On my way to the Couch

E.S. Turner, 30 March 1989

On my way to the Club 
by Ludovic Kennedy.
Collins, 429 pp., £15, January 1989, 0 00 217617 3
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... at 10 Rillington Place, West London, an address later notorious as the home of the mass murderer John Christie. The same Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, by now a ‘charlatan’ with ‘all the arrogance of the truly ignorant’, contended that there had been no miscarriage of justice and was content to believe that by an odd coincidence two murderers had ...

Defence of the Housefly

Dinah Birch, 14 November 1996

Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy 
edited by Michael Millgate.
Oxford, 364 pp., £45, April 1996, 0 19 818609 6
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... callers – Edmund Blunden, E.M. Forster, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, John Drink water – and Florence took an eager interest in their conversation. Quick to forget her own afflictions when she sensed greater distress, she did all she could to help Charlotte Mew, whom she pitied and ...

Melbourne’s Middle Future

Tom Shippey, 7 January 1988

The Sea and Summer 
by George Turner.
Faber, 318 pp., £10.95, August 1987, 0 571 14846 8
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The Dragon in the Sword 
by Michael Moorcock.
Grafton, 283 pp., £10.95, July 1987, 0 246 13129 2
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Fiasco 
by Stanislaw Lem, translated by Michael Kandel.
Deutsch, 322 pp., £11.95, August 1987, 0 233 98141 1
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... ponder on the strange lives of the people who lived in them before the ‘greenhouse effect’ took hold, melted the ice caps, and loosed the overpopulated 21st century’s shaky grip on civilisation. Most of the book is a documentary fiction by one such historian, concerned to explore her theory that in that century the division which all later historians ...

They both hated DLT

Andy Beckett: Radio 1, 15 April 1999

The Nation’s Favourite: The True Adventures of Radio 1 
by Simon Garfield.
Faber, 273 pp., £9.99, October 1998, 0 571 19435 4
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... as he gruffly liked to be known). Travis was having a party at his home, and decided to invite John Peel, then the only DJ at Radio 1 with a serious interest in the music he played. Peel, who was much older, and held a far more marginal position in the station’s daily schedule, went along out of curiosity. Looking around Travis’s house he ‘suddenly ...

The Light Waters of Amnion

Dan Jacobson: Bruno Schulz, 1 July 1999

The Collected Works of Bruno Schulz 
edited by Jerzy Ficowski.
Picador, 582 pp., £50, December 1998, 0 330 34783 7
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... in the evening covered the branches of the trees around the church with living black leaves, then took off, fluttering, and came back, each clinging to its own place on its own branch, only to fly away at dawn, in large flocks, like gusts of soot, flakes of dirt, undulating and fantastic, blackening with their insistent cawing the musty yellow streaks of ...

Out of Sight, out of Mind

Frank Kermode: A.J. Ayer’s Winning Ways, 15 July 1999

A.J. Ayer: A Life 
by Ben Rogers.
Chatto, 402 pp., £20, June 1999, 9780701163167
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... Oxford philosophy was a competitive business; there were certain prizes that one had to win, the John Locke Prize, the All Souls Fellowship; but Ayer’s fate was to be pipped by his contemporaries, Isaiah Berlin, Goronwy Rees and the slightly younger J.L. Austin. As an undergraduate he had been taken up by Maurice Bowra and acquired a certain celebrity by ...

Educating the Blimps

Geoffrey Best: Military history, 10 June 1999

Alchemist of War: The Life of Basil Liddell Hart 
by Alex Danchev.
Weidenfeld, 369 pp., £25, September 1998, 0 297 81621 7
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Studies in British Military Thought: Debates with Fuller and Liddell Hart 
by Brian Holden Reid.
Nebraska, 287 pp., £30, October 1998, 0 8032 3927 0
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... came his 1948 book The Other Side of the Hill (a quotation from the Duke of Wellington, who told John Wilson Croker that he had ‘spent all his life guessing what was on the other side of the hill’). This was military history from the opposing army’s perspective and with the politics and ethics left out. General Sir Percy Hobart, the most cussed of the ...

Strange Love

William Boyd, 1 December 1983

The Africans 
by David Lamb.
Bodley Head, 363 pp., £12.50, August 1983, 0 370 30968 5
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African Princess 
by Princess Elizabeth of Toro.
Hamish Hamilton, 230 pp., £9.95, September 1983, 0 241 11002 5
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The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat 
by Ryszard Kapuściński, translated by William Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowsa-Brand.
Quartet, 164 pp., £7.95, October 1983, 0 7043 2415 6
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... kiss, Africans copulate’). This thorough conspectus of the continent invites comparison with John Gunther’s Inside Africa, a survey done in the last days of colonialism, and, until events overtake it, The Africans should stand, in succession to Gunther, as the most accessible and comprehensive overview of the continent. The twenty-odd years since the ...

