Arabs

Malise Ruthven, 18 February 1982

Covering Islam 
by Edward Said.
Routledge, 224 pp., £8.95, October 1981, 0 7100 0840 6
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Heart-Beguiling Araby 
by Kathryn Tidrick.
Cambridge, 224 pp., £12.50, July 1981, 0 521 23483 2
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Inside the Iranian Revolution 
by John Stempel.
Indiana, 336 pp., £10.50, December 1981, 0 253 14200 8
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The Return of the Ayatollah 
by Mohamed Heikal.
Deutsch, 218 pp., £9.95, November 1981, 0 233 97404 0
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Sadat 
by David Hirst and Irene Beeson.
Faber, 384 pp., £11.50, December 1981, 0 571 11690 6
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... continue to exhibit an almost complete lack of self-consciousness about the methodology of their field, its ‘knowability’ and the purposes to which their knowledge (which can only consist of interpretation) may be put. This he attributes to two factors: the marginality, or ‘willed irrelevance’, of Islamic studies in relation to the general ...

Rising Moon

R.W. Johnson, 18 December 1986

L’Empire Moon 
by Jean-Francois Boyer.
La Découverte, 419 pp., August 1986, 2 7071 1604 1
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The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection 
by Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead.
Sheridan Square, 255 pp., $19.95, May 1986, 0 940380 07 2
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... to recognise that, for all sorts of obvious reasons, the Western press is a far, far more fruitful field for disinformation stemming from the right than from the left. How much does all of this matter? Moon is fairly clearly mad, after all; the number of his followers is stagnant; and journalists like de Borchgrave seem unlikely ever to gain the full ...

Beyond Textualism

Christopher Norris, 19 January 1984

Text Production 
by Michael Riffaterre, translated by Terese Lyons.
Columbia, 341 pp., $32.50, September 1983, 0 231 05334 7
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Writing and the Experience of Limits 
by Philippe Sollers, edited by David Hayman, translated by Philip Barnard.
Columbia, 242 pp., $31.50, September 1983, 0 231 05292 8
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The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory 
by Paul Fry.
Yale, 239 pp., £18, October 1984, 0 300 02924 1
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Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism 
by Paul de Man, edited by Wlad Godzich.
Methuen, 308 pp., £7.50, November 1983, 0 416 35860 8
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Displacement: Derrida and After 
edited by Mark Krupnick.
Indiana, 198 pp., £9.75, December 1983, 0 253 31803 3
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Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre 
by Susan Rubin Suleiman.
Columbia, 299 pp., £39, August 1983, 0 231 05492 0
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... In fact he suggests that his book might be read as an attempt to ‘recover nearly the whole field for Longinus’, as opposed to the dominant critical tradition descending from Aristotle to the present-day formalists. The Longinan Sublime becomes a touchstone, for Fry, of that willingness to entertain doubts and perplexities which formalism vainly ...

Fine-Tuned for Life

John Leslie: Cosmology, 1 January 1998

Before the Beginning 
by Martin Rees.
Simon and Schuster, 288 pp., £7.99, January 1998, 0 684 81660 1
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The Life of the Cosmos 
by Lee Smolin.
Weidenfeld, 358 pp., £20, September 1997, 0 297 81727 2
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... the Sun, or without any atoms, or with just the simplest atoms and no chemistry. Arguments in this field go well beyond the claim that life couldn’t have evolved without carbon, a claim sometimes thought unimaginative, although Rees finds it interesting. Marginally different knob positions would have led to a mainly carbon-free universe (or huge cosmic ...

On Cruelty

Judith Butler: The Death Penalty, 17 July 2014

The Death Penalty: Vol. I 
by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf.
Chicago, 328 pp., £24.50, January 2014, 978 0 226 14432 0
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... any injury is conceptualised as a debt, and every punishment understood as a payment. Hence the field of suffering is pervasively economised, and the contract becomes the salient model for human exchange. According to Nietzsche, all manner of injury is now modelled on the creditor-debtor relation. As injury comes to be conceived as payment in default, the ...

No Crying in This House

Jackson Lears: The Kennedy Myth, 7 November 2013

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy 
by David Nasaw.
Allen Lane, 896 pp., £12.35, September 2013, 978 0 14 312407 8
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Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch 
by Barbara Perry.
Norton, 404 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 393 06895 5
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... rollicking Irish Catholic clan, athletic, photogenic and as rambunctious as any crowd of kids in a Frank Capra film. They are presided over by Joseph Kennedy, a fabulously successful self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf ...

