Play Again?

Matthew Reynolds: Douglas Coupland’s ‘JPod’, 3 August 2006

JPod 
by Douglas Coupland.
Bloomsbury, 448 pp., £12.99, June 2006, 9780747582229
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... the lesbian mother of one of Ethan’s co-workers who has changed his name to John Doe and strives ‘to be statistically normal to counteract his wacko upbringing’. Ethan’s dad keeps failing to get a speaking part in a movie but his moment comes as the voice of the computerised Ronald McDonald: ‘I shall pierce your being with shakes ...

I blame Foucault

Jenny Diski: Bush’s Women, 22 September 2005

Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species 
by Laura Flanders.
Verso, 342 pp., £10, July 2005, 1 84467 530 0
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... had no interest in direct political action against the bombers and racists of Birmingham, Alabama, John Rice made a passionate speech to the campus in 1970 to commemorate the students killed at Kent State, calling them ‘young people who gave their lives for the cause of freedom and for the cause of eliminating useless war’. He went on: ‘As I look out at ...

Anti-Condescensionism

Susan Pedersen: The fear of needles, 1 September 2005

Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907 
by Nadja Durbach.
Duke, 276 pp., £14.95, March 2005, 0 8223 3423 2
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... douched, frozen, pilled, potioned, lotioned, salivated … by Act of Parliament?’ blustered John Gibbs, hydropath and teetotaller, in a pamphlet denouncing the act. The anti-vaccination movement was born. It was, initially, little more than a collection of outraged scribblers: the 1853 Act was easily evaded and Poor Law Unions, which had quite enough to ...

Lumpers v. Splitters

Lorraine Daston: The Weather Watchers, 3 November 2005

Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology 
by Katharine Anderson.
Chicago, 331 pp., £31.50, July 2005, 0 226 01968 3
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... send them to London to be tabulated and – somehow – synthesised to reveal the laws of the air. John Locke was one of scores of weather-watchers who interleaved their observations with entries in journals and commonplace book jottings. The diurnal rhythms of most of an adult life could be set by the metronome of the morning measurements of temperature, air ...

Thwarted Closeness

Adam Phillips: Diane Arbus, 26 January 2006

... when the photographer is as eloquent and canny as Arbus obviously was. The worse your art is, John Ashbery once remarked, the easier it is to talk about. What is truly odd about Arbus’s work is not her subject-matter, but how difficult it is to conceive of not talking about it in psychological terms. And I don’t mean, as an alternative to ...

Back to the Cold War?

Michael Byers: Missile Treaties, 22 June 2000

... the failure to conclude an agreement as the ‘greatest disappointment’ of his administration. John Kennedy came closest to success when the Limited Test Ban Treaty came into force on 10 October 1963, just a few weeks before his assassination, though that treaty, which prohibited nuclear tests in the oceans, atmosphere and space, did not prohibit ...

Why Goldwyn Wore Jodhpurs

David Thomson, 22 June 2000

The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper 
by Dominick Dunne.
Crown, 218 pp., £17.99, October 1999, 0 609 60388 4
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Gary Cooper Off Camera: A Daughter Remembers 
by Maria Cooper Janis.
Abrams, 176 pp., £22, November 1999, 0 8109 4130 9
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... often indulged friends or relatives. (Play It as It Lays was scripted by Dominick’s brother, John Gregory Dunne, and his wife, Joan Didion, and was an adaptation of Didion’s warning novel on Hollywood.) But he threw parties, and for a few years real class people came, and he took their pictures. He hadn’t set out to be a studied photographer, but he ...

Make enemies and influence people

Ross McKibbin: Why Vote Labour?, 20 July 2000

... like the universities but has evinced no other signs of wanting to endanger the status quo. John Prescott appears a broken reed – but could benefit from the spending review. Margaret Beckett, the minister most responsible for Parliamentary reform, has been an almost complete failure. The David Blunkett of Sheffield Council days is scarcely ...

