Do women like sex?

Michael Mason, 8 November 1990

Making sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud 
by Thomas Laqueur.
Harvard, 352 pp., $27.50, October 1990, 0 674 54349 1
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... to culture if literary academics turn into New Historicists – to such lengths has the process of self-disablement as an intellectual enterprise been carried by literary studies in the last two decades. The article which Professor Laqueur wrote before he succumbed was about the working-class demand for elementary education in England around 1800. He argued ...

Out of Ottawa

John Bayley, 21 November 1991

By Heart. Elizabeth Smart: A Life 
by Rosemary Sullivan.
Lime Tree, 415 pp., £17.99, October 1991, 0 413 45341 3
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... the reader by her normality, to a greater extent even than do accounts of the American poet. Self-groomed like her hairstyle and worn like a twinset, her intensity seems healthy and normal, as it seemed to her sensible and amiable lawyer father, or to a family friend, the rising young diplomat Charles Ritchie, who was to meet Elizabeth Bowen in London in ...

Do we need a constitution?

Peter Pulzer, 5 December 1991

The Constitution of the United Kingdom 
Institute for Public Policy Research, 128 pp., £20, September 1991, 1 872452 42 6Show More
A People’s Charter 
Liberty, 118 pp., £7.99, October 1991, 9780946088393Show More
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... of the Levellers. That is no longer so. The Seventies saw a revival of the movement for Scottish self-government. There can be no Scottish devolution without an element of a written constitution, bringing with it the power of the courts – or of a specially constituted court – to interpret the terms of whatever Scotland Act is in force. It is highly ...

Dreams of Avarice

Patrick Parrinder, 29 August 1991

A Closed Eye 
by Anita Brookner.
Cape, 255 pp., £13.99, August 1991, 0 224 03090 6
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Underwood and After 
by Ronald Frame.
Hodder, 246 pp., £14.99, August 1991, 0 340 55359 6
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Lemprière’s Dictionary 
by Lawrence Norfolk.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 530 pp., £14.95, August 1991, 1 85619 053 6
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... approach makes her dreadfully anxious, and that Jack is merciless towards feminine weakness and self-denial. Harriet is a moderately literary person who responds to the gloomier aspects of Jane Eyre and Little Dorrit, and who, as she sets out alone for Jack’s apartment, realises that it is April, ‘traditionally the cruellest month’. Beautiful people ...

Answering back

James Campbell, 11 July 1991

The Intended 
by David Dabydeen.
Secker, 246 pp., £13.99, February 1991, 0 436 20007 4
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Cambridge 
by Caryl Phillips.
Bloomsbury, 185 pp., £13.99, March 1991, 0 7475 0886 0
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Lucy 
by Jamaica Kincaid.
Cape, 176 pp., £11.99, April 1991, 0 224 03055 8
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... me serve time for inciting rhyme to riot ... I ent serving no jail sentence I slashing suffix in self-defence I bashing future wit present tense and if necessary I make de Queen’s English accessory / to my offence. Unlike the poets, the members of the new generation of Caribbean novelists have not so far made strenuous attempts to structure their works ...

Hitler in Jakarta

Ira Katznelson, 7 November 1991

Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia 
by Benedict Anderson.
305 pp., $44.95, January 1991, 0 8014 9758 2
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... their brutal calamities and our own world. The concept has become an accessory to complacency and self-satisfaction. Anderson asserts that just as charisma cannot be counterposed to traditional bases of authority, neither can it be divorced from the rational-legal order. If Hitler was the ultimate charismatic figure, he was equally a product of just those ...

Henry Hill and Laura Palmer

Philip Horne, 20 December 1990

... raised with the same nonchalance he had used in setting up a bookie joint or slipping a tail.’ Self-interest is his motive for leaving as for joining the Mob. The difficulty of our taking Henry as a hero in the approved pattern makes for a queasy unfamiliarity in the film’s stance, and reaction to GoodFellas has betrayed confusion and resentment on this ...

Head over heart for Europe

Peter Pulzer, 21 March 1991

Ever Closer Union: Britain’s Destiny in Europe 
by Hugh Thomas.
Hutchinson, 96 pp., £7.99, January 1991, 0 09 174908 5
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The Challenge of Europe: Can Britain win? 
by Michael Heseltine.
Pan, 226 pp., £5.99, February 1991, 9780330314367
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... had warned the Germans after 1871, a great victory is a great danger. It suspends the faculty of self-criticism. It tempts the beneficiary to ignore the re-appraisals that the less fortunate have embarked on. For most Britons the war taught two lessons: that a nation secure in its identity and cohesion, confident in its history and its mission, can triumph ...

