Instant Depths

Michael Wood, 7 July 1994

The Cryptogram 
by David Mamet.
The Ambassador's Theatre
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A Whore’s Profession: Notes and Essays 
by David Mamet.
Faber, 412 pp., £12.99, June 1994, 0 571 17076 5
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... Donny, the mother, a role she plays with frazzled charm and confident understatement, and the boy, John, aged about twelve, is Danny Worters, whose age is not in the programme, but who manages to sound like a worried prodigy without sounding like a pain. Izzard is a bit lost between these two, trying to be laid-back but only managing to seem out of it, and ...

Glooms

E.S. Turner, 23 February 1995

Edward Lear: A Biography 
by Peter Levi.
Macmillan, 362 pp., £20, January 1995, 0 333 58804 5
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... stiff competition. Levi in his bibliography does not bother to mention studies by Peter Quennell, John Lehmann, Joanna Richardson and Susan Chitty, among others. He does, however, pay his warm respects to Vivien Noakes’s definitive Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (1968, reissued 1985). Noakes has reviewed Levi’s book – ‘a joyous ...

Sideshows

Charles Maier, 18 November 1993

German Resistance against Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad 1938-1945 
by Klemens von Klemperer.
Oxford, 487 pp., £45, April 1992, 0 19 821940 7
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... Council of Churches, intelligence and counter-intelligence, and such German experts in Britain as John Wheeler Bennett. But it is questionable whether this tissue of unsubstantiated promises – comprised as it was of many, often contradictory, fugitive contacts, indirect reports and indiscreet conversations – really amounts to a model of international ...

Hitler’s Belgian Partner

Robert Paxton, 27 January 1994

Collaboration in Belgium: Léon Degrelle and the Rexist Movement 
by Martin Conway.
Yale, 364 pp., £30, October 1993, 0 300 05500 5
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... terms, was the position of a tiny minority. His bibliography notably fails to include John Gillingham’s harsh, though solidly documented, indictment of the Galopin Committee – another unwelcome memory in Belgium. The collaborationists – as distinct from the collaborateurs d’ état – began to seem more useful to the occupation authorities ...

Naming the flowers

Robert Alter, 24 February 1994

A History of the Hebrew Language 
by Angel Sáenz-Badillos, translated by John Elwolde.
Cambridge, 371 pp., £24.95, December 1993, 0 521 43157 3
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Language in Time of Revolution 
by Benjamin Harshav.
California, 234 pp., £19.95, September 1993, 0 520 07958 2
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... One of the most intriguing and in some ways bewildering aspects of the Hebrew language is that it has managed to stay in continuous literary use for over three thousand years; roughly the same length of time as Chinese and Sanskrit, the two other major ancient literary languages that are still in written use. The most dramatic changes that have occurred over the centuries have been the emergence of rabbinic Hebrew from Biblical Hebrew towards the end of the pre-Christian era; the complex encounter of Hebrew with Arabic poetry and philosophy beginning in the tenth century; and the early 20th-century revival of Hebrew as a vernacular in the new Zionist settlements, itself preceded – and made possible – by the revival in Enlightenment Europe of Hebrew as a secular literary language ...

Rachel and Heather

Stephen Wall, 1 October 1987

A Friend from England 
by Anita Brookner.
Cape, 205 pp., £9.95, August 1987, 0 224 02443 4
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The New Confessions 
by William Boyd.
Hamish Hamilton, 462 pp., £11.95, September 1987, 0 241 12383 6
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The Colour of Blood 
by Brian Moore.
Cape, 182 pp., £10.95, September 1987, 0 224 02513 9
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... of its precursor is not altogether to the novel’s advantage. The revelations are made by John James Todd, a forgotten film-director in Mediterranean exile putting his memories in order. These are varied enough: born in Edinburgh in 1899, Todd proves largely ineducable but has a talent for mathematics and holding a camera. He endures an unsympathetic ...
The Korean War 
by Max Hastings.
Joseph, 476 pp., £14.95, September 1987, 9780718120689
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The Origins of the Korean War 
by Peter Lowe.
Longman, 256 pp., £6.95, July 1986, 0 582 49278 5
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Korea: The War before Vietnam 
by Callum MacDonald.
Macmillan, 330 pp., £25, November 1986, 0 333 33011 0
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... troops, Synghman Rhee’s openly-proclaimed ambitions and the coincidental presence of the hawkish John Foster Dulles in Seoul have been cited in evidence, but none of the works under review provides any substantiation for this interpretation. The scale and weight of the North Korean attack speaks for itself. And as Max Hastings properly reminds us, the United ...
An Awfully Big Adventure 
by Beryl Bainbridge.
Duckworth, 193 pp., £10.95, December 1989, 0 7156 2204 8
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The Thirteen-Gun Salute 
by Patrick O’Brian.
Collins, 319 pp., £11.95, November 1989, 0 00 223460 2
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Family Sins, and Other Stories 
by William Trevor.
Bodley Head, 251 pp., £11.95, January 1990, 0 370 31374 7
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... him to be disturbed by conflicting allegiances in a way which is not foreign to readers of, say, John le Carré’s stories. Picking up such parallels is one pleasure. A deeper reason for the effectiveness of the books is the escape they offer from present anxiety into past discomfort. When Aubrey sets sail for the East Indies with the British envoy, Edward ...

