Women beware men

Margaret Anne Doody, 23 July 1992

Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women 
by Susan Faludi.
Chatto, 592 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 7011 4643 5
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The War against Women 
by Marilyn French.
Hamish Hamilton, 229 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 241 13271 1
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... was added to the bad ‘news’. Women become clocks, always ticking away, like the crocodile in Peter Pan who had swallowed the alarm clock. Women must marry and have children immediately, skipping the attractions of further education or interesting careers. There were no men and yet it was every young woman’s painful duty to try to find and hang onto a ...

After Gibraltar

Conor Gearty, 16 November 1995

... sensitive issue of childcare decision-making in Scotland and upheld the convicted drugs offender Peter Welch’s claim that the confiscation order of £59,914 imposed on him violated his rights under the Convention. In March 1994 the AlFayed brothers took a legal team of six to argue (unsuccessfully) that the DTI report into the House of Fraser had infringed ...

Feast of St Thomas

Frank Kermode, 29 September 1988

Eliot’s New Life 
by Lyndall Gordon.
Oxford, 356 pp., £15, September 1988, 0 19 811727 2
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The Letters of T.S. Eliot 
edited by Valerie Eliot.
Faber, 618 pp., £25, September 1988, 0 571 13621 4
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The Poetics of Impersonality 
by Maud Ellmann.
Harvester, 207 pp., £32.50, January 1988, 0 7108 0463 6
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T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism 
by Richard Shusterman.
Duckworth, 236 pp., £19.95, February 1988, 0 7156 2187 4
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‘The Men of 1914’: T.S. Eliot and Early Modernism 
by Erik Svarny.
Open University, 268 pp., £30, September 1988, 0 335 09019 2
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Eliot, Joyce and Company 
by Stanley Sultan.
Oxford, 326 pp., £25, March 1988, 0 19 504880 6
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The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot 
by Robert Crawford.
Oxford, 251 pp., £25, December 1987, 9780198128694
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T.S. Eliot: The Poems 
by Martin Scofield.
Cambridge, 264 pp., £25, March 1988, 0 521 30147 5
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... there has been a boom in such research. A procession of students combs the archives in New York, Cambridge and elsewhere. The poet’s early philosophical studies and his work on F.H. Bradley have been very carefully examined; and those early slogans, Impersonality, Tradition, Dissociation of Sensibility, Objective Correlative, have been dissected ...

Terror on the Vineyard

Terry Castle: Boss Ladies, Watch Out!, 15 April 1999

A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman 
by Rosemary Mahoney.
Doubleday, 273 pp., $23.95, November 1998, 9780385479318
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... It has received unusual praise in the United States – even in such genteel quarters as the New York Times – largely, I suspect, because its author fulfils the expectations of the genre so well. In these blithe post-feminist times, everyone, it would seem, enjoys the spectacle of a famous old dead lady humbled – especially one as wrinkly, foul-mouthed ...

We came, we saw, he died

Jackson Lears: Clinton’s Creed, 5 February 2015

Hard Choices 
by Hillary Clinton.
Simon and Schuster, 635 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 1 4711 3150 9
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HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton 
by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
Hutchinson, 440 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 0 09 195448 2
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... jihadism. In late 2010, Schmidt hired Cohen to head Google Ideas, a ‘think/do tank’ in New York. His career trajectory reflected the new intimacy of Washington and Silicon Valley. Still the question remained: how to put the undisciplined geniuses of the tech world at the service of the sclerotic State Department (and vice versa)? According to Allen and ...

A Car of One’s Own

Andrew O’Hagan: Chariots of Desire, 11 June 2009

... was part-nationalised in 1975 – and several banks have been as good as nationalised this year. Peter Mandelson recently said that the £2.3 billion in loan guarantees he unlocked for the car industry were no ‘bail-out’, being intended to promote its ‘greening’, but this was just a fancy way of getting access to £1.3 billion from the European ...

I gotta use words

Mark Ford: Eliot speaks in tongues, 11 August 2016

The Poems of T.S. Eliot: Volume I: Collected & Uncollected Poems 
edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.
Faber, 1311 pp., £40, November 2015, 978 0 571 23870 5
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The Poems of T.S. Eliot: Volume II: Practical Cats & Further Verses 
edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.
Faber, 667 pp., £40, November 2015, 978 0 571 23371 7
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... have appealed much to Leavis either, but they do offer graphic additional proof in support of Peter Ackroyd’s assertion in his 1984 biography of Eliot that ‘when he allowed his sexuality free access, when he was not struggling with his own demons, it was of a heterosexual kind’: When my tall girl sits astraddle on my lap, She with nothing on and I ...

