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Unquiet Deaths

Patrick Parrinder, 3 September 1987

Two Lives and a Dream 
by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Walter Kaiser.
Aidan Ellis, 245 pp., £9.95, July 1987, 0 85628 160 3
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The Wedding at Port-au-Prince 
by Hans Christoph Buch, translated by Ralph Manheim.
Faber, 259 pp., £10.95, August 1987, 0 571 14928 6
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Saints and Scholars 
by Terry Eagleton.
Verso, 145 pp., £9.95, September 1987, 0 86091 180 2
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Imperial Patient: The Memoirs of Nero’s Doctor 
by Alex Comfort.
Duckworth, 206 pp., £10.95, June 1987, 0 7156 2168 8
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... Port-au-Prince cinema. Nothing is left of him except a rusty dagger thrown into the harbour, and a small wet spot on the back of his seat. There are other richly entertaining episodes, including some rather blatantly steeped in literary pastiche. Buch even has a blown-up condom episode set in Weimar, as if Porterhouse Blue had been transported to the ...

Jabs

Richard Horton, 8 October 1992

Edward Jenner 1749-1823 
by Richard Fisher.
Deutsch, 361 pp., £20, July 1991, 0 233 98681 2
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... Bacon complains of biographical literature of his day. He says that actions both great and small, public and private, sho’d be so blended together as to secure that genuine nature and lively representation, which forms the peculiar excellence and use of biography.’ Fisher quotes these wise words of Jenner’s, but his book ignores them. Church ...
Selected Poems 
by James Merrill.
Carcanet, 152 pp., £9.95, April 1996, 1 85754 228 2
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... whose white gestures filled a cab, And thought of neither then nor since. Also, to clasp them, the small, red-nailed hand Of no one I can place. Wait. No. Her name, her features Lie toppled underneath that year’s fashions ... The memory comes back not all at once but in pieces. The hand is fitted in at the end of a strangely constructed line that the words ...

Next Stop, Reims

Ardis Butterfield: Medieval Literary Itineraries, 26 April 2018

Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 
by David Wallace.
Oxford, 1591 pp., £180, April 2016, 978 0 19 873535 9
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... Cambridge) and Norwich, picks out for discussion the castle at Berkeley in Gloucestershire and the small town of Lichfield. The rest of Britain is treated in the same itinerary as Iceland and Finistère: this neatly ties together the place where the Scots, Norse and Celtic languages were known. Before making this journey around the North Sea, we have travelled ...

Not an Inkling

Jerry Coyne: There’s more to life than DNA, 27 April 2000

Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters 
by Matt Ridley.
Fourth Estate, 344 pp., £8.99, February 2000, 9781857028355
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... the eugenics movements of the early 20th century, and culminating in the loudest recent salvos, Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. Given the inflammatory nature of the topic, and the powerful sociopolitical questions it raises, it would pay a writer to tread gingerly here. Will ...

White Peril

E.S. Turner: H. Rider Haggard, 20 September 2001

Diary of an African Journey (1914) 
by H. Rider Haggard.
Hurst, 345 pp., £20, August 2001, 1 85065 468 9
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... but is now published in full for the first time, edited, introduced and ably annotated by Stephen Coan of the Natal Witness. It has the fascination that goes with anything written in 1914, even though the more spectacular events of Armageddon were slated for the adjacent continent. No one should be surprised to come across words now ruled ...

Making Money

Andrew Cockburn: The Chalabis, 1 December 2011

Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family 
by Tamara Chalabi.
Harper, 352 pp., £12.99, July 2011, 978 0 06 124039 3
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From Dictatorship to Democracy: An Insider’s Account of the Iraqi Opposition to Saddam 
by Hamid al-Bayati.
Pennsylvania, 347 pp., £23, February 2011, 978 0 8122 4288 1
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... firms dominated Iraq’s economic life. Riverboat freight on the Euphrates was monopolised by Stephen Lynch & Co. When the Chalabis set off for their frequent trips to Lebanon and elsewhere they travelled on the coaches of the Nairn Transport Company. Andrew Weir & Co, for whom Hadi Chalabi was the principal grain buyer, dominated the country’s barley ...

Why can’t she just do as she ought?

