Ludic Cube

Angela Carter, 1 June 1989

Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words 
by Milorad Pavic, translated by Christina Pribicevic-Zoric.
Hamish Hamilton, 338 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 241 12658 4
Show More
Show More
... as to be almost parodically fashionable, the perfect type of those Euro-best-sellers such as Patrick Susskind’s Perfume and Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose that seem, to some British critics, to spring from an EEC conspiracy to thwart exports of genuine, wholesome, straightforward British fiction the same way French farmers block the entry of English ...

Dismantling the class war

Paul Addison, 25 July 1991

The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950. Vol I.: Regions and Communities 
edited by F.M.L. Thompson.
Cambridge, 608 pp., June 1990, 0 521 25788 3
Show More
The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950. Vol II.: People and Their Environment 
edited by F.M.L. Thompson.
Cambridge, 392 pp., June 1990, 0 521 25789 1
Show More
The Temper of the Times: British Society since World War Two 
by Bill Williamson.
Blackwell, 308 pp., £30, August 1990, 0 631 15919 3
Show More
Show More
... is meaningless to describe them both as expressions of urban society. Class, too, is atomised in Patrick Joyce’s chapter on work. Labour historians have long assumed that 19th-century industry was a field of conflict between workers and employers in which the employers held the whip hand. Joyce turns this conception almost upside down. In his view, the ...

Special Status

R.J. Berry, 21 February 1985

Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology 
HMSO, 103 pp., £6.40Show More
Human Procreation: Ethical Aspects of the New Techniques 
Oxford, 91 pp., £3.95, December 1984, 0 19 857608 0Show More
The Redundant Male 
by Jeremy Cherfas and John Gribbin.
Bodley Head, 197 pp., £9.95, May 1984, 9780370305233
Show More
Begotten of Made? Human Procreation and Medical Technique 
by Oliver O’Donovan.
Oxford, 88 pp., £2.50, June 1984, 0 19 826678 2
Show More
Show More
... dish. Moral or not? Legal or not? Playing God? Her existence was made possible by the work of Patrick Steptoe, a North Country obstetrician, and Bob Edwards, a Cambridge physiologist. In his 1983 Horizon Lecture on BBC Television, Edwards described their search for moral guidelines: We have looked for inspiration to ...

The Art of Self-Defeat

Noël Annan, 19 July 1984

Faces of Philip: A Memoir of Philip Toynbee 
by Jessica Mitford.
Heinemann, 175 pp., £9.95, July 1984, 0 434 46802 9
Show More
Show More
... with irrepressible Mitford brio. There’s a high-spirited acknowledgment of help received from Patrick Leigh-Fermor (easily the best of her correspondents) in removing from her MS such campus jargon as ‘on-going’, ‘explicate’ and ‘comedic scenarios’. I only wish he had cut out ‘long-remembered’ and ‘sadly missed’. What’s odd is how ...

Davitt’s Part

Charles Townshend, 3 June 1982

Davitt and Irish Revolution 1846-1882 
by T.W. Moody.
Oxford, 674 pp., £22.50, April 1982, 9780198223825
Show More
Show More
... Fenian rhetoric, is equally significant. His contact with the fierce US Fenian organisation, with Patrick Ford of the Irish World and above all with John Devoy, precipitated him into the ‘new departure’. Prison had probably prepared his mind to grasp the land issue; though many readers will be surprised by the clarity with which it emerges that Davitt did ...

Out of the Closet

Richard Altick, 20 August 1981

The Private Case: An Annotated Bibliography of the Private Case Erotica Collection in the British Library 
by Patrick Kearney.
Jay Landesman, 354 pp., £45, July 1981, 0 905150 24 4
Show More
Show More
... Erotica are the non-books of the bibliographical world. In most, if not all, of the standard records of book production and book possession their existence has gone unnoticed. They have seldom been recorded in the lists of books entered for copyright at the British Library or the Library of Congress, for the understandable reason that their secret publishers did not wish to bring them to any form of official attention ...

How to vanish

Michael Dibdin, 23 April 1987

The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis 
by Humberto Costantini, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni.
Fontana, 193 pp., £3.50, January 1987, 0 00 654180 1
Show More
Requiem for a Woman’s Soul 
by Omar Rivabella, translated by Paul Riviera.
Penguin, 116 pp., £2.95, February 1987, 0 14 009773 2
Show More
Words in Commotion, and Other Stories 
by Tommaso Landolfi, translated by Ring Jordan and Lydia Jordan.
Viking, 273 pp., £10.95, February 1987, 0 670 80518 1
Show More
The Literature Machine 
by Italo Calvino, translated by Patrick Creagh.
Secker, 341 pp., £16, April 1987, 0 436 08276 4
Show More
The St Veronica Gig Stories 
by Jack Pulaski.
Zephyr, 170 pp., £10.95, December 1986, 0 939010 09 7
Show More
Kate Vaiden 
by Reynolds Price.
Chatto, 306 pp., £10.95, February 1987, 0 7011 3203 5
Show More
Show More
... To vanish from sight; be traceable no farther; cease to be present; be lost, especially without explanation.’ The verb in question normally behaves intransitively, but in Argentina after 1976 it learned to take a direct object as the military regime disappeared between nine and twenty thousand people. Humberto Costantini and Omar Rivabella both write about this, but their approach is so different that their books in fact complement each other ...

