Eat grass

Jenny Turner: The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank, 15 July 1999

The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing 
by Melissa Bank.
Viking, 274 pp., £9.99, July 1999, 9780670883004
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... and black-clad, smoking cigarettes as they cluster in the dark S&M club of your body’, which may look like a hip and brave and humorous way of putting it, but actually is quite odd. Sinister, black-clad, cigarette-smoking? How can a woman writer in late 20th-century Manhattan be so narrow-minded and square? As Bank’s stories carry Jane Rosenal across ...

Star-Crossed in the Congo

Mark Hudson: Ronan Bennett, 20 August 1998

The Catastrophist 
by Ronan Bennett.
Headline, 313 pp., £14.99, July 1998, 9780747222101
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... Lumumba’s house, wanting to talk to her about ‘us’ as a massive riot is about to start, may seem like a good way of dramatising the gulf between the personal and the political, but all we feel is the lamentable poorness of his timing (a similarly adolescent solipsism creeps into many of his pronouncements on Inès). Equally, we immediately identify ...

Sisterliness

Jonathan Barnes, 6 September 1984

Antigones 
by George Steiner.
Oxford, 326 pp., £15, June 1984, 0 19 812665 4
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... to a splendid theme. The book has already won applause; it will surely be widely read; and it may well establish itself as a classic of literary criticism. Yet I confess that in reading it I was more often irked than thrilled. It would be petty to insist on the occasional shortcomings in scholarship. There certainly are a few odd slips. Aristophanes of ...

Cross Words

Neal Ascherson, 17 November 1983

The Story of the ‘Times’ 
by Oliver Woods and James Bishop.
Joseph, 392 pp., £14.95, October 1983, 0 7181 1462 0
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Good Times, Bad Times 
by Harold Evans.
Weidenfeld, 430 pp., £11.95, October 1983, 0 297 78295 9
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... himself with the British ruling caste that he also hated. But he turned out to have been right. It may be, too, that he understood that not all journalists are crusaders, but that even in the ‘higher’ reaches of the profession there are plenty who enjoy the frisson of betraying colleagues to further themselves, the shiver which accompanies writing copy ...

Defender of the Faith

C.H. Sisson, 16 February 1984

The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh 
edited by Donat Gallagher.
Methuen, 662 pp., £20, February 1984, 0 413 50370 4
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... on to speak of the ‘tough habits of mind of an active, penetrating thinker’ that the reader may begin to dissent. For ‘tough’, in any serious sense, Waugh was not; the impression is rather of a weak and wounded personality trying to outstare the world, to make up by the emphasis of his talk for what he lacks in inner coherence. No doubt the best ...

Scientific Fraud

Peter Medawar, 17 November 1983

Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science 
by William Broad and Nicholas Wade.
Century, 256 pp., £8.95, July 1983, 0 7126 0243 7
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... they suspected he would dearly like to hear: moreover, as Mendel was an abbé, his assistants may have felt that there was an element of heresy in securing results other than those the Reverend Father was convinced were true. This is a subject on which the authors of the present book write amusingly. I do not suppose that personal advancement is a ...

Morituri

D.A.N. Jones, 23 May 1985

Secret Villages 
by Douglas Dunn.
Faber, 170 pp., £8.95, April 1985, 0 571 13443 2
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Miss Peabody’s Inheritance 
by Elizabeth Jolley.
Viking, 157 pp., £7.95, April 1985, 0 670 47952 7
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Mr Scobie’s Riddle 
by Elizabeth Jolley.
Penguin, 226 pp., £2.95, April 1985, 0 14 007490 2
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The Modern Common Wind 
by Don Bloch.
Heinemann, 234 pp., £9.95, May 1985, 0 434 07551 5
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Fiskadoro 
by Denis Johnson.
Chatto, 221 pp., £9.50, May 1985, 0 7011 2935 2
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... people. For Punch readers it is assumed that Scotland is already pretty familiar, and the stories may have a punch-line. The Encounter stories are more allusive, elliptical, up-market. The first two stories concern illegitimate bairns. One is called ‘South America’: a Scottish engineer goes to that continent, leaving his wife with two children, and seems ...

The Earnestness of Being Important

P.N. Furbank, 19 August 1982

John Buchan: A Memoir 
by William Buchan.
Buchan and Enright, 272 pp., £9.95, May 1982, 0 907675 03 4
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The Best Short Stories of John Buchan. Vol. II 
edited by David Daniell.
Joseph, 240 pp., £8.50, June 1982, 9780718121211
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... does not lie there but in birdwatching. In Buchan’s novels there is a nice variant, which we may call the principle of ‘not being really there’ (it recalls T. E. Lawrence to us). Buchan’s heroes tend to be in continual transit between the extremities of the Empire and, faced though you may be with them in a ...

