Fat and Fretful

John Bayley, 18 April 1996

Foreign Country: The Life of L.P. Hartley 
by Adrian Wright.
Deutsch, 304 pp., £17.99, March 1996, 0 233 98976 5
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... Leo can only marvel, in his secretly comfortable way, at what he feels to be the extent of her self-deception. Wright takes for granted that Hartley’s inability to come to terms with his own sexuality ruined his life. But there seems to me no evidence for that at all. Both as artist and as social being Hartley found a way of doing very nicely for ...

Politics can be Hell

Jeremy Waldron, 22 August 1996

Machiavelli’s Virtue 
by Harvey Mansfield.
Chicago, 371 pp., £23.95, April 1996, 0 226 50368 2
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... as far as possible, that the harsh necessities he imposes on the people are regarded by them as self-inflicted. Above all, the executive, the prince and the statesman must manage the smoke and mirrors of public morality so that the two things the common people are most impressed by – results and appearances – are kept firmly and unscrupulously in ...

Donald’s Duck

John Sturrock, 22 August 1996

Bradman 
by Charles Williams.
Little, Brown, 336 pp., £20, August 1996, 0 316 88097 3
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... and to no one but yourself. That Bradman was a ‘natural’ was never in question; he was a self-made master in an aspect of cricket, batting, whose best-loved movements – the off-drive, the late cut – are far from simply natural. The 1930 tour, when the 22-year-old Bradman had scored with such destructive ease off all the English bowlers, led ...

Malvolio’s Story

Marilyn Butler, 8 February 1996

Dirt and Deity: A Life of Robert Burns 
by Ian McIntyre.
HarperCollins, 461 pp., £20, October 1995, 0 00 215964 3
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... dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!’ Burns was a ‘self-fashioner’ who used his poems, prefaces and private letters to project an intensely attractive and social personality, which makes it unsurprising that most people were struck by him in much the same way. Verdicts on the career, on the other hand, tend to ...

Maschler Pudding

John Bayley, 19 October 1995

À la Pym: The Barbara Pym Cookery Book 
by Hilary Pym and Honor Wyatt.
Prospect, 102 pp., £9.95, September 1995, 0 907325 61 0
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... much as toast, which he pursued and devoured in prodigious quantity. Being an invalid, even if a self-made one, Mr Woodhouse’s interest in food in Emma is specially keen. One of his chief pleasures in life is recommending dishes to his friends, such as lightly boiled eggs, but only as they are done by his own housekeeper. Another of his pleasures is ...

Never mind the neighbours

Margaret Anne Doody, 4 April 1996

Delphine 
by Germaine de Staël, translated by Avriel Goldberger.
Northern Illinois, 468 pp., $50, September 1995, 0 87580 200 1
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... it seems, is expected to respond critically to Delphine’s flights: if she is to some extent a self-portrait of her author it is not an uncritical one. Delphine’s imperfections are, however, high imperfections, like those of her important predecessors, Julie and Clarissa. Delphine can also be seen as a reconsidering of Madame de Lafayette’s La ...

Lacking in style

Keith Kyle, 25 February 1993

Divided we stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis 
by W. Scott Lucas.
Hodder, 399 pp., £25, September 1991, 0 340 53666 7
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Blind Loyalty: Australia and the Suez Crisis 
by W.J. Hudson.
Melbourne, 157 pp., £12.50, November 1991, 0 522 84394 8
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... was prepared to think in terms less of reproach than of damage limitation. But British plans (and self-defeating British secrecy) dictated, first, that scarcely anything should start before the ultimatum expired, and secondly, that no airborne invasion from Cyprus be attempted before the seaborne reinforcements had arrived from Malta. The allies thus ...

There’s Daddy

Michael Wood, 13 February 1992

Flying in to Love 
by D.M. Thomas.
Bloomsbury, 262 pp., £14.99, February 1992, 0 7475 1129 2
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JFK 
directed by Oliver Stone.
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... monstrous is the film’s use of Robert Kennedy’s assassination as a mere item in Garrison’s self-vindication and patched-up private life. It proves he was right about everything, and it regains him (immediately) his wife’s love and respect and sexual favours. Amazing how useful public calamities can be once you get the hang of them. The largest ...

