Nicknames

Adam Phillips, 9 March 1995

Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond 
by Nancy Chodorow.
Free Association, 132 pp., £8.95, July 1994, 1 85343 380 2
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... advising us on our best sexual behaviour (usually called maturity, or mental health or a decentred self). It is indeed, dismaying how quickly psychoanalysis has become the science of the sensible passions; as though its aim was to make people more intelligible to themselves rather than to realise how strange they are. When psychoanalysis makes too much ...

Hoping to Hurt

Paul Smith, 9 February 1995

The Cultivation of Hatred 
by Peter Gay.
HarperCollins, 685 pp., £25, April 1994, 0 00 255218 3
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... forms, and by seeking individually and collectively to restrain it by means of a philosophy of self-control and a culture of indirection and discretion, at the high price of acquiring a ‘recognisable preferred neurotic style ... obsessional-compulsive neurosis’ (aggression makes you nervous). It would be hard to conceive a more ambitious historical ...

A Fair State

Bernard Williams, 13 May 1993

Political Liberalism 
by John Rawls.
Columbia, 416 pp., £19.95, June 1993, 0 231 05248 0
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... the parties choose ‘rationally’, as Rawls puts it, which means on the basis of intelligent self-interest. However, behind the veil, they do not know what their particular interests are, so everyone’s self-interest has to be stylised in terms of a set of all-purpose or ‘primary’ goods – notably, liberty, money ...

Problem Parent

Michael Wood, 17 August 1989

Memories of Amnesia 
by Laurence Shainberg.
Collins Harvill, 190 pp., £10.95, April 1989, 0 00 272024 8
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We find ourselves in Moontown 
by Jay Gummerman.
Cape, 174 pp., £11.95, June 1989, 0 224 02662 3
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The Russia House 
by John le Carré.
Hodder, 344 pp., £12.95, June 1989, 0 340 50573 7
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My Secret History 
by Paul Theroux.
Hamish Hamilton, 468 pp., £13.95, June 1989, 0 241 12369 0
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... The brain, sick or healthy, is cast in the role of authoritarian ruler, while the rest of the self (‘I had begun to realise, through a combination of instinct and insight, that I was not my brain’) agitates like a band of sans-culottes or dissident Sixties students. ‘No ... it’s the normal brain that’s really damaged. Having a brain – that’s ...

Surviving the Sixties

Hilary Mantel, 18 May 1989

Shoe: The Odyssey of a Sixties Survivor 
by Jonathan Guinness.
Century Hutchinson, 233 pp., £14.95, March 1989, 0 09 173857 1
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Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman 
by Peter Feibleman.
Chatto, 364 pp., £14.95, February 1989, 0 7011 3441 0
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... inwards at herself, but never outwards at other people. As a result, she appears both stupid and self-centred, and the most disagreeable attribute he gives her is a perverse puritanism: she has contempt for the normal pleasures of food and drink, a contempt for the chattering and sociable members of her own sex. Penelope Betjeman is kind to her, but ‘far ...

Scientific Fraud

Peter Medawar, 17 November 1983

Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science 
by William Broad and Nicholas Wade.
Century, 256 pp., £8.95, July 1983, 0 7126 0243 7
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... empirical truth. Aristotle was a pioneer, perhaps, in what I believe to be the commonest form of self-deception in science: the kind of attachment to a dearly loved hypothesis that predisposes us (yes, all of us) to attach a special weight to observations that square with and thus uphold our pet hypotheses, while finding reasons for disregarding or attaching ...

Rights

John Dunn, 2 October 1980

Natural Rights Theories 
by Richard Tuck.
Cambridge, 192 pp., £10.50, December 1979, 0 521 22512 4
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Natural Law and Natural Rights 
by John Finnis.
Oxford, 425 pp., £15, February 1980, 0 19 876110 4
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A Discourse on Property 
by James Tully.
Cambridge, 208 pp., £10.50, July 1980, 0 521 22830 1
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... and each other as endowed with certain inalienable rights. Not merely is this true: it is self-evidently true (and you cannot readily get truer than that). Nozick himself keeps his cards close to his chest on the matter of what (if anything) does make his initial claim true. But it is a safe inference that his views on the question diverge from those ...

