Hinsley’s History

Noël Annan, 1 August 1985

Diplomacy and Intelligence during the Second World War: Essays in Honour of F.H. Hinsley 
edited by Richard Langhorne.
Cambridge, 329 pp., £27.50, May 1985, 0 521 26840 0
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British Intelligence and the Second World War. Vol. I: 1939-Summer 1941, Vol. II: Mid-1941-Mid-1943, Vol. III, Part I: June 1943-June 1944 
by F.H. Hinsley, E.E. Thomas, C.F.G. Ransom and R.C. Knight.
HMSO, 616 pp., £12.95, September 1979, 0 11 630933 4
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... of the establishment and what it was to do? He solved that problem by engaging three Kingsmen, F.E. Adcock, Dillwyn Knox and Frank Birch, who had worked in the First World War in Room 40at the Admiralty. They at once recruited ten more Kingsmen as well as other Cambridge dons and some German linguists. The most fertile fields they reaped were those of the ...

Frege and Analytical Philosophy

Michael Dummett, 18 September 1980

Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence 
by Gottlob Frege, translated by Hans Kaal, edited by Brian McGuinness.
Blackwell, 214 pp., £15, March 1980, 9780631196204
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Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege 
edited by Peter Geach and Max Black.
Blackwell, 228 pp., £12, July 1980, 0 631 12901 4
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Frege’s Theory of Judgement 
by David Bell.
Oxford, 163 pp., £8.50, July 1979, 0 19 827423 8
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Gottlob Frege 
by Hans Sluga.
Routledge, 203 pp., £12.95, July 1980, 0 7100 0474 5
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... In the course of 1936, Professor Heinrich Scholz of Münster completed the collection of Frege’s unpublished writings, of which he had charge, by obtaining from those, such as Russell and Husserl, whose letters to Frege were included in the collection, the letters Frege had written to them. On 25 March 1945 the US Air Force bombed Münster. I believe that the object was to destroy an important telephone exchange: a large part of the town was destroyed, but the telephone exchange was left intact ...

Cinematically Challenged

Adam Mars-Jones, 19 September 1996

The Cinema of Isolation 
by Martin Norden.
Rutgers, 385 pp., $48, September 1994, 0 8135 2103 3
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... in point would be The Elephant Man (1980), a still from which appears on the cover of the book. David Lynch’s film may indeed demonstrate ‘time-worn points of view’ in some ways, and its central figure may indeed combine the stereotypes of the Sweet Innocent and the Saintly Sage (Norden is inordinately fond of categories like these and the ‘Elderly ...

The Party and the Army

Ronan Bennett, 21 March 1996

... Protestant people, to use their weapons if Britain tried to force constitutional change on them. David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, now hailed in many quarters as a ‘moderate’, was himself a supporter of Vanguard, the militant Unionist body which in the early Seventies had links with Loyalist paramilitaries. After the abolition of the ...

Falling in love with Lucian

Colm Tóibín: Lucian Freud’s Outer Being, 10 October 2019

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth, 1922-68 
by William Feaver.
Bloomsbury, 680 pp., £35, September 2019, 978 1 4088 5093 0
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... be dizzy with so much money or otherwise not have my bus fare.’ In his interviews with David Sylvester, Francis Bacon connects chance in gambling with chance in making a painting. What Freud did seems more deliberate, less open to chance. Because the process was slow and delicate, involving many small decisions in the mixing of paint and the ...

Marx at 193

John Lanchester, 5 April 2012

... the digital-oriented sense) that it’s not easy to see where the accumulated labour in them is. David Harvey’s lectures on Capital, for instance, the best beginning for anyone studying Marx’s most important book, are of immense value but they’re also available for free on the internet, so if you buy them as a book – you can take in information much ...

As Astonishing as Elvis

Jenny Turner: Ayn Rand, 1 December 2005

Ayn Rand 
by Jeff Britting.
Duckworth, 155 pp., £12.99, February 2005, 0 7156 3269 8
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... Objectivism is also promulgated by the Objectivist Center in Washington DC, until recently run by David Kelley, the author of A Life of One’s Own: Individualism and the Welfare State. Kelley split from the ARI in 1990, ‘dismayed’ by ‘the exploding excesses’ of its ‘official, dogmatic approach’. The Center supports lectures and social events, a ...

