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Allegedly

Michael Davie, 1 November 1984

Public Scandal, Odium and Contempt: An Investigation of Recent Libel Cases 
by David Hooper.
Secker, 230 pp., £12.95, September 1984, 0 436 20093 7
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... that it was factually correct. Clutching the galleys, I rang the bell at his house in St John’s Wood. Sir Thomas himself opened the door. He did not seem friendly. However, he allowed me into his drawing-room, though without offering me a chair, and himself sat down and began to read. Never before or since have I seen anyone so slowly and yet so inexorably ...

The Slightest Sardine

James Wood: A literary dragnet, 20 May 2004

The Oxford English Literary History. Vol. XII: 1960-2000: The Last of England? 
by Randall Stevenson.
Oxford, 624 pp., £30, February 2004, 0 19 818423 9
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... readers, encouraged some novelists almost to usurp the short story’s usual dimensions. When Ian McEwan moved on from short-story writing, it was to produce a first "novel", The Cement Garden (1978), not much in excess of one hundred pages.’ Ah, so that is why McEwan’s novels are so short. What layers of evasion are hidden in that careful verb ...

Some Names for Robert Lowell

Karl Miller, 19 May 1983

Robert Lowell: A Biography 
by Ian Hamilton.
Faber, 527 pp., £12.50, May 1983, 0 571 13045 3
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... great man, however bashful, stumbling and dishevelled. It is the work of a tyrannicide subject, in Ian Hamilton’s words, to ‘tyrant delusions’. Lowell was a pacifist who was able, at moments, to praise the ideology of the master race. Mischievously mad or mischievously sane, it was hard to tell which, he once urged companions to exercise a sortes ...

Get knitting

Ian Hacking: Birth and Death of the Brain, 18 August 2005

The 21st-Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind 
by Steven Rose.
Cape, 344 pp., £20, March 2005, 0 224 06254 9
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... biologist of the whole living being. All creatures are in their own ways social creatures, be they wood ants, turtles or politicians. He is the kind of biologist – the most common kind – who emphasises complexity, and he does not want to reduce the complex to simpler structures or formulae. Next to Dobzhansky’s mantra, perhaps the most common line in the ...

Bunnymooning

Philip French, 6 June 1996

The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives 
by Sebastian Faulks.
Hutchinson, 309 pp., £16.99, April 1996, 0 09 179211 8
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... of Sebastian Faulks’s percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes ...

Puffed Wheat

James Wood: How serious is John Bayley?, 20 October 2005

The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature: Essays 1962-2002 
by John Bayley, selected by Leo Carey.
Duckworth, 677 pp., £25, March 2005, 0 7156 3312 0
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... complexity. Everything between Tolstoy on the one side and honestly unserious Wodehouse or Ian Fleming, say, on the other – Waugh, Greene, Joyce, you name it – will have for him something of the status of kitsch or poshlost, will be fundamentally untrue, in some way. The problem for the critic is not just that the Tolstoyan or Shakespearean or ...

Most Curious of Seas

Richard Fortey: Noah’s Flood, 1 July 1999

Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event that Changed History 
by William Ryan and Walter Pitman.
Simon and Schuster, 319 pp., £17.99, February 1999, 0 684 81052 2
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... Geologists seem destined to lock horns with those who want to interpret the Bible story literally. Ian Plimer, a geologist at the University of Melbourne and an expert in Turkish geology, recently placed his livelihood in peril to challenge what he sees as Creationist nonsense. A group of local fundamentalists, led by one Allen Roberts, claimed to have found ...

Pay Attention, Class

Robert Hanks: Giles Foden, 10 September 2009

Turbulence 
by Giles Foden.
Faber, 353 pp., £16.99, June 2009, 978 0 571 20522 6
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... choreographed disaster involving a hydrogen weather balloon. The scene puts one in mind of Ian McEwan’s balloon disaster in Enduring Love, but this isn’t the first time Foden has shown an interest in balloons: two of the characters in Ladysmith escape the siege in an observation balloon. Perhaps he just likes them. Before this, though, Meadows has ...