The Literature Man

Charles Nicholl, 25 June 1987

Cuts 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Hutchinson, 106 pp., £6.95, April 1987, 0 09 168280 0
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No, Not Bloomsbury 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Deutsch, 373 pp., £17.95, May 1987, 9780233980133
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The Last Romantics 
by Caroline Seebohm.
Weidenfeld, 322 pp., £10.95, May 1987, 0 297 79056 0
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The Magician’s Girl 
by Doris Grumbach.
Hamish Hamilton, 206 pp., £10.95, May 1987, 0 241 12114 0
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... the rather dinky, miniaturist feel of that term – prefers to style it, with characteristic self-deprecation, ‘a very short novel’. Either way, the text takes up less than a hundred pages, and does little to dispel an impression of slightness – in volume terms, at least – in his fictional oeuvre. He has, of course, written a great many other ...

Not You

Mary Beard, 23 January 1997

Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship 
edited by J.P. Hallett and T. van Nortwick.
Routledge, 196 pp., £42.50, November 1996, 0 415 14284 9
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... to keep yourself safe ... In short, you can become a little Odysseus, lying, disguising your true self.’) And some of the more interesting contributions (by Charles Martindale, for example, and Vanda Zajko) take the time to reflect on the perils of writing about oneself, and on how far the written self must inevitably be ...

The least you can do is read it

Ian Hamilton, 2 October 1997

Cyril Connolly: A Life 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 653 pp., £25, May 1997, 0 224 03710 2
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... try too hard. The stance of ‘promise-victimised’ was picked up early on. At first, it was a self-defensive social ploy but over the years it was coaxed into a thoroughgoing style: a life-style and a work-style. Observing the dinner-table impact of lordly non-producers like Logan Pearsall Smith and Desmond MacCarthy, Connolly in his mid-twenties realised ...

Like Washbasins

Ange Mlinko: Yiyun Li, 6 May 2021

Must I Go 
by Yiyun Li.
Hamish Hamilton, 368 pp., £16.99, July 2020, 978 0 241 28428 5
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... life among husbands and children and gardens,’ Lilia, who’s 81, reflects. ‘I’ve lived a self-contained life. I’m what you call a happy woman.’ Happy, except for the fact that she’s been ‘arguing’ for 37 years with the ghost of her daughter, Lucy, who committed suicide at 27 and left her child, Katherine, to be raised by Lilia. Lilia has ...

Angelic Porcupine

Jonathan Parry: Adams’s Education, 3 June 2021

The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams 
by David S. Brown.
Scribner, 464 pp., £21.20, November 2020, 978 1 9821 2823 4
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... is incisive, apparently insightful and certainly idiosyncratic. His faux-reticent third-person self-criticism established him as a more intriguing figure in readers’ minds than any of the public figures he skewered with practised astringency. Reading it now, the Education seems more mannered and ponderous than Galsworthy and Mann’s sagas, but its ...

Stinker

Jenny Diski, 28 April 1994

Roald Dahl: A Biography 
by Jeremy Treglown.
Faber, 307 pp., £17.50, March 1994, 0 571 16573 7
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... know that beneath all exteriors lie subterranean streams and caverns where the private, unknowable self contradicts the stated desires and achievements of the visible life. A biography, these days, must be a tale of the unexpected. Wouldn’t modern readers feel cheated to find that Antonia White and A.A. Milne were wise and devoted parents, or that Larkin ...

Badmouthing City

William Fitzgerald: Catullus, 23 February 2006

The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition 
translated by Peter Green.
California, 339 pp., £15.95, September 2005, 0 520 24264 5
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... must have suspected that there was more to this than meets the eye. Was Catullus parodying his self-importance and the orotund symmetries of his prose? Would he be immortalised as the sort of person who would swallow something this bald? Or were these just paranoid imaginings? Modern readers are in much the same situation, not sure whether we are in on the ...

Best Known for His Guzzleosity

Helen Hackett: Shakespeare’s Authors, 11 March 2010

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? 
by James Shapiro.
Faber, 367 pp., £20, April 2010, 978 0 571 23576 6
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... Shapiro asserts that in Shakespeare’s time literature was ‘rarely if ever a vehicle for self-revelation’, and that ‘autobiography as a genre and as an impulse was extremely unusual.’ It is certainly true that the relation between life and art was then understood very differently from the ways Romantic poets, Victorian novelists or modern ...