The Ramsey Effect

Kieran Setiya, 18 February 2021

Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers 
by Cheryl Misak.
Oxford, 500 pp., £25, February 2020, 978 0 19 875535 7
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... Logico-Philosophicus in 1916. The loss would be unfathomable.In Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers, Cheryl Misak shows us how much Ramsey achieved in the little time he had. Her book is not the first to tell the story of his life: an unfinished memoir by his younger sister, Margaret Paul, was published in 2012, but it was missing a crucial chapter ...

Total Knowledge

Peter Campbell, 10 September 1992

Hypertext 
by George Landow.
Johns Hopkins, 242 pp., £35, April 1992, 0 8018 4281 6
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... this information) has hopelessly diminished the role apparently played by the individual.’ Michael Heim, among others, fears Babel: ‘Fragments, reused material, the trails and intricate pathways of “hypertext” ... advance the disintegration of the centring voice of contemplative thought.’ Such dissent, Landow says, exemplifies the line of ...

Identity Parade

Linda Colley, 25 February 1993

People and Places: Country House Donors and the National Trust 
by James Lees-Milne.
Murray, 232 pp., £19.99, October 1992, 0 7195 5145 5
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The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 
by Michael Dobson.
Oxford, 266 pp., £30, October 1992, 0 19 811233 5
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Myths of the English 
edited by Roy Porter.
Polity, 280 pp., £39.50, October 1992, 0 7456 0844 2
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Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States 
by Stephen Daniels.
Polity, 257 pp., £39.50, November 1992, 0 7456 0450 1
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... just how far men and women responded to these promptings and why. This is the main drawback in Michael Dobson’s clever, lucid and scrupulously-researched book about the making of Shakespeare’s national reputation. Part of the current fashion for problematising the literary canon, it argues that there were three main reasons for the rise of Bardolatry ...

Let them cut grass

Linda Colley, 16 December 1993

The Downing Street Years 
by Margaret Thatcher.
HarperCollins, 914 pp., £25, October 1993, 0 00 255049 0
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... males. These could be the men of her own party, as when she notes how hopeless Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine were when they accompanied her on a visit to Reagan in 1985. ‘I did not bring them again,’ she remarks, for all the world as though they were a couple of incontinent pet dogs. But foreign statesmen could fare little better. That same ...

Growth

Arthur Marwick, 3 June 1982

The Wasting of the British Economy 
by Sidney Pollard.
Croom Helm, 197 pp., £11.95, March 1982, 0 7099 2019 9
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The Global 2000 Report to the President: Entering the 21st Century 
Penguin, 766 pp., £7.95, January 1982, 0 14 022441 6Show More
United Kingdom Facts 
by Richard Rose and Ian McAllister.
Macmillan, 168 pp., £30, February 1982, 0 333 25341 8
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... as implied, for example, in the Tebbit Bill: it is not that abroad the legal or economic powers of unions are more restricted, it is that ‘unlike the British they do not wish to use them in ways damaging to the nation in general and their members in particular.’ Furthermore, the unions are not really to blame for these attitudes. They have ...

The cow, the shoe, then you

Philip Oltermann: Hans Fallada, 8 March 2012

More Lives than One: A Biography of Hans Fallada 
by Jenny Williams.
Penguin, 320 pp., £12.99, February 2012, 978 0 241 95267 2
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A Small Circus 
by Hans Fallada, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Penguin, 577 pp., £20, February 2012, 978 0 14 119655 8
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... alcohol and morphine. But the persona he created still drives sales sixty years after his death. Michael Hofmann’s 2009 translation of his last novel, Alone in Berlin, sold around 350,000 copies in the UK alone, 100,000 of them in the first three months after publication. Much of Alone in Berlin’s success has to do with the way the story is told. Otto ...

Retripotent

Frank Kermode: B. S. Johnson, 5 August 2004

Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson 
by Jonathan Coe.
Picador, 486 pp., £20, June 2004, 9780330350488
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‘Trawl’, ‘Albert Angelo’ and ‘House Mother Normal’ 
by B.S. Johnson.
Picador, 472 pp., £14.99, June 2004, 0 330 35332 2
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... the OED) as Lawrence might have done. Some time around 1972 he came once or twice with his agent, Michael Bakewell, to a seminar at University College London, attended by students and lecturers but open to interested visitors. I can’t now remember anything he said, but he made himself welcome, and my memory is of a large and genially argumentative ...