The Curse of a Married Man’s Life

Sarah Rigby, 27 November 1997

The Acceptable Face of Feminism: The Women’s Institute as a Social Movement 
by Maggie Andrews.
Lawrence and Wishart, 176 pp., £12.99, June 1997, 0 85315 833 9
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... to. Branches were to be independent, but were expected to uphold the principles of democracy, self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Andrews lists the official objectives of the organisation: ‘1) stimulating interest in the agricultural industry 2) developing co-operative industries 3) encouraging home and local ...

Half Bird, Half Fish, Half Unicorn

Paul Foot, 16 October 1997

Peter Cook: A Biography 
by Harry Thompson.
Hodder, 516 pp., £18.99, September 1997, 0 340 64968 2
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... his own admission is a liar, a humbug, a hypocrite, a vagabond, a loathsome spotted reptile and a self-confessed chicken strangler. You may choose if you wish to believe the transparent tissue of odious lies which streamed on from his disgusting, reedy, slavering lips. That is entirely a matter for you. We have been forced to listen to the whinings of Mr ...

All Her Nomads

Helen Vendler: Amy Clampitt, 5 February 1998

Collected Poems 
by Amy Clampitt.
Faber, 496 pp., £25, May 1998, 0 571 19349 8
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... Immersion in landscape seemed to return Clampitt to that pre-subjective moment of joy before self and object become two things. Consequently, nothing made her happier as a writer than the challenge to make the physical world appear to others as it seemed to her. The tornados of her childhood, for ...

Sex with Satan

Deborah Friedell, 21 October 2021

Crossroads 
by Jonathan Franzen.
Fourth Estate, 592 pp., £20, October, 978 0 00 830889 6
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... He wanted to write books that would be too angry for most readers, too chilly, exhausting and self-conscious. To do otherwise would produce fiction ‘simply inadequate to the social and technological crises’ he saw developing all around him. Which was a shame, because he also thought that mass readership of his work would lead to ‘better political ...

Defensive, Not Aggressive

Andrew Cockburn: Khrushchev’s Cuban Gambit, 9 September 2021

The Silent Guns of Two Octobers: Kennedy and Khrushchev Play the Double Game 
by Theodore Voorhees.
Michigan, 384 pp., £27.95, September, 978 0 472 03871 8
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Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis 
by Serhii Plokhy.
Allen Lane, 464 pp., £25, April, 978 0 241 45473 2
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... 1990s, this indisputable record revealed that all previous insider accounts were both wrong and self-serving. Far from being the voice of reason, Bobby Kennedy had been belligerent to an almost hysterical degree, urging not only attacks on the offending missile sites but a full-scale invasion of Cuba – even though, as his own diaries show, he knew that ...

I write in Condé

Alexandra Reza, 12 May 2022

Crossing the Mangrove 
by Maryse Condé, translated by Richard Philcox.
Penguin, 170 pp., £9.99, September 2021, 978 0 241 53005 4
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Waiting for the Waters to Rise 
by Maryse Condé, translated by Richard Philcox.
World Editions, 282 pp., £12.99, August 2021, 978 1 912987 15 3
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L’Évangile du nouveau monde 
by Maryse Condé.
Buchet Chastel, 287 pp., €20, September 2021, 978 2 283 03544 3
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... me, to enrol me,’ she thinks. ‘Right up to only sleeping with people he OKs.’ Veronica is self-centred and sometimes foolish, but Condé shows her navigating machismo on all sides: there’s something more going on here than just wilfulness or naivety.Published in 1976, Heremakhonon wasn’t a success. The left attacked it for betraying African ...

The Beast He Was

Tim Parks: ‘Kapo’, 26 May 2022

Kapo 
by Aleksandar Tišma, translated by Richard Williams.
NYRB, 306 pp., £14.99, August 2021, 978 1 68137 439 0
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... to God and to fate. Sredoje is disappointed by what he reads. ‘Fräulein, whom he had known as self-assured to the point of obduracy, was suddenly revealed to be fragile to the point of helplessness in the face of life.’ Tišma focuses on the link between libido and violence and the ways in which it played out during the struggle for survival of the ...