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Bible Stories

John Barton, 16 February 1989

The Book of God: A Response to the Bible 
by Gabriel Josipovici.
Yale, 350 pp., £18.95, November 1988, 0 300 04320 1
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Who wrote the Bible? 
by Richard Elliott Friedman.
Cape, 299 pp., £12.95, June 1988, 0 224 02573 2
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... instances the boy in the shirt in the garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:51-2), discussed at length by Frank Kermode in The Genesis of Secrecy, and the man Joseph meets in a field at Shechem while he is searching for his brothers (Genesis 37:12-18). These characters should not be seen as interpolations, or as survivals of some ...

In Shanghai

John-Paul Stonard: The West Bund Museum, 20 February 2020

... the gallery has to offer. A stone circle by Richard Long; an early To the Studios painting by Frank Auerbach. It’s difficult to say what these might mean in a Chinese context.This internationalism is new in China, according to the fair’s director, the painter Zhou Tiehai. It seems to indicate an openness to liberal market values, if not to Western ...

Maggiefication

Peter Clarke, 6 July 1995

The Path to Power 
by Margaret Thatcher.
HarperCollins, 656 pp., £24, June 1995, 0 00 255050 4
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... of the mid-Seventies, notably the inflationary impact of the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. The frank admission of ‘the benefit of two decades’ hindsight’ prefaces the chapter on the Heath Government, coupled with the verdict: ‘His errors – our errors, for we went along with them – did huge harm to the Conservative Party and to the ...

Just Good Friends

Caroline Moorehead, 2 February 1984

The Brotherhood: The Secret World of the Freemasons 
by Stephen Knight.
Granada, 325 pp., £8.95, January 1984, 0 246 12164 5
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The Calvi Affair: Death of a Banker 
by Larry Gurwin.
Macmillan, 249 pp., £8.95, October 1983, 0 333 35321 8
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... When a Mafia suspect called Joseph Miceli Crimi led police, in March 1981, to an office safe in Castiglion Fibocchi, near Arezzo, which contained the names of prominent Italians and documents linking them to a series of dubious and highly confidential deals, the stability of the entire country came under threat. So, too, did the international institution of Freemasonry ...

Ojai-geeky-too-LA

Lucie Elven: LA Non-Confidential, 17 June 2021

I Used to Be Charming 
by Eve Babitz.
NYRB, 448 pp., £14.99, January 2020, 978 1 68137 379 9
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... people having fun without you.’When she graduated from Hollywood High in 1961, Babitz wrote to Joseph Heller: ‘Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer. Eve Babitz.’ That year her family travelled to Europe so that her father, Sol, a contract violinist for ...

To Live like a Bird

Mark Rudman, 1 June 2000

Approximately Nowhere 
by Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 77 pp., £7.99, April 1999, 0 571 19524 5
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... Michael Hofmann’s poetry is a lament for a lost world. Some years ago, in an article on Frank O’Hara, he talked about New York no longer being the thrilling place it had been in the days when O’Hara and the gang could go downtown to the Blue Note and hear John Coltrane or uptown to hear Billie Holiday. This kind of nostalgia can be tiresome: better for each generation to invent a new idea of the new – to enlarge the temple ...

Cad

Frank Kermode, 4 April 1996

Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude 
by Ray Monk.
Cape, 720 pp., £25, April 1996, 0 224 03026 4
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... A sort of mystic illumination possessed me ...’ Yet another epiphany occurred when Russell and Joseph Conrad looked ‘deep down into each other’s eyes’. At other times whole books presented their arguments to him in the twinkling of an eye (and it must be admitted that when he got an idea he often developed it with prodigious speed). To view one’s ...
Joseph Conrad: A Biography 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Murray, 320 pp., £20, July 1991, 0 7195 4910 8
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Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper 
by Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan.
Oxford, 218 pp., £30, August 1991, 9780198117858
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... the end of the first paragraph of Heart of Darkness, the full oddity of which was pointed out by Frank Kermode. ‘Gleams of vanished spirits’ – no doubt the souls of all the sailormen haunting the Thames since the savage early days of Roman conquest – seemed acceptable Conradian language, in keeping with the tale’s general atmosphere, except that ...

