Women on top

David Underdown, 14 September 1989

The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe 
by Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol.
Macmillan, 128 pp., £27.50, February 1989, 0 333 41252 4Show More
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“... with gender, which involves the perception and social construction of those differences. And as Peter Burke points out in his foreword to this short but intriguing book, even historians of gender (and there are now a few of them around) have not made much of the subject of transvestism as it is explored by these two Dutch historians. Yet, as Burke also ...”

Letting it get out

Bernard Williams, 18 October 1984

Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation 
by Sissela Bok.
Oxford, 332 pp., £12.95, March 1984, 0 19 217733 8Show More
The Secrets File: The Case for Freedom of Information in Britain Today 
edited by Des Wilson, foreword by David Steel.
Heinemann, 166 pp., £4.95, September 1984, 9780435839390Show More
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“... past espionage is obscene partly because fact and fiction have merged: Blunt, Bill Haydon, Smiley, Peter Wright seem by now all at the same distance. This obsession with espionage is that of investigators, of unmaskers. Its motives even with regard to secrecy are complex. It is obvious that the need to unmask and then unmask again assorted Cambridge spies is ...”

Mother One, Mother Two

Jeremy Harding: A memoir, 31 March 2005

“... We were all friends, I suppose. You may not remember Graham, but he was Maureen’s first husband, Peter and Jill’s father . . . you do, that’s good. They were Surrey people: they had a grand house in Caterham. Graham was a rich fellow, talented, energetic, generous; he’d made most of his money as a printer: he published the daily stock exchange ...”

From Plato to Nato

Christopher Norris, 7 July 1983

Literary Theory: An Introduction 
by Terry Eagleton.
Blackwell, 244 pp., £15, May 1983, 0 631 13258 9Show More
Essays on Fiction 1971-82 
by Frank Kermode.
Routledge, 227 pp., £9.95, May 1983, 0 7100 9442 6Show More
Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction 
by Vincent Leitch.
Hutchinson, 290 pp., £15, January 1983, 0 09 150690 5Show More
Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies 
by Peter Wollen.
Verso, 228 pp., £15, March 1983, 0 86091 055 5Show More
Knowing the Poor: A Case-Study in Textual Reality Construction 
by Bryan Green.
Routledge, 221 pp., £12.95, February 1983, 0 7100 9282 2Show More
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“... of the rise and present institutional character of English Studies. A similar case was argued by Peter Widdowson and his contributors in the ‘New Accents’ volume Re-Reading English. It is hardly surprising that their arguments were met with great hostility by those (not only ‘Leavisites’) who continue to believe in the vital role of English as a ...”

Walking among ghosts

Paul Fussell, 18 September 1980

The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard, 1914-1925 
edited by D.S. Higgins.
Cassell, 299 pp., £14.95, May 1980, 0 304 30611 8Show More
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“... The large university library I use contains few books which the undergraduates have read virtually to pulp. One is Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, published 95 years ago. Its pages are falling out and its binding has been worn to threads and cardboard. Clearly students told off to go and read Wittgenstein and George Eliot have been spending delicious secret hours enjoying Allan Quatermain’s phlegmatic accounts of people crushed to death, impaled, dismembered and beheaded ...”

Every three years

Blake Morrison, 3 March 1988

Fifty Poems 
by Ian Hamilton.
Faber, 51 pp., £4.95, January 1988, 0 571 14920 0Show More
A Various Art 
edited by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville.
Carcanet, 377 pp., £12.95, December 1987, 0 85635 698 0Show More
Between Leaps: Poems 1972-1985 
by Brad Leithauser.
Oxford, 81 pp., £5.95, September 1987, 0 19 282089 3Show More
Eldorado 
by William Scammell.
Peterloo, 71 pp., £4.50, October 1987, 0 905291 88 3Show More
Disbelief 
by John Ash.
Carcanet, 127 pp., £6.95, September 1987, 0 85635 695 6Show More
The Automatic Oracle 
by Peter Porter.
Oxford, 72 pp., £4.95, November 1987, 0 19 282088 5Show More
Voice-over 
by Norman MacCaig.
Chatto, 64 pp., £5.95, February 1988, 0 7011 3313 9Show More
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“... Durcan’s Going home to Russia, coming two years after The Berlin Wall Café contains 48 poems; Peter Redgrove’s In the Hall of the Saurians, one year after its predecessor, has 34; Norman MacCaig’s Voice-over, three years on from his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two ...”

‘We prefer their company’

Sadiah Qureshi: Black British History, 15 June 2017

Black and British: A Forgotten History 
by David Olusoga.
Pan Macmillan, 624 pp., £25, November 2016, 978 1 4472 9973 8Show More
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“... the early 1990s, the historian Gretchen Gerzina went to a London bookshop looking for a copy of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). When she asked the shop assistant for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people ...”

