Was Weber wrong?

Malise Ruthven, 18 August 1994

The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World 
by Gilles Kepel.
Polity, 200 pp., £39.50, December 1993, 0 7456 0999 6
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Pious Passion: The Emergence of Modern Fundamentalism in the United States and Iran 
by Martin Riesebrodt.
California, 272 pp., £30, September 1993, 0 520 07463 7
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... in Egypt and Algeria, anti-abortion activists in America and the Jewish groups who inhabit the self-imposed ghettos of Meir Shearim in Jerusalem or try to sabotage the Palestinian peace process. Kepel concludes that all such movements have arisen ‘in a world that has lost the assurance born of scientific and technical progress since the Fifties. Just as ...

God, what a victory!

Jeremy Harding, 10 February 1994

Martyr’s Day: Chronicle of Small War 
by Michael Kelly.
Macmillan, 354 pp., £16.99, October 1993, 0 333 60496 2
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Battling for News: The Rise of the Woman Reporter 
by Anne Sebba.
Hodder, 301 pp., £19.99, January 1994, 0 340 55599 8
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Women’s Letters in Wartime 
edited by Eva Figes.
Pandora, 304 pp., £20, October 1993, 0 04 440755 6
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The War at Sixteen: Autobiography, Vol. II 
by Julien Green, translated by Euan Cameron.
Marion Boyars, 207 pp., £19.95, November 1993, 0 7145 2969 9
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... the time Kelly arrives to watch them undergo ‘the first ritual of prison life, the stripping of self’: Each man emptied his pockets. Their belongings made a pile in the mud, a sad litter of cheap plastic combs, letters from home, empty wallets, matches and the occasional cigarette, a few coins. In the background, two Iraqis lay dead, one covered with a ...

Wasp in a Bottle

John Sturrock, 10 February 1994

Charles Sanders Peirce 
by Joseph Brent.
Indiana, 388 pp., £28.50, January 1993, 0 253 31267 1
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The Esssential Peirce: Vol. I 
edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Koesel.
Indiana, 399 pp., £17.99, November 1992, 0 253 20721 5
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... production. As the study of validity in argument or inference, logic must be autonomous, self-contained. It was a new demand in Peirce’s time and that he should have insisted on it entitles him to the high place he has been accorded by W.V. Quine as one of the two great sources, with Frege, of modern logic. Four years after getting a ...

Modernisms

Frank Kermode, 22 May 1986

Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement 
by C.K. Stead.
Macmillan, 393 pp., £27.50, March 1986, 0 333 37457 6
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The Myth of Modernism and 20th-century Literature 
by Bernard Bergonzi.
Harvester, 216 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 7108 1002 4
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The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts 
by Roger Shattuck.
Faber, 362 pp., £15, March 1986, 0 571 12071 7
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... Pancirolli wrote a very popular book on it in the 16th century, and it was often remarked by self-deprecating moderns that they were like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. The antiquity of this figure is the subject of a very learned and also very amusing book by Robert Merton; the received wisdom is that it goes at least as far back as the ...

Ideologues

Peter Pulzer, 20 February 1986

The Redefinition of Conservatism: Politics and Doctrine 
by Charles Covell.
Macmillan, 267 pp., £27.50, January 1986, 0 333 38463 6
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Thinkers of the New Left 
by Roger Scruton.
Longman, 227 pp., £9.95, January 1986, 0 582 90273 8
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The Idea of Liberalism: Studies for a New Map of Politics 
by George Watson.
Macmillan, 172 pp., £22.50, November 1985, 0 333 38754 6
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Socialism and Freedom 
by Bryan Gould.
Macmillan, 109 pp., £25, November 1985, 0 333 40580 3
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... They are in the mainstream of public life. They can be safely quoted today as the source of self-evident truths. Because of these common-sense qualities, their ideas virtually monopolised British political thinking in the modern period. That did not mean that Britain was intellectually isolationist. German scholarship was much admired and emulated in ...