Festschriftiness

Susan Pedersen, 6 October 2011

Structures and Transformations in Modern British History 
edited by David Feldman and Jon Lawrence.
Cambridge, 331 pp., £50, January 2011, 978 0 521 51882 6
Show More
The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain 
edited by Simon Gunn and James Vernon.
California, 271 pp., £20.95, May 2011, 978 0 9845909 5 7
Show More
Classes, Cultures and Politics: Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin 
edited by Clare Griffiths, John Nott and William Whyte.
Oxford, 320 pp., £65, April 2011, 978 0 19 957988 4
Show More
Show More
... shape British social history over the last four decades: Ross McKibbin, Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce. I should say before I go any further that I too am a modern British historian: this is my subject and my tribe. I’ve met the dedicatees, most of the editors and a majority of the contributors to these volumes; a few are good friends. But for ...

Turncoats and Opportunists

Alexandra Walsham: Francis Walsingham, 5 July 2012

The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I 
by John Cooper.
Faber, 400 pp., £9.99, July 2012, 978 0 571 21827 1
Show More
Show More
... on the co-operation of her councillors and citizens echoes the influential thesis of the late Patrick Collinson. Walsingham’s status as a critical part of the ‘Heath Robinson machine’ of Tudor government – attested by the politician and historian Sir Robert Naunton, who described him as the ‘engine’ of the state – is well established. But ...

Irishness is for other people

Terry Eagleton: Enrique Vila-Matas, 19 July 2012

Dublinesque 
by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey.
Harvill Secker, 245 pp., £16.99, June 2012, 978 1 84655 489 6
Show More
Show More
... been dominated by nationalism, the most poetic of all political currents. It is hard to imagine Patrick Pearse chairing a finance committee. The former prime minister Garret FitzGerald, a writer and intellectual as well as a politician, is said to have remarked of a certain policy proposal: ‘That’s all right in practice, but will it work in ...

Too Important to Kill

Adam Shatz: Real Men Go to Tehran, 23 January 2020

... forces. Soleimani’s assassination has turned Iranian anger back towards the Great Satan. As Patrick Cockburn explains (in the next piece in this issue), Iran’s leaders were astounded by the millions of mourners who turned out in the streets. Thanks to Trump, a regime that had become increasingly estranged from its own people saw extra­ordinary scenes ...

Upside Down, Inside Out

Colin Kidd: The 1975 Referendum, 25 October 2018

Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain 
by Robert Saunders.
Cambridge, 509 pp., £24.99, March 2018, 978 1 108 42535 3
Show More
Show More
... a women’s section, while on the other side of the argument, Caroline Neill, whose husband, Patrick Neill, was the chair of the Bar Council, turned the top floor of their Chelsea home into an anti-EEC think tank. Inside the Labour Party women played a formidable role on both sides of the debate, Castle and Judith Hart for the socialist antis, Shirley ...

Devolution Doom

Christopher Harvie: Scotland’s crisis, and some solutions, 5 September 2002

... its ‘geotechnic’ successor (in which technology would enhance society and the environment). Patrick Geddes had predicted this in the 1890s, along with self-government. Which is why Geddes – a recurrent presence in the novels of Alasdair Gray – counts as a patron of devolution, and indeed of that peaceable civic Europe in which Gray’s ‘Scottish ...

Wrong Sort of Citizen

Aziz Huq, 2 April 2026

... had been ‘illegally procured’ – by fraud, say. In practice, according to the historian Patrick Weil, it was ‘quite discretionary’, and invariably ‘highly political’ and ‘symbolic’. In 1940 and 1952, the discretionary power was formalised by provisions permitting denaturalisation for people who had voted in a foreign election, worked for ...

Irrational Expectations

Barry Supple, 18 November 1982

The 1982 Budget 
edited by John Kay.
Blackwell, 147 pp., £10, July 1982, 0 631 13153 1
Show More
Money and Inflation 
by Frank Hahn.
Blackwell, 116 pp., £7.95, June 1982, 0 631 12917 0
Show More
Public Enterprise in Crisis: The Future of the Nationalised Industries 
by John Redwood.
Blackwell, 211 pp., £5.25, May 1982, 0 631 13053 5
Show More
Controlling Public Industries 
by John Redwood and John Hatch.
Blackwell, 169 pp., £12, July 1982, 0 631 13078 0
Show More
Show More
... different, of course, on the other side of the theoretical divide. In his comments on the Budget, Patrick Minford, the most determined monetarist around, argues that the Government’s financial and monetary policy is absolutely right. Yet in justifying these comments, and in his discussion of the nature of unemployment, Minford leads us onto the more ...