Uplifting Lust

E.S. Turner: Mills and Boon, 6 January 2000

Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills and Boon 
by Joseph McAleer.
Oxford, 322 pp., £25, November 1999, 0 19 820455 8
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The Romantic Fiction of Mills and Boon 1909-1995 
by Jay Dixon.
UCL, 218 pp., £11.99, November 1998, 1 85728 267 1
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... in Marxstadt, but here was escapism Western style, ‘wholesome’ and ‘hot’ at the same time (Joseph McAleer’s rating). It was wholesome in the sense that these paperbacks with their innocuous strong-man-and-starlet covers contained no swearing or four-letter words or blasphemies or gratuitous squalor, but hot in the sense that a high proportion of them ...

Anti-Anti-Racism

Ann Dummett, 9 July 1987

Anti-Racism: An Assault on Education and Value 
edited by Frank Palmer.
Sherwood, 210 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 907671 26 8
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The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain 
by Ron Ramdin.
Gower, 626 pp., £35, January 1987, 0 566 00943 9
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... of it. Two of the contributors, however, are members of the Labour Party. According to the editor, Frank Palmer, the idea for the book came from Roger Scruton, who, like several other contributors, also writes for the Salisbury Review and the Times. In short, this book is a product of the New Right. It would have been unthinkable ten years ago for a book to ...

Mulberrying

Andrew Gurr, 6 February 1986

Forms of Attention 
by Frank Kermode.
Chicago, 93 pp., £9.95, September 1985, 0 226 43168 1
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Shakespeare: A Writer’s Progress 
by Philip Edwards.
Oxford, 204 pp., £12.50, January 1986, 0 19 219184 5
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Shakespeare’s Lost Play: ‘Edmund Ironside’ 
edited by Eric Sams.
Fourth Estate, 383 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 947795 95 2
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Such is my love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets 
by Joseph Pequigney.
Chicago, 249 pp., £16.95, October 1985, 0 226 65563 6
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Shakespeare Survey 38: An Annual Survey of Shakespearian Study and Production 
edited by Stanley Wells.
Cambridge, 262 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 521 32026 7
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The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama 
by Catherine Belsey.
Methuen, 253 pp., £13.95, September 1985, 0 416 32700 1
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... argument becomes too obvious for comfort. The formation and function of canons was the subject of Frank Kermode’s Wellek Library lectures, now published as Forms of Attention. The third and concluding lecture is called ‘Disentangling Knowledge from Opinion’. Kermode’s elegant traditionalism allows him to acknowledge the difficulty of distinguishing ...

What’s the big idea?

Jonathan Parry: The Origins of Our Decline, 30 November 2017

The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914 
by Simon Heffer.
Random House, 912 pp., £30, September 2017, 978 1 84794 742 0
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... adventures and the fact that three of his wives succumbed to ailments that suggested poison. Joseph Boehm, who designed the commemorative coins for the 1887 Jubilee, may – but then again may not – have died in flagrante with Queen Victoria’s ‘bohemian’ daughter Princess Louise. Politicians used smart dress to cover poor morals: ...

Hands Down

Denise Riley: Naming the Canvas, 17 September 1998

Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles 
by John Welchman.
Yale, 416 pp., £35, October 1997, 0 300 06530 2
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... or the self-cancelling title which depends on a willingness to be arch; or titled titles, like Joseph Kosuth’s, where the art work is a text of some description, often a dictionary definition; or the literary satires of Situationism, handled here with deadpan solemnity. Welchman insists that his titles speak up seriously in their own right and that they ...

Bus Lane Strategy

Tristram Hunt: London Governments, 31 October 2002

Governing London 
by Ben Pimlott and Nirmala Rao.
Oxford, 208 pp., £15.99, May 2002, 0 19 924492 8
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... of the Municipal Corporations by a central authority.’ Beatrice Webb had intimate knowledge of Joseph Chamberlain’s achievements in Birmingham, yet she and Sidney went on to lament the failure of the ‘enthusiastic Democrats of the time’ to provide ‘any of the appropriate administrative machinery, for audit and inspection’ and to ‘comply with ...

Wannabe Pervert

Sam Thompson: Howard Jacobson, 25 September 2008

The Act of Love 
by Howard Jacobson.
Cape, 308 pp., £17.99, September 2008, 978 0 224 08609 7
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... In Howard Jacobson’s 1998 novel No More Mr Nice Guy, a newspaper columnist, Frank, is approached on the street by a female reader wanting his autograph. She is flustered by her own boldness, and to his mind she has good reason to be: he thinks that asking a strange man for a signature shows no less temerity than asking him for sex ...

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