Prada Queen

Elaine Showalter: Shopping, 10 August 2000

Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End 
by Erika Diane Rappaport.
Princeton, 323 pp., £21.95, January 2000, 0 691 04477 5
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... and sparkle dust. With colours like Hummous and Guacamole, you know you’re in Islington. John Oliver in Notting Hill is the epitome of Posh Paint, elegant, with shelves of leather-bound sample books, like an aristocratic library in a gentleman’s or ladies’ club. Here the paints are called Shrinking Violet, Purple Heart, British Navy, Betty ...

Don’t Move

Jeremy Noel-Tod: Fictional re-creations of Vermeer, 9 August 2001

Girl with a Pearl Earring 
by Tracy Chevalier.
HarperCollins, 248 pp., £5.99, July 2000, 0 00 651320 4
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Girl in Hyacinth Blue 
by Susan Vreeland.
Review, 242 pp., £6.99, May 2001, 9780747266594
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A View of Delft: Vermeer Then and Now 
by Anthony Bailey.
Chatto, 288 pp., £16.99, April 2001, 0 7011 6913 3
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Vermeer's Camera 
by Philip Steadman.
Oxford, 207 pp., £17.99, February 2001, 0 19 215967 4
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... and its many assumptions coarsen interpretation. Bailey is genially sceptical about John Nash’s reading of the eye-catching threads in the foreground of The Lacemaker as the ‘blood red and milk white spilling from the womb that precede the birth of a child’: ‘Even if we think the painter chose red and white for purely painterly ...

Cooking the Books

Anna Vaux: Desire and Susie Orbach, 27 April 2000

The Impossibility of Sex 
by Susie Orbach.
Allen Lane, 216 pp., £16.99, May 1999, 0 7139 9307 3
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... by a story that we know either to be true (analytic literature) or to be made up (fiction). As John Bayley once remarked, writing about Iris Murdoch, it is bound to be a tautology to talk about ‘freedom’ in a novel, in which only the author is free to do as he likes. Pushkin, and Tolstoy following him, liked to emphasise that their characters ‘took ...
Stafford Cripps: A Political Life 
by Simon Burgess.
Gollancz, 374 pp., £25, November 1999, 0 575 06565 6
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... Sikhs. This was the task, assigned to two young personal assistants, Major Woodrow Wyatt and Major John McLaughlin Short. Wyatt was an ebullient, high-living Labour MP, whose political career was to describe a long arc from the socialist Left to the Thatcherite Right. His main job was to keep open the line to the Muslim League. Short was an expert on the ...

‘We would rather eat our cake than merely have it’

Rosemary Hill: Victorian men and women, 4 October 2001

A Circle of Sisters: Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin 
by Judith Flanders.
Penguin, 392 pp., £17.99, September 2001, 0 670 88673 4
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The Hated Wife: Carrie Kipling 1862-1939 
by Adam Nicolson.
Short Books, 96 pp., £4.99, May 2001, 0 571 20835 5
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Victorian Diaries: The Daily Lives of Victorian Men and Women 
edited by Heather Creaton.
Mitchell Beazley, 144 pp., £14.99, February 2001, 1 84000 359 6
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... big success was Faithful unto Death says all that need be said here about his work. Alice married John Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor who went to teach art in India, and became the mother of Rudyard. Only Louisa made what seemed at the time a good match from the material point of view, becoming the wife of Alfred Baldwin, iron founder and, later, MP. Their only ...

How to put the politics back into Labour

Ross McKibbin: Origins of the Present Mess, 7 August 2003

... Thatcherism which the present leadership of the Party obviously favours. The domination, since John Smith’s death, of the Party and its machine by people associated with the soft Left has, paradoxically, exposed it even more to bastard Thatcherism. The victory of the soft Left meant the vanquishing not just of the Bennite Left but also the Gaitskellite ...

Entitlement

Jenny Diski: Caroline Blackwood, 18 October 2001

Dangerous Muse: A Life of Caroline Blackwood 
by Nancy Schoenberger.
Weidenfeld, 336 pp., £20, June 2001, 0 297 84101 7
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... pick up a scrap of paper from the front step. It reads: ‘Just remember I am a witch.’ Ooh-er. John Huston referred to the three Guinness girls, of whom Maureen was one, as ‘lovely witches’. To say that someone was brought up as a wealthy, landed aristocrat (moneyed, narcissistic mother; aristocratic, fey father) is tantamount to saying they had a ...