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Schusterism

C.H. Sisson, 18 April 1985

Diaries: 1923-1925 
by Siegfried Sassoon, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Faber, 320 pp., £12.95, March 1985, 0 571 13322 3
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... that accumulate to set a marked distance between ourselves and our predecessors. Sixty years is long enough even for those who were alive at the time to look back with some astonishment on the ordinary arrangements of the day. Consider W.J. Turner – admittedly a new and uncertain driver – driving to Warminster in second gear and not unnaturally ...

Winners and Wasters

Tom Shippey, 2 April 1987

The French Peasantry 1450-1660 
by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, translated by Alan Sheridan.
Scolar, 447 pp., £42.50, March 1987, 0 85967 685 4
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The Superstitious Mind: French Peasants and the Supernatural in the 19th Century 
by Judith Devlin.
Yale, 316 pp., £20, March 1987, 0 300 03710 4
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... may well feel Gradground out of comprehension: the issue of ‘the way of life’ seems for long periods to have been totally forgotten. Yet Ladurie does once again have a story to tell, and once again it is one of considerable interest and provocation, even to the insularly English reader. The story is one of collapse, recovery, ‘stagflation’ and ...

Glad to Go

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 6 March 1997

Death in the Victorian Family 
by Pat Jalland.
Oxford, 464 pp., £25, November 1996, 0 19 820188 5
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... than that of the old; they found sudden loss more difficult to cope with than losses they had long anticipated; they relied on family and friends for comfort in times of bereavement; they took solace from memories of the dead, whom they were inclined, at least in the early stages of their grief, to idealise. Some of our received opinions about the ...

The Everyday Business of Translation

George Steiner, 22 November 1979

The True Interpreter 
by Louis Kelly.
Blackwell, 282 pp., £15
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... metaphoric and local suggestion, that there can be no genuine ‘theory of translation’ so long as there is no satisfactory ‘theory’ of how the human mind produces meaningful speech, let alone interlingual transfers of such speech). Kelly’s position is an intermediate one; though he rejects the meta-mathematical formalism of certain paradigms of ...

Life in the Colonies

Steven Rose, 20 July 1995

Naturalist 
by Edward O.Wilson.
Allen Lane, 380 pp., £20, August 1995, 0 7139 9141 0
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Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration 
by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O.Wilson.
Harvard, 228 pp., £19.95, November 1994, 0 674 48525 4
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... sisters: they are genetically identical. Reading Hamilton, Wilson might well have complained, as T.H Huxley did when he read Darwin: ‘How stupid not to have thought of that.’ But thanks to his encyclopedic knowledge of the ant world, a mathematical syllogism became a science of life itself. In the UK, Richard Dawkins is often credited with Hamilton’s ...

Sing Tantarara

Colin Kidd, 30 October 1997

Secret and Sanctioned: Covert Operations and the American Presidency 
by Stephen Knott.
Oxford, 258 pp., £19.50, November 1996, 0 19 510098 0
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The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800 
by Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 367 pp., £25, December 1996, 1 85619 637 2
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American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson 
by Joseph Ellis.
Knopf, 365 pp., $26, February 1997, 0 679 44490 4
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Slave Laws in Virginia 
by Philip Schwarz.
Georgia, 253 pp., $40, November 1996, 0 8203 1831 0
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... unlikely, and apparently unconscious, present-day continuator is Conor Cruise O’Brien. In The Long Affair O’Brien presents himself as an original and incorruptible outsider prepared not only to challenge the vested interests of Jeffersonian hagiography, but to exclude Jefferson from the American civil religion. O’Brien’s Jefferson presides as high ...

Miserable Creatures

C.H. Sisson, 2 August 1984

The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Vol. IV: 1909-1913 
edited by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate.
Oxford, 337 pp., £21, March 1984, 0 19 812621 2
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The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper. Vol. IV: 1792-1799 
edited by James King and Charles Ryskamp.
Oxford, 498 pp., £48, March 1984, 0 19 812681 6
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The Land and Literature of England: A Historical Account 
by Robert M. Adams.
Norton, 555 pp., £21, March 1984, 0 393 01704 4
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The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy. Vol. II 
edited by Samuel Hynes.
Oxford, 543 pp., £35, June 1984, 0 19 812783 9
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... vital messages from the Athenaeum: ‘I did not bring my ordinary walking great coat – only that long water-proof: so I have to walk about in it, having nothing else.’ Then, on 27 November 1912, to Charles Gifford: ‘You will be grieved and shocked to hear Emma died this morning shortly after nine o’clock.’ There follow, besides the usual replies to ...