Travels in Israel

Gabriel Piterberg: ‘Are you not from this country?’, 21 September 2006

... establish that in perpetuity, were confirmed by the point on which Barak was most adamant at Camp David in 2000: the absolute and irrevocable finality of whatever was agreed. There are frightening continuities between Israel’s unilateralism in Lebanon and in the Occupied Territories. Some of them are pointed up in Jean Said Makdisi’s extraordinary war ...

More Pain, Better Sentences

Adam Mars-Jones: Satire and St Aubyn, 8 May 2014

Lost for Words 
by Edward St Aubyn.
Picador, 261 pp., £12.99, May 2014, 978 0 330 45422 3
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Books 
by Charlie Hill.
Tindal Street, 192 pp., £6.99, November 2013, 978 1 78125 163 8
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... but also want to read about not-quite Tony Parsons’s head being burst to bits between copies of David Lodge’s Consciousness and the Novel and The History of Roget’s Thesaurus. Some of this can be put down to the impure nature of satire itself, which appeals almost exclusively to the dark side. Is there another genre that depends on a character flaw for ...

We came, we saw, he died

Jackson Lears: Clinton’s Creed, 5 February 2015

Hard Choices 
by Hillary Clinton.
Simon and Schuster, 635 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 1 4711 3150 9
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HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton 
by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
Hutchinson, 440 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 0 09 195448 2
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... learned from her mistake. On her arrival at the State Department, she began courting General David Petraeus, the ‘architect of the successful counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq’ according to Allen and Parnes, whom she had offended in 2007 by questioning his rosy assessments of American military prospects. In early 2009, Petraeus was head of ...

Shapeshifter

Ian Penman: Elvis looks for meaning, 25 September 2014

Elvis Has Left the Building: The Day the King Died 
by Dylan Jones.
Duckworth, 307 pp., £16.99, July 2014, 978 0 7156 4856 8
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Elvis Presley: A Southern Life 
by Joel Williamson.
Oxford, 384 pp., £25, November 2014, 978 0 19 986317 4
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... his personal jeweller for two hundred wrist watches that flashed both cross of Jesus and star of David. Such personal touches were far more Elvis than any of the books that had been recommended to him. Soon life would again be games with lascivious starlets and golden guns and awesome dune buggies. Soon he would be home again and primed for every day’s ...

Let Us Pay

John Lanchester: Can newspapers survive?, 16 December 2010

... Wall Street Journal have been able to make money by putting a paywall around their content. The FT has a staggered system in which the first casual visits are completely free; then you have to register, but the articles are free to read; then when you’ve read more than a certain amount of content, you have to pay. When you ask insiders why this ...

His Peach Stone

Christopher Tayler: J.G. Farrell, 2 December 2010

J.G. Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries 
edited by Lavinia Greacen.
Cork, 464 pp., €19.95, September 2010, 978 1 85918 476 9
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... 1972 winner, John Berger, in denouncing capitalism and Booker’s treatment of Guyanese workers. David Lean optioned the novel a year later, and though the project came to nothing, Farrell found himself in funds for the first time in his life. After finishing The Singapore Grip in his two-room flat in South Kensington, he bought a cottage on the coast of ...

Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer

Julian Barnes: ‘Madame Bovary’, 18 November 2010

Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways 
by Gustave Flaubert and Lydia Davis.
Penguin, 342 pp., £20, November 2010, 978 1 84614 104 1
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... Hopkins; and though Steegmuller did write some fiction – including mysteries under the name of David Keith – it’s a fair bet that Davis is the best fiction writer ever to translate the novel. Which suggests a further question to the opening list: would you rather have your great novel translated by a good writer or a less good one? This is not as idle ...

In the Potato Patch

Jenny Turner: Penelope Fitzgerald, 19 December 2013

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life 
by Hermione Lee.
Chatto, 508 pp., £25, November 2013, 978 0 7011 8495 7
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... into the reading room.’ And it’s used defensively, to protect her privacy. ‘Have written to David Godwin pretending not to understand exactly and hope that will keep him at bay.’ After Offshore, Fitzgerald wrote six more novels, of which two more were nominated for the Booker. Since her death in 2000 it has become common to talk of her as one of the ...