Beckett’s Buttonhook

Robert Taubman, 21 October 1982

Ill seen ill said 
by Samuel Beckett.
Calder, 59 pp., £4.95, August 1982, 0 7145 3895 7
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Mantissa 
by John Fowles.
Cape, 192 pp., £6.95, October 1982, 9780224029384
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Sounding the terriotory 
by Laurel Goldman.
Faber, 307 pp., £7.95, September 1982, 9780571119622
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Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant 
by Anne Tyler.
Chatto, 303 pp., £7.50, September 1982, 0 7011 2648 5
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... of death. Because they are recognisably his themes, one is somehow reassured by them – which may be false comfort, for it’s not the same as understanding them. Here is a lone, elderly woman, soon to die but surviving for the time being in a cabin or hovel in a patch of stones. Sometimes she visits a nearby tomb, and comes under the scrutiny of 12 ...

Believing in the Alliance

Keith Kyle, 19 November 1981

... of the ‘centre-right’ move into the new party’s positions of influence and power, there may be trouble in the future. One cannot at the same time praise the Liberals’ achievements in community politics (as many Social Democrats are quite properly doing) and work to fortify in positions of local power those same long-established office-holders whom ...

Facts and Makings

John Bayley, 21 February 1980

Moortown 
by Ted Hughes.
Faber, 176 pp., £5.25, October 1980, 0 571 11453 9
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Selected Poems 1955-1975 
by Thom Gunn.
Faber, 131 pp., £4.50, October 1980, 0 571 11512 8
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Collected Poems 1942-1977 
by W.S. Graham.
Faber, 268 pp., £8.50, November 1980, 0 571 11416 4
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... romantic world is the creation of absolute fact, so far as language and poetry can make it, which may be the world of enchanted castles and maidens as well as that of minnows and billiard-balls, of lime-trees and water-snakes and an evening sky, ‘with its peculiar tint of yellow green’. But the other world is not a world at all: it is the ‘description ...

The Hadar Hominids

J.Z. Young, 21 May 1981

The Making of Mankind 
by Richard Leakey.
Joseph, 256 pp., £9.95, April 1981, 0 7181 1931 2
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Lucy: The Beginning of Humankind: The Dramatic Discovery Of Our Oldest Human Ancestor 
by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey.
Granada, 409 pp., £9.95, April 1981, 0 246 11362 6
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... overemphasis on the importance of these discoveries. At several points it is hinted that they may be compared to the analysis of DNA. These are indeed the oldest fairly complete near-human remains, and Johanson and his colleagues are to be congratulated on finding them. They have worked hard in giving descriptions. But these bones do not reveal any new ...

George Eliot, Joyce and Cambridge

Michael Mason, 2 April 1981

... It is admittedly a small one, but a damaging point for MacCabe’s argument about Eliot and Joyce may seem to ensue from it. In Dubliners, Joyce would never have permitted himself a fuzziness about an utterance of the ‘have his say’/‘hev my say’ type. In this sense, his practice is closer than George Eliot’s to that which MacCabe calls ‘classic ...

Before the Revolution

J.D. Gurney, 2 July 1981

Iran: Religion, Politics and Society 
by Nikki Keddie.
Frank Cass, 243 pp., £13.50, October 1980, 0 7146 3150 7
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Towards a Modern Iran 
edited by Elie Kedourie and Sylvia Haim.
Frank Cass, 262 pp., £14.50, October 1980, 0 7146 3145 0
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Islam in the Modern World 
by Elie Kedourie.
Mansell, 332 pp., £10, December 1980, 0 7201 1570 1
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... In this sense, the dangers for Twelver Shiism that Kedourie sees in Khomaini’s position may be more apparent than real. Another danger much spoken of by Western commentators is that of the imminent fragmentation of Iran. This prediction owes a great deal to the interpretation of late 19th and early 20th-century Iranian society by Ervand ...

Diary

Alan Milward: On Anti-Semitism, 17 October 1985

... universal traits and in his compulsive descriptions of poor Jews seen in Vienna in his adolescence may be detected the fear of the unrespectable classes felt by those who are immediately threatened by them. Here, too, there is a rational starting-point. The great barrier to the historical study of irrationality is the initial refusal to accept that rationality ...