The Slap

Michael Wilding, 17 April 1986

The Image, and Other Stories 
by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Cape, 310 pp., £9.95, February 1986, 0 224 02357 8
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... and end, Singer’s conservatism is not a blind refusal. He is not in this a reactionary. The self-referential nature of Modernism, art aware of and concerned with its own processes, is not absent from his work. There are frequent stories about stories, stories about writers. The Warsaw Yiddish Writers’ club is a frequent setting or departure point in ...

Risks

Tom Paulin, 1 August 1985

On the Contrary 
by Miroslav Holub, translated by Ewald Osers.
Bloodaxe, 126 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 0 906427 75 4
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The Lamentation of the Dead 
by Peter Levi.
Anvil, 40 pp., £2.95, October 1984, 0 85646 140 7
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Collected Poems 
by Peter Levi.
Anvil, 255 pp., £12, November 1984, 0 85646 134 2
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Elegies 
by Douglas Dunn.
Faber, 64 pp., £7.50, March 1985, 0 571 13570 6
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Poems: 1963-1983 
by Michael Longley.
Salamander, 206 pp., £9.95, March 1985, 0 904011 77 1
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Making for the Open: The Chatto Book of Post-Feminist Poetry 
edited by Carol Rumens.
Chatto, 151 pp., £4.95, March 1985, 0 7011 2848 8
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Direct Dialling 
by Carol Rumens.
Chatto, 48 pp., £3.95, March 1985, 0 7011 2911 5
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The Man Named East 
by Peter Redgrove.
Routledge, 137 pp., £4.95, March 1985, 0 7102 0014 5
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... inhuman, so that the poet can acknowledge European history and suffering without sentimentality or self-regard. Thus in ‘Distant Howling’ Holub describes how in 1885 Pasteur saved his first patient, the nine-year-old Joseph Maister, with his new vaccine: Pasteur died of ictus ten years later. The janitor Meister fifty-five years later committed suicide ...

Sisterhoods

Brian Harrison, 6 December 1984

Significant Sisters: The Grassroots of Active Feminism 1839-1939 
by Margaret Forster.
Secker, 353 pp., £12.50, September 1984, 0 436 16113 3
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Stepping Stones to Women’s Liberty: Feminist Ideas in the Women’s Movement 1900-1918 
by Les Garner.
Gower, 142 pp., £15, July 1984, 0 435 32357 1
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Women First: The Female Tradition in English Physical Education 1880-1980 
by Sheila Fletcher.
Athlone, 194 pp., £18, July 1984, 0 485 11248 5
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A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women 1890-1940 
by Elizabeth Roberts.
Blackwell, 246 pp., £14.95, September 1984, 0 631 13572 3
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... did not really make an impact till after 1940. Sceptical anti-suffragist politicians (however self-interested) understood this situation when they doubted suffragist claims about what the vote would do for women. All four books are properly documented, and only Garner is sometimes inaccurate on details: The Vote was not a ‘WSPU paper’, but the organ ...

Red

Stephen Bann, 5 July 1984

Time in a Red Coat 
by George Mackay Brown.
Chatto, 249 pp., £8.95, May 1984, 0 7011 2804 6
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Harland’s Half-Acre 
by David Malouf.
Chatto, 230 pp., £8.95, May 1984, 0 7011 2737 6
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The Border 
by Elaine Feinstein.
Hutchinson, 113 pp., £6.95, June 1984, 0 09 156320 8
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... war. But he has taken enormous pains to ensure that his claims to generality are underpinned by a self-questioning poetic strategy, which both lays bare the mechanisms of imaginative fiction and then contrives to work with them nonetheless. The result is a book which is far from easy to read. Occasionally Mackay Brown’s refusal to pamper us by remaining ...

Henry James’s Christmas

P.N. Furbank, 19 July 1984

Henry James Letters. Vol. IV: 1895-1915 
edited by Leon Edel.
Harvard, 835 pp., £24, April 1984, 9780674387836
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... himself as definitively cured, he explained his cure in terms of the homeliest old-fashioned self-help. The ‘real clue to the labyrinth’ and basis of his recovery, he told Putnam, was eating enough, feeding as little fatteningly as possible, and having plenty of distractions. This brings us to a major issue in regard to Leon Edel’s great ...

