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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“... to have run into feminist theory in some form or other. She needed re-education, constructive self-criticism. But women of all classes watched these films, and they could all get the message. Films are much more likely to be overtly macho and misogynistic than television programmes. Men dictate what films they, their girlfriends and their families will ...”

The German Question

Perry Anderson: Goodbye to Bonn, 7 January 1999

“... employees, where the SPD gained 6 per cent nationwide, and pulled over significant numbers of the self-employed, some of them former Green supporters. There was little gender variance in the vote, with the exception of young women under 24, who went for the SPD much more strongly than their male counterparts. The truly dramatic change, however, came in the ...”

Lost between War and Peace

Edward Said, 5 September 1996

“... posture and stiff walk of the chronic sufferer from back pain, he communicated an attractive self-confidence. The Centre occupies offices on the sixth floor of the Bakri Building, downtown Ramallah’s largest, its ground floor filled with souvenir and shoe-shops. Wadie’s relationship with Hassan is almost fraternal, though Wadie keeps the deferential ...”

Cutty, One Rock

August Kleinzahler: My Big Bad Brother, 21 August 2003

“... would prevail and not take it out too badly on the old man. My brother was not only tough and self-destructive, he was handsome. He was fit as hell – hundreds of push-ups and the rest – and he had a good-looking mug: good bones, a nicely shaped head, straight nose, brown eyes, full mouth. A bit like the young Marlon Brando, in fact, especially around ...”

Bournemouth

Andrew O’Hagan: The Bournemouth Set, 21 May 2020

“... to assume the receptive attitude, that cardinal virtue in women’. ‘Her illness was a form of self-assertion,’ Strouse adds, and it was soon decided that she should go to Bournemouth, where they knew how to take such things seriously. Alice liked the ‘neutrality’ of the watering place and the sense of there being something to be gained from knowing ...”

The Perfect Plot Device

Dinah Birch: Governesses, 17 July 2008

Other People’s Daughters: The Life and Times of the Governess 
by Ruth Brandon.
Weidenfeld, 303 pp., £20, March 2008, 978 0 297 85113 4
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“... in 1846, helped to establish her credentials as a shrewd social critic. Anna Leonowens, another self-reliant woman, also saw that she could make literature out of her experiences. In 1870 she wrote a titillating and entirely untrustworthy account of working as a governess to the family of King Mongkut of Siam, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (it ...”

Sly Digs

Frank Kermode: E.M. Forster as Critic, 25 September 2008

‘The Creator as Critic’ and Other Writings 
by E.M. Forster, edited by Jeffrey Heath.
Dundurn, 814 pp., £45, March 2008, 978 1 55002 522 4
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“... country or in a Cambridge college, or travelling a lot, he achieved such public eminence. Always self-deprecating, he nevertheless understood his own stature; in his commonplace book he privately compared his powers with those of other writers, including Eliot, and judged himself superior. It must be allowed that he had many admiring friends, and his name ...”

Cuba or the Base?

Piero Gleijeses: Guantánamo, 26 March 2009

Guantanamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution 
by Jana Lipman.
California, 325 pp., £17.95, December 2008, 978 0 520 25540 1
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“... allowed to continue to work at GTMO, but without any retirement rights. In 1979, Jimmy Carter – self-proclaimed champion of human rights – softened this policy, decreeing that Cubans who commuted to the base would receive a government pension. But this decision – which simply gave workers what was owed to them – applied only to those who retired after ...”

So Fresh and Bloody

Caroline Fraser: Qiu Xiaolong, 18 December 2008

Red Mandarin Dress 
by Qiu Xiaolong.
Sceptre, 310 pp., £7.99, July 2008, 978 0 340 93518 7
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“... that Chen remembers are by the 11th-century poet Su Dongpu: ‘Long, long I lament/there is not a self for me to claim.’ There is another, more benign cultural force at work in these novels, one that ties Chen and his colleagues to China’s past: food. What booze and bars are to the American gumshoe, food is to his Chinese counterpart. Luscious ...”

Offered to the Gods

Frank Kermode: Sacrifice, 5 June 2008

Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera 
by Derek Hughes.
Cambridge, 313 pp., £45, October 2007, 978 0 521 86733 7
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“... he was with ‘the opposition between the male property instinct and woman’s maternal drive to self-immolation’. Hughes finds a reflection of this concern in the frequency in the operas of interrupted weddings. Wagner also makes use of the related theme of the Fatal Oath, which appeared in many treatments of the biblical Jephtha story, and in the plot of ...”

Someone like Maman

Elisabeth Ladenson: Proust’s mother, 8 May 2008

Madame Proust: A Biography 
by Evelyne Bloch-Dano, translated by Alice Kaplan.
Chicago, 310 pp., £16, October 2007, 978 0 226 05642 5
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“... the narrator’s family in A la Recherche, are dealt with purely as a routine expression of Jewish self-hatred. ‘This distancing, this critical glance cast upon one’s own kind,’ Bloch-Dano writes, ‘is a well-known phenomenon: the difficulty of seeing oneself reflected in the gaze of others.’ True enough, but it doesn’t really explain the baroque ...”

At the End of My Pencil

Bridget Riley, 8 October 2009

“... constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.’But to be excited by the prospect of a great adventure is one thing, to act is another. To make a start, I had to sacrifice some hard-won achievements and joys. For instance colour, about which I had only recently ...”

Phenomenologically Fucked

Alex Abramovich: Percival Everett, 19 November 2009

I Am Not Sidney Poitier 
by Percival Everett.
Graywolf, 234 pp., $16, June 2009, 978 1 55597 527 2
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“... to this place to find something, to connect with something lost, to reunite if not with my whole self, then with a piece of it. What I’ve discovered is that this thing is not here. In fact, it is nowhere. I have learned that my name is not my name. It seems you all know me and nothing could be further from the truth and yet you know me better than I know ...”

The Family That Slays Together

Deborah Friedell: Lorrie Moore, 19 November 2009

A Gate at the Stairs 
by Lorrie Moore.
Faber, 322 pp., £16.99, October 2009, 978 0 571 19530 5
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“... was a deer . . . I got Gandhi mixed up with Bambi,’ it almost seems like Moore is offering a self-parody. ‘I don’t know – words remind me of other words. Like the word hostage reminds me of sausage.’ When Tassie listens to Christmas music, ‘“Rejoice, rejoice” sounded like “Read Joyce, read Joyce,” and so I did, getting a head start on ...”

Dressed in Blue Light

Amy Larocca: Gypsy Rose Lee, 11 March 2010

Stripping Gypsy: The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee 
by Noralee Frankel.
Oxford, 300 pp., £12.99, June 2009, 978 0 19 536803 1
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Gypsy: The Art of the Tease 
by Rachel Shteir.
Yale, 222 pp., £12.99, March 2009, 978 0 300 12040 0
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“... hid all her life, so that even as she stripped, she remained entirely obscure behind a screen of self-invention. Gypsy, she writes, ‘came to interest me more and I came to like her less.’ Without the performance, she is all ambition and lies; just as without all the marabou fans, she is just a naked lady with a better than average pair of ...”