Poet at the Automat

Eliot Weinberger: Charles Reznikoff, 22 January 2015

“... three geographical areas (North, South, West), which contained subcategories – some critics have read them as serial poems – such as ‘Machine Age’, ‘Domestic Scenes’, ‘Property’, ‘Railroads’, ‘Negroes’, ‘Sounds and Smells’, ‘Social Life’, ‘Children’ and so on, most of which are repeated throughout the book. As far as I ...”

My Dagger into Yow

Ian Donaldson: Sidney’s Letters, 25 April 2013

The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney 
edited by Roger Kuin.
Oxford, 1381 pp., £250, July 2012, 978 0 19 955822 3Show More
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“... hone the epistolary skills so essential to diplomacy and the cultivation of friendship. He should read and reread the letters of Cicero, translate them into another language, then back into Latin, then check how close he had come to the original. He should study the letters of stylish contemporaries such as Languet’s friend the historian and spy Pietro ...”

Diary

Ben Rawlence: In Nigeria, 26 April 2007

“... the ruling party had already chosen its candidates. I almost felt sorry for the smiling face of Peter Odili. British audiences may remember him as the governor of Rivers State in the Niger Delta, Nigeria’s richest state: last year he entertained a Channel 4 film crew in his throne room with Cristal champagne, which costs more per bottle than the large ...”

Indoor Raincoat

Lavinia Greenlaw: Joy Division, 23 April 2015

So This Is Permanence: Joy Division Lyrics and Notebooks 
by Ian Curtis, edited by Deborah Curtis and Jon Savage.
Faber, 304 pp., £27, October 2014, 978 0 571 30955 9Show More
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“... original lyric gets completely changed.’ We already had the words to his songs, which tend to be read as details in the narrative of his suicide. This book gives us deletions, revisions and variants that make clear the extent to which he felt unsecured. Curtis was diagnosed with epilepsy two years before he died but seems to have experienced seizures or ...”

Competition is for losers

David Runciman: Silicon Valley Vampire, 23 September 2021

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power 
by Max Chafkin.
Bloomsbury, 400 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 1 5266 1955 6Show More
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“... Peter​ Thiel is known for so many different things it can be hard to keep up. He co-founded PayPal, which provided the basis for his early fortune as well as Elon Musk’s. He is the eerily prescient angel investor who helped launch Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook on the path to global domination. He is the man who bankrupted Gawker, the online gossip site, by funding Hulk Hogan’s libel action, fulfilling a decade-long vendetta that started after Gawker outed Thiel as gay ...”

Unfair Judgments

Ed Kiely: Lethal Cuts at the DWP, 17 April 2025

The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence 
by John Pring.
Pluto, 292 pp., £16.99, August 2024, 978 0 7453 4989 3Show More
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“... Any physical or psychiatric disorder can be exaggerated, faked or feigned,’ the psychologists Peter Halligan, Christopher Bass and David Oakley wrote in their introduction to a collection of essays from 2003 titled Malingering and Illness Deception. Medical professionals, researchers and even courts, they went on, were often reluctant ‘to entertain the label or to stigmatise individuals as malingerers ...”

Children’s Fiction and the Past

Nicholas Tucker, 17 July 1980

The Lord of Greenwich 
by Juliet Dymoke.
Dobson, 224 pp., £4.95, April 1980, 0 234 72165 0Show More
A Flight of Swans 
by Barbara Willard.
Kestrel, 185 pp., £4.50, May 1980, 0 7226 5438 3Show More
Fanny and the Battle of Potter’s Piece 
by Penelope Lively.
Heinemann, 45 pp., £3.50, June 1980, 9780434949373Show More
John Diamond 
by Leon Garfield.
Kestrel, 180 pp., £4.50, April 1980, 9780722656198Show More
Friedrich 
by Hans Peter Richter.
Kestrel, 150 pp., £4.50, June 1980, 0 7226 5285 2Show More
I was there 
by Hans Peter Richter.
Kestrel, 187 pp., £4.50, June 1980, 0 7226 6434 6Show More
The Time of the Young Soldiers 
by Hans Peter Richter.
Kestrel, 128 pp., £3.95, June 1980, 0 7226 5122 8Show More
The Runaway Train 
by Penelope Farmer.
Heinemann, 48 pp., £3.50, June 1980, 0 434 94938 8Show More
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“... and the Haggards ride no more’ has now come true. If these older historical novels are no longer read, is a new generation of writers getting over an equally vivid sense of the past? The answer to this question is a mixed one. There are good historical novelists writing for modern children, but in most cases the vision of history they convey is pallid by ...”

On Thatcher

“... then she took it and popped it into her handbag unopened, saying that she did not wish to read it.’Peter Clarke, 28 January 1993She​ pierced me with a glance. ‘Bow lower,’ she commanded. With what I thought was an insouciant look, I bowed a little lower. ‘No, no – much lower!’ A silence had fallen over ...”
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