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New Faces on the Block

Jenny Diski, 27 November 1997

Venus Envy 
by Elizabeth Haiken.
Johns Hopkins, 288 pp., £20.50, January 1998, 0 8018 5763 5
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The Royal Women of Amarna: Images of Beauty From Ancient Egypt 
by Dorothea Arnold.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 192 pp., $45, February 1997, 0 8109 6504 6
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... The depictions of the royal women of Amarna were conceptual rather than realistic, Dorothea Arnold explains, quoting Edna Russmann, who dismisses the search by other scholars for a pathological explanation of the egg-headed princesses. Such views are, she says, based on false premises. ‘They arise from modern perceptions and preoccupations – from ...

Big Books

Adam Mars-Jones, 8 November 2018

... was perhaps more central to Victorian high culture (the culture that produced Jowett, Matthew Arnold and Housman) than the Oxford English Dictionary itself. There was humour in Liddell and Scott, or so we were told, but it was donnish to the point of desiccation. The entry explaining how σῡκοφάντης, literally ‘fig-sayer’, came to mean what ...

Big Fish

Frank Kermode, 9 September 1993

Tell Them I’m on my Way 
by Arnold Goodman.
Chapmans, 464 pp., £20, August 1993, 1 85592 636 9
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Not an Englishman: Conversations with Lord Goodman 
by David Selbourne.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 237 pp., £17.99, August 1993, 1 85619 365 9
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... The portrait of Lord Goodman on the jacket of his memoirs is from a photograph; the one on David Selbourne’s book is from a portrait by Lucian Freud. In the first he looks severe but quizzical, a kind man but not a man to be put upon; in the second he looks quite desperately sad, as if he had done much to little or no avail, and might well have been put upon quite heavily ...

Seriously Uncool

Jenny Diski: Susan Sontag, 22 March 2007

At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches 
edited by Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump, preface by David Rieff.
Hamish Hamilton, 235 pp., £18.99, April 2007, 978 0 241 14371 1
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A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005 
by Annie Leibovitz.
Cape, 480 pp., £60, October 2006, 0 224 08063 6
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... now published as At the Same Time to be her final collection of essays. After that, says her son, David Rieff, in his foreword, she intended to get on with what she most valued, writing fiction. Edited by her, somewhat differently no doubt, this would, then, have been her next book. As it is, published two years after her death, and put together by Rieff and ...

Chimps and Bulldogs

Stefan Collini: The Huxley Inheritance, 8 September 2022

An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family 
by Alison Bashford.
Allen Lane, 529 pp., £30, September 2022, 978 0 241 43432 1
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... in the select Metaphysical Society and engaged in high-profile exchanges with his friend Matthew Arnold about the respective claims of science and literature in education. When a magisterial statement was needed on ethics and evolution, it was the ageing Huxley who provided it in his Romanes Lecture for 1893. The celebrity Darwinian of the 1860s became the ...

Heaps upon Heaps

Jenny Diski: The myth of Samson, 20 July 2006

Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Samson 
by David Grossman.
Canongate, 155 pp., £12.99, June 2006, 1 84195 656 2
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... the poster boy for gang moronics, for self-destructive, incommensurate revenge? According to David Grossman, all Jewish children when they first hear the story learn to call him Samson the Hero. He is wrong about this, but then my Jewish childhood was not in Hebrew or in Israel. I recall the Samson story mainly as an early introduction to the power of ...

Pollutants

Antony Lerman: The Aliens Act, 7 November 2013

Literature, Immigration and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England: A Cultural History of the 1905 Aliens Act 
by David Glover.
Cambridge, 229 pp., £55, November 2012, 978 1 107 02281 2
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... town of Korosten in Ukraine, who arrived in Britain in 1901, as having sought asylum. But he did. David Glover wants to find out how ‘a law restricting immigration [could] be passed in a country that had prided itself on offering asylum to refugees and had virtually made the right to freedom of movement across national boundaries an article of faith’, and ...