Mothers and Others

Nicholas Spice: Coetzee’s Multistorey Consciousness, 7 March 2024

‘The Pole’ and Other Stories 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Harvill Secker, 255 pp., £20, October 2023, 978 1 78730 405 5
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... like an evasion, a tricksy manoeuvre by Coetzee to sidestep saying what he ‘really’ believed. Peter Singer, one of Coetzee’s designated respondents, was particularly exasperated: ‘I prefer to keep truth and fiction clearly separate.’ Others saw it as an effective polemical gesture, concisely articulating the proposition that ideas are always an ...

The Best Stuff

Ian Jack: David Astor, 2 June 2016

David Astor: A Life in Print 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 400 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 0 224 09090 2
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... Astor fortune had its origins in the fur trade monopoly that John Jacob Astor established in New York after migrating there from Walldorf in the Rhineland in the late 18th century. The profits went into buying up large tracts of Manhattan when it was still mainly farmland and scrub; later, when the fields grew into streets and buildings, many of them held on ...

You Are the Product

John Lanchester: It Zucks!, 17 August 2017

The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention Is Harvested and Sold 
by Tim Wu.
Atlantic, 416 pp., £20, January 2017, 978 1 78239 482 2
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Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine 
by Antonio García Martínez.
Ebury, 528 pp., £8.99, June 2017, 978 1 78503 455 8
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Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon have Cornered Culture and What It Means for All of Us 
by Jonathan Taplin.
Macmillan, 320 pp., £18.99, May 2017, 978 1 5098 4769 3
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... attention of Facebook’s first external investor, the now notorious Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Again, The Social Network gets it right: Thiel’s $500,000 investment in 2004 was crucial to the success of the company. But there was a particular reason Facebook caught Thiel’s eye, rooted in a byway of intellectual history. In the course of his ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2010, 16 December 2010

... before he landed up in Leeds, including playing for Xavier Cugat at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Cut to 40 years later, when I saw him in the Festival Hall bookshop. I went up to him and stammered out my appreciation of that time in the 1950s, saying how much the orchestra had meant to me then. For someone who’d gone on to become principal bass of ...

The Angry Men

Jean McNicol: Harriet Harman, 14 December 2017

A Woman’s Work 
by Harriet Harman.
Allen Lane, 405 pp., £20, February 2017, 978 0 241 27494 1
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The Women Who Shaped Politics 
by Sophy Ridge.
Coronet, 295 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 4736 3876 1
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... of the ‘unmarried mother, condemned to have neither a husband nor a career’. Harman went to York University, which she didn’t enjoy much, and where, just before she sat finals, one of her tutors, T.V. Sathyamurthy, told her if she slept with him he’d make sure she got a 2.1. She turned him down and got a 2.1 anyway, but one of her friends, a girl ...

Sex on the Roof

Patricia Lockwood, 6 December 2018

Evening in Paradise: More Stories 
by Lucia Berlin.
Picador, 256 pp., £14.99, November 2018, 978 1 5098 8229 8
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Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs 
by Lucia Berlin.
Picador, 160 pp., £12.99, November 2018, 978 1 5098 8234 2
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... affair with him in New Mexico, which was interrupted when she and Race picked up and moved to New York. Lucia sold children’s ponchos and lived in the same building as Denise Levertov and was happy – wasn’t she? – until Buddy showed up one night with ‘a bottle of brandy and four tickets to Acapulco’. That is what, in this world, we call a ...

‘We’ve messed up, boys’

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Bad Blood, 16 November 2023

The Poison Line: A True Story of Death, Deception and Infected Blood 
by Cara McGoogan.
Viking, 396 pp., £20, September 2023, 978 0 241 62750 1
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Death in the Blood: The Inside Story of the NHS Infected Blood Scandal 
by Caroline Wheeler.
Headline, 390 pp., £22, September 2023, 978 1 0354 0524 4
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... and said that without factor concentrates, quality of life would be ‘much poorer’ for many. Dr Peter Jones, director of Newcastle’s haemophilia centre, complained to the Press Council that the Mail on Sunday’s piece was ‘sensational and highly exaggerated’, and had led to haemophilia centres being ‘inundated with calls from worried ...

Karl Miller Remembered

Neal Ascherson, John Lanchester and Andrew O’Hagan, 23 October 2014

... without him.The Scottish poet Alastair Reid died almost on the same day as Karl, far away in New York, and in his poem ‘Curiosity’, which is about cats with nine lives, he left some helpful lines about death:A cat-minority of oneis all that can be counted onto tell the truth and what cats have to tellon each return from hellis this: that dying is what ...