Making strange

John Sutherland, 19 March 1981

Other people 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 223 pp., £5.95, March 1981, 0 224 01766 7
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The Magic Glass 
by Anne Smith.
Joseph, 174 pp., £6.50, March 1981, 9780718119867
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The Book of Ebenezer Le Page 
by Gerald Edwards.
Hamish Hamilton, 400 pp., £7.50, March 1981, 0 241 10477 7
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Sharpe’s Eagle 
by Bernard Cornwell.
Collins, 266 pp., £6.50, February 1981, 0 00 221997 2
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XPD 
by Len Deighton.
Hutchinson, 397 pp., £6.95, March 1981, 0 09 144570 1
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... would often seem to elude the Scot. The Magic Glass, then, is not concerned with putting the whole self together. Rather it slices off a childhood, and leaves it disconnected, a preparation for nothing. There remains, however, an uneasiness, as if the author felt obliged to offer something more in the way of a portrait of the editor as a young woman. The ...

Taylorism

Norman Stone, 22 January 1981

Politicians, Socialism and Historians 
by A.J.P. Taylor.
Hamish Hamilton, 259 pp., £12.50, October 1980, 0 241 10486 6
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A.J.P. Taylor: A Complete Annotated Bibliography 
by Chris Wrigley.
Harvester, 607 pp., £35, August 1980, 0 85527 981 8
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... Establishment between the wars, and especially the gap between its rhetoric and its ambitions. ‘Self-determination of peoples’ had been a con-trick as far as the defeated peoples of 1918 had been concerned; so was the League of Nations. ‘Reparations’, the Gold Standard, German Democracy, the Little Entente were all of them bogus – like the Maginot ...

Extraordinary People

Anthony Powell, 4 June 1981

The Lyttelton – Hart-Davis Letters 
edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Murray, 185 pp., £12.50, March 1981, 0 7195 3770 3
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... a letter-writer, is never, as Hart-Davis’s is, rounded off into what amounts to a lightly-drawn self-portrait. The portrait of Hart-Davis gives design to the collection, and almost makes the Letters into a story (though a very different one from the work in question) in the manner of such novels in letters as Les Liaisons Dangereuses. One appreciates that ...

My Americas

Donald Davie, 3 September 1981

... the admission) projections or extensions, for the most part bitterly ironic, of the poet’s own self as he understands it. De Araujo’s versions from Carlos Drummond are precisely on a par with Felstiner’s from Neruda. Her name may mislead: she is entirely North American by birth and nurture, as her own idiom would leave us in no doubt. Looky now, love ...
... is a troubled, Dickensian lost child in a man’s body; the angular Sotgui Kouyate as the saintly self-denying Bhishma has the sad grace of an elongated sculpture from Nigeria or New Guinea, and something of the tragedy of a calcinated Giacometti figure. Just as we have recently learned to see ‘Modernist Primitivism’ in painting and sculpture as a complex ...

Grande Dame

D.A.N. Jones, 18 July 1985

With Open Eyes: Conversations with Matthieu Galey 
by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Beacon, 271 pp., £19.95, October 1984, 0 8070 6354 1
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The Dark Brain of Piranesi, and Other Essays 
by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated with the author Richard Howard.
Aidan Ellis, 232 pp., £9.50, June 1985, 0 85628 140 9
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Alexis 
by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated with the author Walter Kaiser.
Aidan Ellis, 105 pp., £8.95, January 1984, 0 85628 138 7
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Coup de Grâce 
by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated with the author Grace Frick .
Black Swan, 112 pp., £2.50, October 1984, 9780552991216
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... a problem did not exist. (She has an interesting parenthesis here concerning the Roman Church’s self-confidence about sex-laws, contrasting the present Pope’s confidence about contraception with his reluctance to denounce Belfast terrorists.) But Hadrian, in another time from Zeno’s, merely ‘prefers to seek his lovers outside the rather hermetic world ...

Finding a role

Peter Pulzer, 5 September 1985

The Decline of Power: 1915-1964 
by Robert Blake.
Granada, 462 pp., £18, June 1985, 0 246 10753 7
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... emergence of Dominion status is one obvious example of that. The commitment, however vague, to self-rule for India, and the dependence on the good will of the Indian princes, are another. The great miscalculation of German policy before 1914 was the assumption that the world was waiting to be liberated from British oppression. Instead, enough of the world ...