When students ruled the earth

D.A.N. Jones, 17 March 1988

1968: A Student Generation in Revolt 
by Ronald Fraser.
Chatto, 370 pp., £14.95, January 1988, 0 7011 2913 1
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Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties 
by Tariq Ali.
Collins, 280 pp., £12.95, November 1987, 9780002177795
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Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades 
by David Caute.
Hamish Hamilton, 464 pp., £14.95, January 1988, 0 241 12174 4
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Nineteen Sixty-Eight: A Personal Report 
by Hans Koning.
Unwin Hyman, 196 pp., £10.95, April 1988, 9780044401858
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... a seat on Lambeth Council. I had worked for two magazines considered left-wing – Tribune, under Michael Foot, and the New Statesman, under Paul Johnson. It was a different world. In those distant days, Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister. He was being assailed by ‘left-wingers’, people like me, for being too subservient to the United States ...

Hoydens

Susannah Clapp, 18 February 1988

A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924 
by Julia Briggs.
Hutchinson, 473 pp., £16.95, November 1987, 9780091682101
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Narratives of Love and Loss: Studies in Modern Children’s Fiction 
by Margaret Rustin and Michael Rustin.
Verso, 268 pp., £22.95, November 1987, 9780860911876
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... fantasies, and to their use of magic as a metaphor for the writer’s imagination. Margaret and Michael Rustin go further. Narratives of Love and Loss discusses several books for children which the authors see as concerned with questions of emotional development and in which they perceive ‘latent depths of meaning’. The popularity of the works selected ...

Hey, Mister, you want dirty book?

Edward Said: The CIA, 30 September 1999

Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War 
by Frances Stonor Saunders.
Granta, 509 pp., £20, July 1999, 1 86207 029 6
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... The main vehicle for all of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967’. My first encounter (pun unintended) with the Congress was through The God that Failed, a compendium of confessions by well-known former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was ...

Andy Paperbag

Hal Foster: Andy Warhol, 21 March 2002

Andy Warhol 
by Wayne Koestenbaum.
Weidenfeld, 196 pp., £12.99, November 2001, 0 297 64630 3
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... bonds of the social formation. Thus, in carnival, age, social status, rank, property, lose their powers, have no place; familiarity of exchange is heightened.’ The strategy of the Factory was indeed ‘super’ – to hyperbolise roles in a way that sometimes mocked them. But this parodistic play with the social order was only half-intended; it was also ...

Tooloose-Lowrytrek

Elizabeth Lowry: Malcolm Lowry, 1 November 2007

The Voyage That Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry in His Own Words 
edited by Michael Hofmann.
NYRB, 518 pp., £16.99, November 2007, 978 1 59017 235 3
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... position where I can consummate the ordeal by the further ordeal of writing it.’ He never did. Michael Hofmann’s The Voyage That Never Ends is not Malcolm Lowry’s, but it puts us as close as anything can to being in a position to assess whether Lowry’s ‘Life Work’, unconsummated and fragmentary as it is, really does have the unity he claimed for ...

The Sound of Thunder

Tom Nairn: The Miners’ Strike, 8 October 2009

Marching to the Fault Line: The 1984 Miners’ Strike and the Death of Industrial Britain 
by Francis Beckett and David Hencke.
Constable, 303 pp., £18.99, February 2009, 978 1 84901 025 2
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Shafted: The Media, the Miners’ Strike and the Aftermath 
edited by Granville Williams.
Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, 176 pp., £9.99, March 2009, 978 1 898240 05 1
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... line’ of 1985 has turned into a global earth-shift. In his contribution to Shafted, Michael Bailey argues that since the spectre of socialism and historical materialism continues to haunt society, it’s legitimate to invoke Walter Benjamin, to keep ‘control of that memory’, and to ‘blast open the continuum of history’. Tony Benn, in his ...

The Second Resolution Question

Owen Bennett-Jones: Post-Invasion Iraq, 1 June 2017

Iraq: The Cost of War 
by Jeremy Greenstock.
Heinemann, 467 pp., £25, November 2016, 978 1 78515 125 5
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... legally necessary. Wilmshurst’s line manager, the Foreign Office’s chief legal adviser, Sir Michael Wood, shared her view that a second resolution was legally necessary. But Wood did not resign. He briefly considered it, he told Chilcot, but decided not to follow Wilmshurst. ‘Questions of conscience are very individual questions,’ he told the ...

Diary

Ian Hamilton: Francis Hope, and Tom and Vic, 15 March 1984

... the Volcano) in Burgess’s. Where will this end? And when, oh when will somebody pick Earthly Powers! Greene, by the way, scolded Burgess for not honouring P. G. Wodehouse – ‘our greatest comic novelist’ – but then forgot to include the old wag in his own Top Ten. Enough? Enough. This selfsame word, come to think of it, sprang unbidden to the lips ...