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Agreeing with Berger

Peter Campbell, 19 March 1987

Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger 
by Geoff Dyer.
Pluto, 186 pp., £4.95, December 1986, 0 7453 0097 9
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... so easy to understand. When he wrote about the entries to the competition for a monument to ‘The Unknown Political Prisoner’, readers’ letters filled pages. While other critics valued art as free expression, Berger suggested that freedom might be destructive. While others wrote about what it was like to look at a painting, he wrote about what it was like ...

Topographies

W.R. Mead, 16 October 1980

The English Heartland 
by Robert Beckinsale and Monica Beckinsale.
Duckworth, 434 pp., £18, June 1980, 0 7156 1389 8
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The English Village 
by Richard Muir.
Thames and Hudson, 208 pp., £8.50, May 1980, 0 500 24106 6
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... the documentary detail in which the Beckinsales revel, as well as the rhymsters – known and unknown – whose verse they disinter. The statistically agile will be tempted to turn to their pocket calculators, if only to estimate how many acres of mature woodland might be needed to construct even a small hamlet, given that three hundred trees were ...

Literary Man

J.I.M. Stewart, 7 June 1984

Hilaire Belloc 
by A.N. Wilson.
Hamish Hamilton, 398 pp., £12.95, April 1984, 0 241 11176 5
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... occasion upon which Belloc produced it. This is entirely harmless. But anecdotes of a similarly unknown provenance and of a more damaging sort continue to float around. There are several about Belloc’s behaviour at church services. From Mr Wilson we learn that when Belloc’s son-in-law, Reginald Jebb, was being received into the Catholic ...

State Aid

Denis Arnold, 22 December 1983

A History of English Opera 
by Eric Walter White.
Faber, 472 pp., £30, July 1983, 0 571 10788 5
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... naturally wish to present the big pieces and certainly cannot afford to risk too many failures by unknown composers. But it must be remembered that not even Puccini had a real success the first time round. All that we can hope, if we share Mr White’s optimism in his delightfully illustrated book, is that, having discovered that the English ‘flock with ...

Biographical Materials

Alan Hollinghurst, 15 October 1981

Remembering Britten 
edited by Alan Blyth.
Hutchinson, 181 pp., £7.95, June 1981, 0 09 144950 2
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Britten and Auden in the Thirties: The Year 1936 
by Donald Mitchell.
Faber, 176 pp., £7.50, February 1981, 0 571 11715 5
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... the time, and it is Mitchell’s claim that the sum of the Auden/Britten collaborations (including unknown quantities like the Group Theatre scores) is larger than that of Brecht and Weill, and as important in shaping the image of the Thirties. Some instinct suggests that this is not the case, perhaps because of the abstruseness of the texts, the inventiveness ...

France’s Favourite Criminal

Douglas Johnson, 7 August 1980

Mesrine: the Life and Death of a Super-crook 
by Carey Schofield.
Penguin, 201 pp., £95, April 1980, 0 14 005607 6
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... victims were known to be embarrassed because they had lost valuables and monies which were unknown to the tax authorities; Leroy had made off with the weekend takings of four supermarkets; Mesrine was a specialist in robbing banks and had most recently kidnapped a millionaire and attacked a casino. British observers must have been flattered to see that ...

Making history

Neal Ascherson, 21 August 1980

The Oak and the Calf 
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Collins Harvill, 568 pp., £8.95, July 1980, 0 06 014014 3
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... from the camps and cured of cancer, wants nothing more than to be left alone to write. He is unknown, a schoolmaster in the provincial town of Ryazan who at nights and weekends fills page after page – line crammed to line, on both sides of the leaf-thin paper – with his minute ‘onion-seed’ handwriting. He burns his rough copies for safety, and ...