A Big Life

Michael Hofmann: Seamus Heaney, 4 June 2015

New Selected Poems 1988-2013 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 222 pp., £18.99, November 2014, 978 0 571 32171 1
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... Holder whiskers, the period of ‘Exposure’, of ‘long-haired and thoughtful’, of the ‘wood-kerne’ and the ‘inner émigré’. But the cheekbones are there. And a listener for sure. ‘You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note,’ he has the ghost of Joyce address him in the marvellous ‘Station Island’ sequence from 1984. Tweed ...

Memories of Frank Kermode

Stefan Collini, Karl Miller, Adam Phillips, Jacqueline Rose, James Wood, Michael Wood and Wynne Godley, 23 September 2010

... he was cautious to the last – have the sense of ‘being able to do what angels can’. James Wood writes: I have good reason to remember Frank Kermode’s collection of essays The Art of Telling, because it was the first book I ever stole. Between the ages of 16 and 18 I lifted more than a few books from shops. Resources were very slight, and the hunger ...

Eels in Their Pockets

Nick Richardson: Poaching, 17 December 2015

The Last English Poachers 
by Bob Tovey and Brian Tovey, with John McDonald.
Simon & Schuster, 288 pp., £16.99, May 2015, 978 1 4711 3567 5
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... memoirs and wistful outsider essays. Black Bill, who appears in the Country Life journalist Ian Niall’s Poacher’s Handbook (1950), is a perfect specimen. He has a black, tousled beard and an over-large jacket and can charm partridges from their roosts with a brass whistle. He also uses raisins to catch pheasants like Danny’s dad in Roald Dahl’s ...

Diary

Tam Dalyell: The Belgrano Affair, 7 February 1985

... to Mrs Thatcher and her faction in the Party. On 22 March – the day, incidentally, on which Mr Ian Scott, a Shropshire farmer, was counting his trees, with a view to felling, in the very coppice in which Miss Murrell’s body was to be found two days later – Mr Heseltine began his investigation into the documents which have come to be known as the Crown ...

What did Aum Shinrikyo have in mind?

Ian Hacking: Sarin in the Subway, 19 October 2000

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche 
by Haruki Murakami, translated by Alfred Birnbaum.
Harvill, 309 pp., £20, June 2000, 1 86046 757 1
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... listens, very knowledgably, to a lot of Western music, jazz, popular and classical. Norwegian Wood, recently released in English, although already translated into many other languages, was Murakami’s first great success in Japan.* It is named after the Beatles song and is not unlike The Catcher in the Rye or L’Education sentimentale, or something ...

Man without a Fridge

Thomas Jones: Haruki Murakami, 17 April 2003

After the Quake 
by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin.
Vintage, 132 pp., £6.99, March 2003, 1 84343 015 0
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Earthshaking Science: What We Know (and Don’t Know) about Earthquakes 
by Susan Elizabeth Hough.
Princeton, 238 pp., £17.95, May 2002, 0 691 05010 4
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... in the late 1980s, uncomfortable with the fame that accompanied the huge success of Norwegian Wood (1987), and gone to the United States. The protagonist of each of the six stories collected in After the Quake is someone who wasn’t there, but whose life has been profoundly affected by the event, and by their absence from it. In ‘UFO in Kushiro’, the ...

Beebology

Stefan Collini: What next for the BBC?, 21 April 2022

The BBC: A People’s History 
by David Hendy.
Profile, 638 pp., £25, January, 978 1 78125 525 4
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This Is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain? 1922-2022 
by Simon J. Potter.
Oxford, 288 pp., £20, April, 978 0 19 289852 4
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... by threatening to cut or curtail its External Services broadcasting. The director general, Ian Jacob, rightly sensing that the country was divided on the issue, stood by the corporation’s commitment to even-handed reporting. Once American pressure had forced Eden into a humiliating withdrawal from the Canal Zone, the threat evaporated, but the ...

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