Oedipus was innocent

Malcolm Bull, 10 March 1994

Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith 
by Norman Cohn.
Yale, 271 pp., £20, October 1993, 0 300 05598 6
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... influence may have been transmitted via this route, it is worth considering the case of David Koresh and the Branch Davidian Seventh-Day Adventists. The siege at Waco had an uncannily Zoroastrian ending. Not only is fire, the eschatological cleanser, the sacred element of Zoroastrianism; and not only is Koresh, meaning Cyrus, the name of the ...

A Kind of Scandal

A.D. Nuttall, 19 August 1993

Shakespeare and Ovid 
by Jonathan Bate.
Oxford, 292 pp., £35, May 1993, 0 19 812954 8
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... happened and always is’. That is why the dogs never cease to tear Actaeon. I last saw him in David Lodge’s Nice Work. I have suggested a certain equivalence of myth and psychology. This may mean that they are in a way rivals. In Euripides’ Hippolytus one can sense that psychology is preparing to take over from myth. The story itself is firmly ...

Credibility Brown

Christopher Hitchens, 17 August 1989

Where there is greed: Margaret Thatcher and the Betrayal of Britain’s Future 
by Gordon Brown.
Mainstream, 182 pp., £4.95, May 1989, 1 85158 233 9
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CounterBlasts No 3: A Rational Advance for the Labour Party 
by John Lloyd.
Chatto, 57 pp., £2.99, June 1989, 0 7011 3519 0
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... and provide the skills base needed by modern industry and commerce.’ To say nothing of Sir David Philips, Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Research Councils, who remarked in 1988 that ‘decisions by the Government were “progressively leading to an unstable situation”.’ Fighting words, no doubt, but they have the unmistakably musty smell of ...

Great Portland Street Blues

Karl Miller, 25 January 1990

Boswell: The Great Biographer. Journals: 1789-1795 
by James Boswell, edited by Marlies Danziger and Frank Brady.
Heinemann, 432 pp., £25, November 1989, 0 434 89729 9
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... The connoisseur of deathbeds, of the fortitude of their occupants, of the composure of the atheist David Hume, the prison visitor who liked to watch executions, and appears to have lacked Johnson’s terror of futurity, was off somewhere on business when his wife stopped living. The journal deals with his five years as the widower formed by that crisis. His ...

Touching the music

Paul Driver, 4 January 1996

Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship 
by Robert Craft.
Vanderbilt, 588 pp., £35.95, October 1994, 0 8265 1258 5
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... aware of the difference between a ‘life of purity’, such as he found exemplified by the poet David Jones when visiting him in a Harrow lodging-house with Stephen Spender, and the ‘many lives of pastiche’. But he is aware of the origin of his woes. From 4 October 1953: ‘My deepest problem. I have changed families and at a terrible cost substituted ...

Cheering us up

Ian Jack, 15 September 1988

In for a Penny: The Unauthorised Biography of Jeffrey Archer 
by Jonathan Mantle.
Hamish Hamilton, 264 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 241 12478 6
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... though it had been devised by a Germany spy while his parachute was coming down to land. Not even David Puttnam could ask for anything more. In this ‘unauthorised biography’ – ‘unauthorised’ in the sense that Archer first agreed to see the author and then thought better of it – Jonathan Mantle sets out to scrutinise Archer’s career. Together ...

Diary

R.W. Johnson: Kinnock must go, 10 December 1987

... own presidential stature and coat-tails, as well as his incomparable political intelligence. David Steel might, just conceivably, be capable of playing such a role, but Labour would never accept Liberal leadership of a joint Opposition campaign. Which means one is left with Neil Kinnock – who is incapable of playing such a role. Kinnock may be a nice ...

Delays that Kill

Jane Binyon: Rail safety, 16 March 2000

... that new safety controls must reduce efficiency is contestable. This view seems to be shared by David Davies, President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, in his recently published assessment of train protection systems, made in the wake of the Ladbroke Grove crash. ‘ETCS level 3,’ he writes, ‘is the best way ahead: it can offer increased line ...

Being that can be understood is language

Richard Rorty: H.-G. Gadamer, 16 March 2000

... is dead. There are many distinguished analytic philosophers, particularly admirers of Kripke like David Lewis and Frank Jackson, who are unabashed physicalist metaphysicians. They think of themselves as continuing the struggle against mystificatory nonsense that Thomas Huxley waged against Bishop Wilberforce, Russell against Bergson, and Carnap against ...

The Propitious Rise of Israel’s little Napoleon

Avi Shlaim: Why peace with Syria and the Palestinians is getting closer, 16 September 1999

... crucially important defence portfolio in addition to the premiership, and gave foreign affairs to David Levy, who broke away from the Likud to join the One Israel alliance. A former construction worker of Moroccan origin, Levy speaks no English and it was no doubt thought that his notorious indolence would allow Barak the latitude he wanted to conduct his own ...

In a Dark Mode

Lawrence Rainey: Grim Modernism, 20 January 2000

Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism 
by T.J. Clark.
Yale, 451 pp., £30, April 1999, 0 300 07532 4
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... are also earlier readings of the various Large Bathers by Cézanne and of the Death of Marat by David, a painting trotted out and unveiled to ‘the people’ in a public ceremony that took place only a few hours after Marie-Antoinette was beheaded. Revolution, murder and martyrdom – with blood congealing around the means of representation – these are ...

Indira’s India

Alok Rai, 20 December 1984

... available, well-used moulds. One of these turned up, somewhat oddly, in the New Statesman, where David Selbourne argued that what had been persistently overlooked was the fact that India wasn’t a country at all, but a sub-continent. This thesis has some truth in it, but there hangs about it an ancient and fish-like smell. It was, after all, a standard ...

Cushy Numbers

Neal Ascherson, 3 November 1983

French and Germans, Germans and French: A Personal Interpretation of France under Two Occupations, 1914-1918/1940-1944 
by Richard Cobb.
University Press of New England, 188 pp., £10.95, July 1983, 0 87451 225 5
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Still Life: Scenes from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood 
by Richard Cobb.
Chatto, 161 pp., £8.95, September 1983, 0 7011 2695 7
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... get carried away beyond the merits of an originally sound case. Why, he goes on, do writers like David Pryce-Jones want the Parisians to have behaved like the people of Warsaw? It is certainly true that, as a result of their rising, the inhabitants of Warsaw managed to get their city largely razed to the ground. If Hitler had had his way, Paris would have ...

It can happen here

Alan Milward, 2 May 1985

Hitler and the Final Solution 
by Gerald Fleming.
Hamish Hamilton, 219 pp., £12.95, January 1985, 0 241 11388 1
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Hitler in History 
by Eberhard Jäckel.
University Press of New England, 115 pp., $9.95, January 1985, 0 87451 311 1
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Albert Speer: The End of a Myth 
by Matthias Schmidt, translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Harrap, 276 pp., £9.95, March 1985, 0 245 54244 2
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... found a way on which Hitler only later bestowed his approval. To this debate two British writers, David Irving and Gerald Fleming, have contributed thunderous points. Irving claims, what no respectable German author has claimed, that not only was Hitler not the author of the ‘final solution’: he did not even know about it until 1943. He thought the Jews ...

Light on a rich country

Rosalind Mitchison, 17 June 1982

The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction 
by E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield.
Edward Arnold, 779 pp., £45, October 1981, 0 7131 6264 3
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... reveals, indeed, a remarkable level of social organisation. Recent work by, among others, David Levine has shown the likely economic developments that led to the lowering of the age of marriage and the relaxation of sexual morals in the 18th century. These changes are attributed to the rise of ‘proto-industry’ – in particular, to the ...