Rinse it in dead champagne

Colm Tóibín: The women who invented beauty, 5 February 2004

War Paint: Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry 
by Lindy Woodhead.
Virago, 498 pp., £20, April 2003, 1 86049 974 0
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Diana Vreeland 
by Eleanor Dwight.
HarperCollins, 308 pp., £30, December 2002, 0 688 16738 1
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... them all at once one night, in the hair, on your bag, up and down your dress?’ Satirists had a field day with her. ‘Why don’t you rinse your blond child’s hair in dead champagne as they do in France?’ she suggested in all seriousness. ‘Or pat her face gently with cream before she goes to bed, as they do in England?’ S.J. Perelman considered the ...

Bristling Ermine

Jeremy Harding: R.W. Johnson, 4 May 2017

Look Back in Laughter: Oxford’s Postwar Golden Age 
by R.W. Johnson.
Threshold, 272 pp., £14.50, May 2015, 978 1 903152 35 5
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How Long Will South Africa Survive? The Looming Crisis 
by R.W. Johnson.
Hurst, 288 pp., £12.99, July 2016, 978 1 84904 723 4
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... Lady’ of Hertford fell silent on the subject, but when Johnson met her at the side of a cricket field and needled her, she told him that ‘no one could be against co-education when you see what lovely young girls we’ve got at Hertford.’ Warnock was also against euthanasia until her husband contracted a fatal lung disease, whereupon ‘she did a ...
... in the South. Whites were also lynched: Wobblies in the labour wars in the north-west in 1919; Leo Frank, a Jew wrongly convicted of murder, in Marietta, Georgia in 1915. But the story of African Americans constitutes a special case. No other post-slave society turned to terror lynching to maintain white racial dominance. At the memorial’s threshold is a ...

Unreasoning Vigour

Stefan Collini: Ian Watt, 9 May 2019

Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic 
by Marina MacKay.
Oxford, 228 pp., £25, November 2018, 978 0 19 882499 2
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... somehow be reckoned with – by every critic concerned with the novel’s emergence, that vast field of inquiry for which Watt’s very title, with or without sceptical quotation marks, remains the usual short-hand designation.’ From the 1980s onwards, attack was the dominant mode of engagement. Parodying the accumulating barrage, Lennard J. Davis wrote ...

Bournemouth

Andrew O’Hagan: The Bournemouth Set, 21 May 2020

... exquisite art, he cannot fight the will of his wife or reverse the destruction she wreaks. Frank Kermode saw the tale as allegorical, ‘the life of art versus the life of evangelical conscience ending in the sacrifice of life’.James had heard from Edmund Gosse about the unsatisfactory marriage of John Addington Symonds, about Symonds’s ‘extreme ...
... the most respected financial writers in the country, and possibly the most elegant stylist in his field. While it is within the competence of the Board of the Observer to discuss the quality of the journalists and of their contributions to the paper, they have no right to dictate to the editor about whom he employs or how he uses their copy. Aware of ...

Time for Several Whiskies

Ian Jack: BBC Propaganda, 30 August 2018

Auntie’s War: The BBC during the Second World War 
by Edward Stourton.
Doubleday, 422 pp., £20, November 2017, 978 0 85752 332 7
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... mutilated’. He felt ‘weary and exasperated’, like a man ‘compelled to walk across a field of glue’. The more surprising thing – heartening evidence, perhaps, of Britain’s relatively open wartime society – was that the Sunday Express chose to publish his complaints. Stourton writes that a diary kept by Marjorie Redman, a BBC employee, is ...

Liquidator

Neal Ascherson: Hugh Trevor-Roper, 19 August 2010

Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Weidenfeld, 598 pp., £25, July 2010, 978 0 297 85214 8
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... Berenson became an intimate friend, and their correspondence over the years – witty and very frank – is one of Sisman’s richest sources. But, unexpectedly, Sisman himself comes downstage to pitch an authorial mud pie: ‘It was possible to see Berenson as an old fraud, a man who had squandered his talents in the pursuit of money, and whose ...

Call a kid a zebra

Daniel Smith: On the Spectrum, 19 May 2016

In a Different Key: The Story of Autism 
by John Donvan and Caren Zucker.
Allen Lane, 670 pp., £25, January 2016, 978 1 84614 566 7
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NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter about People Who Think Differently 
by Steve Silberman.
Allen and Unwin, 534 pp., £9.99, February 2016, 978 1 76011 364 3
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... Ruth Sullivan, the doyenne of American parent advocates, said that the movie had ‘advanced the field of autism by 25 years’. The new public fascination with autism, coupled with the rise in diagnoses, gave activist groups a long-awaited chance to secure funding for their cause and help from social services. Their goals were admirable, but they went after ...