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When it is advisable to put on a fez

Richard Popkin: Adventures of a Messiah, 23 May 2002

The Lost Messiah: In Search of Sabbatai Sevi 
by John Freely.
Viking, 275 pp., £20, September 2001, 0 670 88675 0
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... and Portugal, and the new kabbalistic ideas coming from the school of Isaac Luria in Palestine. John Freely’s lively book is basically a retelling of Scholem’s story enriched by the author’s knowledge of the Ottoman background. His one significant addition to Scholem is his suggestion as to where Sabbatai might be buried. Freely has omitted all of ...

Diary

A.J.P. Taylor: What on earth should I talk about? , 4 March 1982

... from a script. Perhaps it was wise to eliminate me. No doubt I should not have been able to resist John Bright’s definition of British foreign policy as ‘a gigantic system of out-relief for the British aristocracy’. 1882 is even less fertile. All I can discover is that in 1882 Charles Bradlaugh, the atheist, administered the oath to himself in the House ...

Saucy to Princes

Gerald Hammond: The Bible, 25 July 2002

The Book: A History of the Bible 
by Christopher de Hamel.
Phaidon, 352 pp., £24.95, September 2001, 0 7148 3774 1
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The Wycliffe New Testament 1388 
edited by W.R. Cooper.
British Library, 528 pp., £20, May 2002, 0 7123 4728 3
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... to the Manchester United superstore, was to accompany her on a tour of the Deansgate branch of the John Rylands University Library. Mrs Rylands, the extraordinary founder of the collection, was particularly keen on Bibles, and among the many Biblical treasures is a tiny triangular fragment of the text of St John’s ...

Radical Literary Theory

John Ellis, 8 February 1990

Fraud: Literary Theory and the End of English 
by Peter Washington.
Fontana, 188 pp., £4.99, September 1989, 0 00 686138 5
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... It is easy to see this happening in RLT. In a recent anthology of feminist criticism, two critics took opposing positions on the relevance of the author’s intention to interpretation of a text. One argued that reliance on the author’s intent was inherently a male position, since this was an appeal to patriarchal authority, while another ...

Replication Crisis

John Whitfield: Shoddy Papers, 7 October 2021

Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science 
by Stuart Ritchie.
Bodley Head, 368 pp., £18.99, July 2020, 978 1 84792 565 7
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... who could show they had recently published a paper in a scientific journal. The restaurant took the journal’s ‘impact factor’ – a statistic based on the average number of citations received by papers carried in the journal in the two years after publication – and converted it into a cash equivalent, to be deducted from the bill.The impact ...

He huffs and he puffs

John Upton: David Blunkett, the Lifers and the Judges, 19 June 2003

... to her release from prison, where she was serving a mandatory life sentence. The Anderson ruling took away from the Home Secretary the power to make the ultimate decision as to how long a mandatory life prisoner should serve; instead, it became one for the courts and the parole board. It was this judgment, based on the provisions of the Human Rights Act ...

I resume and I sum up

John Sturrock: Robbe Grillet’s Return, 21 March 2002

La Reprise 
by Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Minuit, 253 pp., €15.09, November 2001, 9782707317568
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... reference, not that exclusive to the imagination of the writer, or his surrogates in the text. It took time for this extreme subjectivism to sink in among Robbe-Grillet’s readers, who, to the contrary, often found him too much of a chosiste, or a writer overinclined to dwell for reasons that weren’t apparent on physical objects undeserving of this ...
In the Tennessee Country: A Novel 
by Peter Taylor.
Chatto, 226 pp., £14.99, September 1994, 0 7011 6253 8
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... that day in the street to say they would never let any woman ruin a horse of theirs, ‘my mother took still another step backward and said: “Indeed! Indeed!” My father said nothing more except once to repeat her “Indeed!” ’ When mother and son scorched along the dirt roads outside the town, as they had done on that day, she sometimes recited a ...

