The Road to 1989

Paul Addison, 21 February 1991

The People’s Peace: British History 1945-1989 
by Kenneth O. Morgan.
Oxford, 558 pp., £17.95, October 1990, 0 19 822764 7
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... films as Gandhi (a severe treatment of the Raj), A Passage to India, and Heat and Dust, even the James Bond spectacular Octopussy, kept the Indian sub-continent securely in the public’s imagination. One of the most triumphant television productions of the decade was ITV’s dramatisation of Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ under the title The Jewel in the ...

Raiding Joyce

Denis Donoghue, 18 April 1985

James Joyce 
by Patrick Parrinder.
Cambridge, 262 pp., £20, November 1984, 9780521240147
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James Joyce and Sexuality 
by Richard Brown.
Cambridge, 216 pp., £19.50, March 1985, 0 521 24811 6
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Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation 
by Fritz Senn, edited by John Paul Riquelme.
Johns Hopkins, 225 pp., £22.20, December 1984, 0 8018 3135 0
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Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French 
edited by Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer.
Cambridge, 162 pp., £20, January 1985, 9780521266369
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... forth he met Butterly’ (a parody of the Gospel report – Matthew 26.75 – of the repentant Peter: ‘Going forth he wept bitterly’)? What difference, and how many differences, does it make if you translate it as: Und als er weiterging, traf er Butterly; or Und als er weiterging, traf er Bütterlich; or Und er ging hinaus und weinte Buttermilch; or ...

His Friends Were Appalled

Deborah Friedell: Dickens, 5 January 2012

The Life of Charles Dickens 
by John Forster.
Cambridge, 1480 pp., £70, December 2011, 978 1 108 03934 5
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Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist 
by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.
Harvard, 389 pp., £20, October 2011, 978 0 674 05003 7
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Charles Dickens: A Life 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 527 pp., £30, October 2011, 978 0 670 91767 9
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... a journalist, jobs he held and discarded, stayed in his thoughts and haunted his novels. William James believed that the careers we might have chosen don’t matter very much: ‘Little by little, the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he may sometimes doubt ...

Spinoza got it

Margaret Jacob: Radical Enlightenment, 8 November 2012

A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy 
by Jonathan Israel.
Princeton, 276 pp., £13.95, September 2011, 978 0 691 15260 8
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... of the Enlightenment dominated historical writing as late as the 1960s, and is best represented by Peter Gay’s two magisterial volumes published in 1966 and 1969. After Gay and Cassirer, two trends dominated Enlightenment history until Israel came on the scene. One situated the Enlightenment in a particular national context, giving little attention to the ...

The Future of the Labour Party

Barbara Wootton, 18 December 1980

Healey’s Eye 
by Denis Healey.
Cape, 191 pp., £7.95, September 1980, 0 224 01793 4
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The Role of the Trade Unions: The Granada Guildhall Lectures 
by James Prior, Tony Benn and Lionel Murray.
Granada, 96 pp., £1, August 1980, 0 586 05386 7
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Rank and File 
by Hugh Jenkins.
Croom Helm, 179 pp., £9.95, September 1980, 0 7099 0331 6
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The Tragedy of Labour 
by Stephen Haseler.
Blackwell, 249 pp., £7.95, September 1980, 9780631113416
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Labour into the Eighties 
edited by David Bell.
Croom Helm, 168 pp., £9.95, September 1980, 0 7099 0443 6
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... either colour) and offers moderate but constructive proposals for the future, while James Prior, also in moderate terms, outlines his view of the role of the unions and describes those changes in the relevant law which are the objective of his own legislative programme. Tony Benn’s contribution is distinguished by its unique style, which reads ...

Scattered Alphabet

Ange Mlinko: On Susan Howe, 25 December 2025

Penitential Cries 
by Susan Howe.
Norton, 96 pp., £12.99, October 2025, 978 0 8112 3982 0
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... Westerly Terrace’ (Stevens’s home address in Hartford), which takes its epigraph from Henry James (‘His alter ego “walked”–’) and begins:In the house the house is allhouse and each of its authorspassing from room to roomShort eclogues as one mightsay on tiptoe do not infringeHowe is reworking Stevens’s ‘The House Was Quiet and the World ...

What did they name the dog?

Wendy Doniger: Twins, 19 March 1998

Twins: Genes, Environment and the Mystery of Identity 
by Lawrence Wright.
Weidenfeld, 128 pp., £14.99, November 1997, 0 297 81976 3
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... twins put up for adoption were separated and used for psychological studies under the direction of Peter Neubauer, who never told either them or their parents that they were twins, or that they were being studied. In our day, the political bias has resurfaced in the racist hypotheses and conclusions of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell ...

