Cad’s Cadenzas

Christopher Driver, 15 September 1988

William Walton: Behind the Façade 
by Susana Walton.
Oxford, 255 pp., £12.95, February 1988, 0 19 315156 1
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Façade: Edith Sitwell Interpreted 
by Pamela Hunter.
Duckworth, 106 pp., £10.95, September 1987, 9780715621844
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... had Sacheverell Sitwell not met him and decided that his ‘very clever-shaped head’ recalled John Wesley. Of William’s Sitwell friends, Sachie was the intimate, however exhausting: ‘one weekend at Sachie’s house in Weston, he had sacked all the servants, rearranged the furniture, and jumped out of the car to stop two dogs fighting, chasing them as ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: On Trade-Unionism, 5 May 1988

... But is it any more startling than to find Aneurin Bevan willing (as I have just learned from John Campbell’s Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism) to see force used in 1948 against dockers seeking to defy Cripps’s wage freeze? Even the most right-wing employer cannot risk industrial relations being made unworkable. Even the most left-wing ...

Nuthouse Al

Penelope Fitzgerald: Memory and culture in wartime London, 18 February 1999

Whistling in the Dark: Memory and Culture in Wartime London 
by Jean Freedman.
Kentucky, 230 pp., £28.50, January 1999, 0 8131 2076 4
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... the BBC broadcast dance music on Sunday. That, of course, would not have been possible under John Reith, who had retired in 1938. November 1941 brought the first transmission of Sincerely Yours – Vera Lynn, billed as a ‘sentimental presentation by Howard Thomas’. These dates represent significant stages in the defeat of the old BBC. Vera Lynn, the ...
Prince Charming: A Memoir 
by Christopher Logue.
Faber, 340 pp., £20, September 1999, 9780571197682
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... when I was the literary editor of the Evening Standard. It was during the Gulf War and my editor, John Leese, said that it would not be appropriate to hold one of the regular literary lunches, meant to be a celebratory occasion, on a morning when – for all we could predict – horrible news of slaughter might be coming in from the Desert. Instead, I ...

Anti-Hedonism

David Marquand, 20 September 1984

Politics and the Pursuit of Happiness: An Inquiry into the Involvement of Human Beings in the Politics of Industrial Society 
by Ghita Ionescu.
Longman, 248 pp., £16.50, September 1984, 0 582 29549 1
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... from the nature of tragedy and the philosophy of Unamuno to the Jacobin terror, the works of John Stuart Mill, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Though the author is a distinguished academic, it is not a conventional academic study. It is a personal statement, a cry from the heart. Perhaps because of this, it ...

Miz Peggy

Penelope Gilliatt, 15 September 1983

The Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell 
by Anne Edwards.
Hodder, 369 pp., £9.95, July 1983, 0 340 32348 5
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... a dust-sheet over her first husband. Miss Edwards excellently takes it off. The second husband, John Marsh, was an advertising copywriter and a PR man. He read her epic carefully and, among many other things, took out the dashes. Gone with the Wind was written in a peculiar manner. It is, of course, very long, but epics are supposed to be. (Beckett’s ...

Tristram Rushdie

Pat Rogers, 15 September 1983

Shame 
by Salman Rushdie.
Cape, 287 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 224 02952 5
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Scandal 
by A.N. Wilson.
Hamish Hamilton, 233 pp., £8.95, September 1983, 0 241 11101 3
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Love and Glory 
by Melvyn Bragg.
Secker, 252 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 436 06716 1
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The Complete Knowledge of Sally Fry 
by Sylvia Murphy.
Gollancz, 172 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 575 03353 3
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... It was best on growing up in New India – the sights and sounds of Bombay, the remnants of John Company and the Victorian Raj, the displaced image of the American West on Eastern cinema screens. Less packed and less subjective, Shame translates the author’s consciousness (‘I have been borne across’) to the other side of the cultural divide. The ...

Diary

Patrick Mauriès: Halfway between France and Britain, 3 November 1983

... certainty as we can from its surroundings. A figure like the 19th-century English literary fraud John Payne Collier could probably never have flourished in France: if such a person has existed there, then the memory has not survived. No one will ever write his biography, or write about him a book resembling the one that Dewey Ganzel has written – in ...

Dealing in futures

W.R. Mead, 21 March 1985

The 2024 Report: A Concise History of the Future 1974-2024 
by Norman Macrae.
Sidgwick, 198 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 283 99113 5
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The Resourceful Earth: A Response to ‘Global 2000’ 
edited by Julian Simon and Herman Kahn.
Blackwell, 585 pp., £14.95, September 1984, 0 631 13467 0
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... of Global 2000. They maintain that the problems are regional and national rather than world-wide. John Wise considers that fish resources are at least keeping pace with world population increase and that, in spite of pollution, aquaculture and fish farming in general do not seem to be suffering in any major way. It is admitted that nationally and regionally ...

Carpetbagging in Bermondsey

Nicholas Murray, 19 August 1982

... of the property speculator, and slowly the local political establishment – ruled in Southwark by John O’Grady and his hand-picked ‘mafia’ of loyal Bermondsey councillors – began to listen to the siren songs of the speculators whose seductive promises of high rate income, ‘planning gain’, and glamorous architectural gigantisme, led them inexorably ...

Diary

Ian Hamilton: Self-Exposure at the Football Terrace, 2 September 1982

... been following them lately. For some reason, I have felt guilty about this. Having just read John Moynihan’s The Chelsea Story,5 though, I’m feeling a bit better: it seems that most people feel guilty about Chelsea at one time or another, guilty about not watching them, or guilty about not taking them seriously, or guilty about always half-expecting ...
... not playing it tough enough. At West Ham, it was the assistant manager (and current manager), John Lyall, who supported his guilt feelings – and in Spain, it was, I suggest, the much-praised coach, Don Howe. Much praised by everyone, that is, except Jimmy Greaves, who reminded us of what Howe had done at Arsenal, and left the rest to our own footballing ...

Glory

Eric Hobsbawm, 3 June 1982

War and Society in Revolutionary Europe 1770-1870 
by Geoffrey Best.
Leicester University Press/Fontana, 336 pp., £12, March 1982, 0 00 634747 9
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European Empires from Conquest to Collapse 1815-1960 
by V.G. Kiernan.
Leicester University Press/Fontana, 285 pp., £12, March 1982, 0 00 634826 2
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... and it is aware of what other historians are doing. Even so specifically a military historian as John Keegan writes recognisable and impressive social history. The major asset of British historians of war is not so much that they have had experience of the armed forces in combat – many have, but much of the best work comes from writers with civilian ...

Infidels

Malise Ruthven, 2 June 1983

The Helen Smith Story 
by Paul Foot and Ron Smith.
Fontana, 418 pp., £1.95, February 1983, 0 00 636536 1
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... to doubts or to be put off by setbacks, Ron Smith showed as many sterling qualities as Burton, St John Philby or Thesiger. The extent to which the story is true, however, is another question. There are aspects of Foot’s narrative, from suspiciously un-Arab names (Major Absalom) and geographical howlers (‘Red Sea oil towns’) to serious misrepresentations ...

Homage to Marginality

Tony Tanner, 7 February 1980

Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives 
by Frederick Karl.
Faber, 1008 pp., £12.50, May 1980, 0 571 11386 9
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... help is it to point out that ‘Conrad’s relationship with his father had been the obverse of John Stuart Mill’s with James Mill’? It must in fairness be stated that Professor Karl moves thoroughly and carefully through the various periods in Conrad’s life: the Marseilles interlude, culminating in the ‘suicide’ attempt (Karl notes some fifteen ...