Households of Patience

John Foot, 9 June 1994

Antonio Gramsci: Letters from Prison 
edited by Frank Rosengarten, translated by Raymond Rosenthal.
Columbia, 374 pp., £27.50, March 1994, 0 231 07558 8
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Antonio Gramsci: Pre-Prison Writings 
edited by Richard Bellamy, translated by Virginia Cox.
Cambridge, 350 pp., £40, January 1994, 0 521 41143 2
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... Central Committee. Because the letter emphasised the seniority of his position in the PCI Gramsci took it very badly. At best it was, he thought, an idiotic and irresponsible mistake; at worst a deliberate plot to keep him in prison for as long as possible. The latter hypothesis is almost certainly absurd. Recent evidence points to the constant efforts of the ...

Ringmaster

John Redmond, 28 November 1996

Expanded Universes 
by Christopher Reid.
Faber, 55 pp., £6.99, September 1996, 9780571179244
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... world and its ‘global concepts’ were mistily obscured, the inside world, as in a sunshower, took on a corresponding, and slightly unreal, brightness. To this super-typicality, the voice in Reid’s first book brings the cajoling, heightening tones of a ringmaster. ‘Canapés and circuses, of course!’ one poem announces, as if by way of explaining its ...

Anything that Burns

John Bayley, 3 July 1997

Moscow Stations 
by Venedikt Yerofeev, translated by Stephen Mulrine.
Faber, 131 pp., £14.99, January 1996, 0 571 19004 9
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... in the book, this couldn’t have actually happened, at least not at the moment of writing: it took place in hospital ten years later, at the author’s painful and premature deathbed. It also takes place by the Kremlin, which the drunken hero, tottering on his way from one Moscow railway station to another, has never troubled himself to visit. Worse ...
Finding the Walls of Troy: Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik 
by Susan Heuck Allen.
California, 409 pp., £27.50, March 1999, 0 520 20868 4
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... Walls of Troy, since he had the money and the willpower to blast a trench through any mound that took his fancy. Calvert, to him, would have been an amiable, if rather studious, doormat who would not mind being written out of the cast any more than Yannakis the foreman, if the plot demanded it. A token tribute in the final report should settle things easily ...

What can happen when you make contact in a MOO

John Sutherland: Crime and passion in a virtual world, 29 July 1999

My Tiny Life: Crime and Punishment in a Virtual World 
by Donald Dibbell.
Fourth Estate, 336 pp., £16.99, January 1999, 1 84115 058 4
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... Quite plausibly, he simply wanted to see what his fellow player looked like, IRL and OOC. Ghaffari took his look and went his way. Even so, he was arrested by a waiting posse of officers and agents. Two condoms were found in his car (not unusual for a prudent 22-year-old bachelor in LA). It was enough. On 23 April, JAMINinLA, a.k.a. Aidin Ghaffari, was found ...

Soul

John Bayley, 2 August 1984

Shakespearian Dimensions 
by G. Wilson Knight.
Harvester, 232 pp., £22.50, May 1984, 0 7108 0628 0
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... by me upon the waters’ – to lead the elect by degrees into the mystery of things. Eliot took up the same theme in his 1937 Edinburgh University lectures on ‘Shakespeare as Poet and Dramatist’. There he described the characters in the final plays as ‘the work of a writer who has finally seen through the dramatic action of men into a spiritual ...

No. 1 Scapegoat

John Foot: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 7 February 2002

Senior Service 
by Carlo Feltrinelli, translated by Alastair McEwen.
Granta, 464 pp., £20, November 2001, 1 86207 456 9
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... of discretion’), perhaps out of kindness to his mother, Feltrinelli’s third wife, Inge, who took over the business and continues to run it (she is described as ‘a blend of Audrey Hepburn and Leslie Caron’). Inge’s suffering when Feltrinelli went underground is vividly recounted, however. Sibilla, the young fourth wife who lived in a ménage à ...

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