Into Africa

J.D.F. Jones, 19 April 1990

My Traitor’s Heart 
by Rian Malan.
Bodley Head, 349 pp., £14.95, April 1990, 0 370 31354 2
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... so is familiar with the ‘Blue Hotel’, the police headquarters in Johannesburg otherwise called John Vorster Square. And then a black man fell out of the sky. He came flying through a fifth floor window, landed at our feet in a spray of glass, and lay there like an upturned tortoise, feebly waving his arms in the air. I ran over and knelt beside him, but I ...

Diary

Nicholas Penny: Getting Rid of the Curators, 4 May 1989

... allowed itself to be used to provide publicity for Sothebys, who staged a preview there of Elton John’s collection of bric-à-brac; for the Sock Shop and for Burberrys. ‘We,’ Lord Armstrong told the Lords in defence of these arrangements, ‘are the National Museum of contemporary design. We take pride in having artefacts of contemporary design in ...

Disorder

David Underdown, 4 May 1989

Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England 1509-1640 
by Roger Manning.
Oxford, 354 pp., £35, February 1988, 0 19 820116 8
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... of food riots, particularly the well-documented one at Maldon in Essex in 1628, of which John Walter has written a fine account, would surely have cast doubt on this assumption, which in any case neglects the elements of ritual inversion which are so central both to the acceptance of female leadership and to the adoption of female disguises. There ...

The Sober Science

Mark Lilla, 20 April 1995

German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back 
by Louis Dumont.
Chicago, 259 pp., £25.95, March 1995, 0 226 16952 9
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... Aron’s intellectual heirs has led few of them to adopt the language of Mill, let alone that of John Rawls. Many have turned instead to the work of the anthropologist Louis Dumont, the great specialist of India now retired from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. Dumont was a student of Marcel Mauss and a contemporary of Lévi-Strauss who was virtually unknown to ...

Diary

Ian Hamilton: Who will blow it?, 22 May 1997

... I have come across’. One of Hudson’s biggest all-time thrills was being spoken to by Elton John. How can a man who has been thus honoured take orders from a joyless frump like Dave Sexton? As Hudson remembers it, the brightest soccer talents of his day – Alan Hudson, Stan Bowles, Tony Currie, Charlie George – were systematically sidelined by ...

Hiveward-Winging

Robert Irwin, 3 July 1997

Quarantine 
by Jim Crace.
Viking, 243 pp., £16.99, June 1997, 0 670 85697 5
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... Froulish’s projected stuck-in-a-lift novel. A lugubriously entertaining secondary character in John Wain’s wonderful picaresque fiction, Hurry on Down (1953), Froulish went on to present his restive audience with the main topics of his austerely untitled novel, including hunger, thirst, boredom and thoughts of suicide, as well as the quest for the ...

Sergeant Jones’s Sleeping-Bag

Michael Ignatieff, 17 July 1997

Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture 
by Elaine Showalter.
Picador, 244 pp., £16.99, June 1997, 0 330 34670 9
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... exaggerated theories of ‘recovered memory’ syndrome. The same institution harbours Professor John Mack, who believes that beings from outer space are abducting men and women and conducting fertility experiments on them. As Showalter observes, ‘to Mack, looking for material evidence is a logical error, typical of the material bias of Western ...