Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction 
by Philip Fisher.
Harvard, 290 pp., £18.50, May 1999, 0 674 83859 9
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... as a passage across temporal boundaries. In America, the old become displaced persons, while the young are quickly naturalised. Children carve out trades, professions, social roles and ways of changing nature that are unintelligible to their elders. They ‘invent their own wisdom about sexual mores, family life, food and clothing, where and how to ...

No Crying in This House

Jackson Lears: The Kennedy Myth, 7 November 2013

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy 
by David Nasaw.
Allen Lane, 896 pp., £12.35, September 2013, 978 0 14 312407 8
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Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch 
by Barbara Perry.
Norton, 404 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 393 06895 5
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... Perry says, Joe became the fixer and ‘enabler of irresponsibility’ for his sons: he reassured young Teddy that ‘the insurance man will fix everything up’ when the boy crashed a rental car on a European vacation, and urged him to share ‘the beautiful women of Cape Cod’ with his recently married brother Jack. Indeed, Perry writes, Joe Sr ‘modelled ...

Let him be Caesar!

Michael Dobson: The Astor Place Riot, 2 August 2007

The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama and Death in 19th-Century America 
by Nigel Cliff.
Random House, 312 pp., $26.95, April 2007, 978 0 345 48694 3
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... of Forrest’s birth in 1806 Shakespeare had already been widely co-opted to the interests of the young republic. In fact, even before the rebellion of the colonies, some had linked the imaginative scope of Shakespearean drama to the liberating possibilities offered by the New World. An ode by William Havard, recited at Drury Lane in 1757, identifies ...

‘I’m a petitioner – open fire!’

Chaohua Wang: Beijing locks up its lawyers, 5 November 2015

... family who had been travelling with him: his hunchbacked mother, in her eighties, and his three young children, all under seven. Belatedly realising the explosive effect the images would have, local police hurriedly traced the other passengers (‘anti-terrorist’ regulations require travellers to produce identification before buying a train ticket), and ...

Medawartime

June Goodfield, 6 November 1986

Memoir of a Thinking Radish: An Autobiography 
by Peter Medawar.
Oxford, 209 pp., £12.50, April 1986, 0 19 217737 0
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... Medawar and Billingham published their discovery in Nature – a time-lag that today’s thrusting young scientific Turks would consider so cautious as to verge on professional suicide. However, the existence of immunological tolerance gave scientists and doctors both a practical and – Medawar insists – a moral boost, for people were beginning to believe ...

Fiery Participles

D.A.N. Jones, 6 September 1984

Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic 
by David Bromwich.
Oxford, 450 pp., £19.50, March 1984, 0 19 503343 4
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William Godwin: Philosopher, Novelist, Revolutionary 
by Peter Marshall.
Yale, 496 pp., £14.95, June 1984, 0 521 24386 6
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Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy 
edited by Marilyn Butler.
Cambridge, 280 pp., £25, June 1984, 0 521 24386 6
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... Marshall’s account) were left-wingers, supporters of John Wilkes and Horne Tooke: but the young Godwin was a Tory. Most of the others saw the absurdity of believing in a loving God who tortured his less competent adherents after death, endlessly, though some thought the fable useful for keeping the lower classes in order: but the ...

Shakespeares

David Norbrook, 18 July 1985

Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism 
edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield.
Manchester, 244 pp., £19.50, April 1985, 0 7190 1752 1
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Alternative Shakespeares 
edited by John Drakakis.
Methuen, 252 pp., £10.50, July 1985, 0 416 36850 6
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Shakespeare and Others 
by S. Schoenbaum.
Scolar, 285 pp., £25, May 1985, 0 85967 691 9
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Illustrations of the English Stage 1580-1642 
by R.A. Foakes.
Scolar, 180 pp., £35, February 1985, 0 85967 684 6
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Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ 
by E.A.J. Honigmann.
Manchester, 172 pp., £17.50, April 1985, 0 7190 1743 2
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... was harnessed to official ideologies under Elizabeth and James I. Terence Hawkes, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (AS), and Paul Brown (PS), link The Tempest with the ideology of colonisation, arguing that the play’s formal involutions reflect, not transcendent truths about illusion and reality, but the ideological strains of legitimising ...

