Shall we tell the children?

Paul Seabright, 3 July 1986

Melanie Klein: Her World and her Work 
by Phyllis Grosskurth.
Hodder, 516 pp., £19.95, June 1986, 0 340 25751 2
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Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey 1924-1925 
edited by Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick.
Chatto, 360 pp., £14.95, February 1986, 0 7011 3051 2
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... a few years of comparative cool, the temperature of the debate between Klein and her opponents rose sharply when, in about 1933, her own daughter Melitta was elected to full membership of the British Psycho-Analytical Association. Relations between the two had been strained for some years, but now an open war erupted. Melitta (backed by Edward Glover, her ...

Wedded to the Absolute

Ferdinand Mount: Enoch Powell, 26 September 2019

Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain 
by Paul Corthorn.
Oxford, 233 pp., £20, August 2019, 978 0 19 874714 7
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... to vote Conservative was decisive in Heath’s rather surprising election victory in June 1970, while his recommendation to vote Labour (so as to secure a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EEC) was instrumental in the Tory debacle in February 1974.* I am not wholly convinced by this thesis. After all, by the spring of 1970 Wilson’s ...

The Case of Agatha Christie

John Lanchester, 20 December 2018

... a well-to-do woman with a position in the world. The hot road spun away behind her; towns rose from the green landscape, crowded close about her with their inn-signs and petrol-pumps, their shops and police and perambulators, then reeled back and were forgotten. June was dying among the roses, the hedges were ...

Somerdale to Skarbimierz

James Meek, 20 April 2017

... were moved to Cadbury’s Bournville plant and Fry’s Chocolate Cream went to Blois in France. In June, the Crunchie bar line and Fry’s Turkish Delight were moved to Poland, followed in September by Curly Wurly, and in December by Chomp, Fudge, Picnic and Double Decker. ‘We watched the last few Double Deckers go through,’ said Silsbury. Someone took a ...

A Djinn speaks

Colm Tóibín: What about George Yeats?, 20 February 2003

Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats 
by Ann Saddlemyer.
Oxford, 808 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 19 811232 7
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... wrote also to Georgie, expressing the hope that she would come to Galway soon before the floods rose above Ballylee, the ruined castle which Yeats had bought a year earlier. Georgie, in the meantime, had been brought by Yeats to meet Maud Gonne and Iseult. Maud wrote to Yeats: I find her graceful & beautiful, & in her bright picturesque dresses, she will ...

An Invertebrate Left

Perry Anderson, 12 March 2009

... of the actions of the PCI. It was Togliatti himself who, as minister of justice, promulgated in June 1946 the amnesty that enabled them. A year later, the party was rewarded with an unceremonious ejection from the government by De Gasperi, who no longer had need of it. The postwar history of Italy was thus to be entirely unlike that of Germany, where there ...

The Road to Reading Gaol

Colm Tóibín, 30 November 2017

... Liverpool, but did not board the ship to Australia. Two months later, she did the same again. In June 1862, at the Wildes’ house on Merrion Square, she entered Jane’s bedroom unannounced. There was an argument between the two women, but it was not severe enough to prevent Mary planning to take the Wilde children on an outing a few days later. Jane later ...

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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... Charlotte Brontë and stretch to Scott Joplin, Alan Turing, Sylvia Plath and Diane Arbus.On 26 June this year, the paper ran a belated obituary of Valerie Solanas, who died in 1988 and is famous for having shot Andy Warhol twenty years earlier. The year before the shooting, Solanas published the SCUM Manifesto, which began: ‘Life in this society ...
... that our friendship both began and ended with his laughing. To Karl Leyser* Magdalen College, 1 June 1944 Since I finished my lectures last Thursday I have been leading a life of quiet pleasure. Most days I’ve sat on the lawn reading the Block Prince’s Register and other sources for the reign of Edward III. On Tuesday I took a complete holiday. Taking ...

Ardour

J.P. Stern, 3 November 1983

The Sacred Threshold: A Life of Rainer Maria Rilke 
by J.F. Hendry.
Carcanet, 184 pp., £9.95, July 1983, 0 85635 369 8
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Rilke: sein Leben, seine Welt, sein Werk 
by Wolfgang Leppmann.
Scherz Verlag, 483 pp., £11, May 1981, 3 502 18407 0
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Rainer Maria Rilke: Leben und Werk im Bild 
edited by Ingeborg Schnack.
Insel Verlag, 270 pp., £2.55, May 1977, 3 458 01735 6
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... whose citizen he eventually became; of the forebodings he felt at the murder of Rathenau in June 1922; and, a year before his death, of his belief (shared by Sigmund Freud) that Mussolini, and strong leaders generally, offered the remedy for Europe’s ailments. Lepmann’s main sources here, especially for the period after 1918, are Joachim Storck’s ...

Subversions

R.W. Johnson, 4 June 1987

Traitors: The Labyrinths of Treason 
by Chapman Pincher.
Sidgwick, 346 pp., £13.95, May 1987, 0 283 99379 0
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The Secrets of the Service: British Intelligence and Communist Subversion 1939-51 
by Anthony Glees.
Cape, 447 pp., £18, May 1987, 0 224 02252 0
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Freedom of Information – Freedom of the Individual? 
by Clive Ponting, John Ranelagh, Michael Zander and Simon Lee, edited by Julia Neuberger.
Macmillan, 110 pp., £4.95, May 1987, 0 333 44771 9
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... of ‘anti-Bolshevik old buffers’. These recruits were so markedly superior that they rapidly rose to positions of power and influence. Given the nature of the Thirties intelligentsia, it was pretty well inevitable that these recruits should have included at least a few who were to turn out to be Soviet moles. The second change followed from the fact ...

Insouciance

Anne Hollander: Wild Lee Miller, 20 July 2006

Lee Miller 
by Carolyn Burke.
Bloomsbury, 426 pp., £12.99, March 2006, 0 7475 8793 0
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... new modish effects, so that brilliant lipstick and nail varnish also came into their own as hems rose and breasts diminished, provocative shoes appeared and whalebone vanished; and Lee Miller seemed the perfect embodiment of this new feminine ideal. Everyone was aiming at it, but Miller at 18 apparently had a cool self-assurance and a strong-willed, unforced ...

The King and I

Alan Bennett, 30 January 1992

... went back north. This was not, as in the play, immediately before the thanksgiving service in June 1789, but some months later. The number of physicians attending the King varied. They were known as the ‘London doctors’ to distinguish them from Dr Willis and his son. I have restricted them to three but there may have been as many as ten. Nor have I ...

A Lazarus beside Me

Avies Platt: An Encounter with Yeats, 27 August 2015

... the seats filled, and I saw Haire approaching, and with him a man I knew must be Benjamin. I rose to greet them, and after a few friendly words they passed on. I sat down again and resumed my thoughts, to which was now added the satisfaction that Benjamin appeared to me as kindly in person as by letter. And before long I should know the truth. I might ...

The Depositor Haircut

James Meek: Cyprus’s Depositor Haircut, 9 May 2013

... not just tourists but prospective residents and second-homers. Cyprus prospered. House prices rose. Ticket prices fell. More visitors, more residents, more houses, more money. First it was people with money seeking homes; then, in a shift that was barely noticeable until after it had happened, it was people seeking a home for their money. Is there some ...