Changing Places

Avi Shlaim, 9 January 1992

... basic message was that Israeli occupation must be ended, that Palestinians have a right to self-determination, and that they intend to pursue it unrelentingly until they achieve statehood. The Intifada, he suggested, had already begun to build the institutions and infrastructure of the Palestinian state. On the other hand, he accepted the need for a ...

He knew he was right

John Lloyd, 10 March 1994

Scargill: The Unauthorised Biography 
by Paul Routledge.
HarperCollins, 296 pp., £16.99, September 1993, 0 300 05365 7
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... drinking club. Especially (but not exclusively) on the left, it was also a culture in which self-education, conspicuous erudition, even philosophical speculation were tolerated as they were not in other union cultures. The brightest star in the left firmament was the Fife miner, Lawrence Daly, who rose to the post of NUM General Secretary under the ...

Life, Death and the Whole Damn Thing

Jenny Diski, 17 October 1996

An Anthropologist on Mars 
by Oliver Sacks.
Picador, 336 pp., £6.99, January 1995, 0 330 34347 5
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The Island of the Colour-Blind 
by Oliver Sacks.
Picador, 336 pp., £16.99, October 1996, 0 330 35081 1
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... but functions more as a travelogue of truncated dreams. This would be fine if it was written with self-conscious humour, but Sacks continually tries to redeem the minor key of the story with grand claims for what to the lay reader seems only a mildly interesting situation. Colour-blindness – complete achromatopsia, seeing no colour at all, only degrees of ...

Undesirable

Tom Paulin, 9 May 1996

T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form 
by Anthony Julius.
Cambridge, 308 pp., £30, September 1995, 0 521 47063 3
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... Calling the anonymous notice ‘shameful’, Ricks expresses the hope that ‘such cruelly self-righteous impercipience’ was later recognised by Eliot to be among ‘the things ill done and done to others’ harm which once he took for exercise of virtue’. Like Ricks, I had interpreted that admonitory statement about things done to others’ harm ...

Goodbye to Some of That

Basil Davidson, 22 August 1996

... different from our own state of mind, and duly led the Abwehr, in the matter of subversion, to one self-inflicted disaster after another. The wonderful fictions evolved for enemy consumption by MI6, invented by the Garbo ‘network’ and recently explained in detail by HM Stationery Office, were far beyond the prudent Abwehr, while not a single Abwehr ...

After-Time

Christopher Hitchens, 19 October 1995

Palimpsest: A Memoir 
by Gore Vidal.
Deutsch, 432 pp., £17.99, October 1995, 0 233 98891 2
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... about Vidal’s family and about the Kennedy branch of it. We come to understand how divided a self he is; not just as between love and death but as between literature and politics, America and the world, the ancient and the modern, the sacred and the profane. And we get the goods not just about his sex life, but about his sexual nature.To get the ...

Oh, My Aching Back

Roy Porter, 2 November 1995

The History of Pain 
by Roselyne Rey, translated by Elliott Wallace and J.A. Cadden , and S.W. Cadden.
Harvard, 394 pp., £25.50, October 1995, 0 674 39967 6
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... to speed to the brain like a tug on a bell-rope. Pain was the bell, a literal fire-alarm for self-preservation. This physiological representation of pain as a beneficial reflex mechanism, a warning system, appealed to anatomists, reinforcing their ‘all is for the best’ vision of the perfection of the organism. Neurology confirmed that human behaviour ...

Rubbing along in the neo-liberal way

R.W. Johnson, 22 June 1995

... from the opening of a new Congress to a Kiwani Club dinner, would launch into perorations of self-praise about what made America and Americans God’s chosen country and people. These, he thought, were self-comfort sessions, the expression of a deep underlying in security. Mills would find the new South Africa a ...

Even paranoids have enemies

Frank Kermode, 24 August 1995

F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism 
by Ian MacKillop.
Allen Lane, 476 pp., £25, July 1995, 0 7139 9062 7
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... Arthur Crook and John Gross) and indeed held the whole London literary world in contempt as a self-serving clique. He became a lecturer in 1936, already over forty, and a full lecturer at 52. MacKillop deals with this scandalously slow ascent in great detail and with a measure of impartiality, reporting Lord Annan’s opinion that Leavis’s treatment ...