Madness and Method

Mark Philp, 3 April 1986

The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry Vol. I: People and Ideas, Vol. II: Institutions and Society 
edited by W.F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd.
Tavistock, 316 pp., £19.95, November 1985, 0 422 79430 9
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Madness, Morality and Medicine: A Study of the York Retreat 1796-1914 
by Anne Digby.
Cambridge, 323 pp., £27.50, October 1985, 0 521 26067 1
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... led by Pinel and the Tukes is seen as substituting ‘mind-forged manacles’ of guilt and self-control for the chains of the old order; the incarceration of the insane in asylums, and their subjection to the ever watchful gaze of their keepers, emerge as part of a broader development of administrative machinery for the maintenance of social control ...

In the beginning was A.J. Ayer

Brian Barry, 20 June 1985

Moral Relativity 
by David Wong.
California, 248 pp., £28, July 1984, 0 520 04976 4
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Beyond Subjective Morality: Ethical Reasoning and Political Philosophy 
by James Fishkin.
Yale, 201 pp., £17.50, January 1984, 0 300 03048 7
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... so-and-so.’ Obviously, any system with more than one such exceptionless principle in it courts self-contradiction. But the notion of an exceptionless moral system as employed by philosophers is that the principles should not conflict – and to avoid that they will normally have to come equipped with ‘unless’ clauses. (It is true that Kant thought ...

Untheory

Alexander Nehamas, 22 May 1986

Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction 
by Christopher Norris.
Methuen, 247 pp., £16, November 1985, 0 416 39939 8
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Philosophical Profiles 
by Richard Bernstein.
Polity, 313 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 7456 0226 6
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Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism 
edited by W.J.T. Mitchell.
Chicago, 146 pp., £12.75, November 1985, 0 226 53226 7
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... all texts are figural’ – rhetorical or fictional – ‘through and through, whatever their self-professed logical status.’ Richard Rorty, who identifies philosophy merely as ‘a kind of writing’, also believes, according to Norris, that ‘literary critics had best give up the idea that philosophy (or “theory”) is capable of solving any ...

Contemplating adultery

Lotte Hamburger and Joseph Hamburger, 22 January 1987

... She sought to demonstrate their emotional kinship and general compatibility. Her letters became a self-presentation that included an account of her opinions and a depiction of her physical attractions, passionate nature, and quality as a sexual partner – all to convince Hermann of her desirability. She assured him that she was the sort of woman he ...

The light that failed

Peter Clarke, 18 September 1980

The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy 1815-1848 
by Maxine Berg.
Cambridge, 379 pp., £16, April 1980, 0 521 22782 8
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Masters, Unions and Men 
by Richard Price.
Cambridge, 355 pp., £18.50, June 1980, 0 521 22882 4
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Work, Society and Politics 
by Patrick Joyce.
Harvester, 356 pp., £24, July 1980, 0 85527 680 0
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... Foster in seeking a technological base for the change – he seizes on the introduction of the self-acting mule in the spinning industry – but otherwise he will have none of this. He maintains that, on the contrary, the spinners were not sharply divided from the rest of the labour force, from whom they were recruited and who comprised their own wives and ...

Dark Tom

Christopher Ricks, 1 December 1983

Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley 1933-1980 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Secker, 323 pp., £8.95, October 1983, 0 436 28852 4
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Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley 1896-1933 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Fontana, 274 pp., £2.50, October 1983, 0 00 636644 9
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... than his ability to deceive others, and it looks as if he, or some part of him, did genuinely and self-deceivingly believe that he was mustering, in Nicholas Mosley’s words, ‘a fascist movement dedicated to peace’ and ‘an army that would march to prevent future wars’. He even managed to persuade himself that had it not been for this ...

Gielgud’s Achievements

Alan Bennett, 20 December 1979

An Actor and his Time 
by John Gielgud.
Sidgwick, 253 pp., £8.95
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... and an artless one; few public figures can be less concerned with the presentation of self, less calculating of the effect produced. Hence the famous gaffes. The foot went into the mouth quite early. At a first night of Romeo and Juliet in 1919, Ellen Terry’s last professional appearance, the Terry family was out in force. Gielgud’s ...

Nationalising English

Patrick Parrinder, 28 January 1993

The Great Betrayal: Memoirs of a Life in Education 
by Brian Cox.
Chapmans, 386 pp., £17.99, September 1992, 1 85592 605 9
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... fiction and drama to the living language, and to a conception of literary study as a form of self-development rather than a means to acquire objective knowledge. (Where the journal was comparatively weak, or saw no need to compete with the academic establishment, was in the historical understanding of literature.) As time went on and Golding and his ...