Life of Brian

Kevin Barry, 25 January 1990

No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien 
by Anthony Cronin.
Grafton, 260 pp., £16.95, October 1989, 0 246 12836 4
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... wished to stick a knife in the donor. In the first paragraphs of The Third Policeman we now may notice in a different way how the nameless narrator comments that his father ‘did not talk much’, that his father and he ‘were strangers and did not converse much ... we were all happy enough in a queer separate way.’ In another dimension we ...
... or amiculture, like much of his other material, presumably refers back to the critical corpus. It may be that Quentin Oates had a point when he reflected in his State of Reviewing Address at the end of last year that ‘the Spectator, in its book reviews at any rate, seems to be going downhill.’ But it has to be said that Peter Ackroyd, formerly its ...

The Contingency of Language

Richard Rorty, 17 April 1986

... the young Wordsworth exulted, to recapture Schiller’s conviction that art and politics together may jointly shape a new humanity, we need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most ...

In the Hyacinth Garden

Richard Poirier: ‘But oh – Vivienne!’, 3 April 2003

Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot 
by Carole Seymour-Jones.
Constable, 702 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 1 84119 636 3
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... their dog Polly and wearing the black shirt of the British Union of Fascists – which she may have joined to please her husband, who had on one occasion expressed some admiration for Mussolini – she managed to get close enough to him after one of his public lectures to ask when he would be coming home. ‘How do you do, I cannot talk to you ...

The Last Witness

Colm Tóibín: The career of James Baldwin, 20 September 2001

... he listed. It was something so all-pervasive in his work, both the essays and the fiction, that he may not have even noticed it, although he was alert to his strange relationship to tradition. He used and adapted the tone of the great masters of English eloquence: Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Hazlitt, Emerson and Henry James. He brought, he wrote, ‘a special ...

Warmer, Warmer

John Lanchester: Global Warming, Global Hot Air, 22 March 2007

The Revenge of Gaia 
by James Lovelock.
Allen Lane, 222 pp., £8.99, February 2007, 978 0 14 102597 1
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Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis Summary for Policymakers: Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 
IPCC, February 2007Show More
Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning 
by George Monbiot.
Allen Lane, 277 pp., £17.99, September 2006, 0 7139 9923 3
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The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies 
by Richard Heinberg.
Clairview, 320 pp., £12.99, October 2005, 1 905570 00 7
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The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review 
by Nicholas Stern.
Cambridge, 692 pp., £29.99, January 2007, 978 0 521 70080 1
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... war and those now towards the threat of global heating. Most of us think that something unpleasant may soon happen, but we are as confused as we were in 1938 over what form it will take and what to do about it. Our response so far is just like that before the Second World War, an attempt to appease. The Kyoto agreement was uncannily like that of Munich, with ...

White Man’s Heaven

Michael Wood, 7 February 1991

Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin 
by James Campbell.
Faber, 306 pp., £14.99, January 1991, 0 571 15391 7
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James Baldwin: Artist on Fire 
by W.J. Weatherby.
Joseph, 412 pp., £17.99, June 1990, 0 7181 3403 6
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... It may be an accident of rereading that makes me want to put James Baldwin’s essays and novels together, to see The Fire Next Time and Giovanni’s Room, for example, as versions of each other. But the matched books do make interesting sense: more thoughtful sense, perhaps, than the already powerful separate stories ...

Mr Poland throws a party

John Lloyd, 27 July 1989

... the Presidency to the Party. It was not supposed to turn out like this. Under the terms of the May Round Table agreement, Solidarity was to be legalised, and controlled elections were to take place for the 480-seat Sejm and a new 100-seat Senate. Only one-third of the Sejm seats would be open to challenge: the others would be reserved for candidates from ...

