Wittgenstein and the Simple Object

Norman Malcolm, 21 February 1980

Notebooks 1914-16 
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, edited by G.H. von Wright and G.E.M. Anscombe, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe.
Blackwell, 140 pp., £8.95, October 1980, 0 631 10291 4Show More
Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann 
edited by Brian McGuinness, translated by Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness.
Blackwell, 266 pp., £9.95, August 1980, 0 631 19470 3Show More
The Central Texts of Wittgenstein 
by Gerd Brand, translated by Robert Innis.
Blackwell, 182 pp., £10, October 1980, 0 631 10921 8Show More
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“... and the Vienna Circle, Brian McGuinness quotes from a letter that Wittgenstein wrote to John Maynard Keynes in 1924: ‘You ask in your letter whether you could do anything to make it possible for me to return to scientific work. The answer is, No: there’s nothing that can be done in that line, because I myself no longer have any strong inner ...”

Party Man

David Marquand, 1 July 1982

Tony Crosland 
by Susan Crosland.
Cape, 448 pp., £10.95, June 1982, 9780224017879Show More
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“... I had become an admirer. Gaitskell was dead, and the revisionists needed a champion. George Brown was too unreliable, and Roy Jenkins too remote. Crosland seemed to be the man. After all, he was the high priest of revisionism. He had charted its course in happier days. Who better to lead it through the storms that followed Gaitskell’s death? For most ...”

Errata

Christopher Ricks, 2 December 1982

T.S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage 
edited by Michael Grant.
Routledge, 408 pp., £25, July 1982, 0 7100 9226 1Show More
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“... a footnote; Latin ones are not. Nine lines from ‘another great poet’ (quoted by someone called Brown and Browne) stand without attribution or reference. Cross-reference within Eliot’s work, which is one way in which an editor could be truly helpful (especially as to the uncollected or stray prose), is disdained: so that Allen Tate’s remark that ...”

Steely Women in a World of Wobbly Men

David Runciman: The Myth of the Strong Leader, 20 June 2019

“... to be as formidable as Thatcher had been, a steely woman in a world of wobbly men. Even Gordon Brown, with his ceaseless personal ambition, believed that politicians only get a few chances to make a lasting difference and he longed to take the opportunities on offer as effectively as she had. The fact that they all failed in these lofty goals shows how ...”

On Thatcher

“... long, new right ideology has been translated into policy: but no one calls it Thatcherism.Gordon Brown, 2 February 1989I realise​ it’s too much to expect a sense of our common lot from this government (‘you common lot’ more often the note), but since Mrs Thatcher has schooled half the nation to put its foot in the face of the other half it’s not so ...”

Pound & Co.

August Kleinzahler: Davenport and Kenner, 26 September 2019

Questioning Minds: Vols I-II: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner 
edited by Edward Burns.
Counterpoint, 1817 pp., $95, October 2018, 978 1 61902 181 5Show More
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“... of the English Department. Davenport was keen on the idea but the then governor of California, Pat Brown, Jerry’s father, cut the university’s funding, putting paid to the possibility of new appointments. Davenport ended up teaching at Haverford College in Pennsylvania for two years and then took a job at the University of Kentucky, ‘the remotest offer ...”

Reports from the Not Too Distant Canon

Frank Kermode, 23 May 2002

The Invasion Handbook 
by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 201 pp., £12.99, April 2002, 0 571 20915 7Show More
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“... upon in a side street: oh it was wretched an unsmiling woman served us bowls of soup – dull brown and greasy – it was intimate and unclean like eating in a hospital with a dying man all we tasted was unhope So the vernacular style can support such flights. But this vernacular poet is also a very literary poet, and often, when he is at his most ...”

Love, Lucia

Lucia Berlin: Letters to August Kleinzahler, 4 August 2005

“... Virgin Mary, who took care of me … Fight with Hope devastating. Only person I had then was Uncle John who was rarely there or sober. The disillusion when he hit the kid and dog was Awful for me. The year or so left was lonely hell. Only reason i’m telling you this is that i know i have dealt with these few years ad nauseum. Problem is everytime I am ...”

Freedom

Lyndall Gordon, 18 September 1980

Olive Schreiner: A Biography 
by Ruth First and Ann Scott.
Deutsch, 383 pp., £9.95, May 1980, 0 233 97152 1Show More
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“... by backward-yearning. Her forward-looking Dreams are located in the landscape of her past: flat brown earth stretching to remote horizons, fierce African heat that throbs slowly against the skin, scorched prickly bush, dust drying the nostrils. It was to this scene that she returned in her deadness in 1890, not to the colonial towns or lush valleys of the ...”

Diary

Zachary Leader: Oscar Talk at the Huntington, 16 April 1998

“... many of them) that Amis received: several hundred from Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and others. These letters help supply the answers to niggling editorial puzzles: for example, the identity of ‘Bluebell’ (Conquest’s dog), or ‘engine driver Hunt’, from a passage in a letter reading ‘Praed, Hood, Gilbert ...”

Helluva Book

Mark Lawson, 3 September 1987

Love is colder than death: The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder 
by Robert Katz and Peter Berling.
Cape, 256 pp., £12.95, June 1987, 0 224 02174 5Show More
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“... classic slob biography – to be compared with Bob Woodward’s Wired, about the grossed-out comic John Belushi, and almost any book about Elvis Presley – and Mr Katz is a first-rank slob biographer. A vital element in such a project is the contrast between subject and biographer: the dull, ascetic and probably jogging yuppy sees in the fluid-spilling and ...”

George’s Hand

Dinah Birch, 7 March 1996

A Son at the Front 
by Edith Wharton.
Northern Illinois, 223 pp., $26, November 1995, 0 87580 203 6Show More
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“... focus of A Son at the Front, much of the novel takes place in well-known Wharton territory. John Campton, the central figure, is a fashionable and successful American painter, living in Paris as tension mounts during the summer of 1914. He is divorced, and awaiting the arrival of his 25-year-old son George, the only child of a ‘stupid and ill-fated ...”

Diary

R.W. Johnson: I was William Hague’s Tutor, 17 July 1997

“... in the world when it was wrecked in the late 16th century. The ship gave its name to Port Saint John, where it is believed to have sunk on its return from Cochin China, with a cargo of spices and china, but my friend has been picking up a quantity of cannonshot as well as pieces of willow pattern-like china. Drilling down into the sandbank at the edge of ...”

Dream on

Alexander Nehamas, 17 July 1997

Dinner with Persephone 
by Patricia Storace.
Granta, 398 pp., £17.99, February 1997, 1 86207 033 4Show More
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“... West Side Story – ‘I like to be in America, everything free in America’ – move on to Elton John, and eventually mouth the English words to the tune the band is playing: ‘This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to New York island.’ ‘In Athens,’ Storace writes, ‘they are dancing at lavish weddings to American protest songs ...”

Hiveward-Winging

Robert Irwin, 3 July 1997

Quarantine 
by Jim Crace.
Viking, 243 pp., £16.99, June 1997, 0 670 85697 5Show More
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“... Froulish’s projected stuck-in-a-lift novel. A lugubriously entertaining secondary character in John Wain’s wonderful picaresque fiction, Hurry on Down (1953), Froulish went on to present his restive audience with the main topics of his austerely untitled novel, including hunger, thirst, boredom and thoughts of suicide, as well as the quest for the ...”
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