Whose Greece?

Martin Bernal, 12 December 1996

Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History 
by Mary Lefkowitz.
Basic Books, 222 pp., $24, February 1996, 0 465 09837 1
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Black Athena Revisited 
edited by Mary Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers.
North Carolina, 544 pp., £14.75, September 1996, 0 8078 2246 9
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... She has found powerful helpers on the far right. In her Preface she thanks the Bradley and John M. Olin Foundations for their grants. These bodies are among the most generous contributors to right-wing organisations such as the National Review, the Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Scholars. Lefkowitz sits on the advisory board of the ...

Defence of the Housefly

Dinah Birch, 14 November 1996

Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy 
edited by Michael Millgate.
Oxford, 364 pp., £45, April 1996, 0 19 818609 6
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... callers – Edmund Blunden, E.M. Forster, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, John Drink water – and Florence took an eager interest in their conversation. Quick to forget her own afflictions when she sensed greater distress, she did all she could to help Charlotte Mew, whom she pitied and admired. ‘What a pathetic little creature! She ...

Crowing

Michael Rogin, 5 September 1996

Imagineering Atlanta 
by Charles Rutheiser.
Verso, 324 pp., £44.95, July 1996, 1 85984 800 1
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... organisation with anti-semitism and anti-Catholicism. Half a century later, Cobb County elected a John Bircher to Congress five times; it is now represented by Newt Gingrich. Although a 1967 Supreme Court decision finally overturned the Georgia state law that barred racial intermarriage, in 1986 the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia statute outlawing consensual ...

Ghosts in the Palace

Tom Nairn, 24 April 1997

... cart as well. We can’t be sure about this yet, in the darkling subsidence of Majorism. However, John Redwood, Sir George Gardiner and Michaels Howard and Portillo are scarcely arguments against the view. ‘The source of the authority and legitimacy of government ... the personification of the nation ... an institution vital to our national ...

The Beast on My Back

Gerald Weissmann, 6 June 1996

The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder 
by Allan Young.
Princeton, 327 pp., £28, March 1996, 0 691 03352 8
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... patterns. He pinpoints the birth of traumatic memory to a machine-made disaster, the train crash. John Erichsen was perhaps the first physician to describe the syndrome in the 1860s while examining victims of British railway accidents; he called it ‘railway spine’, and attributed it to vaguely defined neurological mechanisms that originated in dorsal ...

Pulp

Scott Bradfield, 14 December 1995

Jim Thompson Omnibus: The Getaway, The Killer inside Me, The Grifters, Pop. 1280 
Picador, 570 pp., £7.99, November 1995, 3 303 34288 1Show More
Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson 
by Robert Polito.
Knopf, 543 pp., $30, October 1995, 0 394 58407 4
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... tighter stuff than Thompson could provide. (Gold Medal signature-writers of the time included John D. MacDonald, David Goodis and that thriller writer’s thriller writer, Peter Rabe.) So during the late Fifties, when most of his proposed literary projects couldn’t find a buyer, Thompson went on to do some of his best work for Stanley Kubrick’s early ...

True Grit

David Craig, 8 February 1996

Wainwright: The Biography 
by Hunter Davies.
Joseph, 356 pp., £16.99, October 1995, 0 7181 3909 7
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... topography all right, and you have only to compare his work with other professionals in the field, John and Anne Nuttall in their Mountains of England and Wales (1990), for example, to appreciate his mastery. Their drawing style is rectilinear whatever the subject; rocks become blocks and right-angles creep into the skylines. Wainwright does much subtler ...

Cures for Impotence

James Davidson, 19 October 1995

Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality 
by Simon Goldhill.
Cambridge, 194 pp., £30, January 1995, 0 521 47372 1
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... homosexual “submission”, can complete a genital act “in expressing a power relationship”. John Boorman’s film Deliverance makes striking use of this theme in depicting the maltreatment of urban “trespassers” by rustic hunters.’ It is this modern view of penetration, universalised by human-zoo logic, that makes the ancient phallocracy ...

