewart, 19 March 1987

Choose freedom: The Future for Democratic Socialism 
by Roy Hattersley.
Joseph, 265 pp., £12.95, January 1987, 0 7181 2483 9
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Power, Competition and the State. Vol. I: Britain in Search of Balance, 1940-61 
by Keith Middlemas.
Methuen, 404 pp., £25, October 1986, 0 333 41412 8
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... the exact opposite of that of the libertarian New Right, which, basing itself on the writings of F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, holds that most intervention by the state, and particularly any intervention designed to promote greater equality, represents an unacceptable infringement of personal liberty. In what is the best part of his book, Hattersley, with ...

Insults

Richard Wollheim, 19 March 1987

Semites and Anti-Semites 
by Bernard Lewis.
Weidenfeld, 288 pp., £15, August 1986, 0 297 79030 7
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After the Last Sky 
by Edward Said and Jean Mohr.
Faber, 224 pp., £6.95, September 1986, 0 571 13918 3
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... up in. I have no knowledge of Judaism, and my elementary feeling about religion is like that of David Hume; I am inclined to think that religions are worse the further they stray from polytheism. According to rabbinic law, which Lewis says gives the ‘authoritative’ answer, I am not a Jew, because of my mother, and, even if my mother had made me a ...

Getting high

Charles Nicholl, 19 March 1987

The Global Connection: The Crisis of Drug Addiction 
by Ben Whitaker.
Cape, 384 pp., £15, March 1987, 0 224 02224 5
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... than a nibble round the edge, crop eradication has to be a full-scale military undertaking. When David Mellor, the Home Office minister responsible for drug control, visited South America last year, he made much of fighting the drug industry ‘at source’, promising British aid to the tune of £1.5 millon. Measured against the money generated by the ...

Ejected Gentleman

Norman Page, 7 May 1987

John Galsworthy’s Life and Art: An Alien’s Fortress 
by James Gindin.
Macmillan, 616 pp., £35, March 1987, 0 333 40812 8
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... that ‘he would go to the stake for his opinions but would go courteously raising his hat’; David Garnett found him ‘rather rigid with good intentions’; others said that he never saw a joke and could not bear to lose at croquet. The generous impulses were certainly there, but tended to take predictable forms: faced with suffering, he reached for his ...

Religion, grrrr

Rachel Aviv: The Scientology Mythos, 26 January 2012

The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion 
by Hugh Urban.
Princeton, 268 pp., £19.95, September 2011, 978 0 691 14608 9
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... form of ‘inquisition’) as a proof of the religion’s authenticity. Under the leadership of David Miscavige, Hubbard’s successor, the church has responded aggressively to the online publication of confidential materials, treating hackers as a new enemy, as threatening as psychiatry. It reframes attacks on Scientology’s sealed materials as an assault ...