Simplicity

Marilyn Butler: What Jane Austen Read, 5 March 1998

Jane Austen: A Life 
by David Nokes.
Fourth Estate, 578 pp., £20, September 1997, 1 85702 419 2
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Jane Austen: A Life 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 341 pp., £20, October 1997, 0 670 86528 1
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... a world of imagination in which she controlled everything that happened. She went on to create young women somewhat like herself, but whose perceptions and judgments were shown to matter; who were able to influence their own fates significantly, and who could even give their parents good advice. Her delight in this work is obvious. It’s pity that this ...

The Candidates

Chris Lehmann: Scott, Rick, Ted, Marco and Jeb, 18 June 2015

... job at McDonald’s. Instead of perfecting his entrepreneurial pluck the fire-breathing young conservative (at Marquette he had displayed a photo of himself with Ronald Reagan in his dorm room) devoted himself entirely to Republican electoral politics. Here, too, he started out as a failure, running a doomed state legislative campaign in a mainly ...

Musical Chairs with Ribbentrop

Bee Wilson: Nancy Astor, 20 December 2012

Nancy: The Story of Lady Astor 
by Adrian Fort.
Cape, 378 pp., £25, October 2012, 978 0 224 09016 2
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... opposing elements – pacifists and fire-eaters, reformers and die-hards, rich and poor, old and young. When they meet each other they generally make friends, and when they make friends they can find some of the solutions to their problems.’ In Nancy’s view, there could be no harm in inviting Ribbentrop for musical chairs, because there was no chance ...

Diary

Patricia Lockwood: When I Met the Pope, 30 November 2023

... called things like Pleasure Hammock.I twist around and see Hope making friends with a brisk-moving young Portuguese priest. He is taking a picture of her? She wore her black jumpsuit that morning, so she fits the dress code for Ladies from the ankles up, but she alone in the Sistine Chapel is wearing Birkenstocks. ‘That’s what she should be ...

Travels with My Mom

Terry Castle: In Santa Fe, 16 August 2007

... been his into her creative lair – nine feet square of dense, paint-flecked, Crazy Glue squalor. Francis Bacon’s famously naff South Ken studio (now re-created in a Dublin museum) is a neatnik’s in comparison. Tracey Emin’s Bed? Pristine and fresh-smelling. The mess is still intact; my mother stopped using the room ages ago but never cleared it ...

Charmed Life

John Bayley, 15 September 1983

The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pasternak 
by Richard Freeborn.
Cambridge, 256 pp., £27.50, January 1983, 0 521 24442 0
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Boris Pasternak: His Life and Art 
by Guy de Mallac.
Souvenir, 450 pp., £14.95, February 1983, 0 285 62558 6
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Pasternak: A Biography 
by Ronald Hingley.
Weidenfeld, 294 pp., £12.95, August 1983, 9780297782070
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Selected Poems 
by Boris Pasternak, translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France.
Allen Lane, 160 pp., £7.50, February 1983, 0 7139 1497 1
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Poets of Modern Russia 
by Peter France.
Cambridge, 240 pp., £20, February 1983, 0 521 23490 5
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Russian Literature since the Revolution 
by Edward Brown.
Harvard, 413 pp., £20, December 1982, 0 674 78203 8
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... asks Hingley, querying de Mallac’s rather coy observation that his hero, like the young Tolstoy, ‘was not above calling on ladies of easy virtue,’ and that this ‘will be documented by some later, less bashful biographer’. But can it be? asks Hingley. There is no evidence one way or another. De Mallac’s suggestion is illustrative of ...

Why children’s books?

Katherine Rundell, 6 February 2025

... Jansson published the first book in 1945, introducing readers to the collected family comprised of young Moomintroll and his parents, the Snorkmaiden, Little My, Sniff and Snufkin. The Moomins achieve something it would be difficult to find in adult literature: they are heroes, and they are deeply, profoundly strange. Their strangeness is accepted without ...

Staying in power

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 7 January 1988

Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era 
by Peter Jenkins.
Cape, 411 pp., £12.95, November 1988, 0 224 02516 3
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De-Industrialisation and Foreign Trade 
by R.E. Rowthorn and J.R. Wells.
Cambridge, 422 pp., £40, November 1988, 0 521 26360 3
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... it got just 28 per cent. But even in 1987, with party political videos to remind the nation that Young Upwardly-Mobile Kinnocks – ‘Yuk-kies’, Jenkins can’t resist suggesting – had displaced the wild-eyed patricians, it got only 32. Neil Kinnock had said that to ‘lose badly’ was to come in with less than 250 seats. The Party won just 229. The ...