Charm with Menaces

Colin Burrow: ‘The Mirror and the Light’, 19 March 2020

The Mirror and the Light 
by Hilary Mantel.
Fourth Estate, 883 pp., £25, March 2020, 978 0 00 748099 9
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... damn thing’ of the artless chronicle principally by making The Mirror and the Light continue the long, diffuse revenge plot that unifies the first two volumes of the trilogy. Her Thomas Cromwell is a loyal servant of Cardinal Wolsey. In Bring Up the Bodies he revenged himself on those who engineered his master’s fall by having them executed along with Anne ...

So Much Smoke

Tom Shippey: King Arthur, 20 December 2018

King Arthur: the Making of the Legend 
by Nicholas Higham.
Yale, 380 pp., £25, October 2018, 978 0 300 21092 7
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... suggests that they may all have been called after someone who had made a name for himself not too long before. But who was he? And was he Roman, or British, or something in between?The major candidate is Lucius Artorius Castus. His career is recorded on two inscriptions found in Croatia, which Higham carefully edits, translates and comments on. He seems to ...

It was worse in 1931

Colin Kidd: Clement Attlee, 17 November 2016

Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee 
by John Bew.
Riverrun, 668 pp., £30, September 2016, 978 1 78087 989 5
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... the Great War. In addition, as an unlikely arrival at the top of the Labour Party, Attlee, for long a permanently contingent leader among noisily ambitious and more glamorous colleagues, knew the value of inscrutable silence. Bew deftly captures the many sides of a supposedly limited personality. In our current crisis, which is much worse than Suez in ...

Blame it on Darwin

Jonathan Rée, 5 October 2017

Charles Darwin, Victorian Mythmaker 
by A.N. Wilson.
John Murray, 438 pp., £25, September 2017, 978 1 4447 9488 5
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... observing the different varieties of domesticated pigeon in the south of England, from the long-necked carrier to the cuddly short-faced tumbler, might assign them to as many as twenty separate species; but in fact all of them could be traced back to the common rock-pigeon, modified by selective breeding over the previous century. ‘The key,’ Darwin ...

Masses and Classes

Ferdinand Mount: Gladstone, 17 February 2005

The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics 
by David Bebbington.
Oxford, 331 pp., £55, March 2004, 0 19 926765 0
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... Gladstone would have recognised these intimations: he felt them at recurring moments both in his long political career and in his personal religious and philosophical life. Why then are we not more eager to attend to Gladstone’s revisions and recantations as the forerunners of our own? Why is David Bebbington’s The Mind of Gladstone such a lonely ...

It’s the plunge that counts

Heathcote Williams: Waterlog by Roger Deakin, 19 August 1999

Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain 
by Roger Deakin.
Chatto, 320 pp., £15.99, May 1999, 0 7011 6652 5
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... Somehow or other it transmits its own self-regenerating power to the swimmer. I can dive in with a long face and what feels like a terminal case of depression and come out a whistling idiot.’ With his trusty snorkel, he stakes out the whole of watery England for his Grail quest. Like D.H. Lawrence, Deakin is happy, in the end, to remain mystified by the ...

Adrenaline Junkie

Jonathan Parry: John Tyndall’s Ascent, 21 March 2019

The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer and Public Intellectual 
by Roland Jackson.
Oxford, 556 pp., £25, March 2018, 978 0 19 878895 9
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... Roland Jackson doesn’t make much of the incident in his recent biography, which is immensely long and devotedly successful at unearthing the facts of Tyndall’s life from the hundred boxes of his private papers, but tone-deaf when it comes to interpreting them, contextualising them or putting them to best effect. Jackson describes the Mer de Glace trip ...

Just one more species doing its best

Richard Rorty, 25 July 1991

The Later Works 1925-1953. Vol. XVII: Miscellaneous Writings, 1885-1953 
by John Dewey, edited by Jo Ann Boydston.
Southern Illinois, 786 pp., $50, August 1990, 0 8093 1661 7
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Dewey 
by J.E. Tiles.
Routledge, 256 pp., £35, December 1988, 0 415 00908 1
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John Dewey and American Democracy 
by Robert Westbrook.
Cornell, 608 pp., $32.95, May 1991, 0 8014 2560 3
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Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford 
by Casey Blake.
North Carolina, 370 pp., $38.45, November 1990, 0 8078 1935 2
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... and useful. Dewey was the most prominent intellectual in the United States for much of his long life (1859-1952). Though he earned his bread as a philosophy professor, he wrote on everything. His range is suggested by the table of contents of the last of the 37 volumes of the magnificent new edition of his published works – an edition which it has ...

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