Ach so, Herr Major

Nicholas Horsfall: Translating Horace, 23 June 2005

Horace: Odes and Epodes 
edited by Niall Rudd.
Harvard, 350 pp., £14.50, June 2004, 0 674 99609 7
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... Publishers seem to understand this, as witness a new Oxford edition of Horace’s Odes (1997) by David West, and a Penguin Aeneid from the same hand (1990), while A.J. Woodman’s edition of Tacitus’ Annals is eagerly awaited. But a Loeb edition is rather more: some volumes have full introductions and ample annotation, even a new critical text of the Latin ...

Reading Cure

John Sutherland, 10 November 1988

The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals. Vol. IV: 1824-1900 
edited by Walter Houghton, Esther Rhoads Houghton and Jean Harris Slingerland.
Toronto/Routledge, 826 pp., £95, January 1988, 0 7102 1442 1
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Circulation: Defoe, Dickens and the Economies of the Novel 
by David Trotter.
Macmillan, 148 pp., £27.50, October 1988, 0 333 40542 0
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From Copyright to Copperfield 
by Alexander Welsh.
Harvard, 200 pp., £19.95, December 1987, 0 674 32342 4
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... in John Holloway’s expression, like Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Bagehot, Froude, Huxley, Morley, Arnold. The team-written Wellesley Index project went on from this quest to anatomise the élite Victorian mind at a lower archaeological level than that of the pre-eminent sage: its grand aim is to bring under bibliographic control the principal Victorian ...

Nationalising English

Patrick Parrinder, 28 January 1993

The Great Betrayal: Memoirs of a Life in Education 
by Brian Cox.
Chapmans, 386 pp., £17.99, September 1992, 1 85592 605 9
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... argued document asking for the review to be undertaken in the first place. The NCC’s chairman, David Pascall, is a former member of Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street Policy Unit. The former head of the Policy Unit, Lord Griffiths, now chairs the School Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC) which will soon be merged with NCC. It just so happens that ...

A Little Pickle for the Husband

Michael Mason, 1 April 1999

Beeton's Book of Household Management 
by Isabella Beeton.
Southover, 1112 pp., £29.95, November 1998, 9781870962155
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... which was deplored even at the time of the centenary of publication 38 years ago, when Elizabeth David pointed out that the currently available Mrs Beeton didn’t contain a single recipe from the original. That this is an odd state of affairs does not of itself make a facsimile of the 1861 book an interesting object. People buy and use the modern Mrs Beeton ...

Górecki’s Millions

David Drew, 6 October 1994

... section in John Carey’s study, The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), is his apologia for Arnold Bennett, a figure not without parallels in the history of British music and British criticism. Like his hero, Carey enjoys the sport of intellectual-baiting, but doesn’t take it too seriously (though his recurrent characterisation of Hitler as an ...

Much like the 1950s

David Edgar: The Sixties, 7 June 2007

White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties 
by Dominic Sandbrook.
Little, Brown, 878 pp., £22.50, August 2006, 0 316 72452 1
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Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles 
by Dominic Sandbrook.
Abacus, 892 pp., £19.99, May 2006, 0 349 11530 3
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... down well, and John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance was a notorious box-office disaster. But Arnold Wesker’s Roots (which is cited as having disappointing ticket sales in its first run) did capacity business on its revival alongside the other two plays in the trilogy. And Look Back in Anger itself was an immediate television hit, a successful movie and ...

Sucking up

Michael Rogin, 12 May 1994

Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War 
by John MacArthur.
California, 274 pp., £10, January 1994, 0 520 08398 9
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Live from the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad – 35 Years in the World’s War Zones 
by Peter Arnett.
Bloomsbury, 463 pp., £17.99, March 1994, 0 7475 1680 4
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... That effort, failing in Vietnam, produced the news reporter as American hero – Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, Seymour Hersch, Jonathan Schell, Peter Arnett. They reported not only the war the government did not want its citizens to see, but also the government efforts to invent a war for domestic consumption. ‘Part of the Vietnamese Seventh Infantry ...

Comparative Everything

Geoffrey Strickland, 6 March 1980

Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook 
edited by E.S. Shaffer.
Cambridge, 327 pp., £12.50, November 1979, 0 521 22296 6
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... of lovers in the Islamic haadith, the Heroides of Ovid and the western courtly romances, and David Swale (all too briefly) discusses the limitations of D.H. Lawrence when read in the light of the German Bildungsroman, with its freedom and spiritual adventurousness which is at the same time related to the sense of a given community: these, however, are ...

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