Little Green Crabs

John Bayley, 12 October 1989

Albertine gone 
by Marcel Proust, translated by Terence Kilmartin.
Chatto, 99 pp., £11.95, August 1989, 0 7011 3359 7
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Marcel Proust: A Biography 
by George Painter.
Chatto, 446 pp., £20, August 1989, 0 7011 3421 6
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The Book of Proust 
by Philippe Michel-Thiriet, translated by Jan Dalley.
Chatto, 406 pp., £25, August 1989, 0 7011 3360 0
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Marcel Proust. Selected Letters: Vol II, 1904-1909 
essays by Philip Kolb, translated by Terence Kilmartin.
Collins, 482 pp., £25, September 1989, 0 00 217078 7
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... does it matter that both Marcel and his creator can be tiresome, pretentious and boring. Proust may well have been conscious that he had gone on too long about Albertine, because in the new version which has come to light, deftly introduced and translated by Kilmartin, he compresses the whole episode, giving it what for him is an almost brutal concision. It ...

Sociology in Cambridge

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 6 November 1986

... did in 1899, that ‘there is no elementary manual of English manufacture by which a student may learn to pass an examination in sociology with the least possible trouble,’ we might as well relax: the extravagant ambition has gone, the subject is domesticated, and its adherents may safely graze. There is nevertheless ...

UK Law

John Horgan, 16 August 1990

Stolen Years: Before and After Guildford 
by Paul Hill and Ronan Bennett.
Doubleday, 287 pp., £12.99, June 1990, 0 385 40125 6
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Proved Innocent 
by Gerry Conlon.
Hamish Hamilton, 234 pp., £12.99, June 1990, 0 241 13065 4
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Cage Eleven 
by Gerry Adams.
Brandon, 156 pp., £4.95, June 1990, 0 86322 114 9
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The Poisoned Tree: The untold truth about the Police conspiracy to discredit John Stalker and destroy me 
by Kevin Taylor and Keith Mumby.
Sidgwick, 219 pp., £15, May 1990, 0 283 06056 5
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... Hill and Conlon books, perhaps, is the intensity of their descriptions of prison life. Innocence may sharpen the memory: at all events, there are passages in both books which have a Kafkaesque quality, chronicling as they do the doings and the passions of that vast underclass which populates Britain’s prisons. It is instructive to compare some of these ...

Further Left

R.W. Johnson, 16 August 1990

Prepared for the worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports 
by Christopher Hitchens.
Hogarth, 357 pp., £9.99, July 1990, 0 7012 0903 8
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Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies 
by Christopher Hitchens.
Chatto, 398 pp., £18, July 1990, 0 7011 3361 9
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... because brashness is a necessary virtue there. He writes well, is extremely witty, and while he may or may not still be a Marxist, he certainly enjoys an opinionatedly radical cutting-edge quite sufficient to place him apart from the general run of American journalism. Moreover, he goads Americans by a scathing de haut en ...

Making faces

Philip Horne, 9 May 1991

The Grimace 
by Nicholas Salaman.
Grafton, 256 pp., £13.99, February 1991, 0 246 13770 3
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Playing the game 
by Ian Buruma.
Cape, 234 pp., £13.99, April 1991, 0 224 02758 1
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The Music of Chance 
by Paul Auster.
Faber, 217 pp., £13.99, March 1991, 9780571161577
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... after all, is a mode modern readers (like Chaucer’s) can cope with. Fictive immediacy may short-circuit by obliterating the mysterious distance of other lives and times. The carefully invented document, on the other hand, the slightly faked and not implausibly revealing memoir, can, when rightly framed, hold moral and formal satisfactions. Such a ...

The Three Acts of Criticism

Helen Vendler, 26 May 1994

The Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Poetry in English 
edited by Ian Hamilton.
Oxford, 602 pp., £25, February 1994, 0 19 866147 9
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... British and American traditions to a rich diversity of younger poetic identities elsewhere’. It may be doubted whether ‘poetry’ is so easily dislodged in favour of ‘poetries’, but no editor is responsible for his jacket copy. Nonetheless, the jacket copy (like the accompanying publicity material) is a test of the current way of marketing poetry; and ...

Vampiric Words

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 26 May 1994

The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment 
by Maud Ellmann.
Virago, 136 pp., £7.99, September 1993, 1 85381 675 2
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... a dramatic rise in reported cases of anorexia and bulimia, especially among young women in the US, may wish to believe that the ever-canny actress and entrepreneur will once more set a trend. But a cautionary note is in order. As Susan Bordo suggests in Unbearable Weight, her recent study of our collective fixation on thinness – discussed here by Carol ...