Bull

Bernard Wasserstein, 23 September 1993

Imperial Warrior: The Life and Times of Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby 1861-1936 
by Lawrence James.
Weidenfeld, 279 pp., £20, January 1993, 0 297 81152 5
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... against all immediate evidence that history would eventually transmute defeat into victory? As self-deception – perhaps the necessary self-deception of a commander refusing to be daunted by short-term setbacks? Unlike Haig, Allenby did not damn himself by keeping a diary nor did he attempt to vindicate himself by ...

Oops

Ian Stewart, 4 November 1993

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier 
by Bruce Sterling.
Viking, 328 pp., £16.99, January 1993, 0 670 84900 6
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The New Hacker’s Dictionary 
edited by Eric Raymond.
MIT, 516 pp., £11.75, October 1992, 0 262 68079 3
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Approaching Zero: Data Crime and the Computer Underworld 
by Bryan Clough and Paul Mungo.
Faber, 256 pp., £4.99, March 1993, 0 571 16813 2
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... SF fandom: for example, IMHO, meaning ‘in my humble opinion’, and ha ha only serious, which is self-explanatory. True hacker jargon must not be confused with the technobabble employed by suits to impress naive real users. It tends to have the surreal nature: ‘the Moof or dogcow is a semilegendary creature that lurks in the depths of the Macintosh ...

Make mine a Worcester Sauce

John Bayley, 23 June 1994

Richard Hughes 
by Richard Perceval Graves.
Deutsch, 491 pp., £20, May 1994, 0 233 98843 2
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... stuff, though it went down well at the time, but it shows the eye for strong effects and rather self-consciously powerful situations which Hughes was to construct in his last unfinished trilogy, and in ideas for the films and plays which he kept attempting to write throughout his career. What constitutes a Jamesian clou, even in that crudely dramatic ...

Among the Picts

John Sutherland, 18 August 1994

Stained Radiance: A Fictionist’s Prelude 
by J. Leslie Mitchell.
Polygon, 219 pp., £7.95, July 1993, 0 7486 6141 7
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The Speak of the Mearns 
by Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
Polygon, 268 pp., £8.95, June 1994, 0 7486 6167 0
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... set in London, the alien city to which many Scots were driven by joblessness in the Twenties. The self-consciously brittle tone recalls Lewis’s Apes of God, early Huxley, and Eliot’s young man carbuncular. There are daring-for-the-time references to casual sexual intercourse, Stopesian contraceptive devices, cheap silken undergarments, pick-ups in Lyons ...

It’s Only Fashion

James Davidson, 24 November 1994

The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment 
by Alan Sinfield.
Cassell, 216 pp., £10.99, July 1994, 0 304 32905 3
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Cultural Politics: Queer Reading 
by Alan Sinfield.
Routledge, 105 pp., £25, November 1994, 0 415 10948 5
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Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford 
by Linda Dowling.
Cornell, 173 pp., £21.50, June 1994, 0 8014 2960 9
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... personage and Oscar Wilde has been too much of a provocation for all but the most self-disciplined imagination. But the distance between the two is by no means easy to bridge. Oscar himself was notoriously less than obliging in terms of statements of gay identity, let alone gay pride, although he had more than a casual acquaintance with the ...

Diary

Conor Gearty: Various Forms of Sleaze, 24 November 1994

... that relating to its own dignity, a cause long recognised as lost by all except those whose self-esteem is ballooned by belief in it. In this regard, as in most matters, the Liberal Democratic reaction is the most comic, and the most revealing. Two of the Party’s senior spokesmen offered totally contradictory judgments on the conduct of the editor of ...

More Pasts Than One

Eric Foner, 23 March 1995

Telling the Truth about History 
by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob.
Norton, 322 pp., £19.95, August 1994, 0 393 03615 4
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... version of history has played a major role in defining the American nation. What they call the ‘self-congratulatory national history’ of the 19th century helped to recast the experience of a few million people on the fringe of European civilisation into a drama with meaning for the entire world. The United States was in fact a multicultural nation from ...