Well, was he?

A.N. Wilson, 20 June 1996

Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman 
by Sally Peters.
Yale, 328 pp., £18.95, April 1996, 0 300 06097 1
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... Wilde himself – that she makes the occasional mistake. For instance, there is no evidence that John Gray was ever Wilde’s lover, or that his disagreable domestic companion Raffalovich was ever (whatever this would be) a ‘Dominican monk’. The National Gallery in London is cheerfully muddled with the National Portrait Gallery. The familiar Gospel ...

Diary

Julian Evans: What might Larbaud have thought?, 31 July 1997

... single reference to Larbaud I was able to find in any text on Nabokov was a letter to a Professor John Kenneth Simon at the University of Illinois, sent from Montreux in February 1971, in which Nabokov says he does not remember ‘having ever read anything by Valery Larbaud – even in my youth when I absorbed a lot of contemporaneous French stuff’. Why was ...

They both hated DLT

Andy Beckett: Radio 1, 15 April 1999

The Nation’s Favourite: The True Adventures of Radio 1 
by Simon Garfield.
Faber, 273 pp., £9.99, October 1998, 0 571 19435 4
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... as he gruffly liked to be known). Travis was having a party at his home, and decided to invite John Peel, then the only DJ at Radio 1 with a serious interest in the music he played. Peel, who was much older, and held a far more marginal position in the station’s daily schedule, went along out of curiosity. Looking around Travis’s house he ‘suddenly ...

Top Grumpy’s Top Hate

Robert Irwin: Richard Aldington’s Gripes, 18 February 1999

Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: A Cautionary Tale 
by Fred Crawford.
Southern Illinois, 265 pp., £31.95, July 1998, 0 8093 2166 1
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Lawrence the Uncrowned King of Arabia 
by Michael Asher.
Viking, 419 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 670 87029 3
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... in the Fifties, but which have since become available. Substantial biographies of Lawrence by John Mack and Jeremy Wilson, in 1976 and 1989 respectively, have denigrated Aldington’s achievement. Nevertheless he got quite a lot right and it was never again going to be possible to treat Lawrence as simply the preux chevalier, the schoolboyish hero of ...

Out of Sight, out of Mind

Frank Kermode: A.J. Ayer’s Winning Ways, 15 July 1999

A.J. Ayer: A Life 
by Ben Rogers.
Chatto, 402 pp., £20, June 1999, 9780701163167
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... Oxford philosophy was a competitive business; there were certain prizes that one had to win, the John Locke Prize, the All Souls Fellowship; but Ayer’s fate was to be pipped by his contemporaries, Isaiah Berlin, Goronwy Rees and the slightly younger J.L. Austin. As an undergraduate he had been taken up by Maurice Bowra and acquired a certain celebrity by ...

Educating the Blimps

Geoffrey Best: Military history, 10 June 1999

Alchemist of War: The Life of Basil Liddell Hart 
by Alex Danchev.
Weidenfeld, 369 pp., £25, September 1998, 0 297 81621 7
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Studies in British Military Thought: Debates with Fuller and Liddell Hart 
by Brian Holden Reid.
Nebraska, 287 pp., £30, October 1998, 0 8032 3927 0
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... came his 1948 book The Other Side of the Hill (a quotation from the Duke of Wellington, who told John Wilson Croker that he had ‘spent all his life guessing what was on the other side of the hill’). This was military history from the opposing army’s perspective and with the politics and ethics left out. General Sir Percy Hobart, the most cussed of the ...

Testing out the Route

Gabrielle Spiegel, 11 November 1999

The Lord’s First Night: The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage 
by Alain Boureau, translated by Lydia Cochrane.
Chicago, 310 pp., £15.25, September 1998, 0 226 06743 2
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... found in the 13th and 14th centuries, in writers such as Vincent de Beauvais and, in particular, John Mandeville, who, in his (imaginary) Travels, projected his account of cuissage onto a distant world. According to Mandeville, the danger of deflowering a virgin was so keenly felt among certain primitive peoples that special young men – called ...