South Yorkshire Republic

Beatrix Campbell, 4 June 1987

Forever England 
by Beryl Bainbridge.
Duckworth/BBC, 174 pp., £9.95, April 1987, 0 563 20466 4
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Nottinghamshire 
by Alan Sillitoe.
Grafton, 170 pp., £14.95, March 1987, 0 246 12852 6
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Left behind: Journeys into British Politics 
by David Selbourne.
Cape, 174 pp., £10.95, February 1987, 0 224 02370 5
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... literature of conscientious objection, of dissent. It derives from the feeling that the nation is unknown or unrecognisable to itself. Its project is to reveal a divided nation at the very moment of the dissidents’ defeat. At its best, though, it is not just a genre mesmerised by the spectre of the victim, but a record of the toil and ingenuity of survivors ...

Something to look at

David Sylvester, 10 March 1994

... Cyladic pieces include a vase of great quality (cat. 49) and an exquisite little object, purpose unknown, like an egg (cat. 47). There are no specimens of the familiar Cycladic idol: a pity; one would have liked to see Ortiz’s choice. But this showcase does provide typical, and very fine, examples of idols from Neolithic Thessaly. One of them especially is ...

Only the Drop

Gabriele Annan, 17 October 1996

Every Man for Himself 
by Beryl Bainbridge.
Duckworth, 224 pp., £14.99, September 1996, 0 7156 2733 3
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... His father died before he was born, his mother three years after. She was a French girl, name unknown, who worked in a café and once sat for Cézanne. His father’s exact identity is not revealed. This is Morgan’s mystery, and at one point he thinks he’s solved it and that Scurra is his father. He would rather like that. Disconcertingly, for the ...

Dress for Success

P.N. Furbank, 2 November 1995

Monsieur d’Eon is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade 
by Gary Kates.
Basic Books, 368 pp., $25, May 1995, 0 465 04761 0
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... spies for what is known as the‘King’s Secret’, a separate system of foreign relations, quite unknown to the Foreign Ministry and pursuing different aims. With the coming of war, it became one of d’Eon’s duties, as agent for the King’s Secret, to act as a courier for a secret correspondence between the Empress Elizabeth of Russia and Louis XV. He ...

Looking big

Asa Briggs, 12 March 1992

Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Engineering Knight-Errant 
by Adrian Vaughan.
Murray, 285 pp., £19.95, October 1991, 0 7195 4636 2
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... shall govern me. The latter is so strong that, even on a dark night, riding home, when I pass some unknown person who perhaps does not even look at me I catch myself trying to look big on my little pony.’ This entry was written on the third day after Brunel had started working on the tunnel under the Thames, a project of his father’s to which posterity ...

For the Sake of the Dollars

Lynne Vallone: The original Siamese twins, 12 September 2019

Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History 
by Yunte Huang.
Liveright, 416 pp., £11.99, May 2019, 978 1 63149 545 8
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... slave states. How the twins and their wives reacted to the curiosity about their private lives is unknown. By one measure – fertility – the marriages were successful: between them, Chang and Eng Bunker fathered 21 children. Eventually, after they moved to a large farm in Surry County, the twins organised a system to preserve marital and fraternal ...

Pompeian Group Therapy

Nora Goldschmidt, 22 September 2022

The Roman Republic of Letters: Scholarship, Philosophy and Politics in the Age of Cicero and Caesar 
by Katharina Volk.
Princeton, 400 pp., £28, January 2022, 978 0 691 19387 8
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... when he had retired from politics. (The contents and date of a pamphlet about Pompey are unknown.) Since almost all the prefaces are lost, it is unclear whether, like Cicero, Varro presented antiquarian scholarship as a form of public service, but what survives of his work (including six of the twenty-five books of De Lingua Latina) is usually read ...

Diary

Fiona Pitt-Kethley: Santería, 27 July 2017

... think of myself as religious I am a bit like the Greeks mentioned in Acts, who had an altar to the Unknown God. Everybody’s gods are OK by me. My Muslim neighbour has been known to sacrifice a sheep at Eid on his terrace; most of the others in the road were brought up as Catholics. I am also visited by a persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Spanish and ...

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