The Daughter Who Hated Her

Frank Kermode: Doris Lessing, 17 July 2008

Alfred and Emily 
by Doris Lessing.
Fourth Estate, 274 pp., £16.99, May 2008, 978 0 00 723345 8
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... is required to do his or her fair share of the work, even though the share isn’t, as Henry James said it should be, ‘quite half’. It consists of two separate narratives, the first fictional, the second autobiographical. Common to both is a preoccupation with the destructive impact of war on ordinary happiness. The first part is a counterfactual ...

Seriously ugly

Gabriele Annan, 11 January 1990

Weep no more 
by Barbara Skelton.
Hamish Hamilton, 166 pp., £14.95, November 1989, 0 241 12200 7
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... have to be particularly hideous. It is impossible to give a full list, but among those chosen were Peter Quennell, Feliks Topolski, Alan Ross, Kenneth Tynan and Charles Addams, as well as a lot of extras with names like Old B., the Bastard and Chuff. She did not waste her time with intellectuals, but absorbed their appreciation of art and literature. She has ...

Homage to Rhubarb

David Allen, 8 October 1992

Rhubarb: The Wondrous Drug 
by Clifford Foust.
Princeton, 317 pp., £27.50, April 1992, 0 691 08747 4
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... rationing in order to keep up prices. Anyone caught smuggling rhubarb paid with his life. In 1727 Peter the Great tried relaxing things, only to touch off such a tremendous surge in trade (as evidenced by the London customs records) that the court came to the conclusion that the monopoly had been very much to its financial advantage, and acted ...

A Resonance for William Styron

Gabriele Annan, 7 November 1985

Savage Grace 
by Natalie Robins and Steven Aronson.
Gollancz, 473 pp., £10.95, October 1985, 0 575 03738 5
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... alive) like the entries in Who’s Who. There are some known names: Cecil Beaton, Jasper Johns, James Jones, John Mortimer, Patricia Neal, William Styron, Andy Warhol. Among the rest are antique dealers, decorators, magazine editors, a ‘freelance music co-ordinator for fashion shows’, a princess ‘internationally concerned with matters of spiritual ...

The Real Johnny Hall

Penelope Fitzgerald, 3 October 1985

Our Three Selves: A Life of Radclyffe Hall 
by Michael Baker.
Hamish Hamilton, 386 pp., £13.95, June 1985, 0 241 11539 6
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... instead mildly successful at W.H. Smith and the Times Bookshop. The case was altered only by James Douglas, the editor (also in a crusader’s spirit) of the Sunday Express. Douglas decided, a month later, to feature the book and its photogenic author, in her ‘severe’ smoking-jacket, as evidence of ‘the plague stalking shamelessly through public ...

What’s the problem with critical art?

Hal Foster: Rancière’s Aesthetics, 10 October 2013

Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art 
by Jacques Rancière, translated by Zakir Paul.
Verso, 272 pp., £20, June 2013, 978 1 78168 089 6
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... History of Ancient Art by Winckelmann in 1764 to the appearance of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans in 1941, his focus is on the arts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that is, on high modernism. His range of interests is impressive: Rancière delves into the poetry of Whitman, the acrobatic performances of the Hanlon-Lees ...

Knife and Fork Question

Miles Taylor: The Chartist Movement, 29 November 2001

The Chartist Movement in Britain 1838-50 
edited by Gregory Claeys.
Pickering & Chatto, £495, April 2001, 1 85196 330 8
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... rights. The tough guys of Chartism are here as well. From Manchester there is the twice imprisoned James Leach, whose Stubborn Facts from the Factories was milked by Engels for his Condition of the Working Class in England (Leach ended up in the 1850s as a soda-water manufacturer). Also from Manchester is the argumentative Reginald Jones Richardson, another ...

Great Tradition

Robert Barnard, 18 December 1980

Plaster Sinners 
by Colin Watson.
Eyre Methuen, 160 pp., £5.95, September 1980, 0 413 39040 3
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Photo-Finish 
by Ngaio Marsh.
Collins, 262 pp., £5.95, September 1980, 0 00 231857 1
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The Predator 
by Russell Braddon.
Joseph, 192 pp., £5.95, October 1980, 0 7181 1958 4
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... enjoys abundant affection from crime-readers but not quite the esteem that Mesdames Rendall and James reap, it may be because his solutions are sometimes less than convincing. We don’t always get the feeling that in his beginning was his end. The solution to Plaster Sinners does not seem inevitable, and is not particularly surprising. Added to that, the ...