Possessed

A.N. Wilson, 14 May 1992

Evelyn Waugh: No Abiding City 1939-1966 
by Martin Stannard.
Dent, 523 pp., £25, April 1992, 0 460 86062 3
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... way in which he nurtured his art to the exclusion of all else. He was one of the most ruthlessly self-protective artists who ever lived. ‘I shall not visit my children during Christmas leave,’ he wrote to his wife in December 1941, ‘they should be able to retain the impression formed of me for another three months. I can’t afford to waste any time on ...

When the Balloon Goes up

Michael Wood, 4 September 1997

Enduring Love 
by Ian McEwan.
Cape, 247 pp., £15.99, September 1997, 0 224 05031 1
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... The distinction, tilted towards novelists, makes writers seem stuffy, even preachy, certainly self-absorbed. Between Sterne and Goethe, Flaubert and Chateaubriand, Calvino and Montherlant, who would you choose? Certainly Golding and McEwan are novelists in Kundera’s sense, but they do make an issue of their ideas. I’m not suggesting that they push ...

Frognal Days

Zachary Leader: Files on the Fifties, 4 June 1998

Previous Convictions: A Journey Through the Fifties 
by Nora Sayre.
Rutgers, 464 pp., £27.95, April 1997, 0 8135 2231 5
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... its concomitant scorn for ‘thimble bellies’), Sayre recalls it as celebratory: ‘of the self and of friendship’. She quotes A.J. Liebling: ‘People whose youth did not coincide with the Twenties never had our reverence for strong drink ... It was the only period during which a fellow could be smug and slopped concurrently.’ As long as he ...

Good Things: Pederasty and Jazz and Opium and Research

Lawrence Rainey: Mary Butts, 16 July 1998

Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life 
by Nathalie Blondel.
McPherson, 539 pp., £22.50, February 1998, 0 929701 55 0
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The Taverner Novels: ‘Armed with Madness’, ‘Death of Felicity Taverner’ 
by Mary Butts.
McPherson, 374 pp., £10, March 1998, 0 929701 18 6
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The Classical Novels: ‘The Macedonian’, ‘Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra’ 
by Mary Butts.
McPherson, 384 pp., £10, March 1998, 0 929701 42 9
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‘Ashe of Rings’ and Other Writings 
by Mary Butts.
McPherson, 374 pp., £18.50, March 1998, 0 929701 53 4
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... they go back to Gault House, they discover that Clarence has gone mad, the result of jealousy, gay self-hatred and shellshock sustained during the war. He has tied Scylla to a statue of Picus which he had made some time before, and has been shooting at her with crude arrows, intending to kill first her and then himself. They arrive just in time to save ...

Done for the State

John Guy: The House of York, 2 April 2020

The Brothers York: An English Tragedy 
by Thomas Penn.
Penguin, 688 pp., £12.99, April, 978 0 7181 9728 5
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Richard III: The Self-Made King 
by Michael Hicks.
Yale, 388 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 0 300 21429 1
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... the regency work? When we come to consider what happened next Michael Hicks’s Richard III: The Self-Made King proves valuable. The great merit of Hicks’s academic study is that he anchors every known move in Richard’s career to the (often conflicting) sources, making it easier for readers to form their own judgments; Penn tends to iron out the ...

In real sound stupidity the English are unrivalled

Stefan Collini: ‘Cosmo’ for Capitalists, 6 February 2020

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the ‘Economist’ 
by Alexander Zevin.
Verso, 538 pp., £25, November 2019, 978 1 78168 624 9
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... wanted. It would appear that omniscience is one attribute of the God-like perspective; absence of self-doubt is another. Then there is a lapidary style leavened by the obiter dicta of powerful individuals, plus a tendency to reiterate a few stern commandments, which one might imagine as: ‘Thou shalt not inhibit economic growth.’ ‘Thou shalt not be ...