Bloody Horse

Samuel Hynes, 1 December 1983

Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography 
by Peter Alexander.
Oxford, 277 pp., £12.50, March 1981, 0 19 211750 5
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The Selected Poems of Roy Campbell 
edited by Peter Alexander.
Oxford, 131 pp., £7.50, July 1982, 9780192119469
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... simpleton. That’s true, certainly: but then, fascism is a simpleton’s politics, and Campbell took to it wholeheartedly. Having identified himself to the world as a Spanish fascist, Campbell immediately, and with characteristic perversity, declared his essential Britishness and joined the British Army. He served with the King’s African Rifles during the ...

Eclipse of Europe

Brian Bond, 3 June 1982

End of the Affair: The Collapse of the Anglo-French Alliance 1939-40 
by Eleanor Gates.
Allen and Unwin, 630 pp., £15, February 1982, 0 04 940063 0
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The Strategy of Phoney War: Britain, Sweden and the Iron Ore Question 1939-1940 
by Thomas Munch-Petersen.
Militärhistoriska Forlaget, 296 pp., £8, October 1981, 91 85266 17 5
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... strife under Vichy and the Nazi occupation, have come from transatlantic scholars such as John C. Cairns, Philip Bankwitz, Telford Taylor and Robert O. Paxton. Eleanor M. Gates might modestly disclaim inclusion in such distinguished company. But she has produced a splendid book which is both instructive and moving. She is not much interested in the ...

Conservatives

Neal Ascherson, 6 November 1980

The Meaning of Conservatism 
by Roger Scruton.
Macmillan, 205 pp., £12, 0 333 37635 8
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Counting Our Blessings 
by Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Secker, 348 pp., £7.95, September 1980, 9780436294013
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Peregrinations 
by Peregrine Worsthorne.
Weidenfeld, 277 pp., £9.95, October 1980, 0 297 77807 2
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... of President Wilson, the pinnacle of American prestige in the world, and to their reassertion in John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural speech. The Senator for New York, as he now is, has served four Presidents, and acted as American Ambassador to India and the United Nations. He is engaging, witty and learned; his prose has the facile deliciousness of Bourbon ...

George Eliot, Joyce and Cambridge

Michael Mason, 2 April 1981

... hardened around the 1830s, but in other respects the forms that quoted and unquoted dialogue took in the 19th century, and the interplay between them and between dialogue and narration, were continuously variable and inventive. The complexity of the subject can be suggested by setting side by side two examples from Dickens noticed by Lambert.   Says ...

Angela and the Beast

Patricia Craig, 5 December 1985

Black Venus 
by Angela Carter.
Chatto, 121 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 7011 3964 1
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Come unto these yellow sands 
by Angela Carter.
Bloodaxe, 158 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 906427 66 5
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Mainland 
by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.
Hamish Hamilton, 285 pp., £9.95, October 1985, 0 241 11643 0
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The Accidental Tourist 
by Anne Tyler.
Chatto, 355 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 7011 2986 7
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Arrows of Longing 
by Virginia Moriconi.
Duckworth, 252 pp., £9.95, October 1985, 9780715620694
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... These fairies are not akin to the wispy little dragonfly creatures, located at Cottingley, that took in Conan Doyle when he saw them on film. Not being mere puffs of sugariness, they’re unsuitable fare for the nursery. It’s been recognised for some time that the Victorians debased their fairy lore, in the course of desexing it. ‘The Victorian ...

The Idea of America

Alasdair MacIntyre, 6 November 1980

Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence 
by Garry Wills.
Athlone, 398 pp., £12.50, September 1980, 0 485 11201 9
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... and falsity, reasonableness and unreasonableness. He is deeply concerned to show that Jefferson took his theory of the moral sense from Francis Hutcheson: he seems not at all interested in whether the theory of the moral sense is true. He seems, indeed, not even to be interested in how it fared in the intellectual arguments of the 18th century. And this ...

Edward and Tilly and George

Robert Melville, 15 March 1984

Swans Reflecting Elephants: My Early Years 
by Edward James, edited by George Melly.
Weidenfeld, 178 pp., £8.95, July 1982, 0 297 77988 5
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... the recording had been a rush job for George, occupying four days between two singing dates with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers. Edward asked him to undertake the job because they had both been collectors of Surrealism. Edward had been a collector of Dali and Magritte on a scale that can be called patronage; George made a faultless selection of Magrittes from ...