Desperate Responses

Richard Hyman, 5 April 1984

Industry, Unions and Government: Twenty-One Years of NEDC 
by Keith Middlemas.
Macmillan, 240 pp., £17.50, January 1984, 0 333 35121 5
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Strikes in Post-War Britain: A Study of Stoppages of Work Due to Industrial Disputes, 1946-73 
by J.W. Durcan, W.E.J. McCarthy and G.P. Redman.
Allen and Unwin, 448 pp., £20, November 1983, 0 04 331093 1
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Picketing: Industrial Disputes, Tactics and the Law 
by Peggy Kahn, Norman Lewis, Rowland Livock and Paul Wiles.
Routledge, 223 pp., £5.95, April 1983, 0 7100 9534 1
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... for the peaceful resolution of disputes and to the observance of agreements reached. It seemed self-evident – certainly it constituted a fundamental principle of the old Ministry of Labour for the fifty years of its existence – that a system of industrial relations predicated on the relative autonomy of employer and worker-representatives was more ...

Mizzled

Roy Harris, 21 February 1985

Longman Dictionary of the English Language 
by Randolph Quirk.
Longman, 1875 pp., £14.95, October 1984, 0 582 55511 6
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The Private Lives of English Words 
by Louis Heller, Alexander Humez and Malcah Dror.
Routledge, 333 pp., £12.95, May 1984, 0 7102 0006 4
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The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words 
by Bill Bryson.
Viking, 173 pp., £7.95, April 1984, 0 7139 1653 2
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The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots 
by Joseph Shipley.
Johns Hopkins, 637 pp., $39.95, May 1984, 0 8018 3004 4
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A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English 
by Eric Partidge and Paul Beale.
Routledge, 1400 pp., £45, May 1984, 0 7100 9820 0
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... in English usage that Mr Bryson always was entirely clear about must make him one of the most self-confident users of English of all time. The other is that it is far from obvious when one has looked at the contents of his dictionary that Mr Bryson has very good reason to believe himself entirely clear about many matters of English usage even now. But ...

Rich and Poor in the Ancient World

Fergus Millar, 17 June 1982

... as a ‘Jones Report on the Later Roman Empire’. De Ste Croix retains, in much more explicit and self-conscious form, the same social and political commitment: ‘I am a historian who tries also to be a sociologist, and my interest in our own society is a primary one.’ This interest informs the book throughout, imparting gravity and moral energy when the ...

Imbroglio

Douglas Johnson, 4 February 1982

Un Crime sous Giscard 
by Jesus Ynfante.
Maspéro, 256 pp., £4.72, October 1981, 2 7071 1259 3
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Enquête sur les Affaires du Septennat 
by Jacques Derogy and Jean-Marie Pontaut.
Laffont, 336 pp., £7, November 1981
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... a former policeman who was heavily involved in the conspiracy to kill, and Pierre de Varga, a self-proclaimed aristocrat of Hungarian origins who was allegedly the instigator of the whole affair, were also given ten years; Serge Tessèdre, who was accused of recruiting the gunman, received five years, and as he had already spent that time in prison, was ...

Can Maynard Keynes do it?

Peter Clarke, 3 June 1982

The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Vol. XIX. Activities 1924-9: The Return to Gold and Industrial Policy 
edited by Sir Austin Robinson and Donald Moggridge.
Macmillan, 468 pp., £40, October 1981, 0 333 10727 6
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The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Vol. XX. Activities 1929-31: Rethinking Employment and Unemployment Policies 
edited by Sir Austin Robinson and Donald Moggridge.
Macmillan, 675 pp., £20, December 1981, 0 333 10721 7
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The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Vol. XXI. Activities 1931-9: 
edited by Sir Austin Robinson and Donald Moggridge.
Macmillan, 645 pp., £20, March 1982, 0 333 10728 4
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... urgent need, on the contrary, was for the state to exercise its initiative to unwind the spiral of self-reinforcing market trends. Does Keynes’s insight hold good in the 1980s? It was developed to explain the flaw at the heart of a general attempt to pile up excessive savings. It pointed to the necessary role for the state in correcting the anomalies of the ...