Michael Newton: ‘Gone with the Wind’, 6 August 2009

Frankly, My Dear: ‘Gone with the Wind’ Revisited 
by Molly Haskell.
Yale, 244 pp., £16.99, March 2009, 978 0 300 11752 3
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... Yet for all the compressed magic of this episode, the mystery is that this character and this small love-confusion should require the great background of the war, and those epic colours; that these convoluted amorous pursuits should depend on and find their place within such a magnificent tapestry. It is not so much that the film explores the relation of ...

Guess what? It’s raining

Deborah Friedell: Murder in Florida, 5 July 2012

Injustice: Life and Death in the Courtrooms of America 
by Clive Stafford Smith.
Harvill Secker, 376 pp., £18.99, July 2012, 978 1 84655 625 8
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... The star witness for the prosecution was Neville Butler, a reporter on the Caribbean Echo, a small newspaper that served West Indians in Miami. Butler testified that Maharaj had paid the newspaper $400 to accuse the Moo Youngs of theft. The Moo Youngs then got the newspaper to publish a series of articles that claimed Maharaj was a ...

Flings

Rosemary Hill: The Writers’ Blitz, 21 February 2013

The Love-Charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War 
by Lara Feigel.
Bloomsbury, 519 pp., £25, January 2013, 978 1 4088 3044 4
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... was ‘no doubt fighting fires day and night’, Waugh reflected that ‘the armed forces cut a small figure. We are like wives reading letters from the trenches.’ The usual situation of wives was one of the many things breaking up for the duration. Macaulay for one was glad. ‘How to be useful though married’ is a question put but never satisfactorily ...

The Undesired Result

Gillian Darley: Betjeman’s bêtes noires, 31 March 2005

Betjeman: The Bonus of Laughter 
by Bevis Hillier.
Murray, 744 pp., £25, October 2004, 0 7195 6495 6
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... married, was no secret; he broadcast the fact in frequent asides about fanciable young men or even small boys. But he had also begun to live a double life, sidelining his wife, Penelope Chetwode, a field marshal’s daughter (whom he nicknamed ‘Philth’) in favour of his mistress, the Hon. Elizabeth Cavendish, a duke’s sister (‘Phoeble’). He had met ...

Why always Dorothea?

John Mullan: How caricature can be sharp perception, 5 May 2005

The One v. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel 
by Alex Woloch.
Princeton, 391 pp., £13.95, February 2005, 0 691 11314 9
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... characterisation in negative qualities: the selfishness of Rosamund Vincy, the priggishness of Stephen Dedalus. Woloch looks at the question of how living persons get ‘rendered into literary form’ from an interesting angle. How do novels use, and make us accept, differences between major and minor characters? How do narratives make their protagonists ...
Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life 
by Herman Pleij, translated by Diane Webb.
Columbia, 544 pp., £23.50, June 2001, 0 231 11702 7
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... hordes of the hungry’. (This prevalent and, in my view, productive tendency is characterised by Stephen Greenblatt’s assertion that ‘the normal is constructed on the shifting sands of the aberrant.’) Pleij’s contention (which is perhaps more relevant to Holland than to other parts of medieval Europe) is that great quantities of meat were consumed by ...

Separating Gracie and Rosie

David Wootton: Two people, one body, 22 July 2004

One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal 
by Alice Domurat Dreger.
Harvard, 198 pp., £14.95, May 2004, 0 674 01294 1
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... In rejecting their defence of necessity the court transformed the law. The previous year Sir James Stephen had argued with perfect confidence that there was indeed such a defence: The old instance of the two drowning men on a plank large enough to support one only, and that of shipwrecked persons in a boat unable to carry them all, are the standing ...

I will give thee Madonna

Richard Beck: After Waco, 21 March 2024

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI and the Birth of America’s Modern Militias 
by Kevin Cook.
Holt, 272 pp., £18.99, January, 978 1 250 84051 6
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Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians and a Legacy of Rage 
by Jeff Guinn.
Simon & Schuster, 383 pp., £20, February 2023, 978 1 9821 8610 4
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... risky plan wasn’t without safeguards, but they were all ignored. The bureau’s director, Stephen Higgins, stressed beforehand that surprise was essential. If there was reason to believe that the Davidians knew about the raid, or if they changed their routines in any meaningful way in the days leading up to it, the agents were supposed to call off the ...

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