Desmondism

John Sutherland, 23 March 1995

Huxley: The Devil’s Disciple 
by Adrian Desmond.
Joseph, 474 pp., £20, November 1994, 0 7181 3641 1
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“... and other reptiles. Planting one’s flag on a root sheath of hair, significant though it may have been in the chronicles of biological discovery, does not rank in glamour with the exploits of Captain Scott and Sir Edmund Hillary. Hydrozoa are commonly known as jellyfish, and Huxley seems to have devoted a lot of time in the 1840s to examining the ...”

Not Mackintosh

Chris Miele, 6 April 1995

‘Greek’ Thomson 
edited by Gavin Stamp and Sam McKinstry.
Edinburgh, 249 pp., £35, September 1994, 0 7486 0480 4
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“... this book, although it is central to Thomson’s development. The problem facing Thomson scholars may be that he left no clear account of the role religion played in his stylistic conversion, or at least no account as unequivocal as that of his near contemporary, George Gilbert Scott, the most prolific of the English Goths. Reading Pugin, Scott recounted in ...”

Diary

Will Frears: A Quiet Night In, 20 July 1995

“... outside a blanket shop that had a booming PA system was followed by a cup of tea. Glastonbury may be a full-on celebration of hedonism but for most of the people involved, drugs and dancing all night are just part of their way of life. An exception must be made for the man who was lying in the middle of a field talking to a blade of grass. It was ...”

The Argument from Design

John Barrell, 24 August 1995

Landscape and Memory 
by Simon Schama.
HarperCollins, 624 pp., £25, April 1995, 0 00 215897 3
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“... intended to or not, prefigures all too exactly the experience of reading Landscape and Memory. We may not know where the wide meanders of a river are taking us, but we know they will take us somewhere; reading this book, I felt like one of those Australian explorers who believed that, by analogy with the geography of other continents, there must somewhere be ...”

Homeroidal

Bernard Knox, 11 May 1995

The Husbands: An Account of Books III and IV of Homer’s ‘Iliad’ 
by Christopher Logue.
Faber, 55 pp., £6.99, October 1994, 0 571 17198 2
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“... to have left the plains of Troy and soared into intergalactic space; at any moment the Klingons may come to fight at Hector’s side. And the verse has become more staccato, the content more trivial. Here is Priam in his palace:   ‘Who’s there?’   ‘Manto, sir.’   ‘Manto?’   ‘Yes, sir. Your youngest son.’   ‘Shine the ...”

Bewitchment

James Wood, 8 December 1994

Shadow Dance 
by Angela Carter.
Virago, 182 pp., £9.99, September 1994, 1 85381 840 2
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Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter 
edited by Lorna Sage.
Virago, 358 pp., £8.99, September 1994, 1 85381 760 0
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“... fairytale. Often, Carter’s prose is brilliantly suggestive, at once playful and black: ‘May progressed slowly. The white lilacs in the churchyard where Honey said Ghislaine had been raped and hurt browned at the edges and reeked of halitosis and finally dropped down dead.’ This was Carter’s great gift – this stab of surrealism, this sharpness ...”

It’s a Crime!

Peter Campbell, 8 December 1994

Chaim Soutine: Catalogue Raisonné, Vols I-II 
by Maurice Tuchman, Esti Dunow and Klaus Perls.
Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 780 pp., £49.99, December 1993, 3 8228 1629 9
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“... in the wind – all things animated. Soutine’s intentions, the way the work of other painters may have influenced him, can only suggest ways of looking. In the most important matters the paintings must speak for themselves. What is at issue is not what Soutine felt and thought as he thrashed or stroked a canvas but how we feel and think as we look at the ...”

Hogshit and Chickenshit

Michael Rogin, 1 August 1996

Washington Babylon 
by Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein.
Verso, 316 pp., £31.95, May 1996, 1 85984 092 2
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“... and who relish the depiction of Tina Brown’s New Yorker as a salon for the rich and famous, may still feel that Washington Babylon gives equal opportunity for women a bad name. Dismissing the difference made by the President’s Supreme Court appointments, Cockburn and Silverstein worry not at all about the criminalisation of abortion and ...”

With Luck

John Lanchester, 2 January 1997

The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage 
edited by R.W. Burchfield.
Oxford, 864 pp., £16.99, November 1996, 0 19 869126 2
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“... and goes on: To recrudesce is to become raw again or renew morbid activity, as a wound or ulcer may, or metaphorically a pestilence. or vice or other noxious manifestation. That being so ... what have Mr Laver and Lord Melbourne done that their appearance should be a r.? Nothing, except fall into the hands of journalists who like POPULARISED TECHNICALITIES ...”

Diary

Dick Leonard: Belgian Affairs, 14 November 1996

“... and there are fears that, as in Italy a few years ago, a whole generation of political leaders may have to be sacrificed. There is no doubt that the political class has been badly frightened by the public response to the paedophile affair – and been galvanised into quite untypically rapid action. Even King Albert, an easy-going monarch who involves ...”

You can’t put it down

Fintan O’Toole, 18 July 1996

The Fourth Estate 
by Jeffrey Archer.
HarperCollins, 550 pp., £16.99, May 1996, 0 00 225318 6
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Tickle the Public: One Hundred Years of the Popular Press 
by Matthew Engel.
Gollancz, 352 pp., £20, April 1996, 9780575061439
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Newspaper Power: The New National Press in Britain 
by Jeremy Tunstall.
Oxford, 441 pp., £35, March 1996, 0 19 871133 6
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“... between an event and the media reflection of it, between fact and fiction, is even less stable. In May 1992, for instance, shortly after the Los Angeles riots, the Vice-President of the United States, Dan Quayle, blamed that eruption of violence on the eponymous heroine of the television sitcom Murphy Brown, who was ‘mocking the importance of fathers, by ...”

Spaced Out

Terry Eagleton, 24 April 1997

Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference 
by David Harvey.
Blackwell, 496 pp., £50, December 1996, 1 55786 680 5
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“... his extension of dialectics from history to nature courts precisely this danger. Othello may be said to be internally contradictory, but in what sense is an onion? What of the case that contradictions apply to the realm of meaning rather than of matter, and can be used of badgers and bananas only in some far-fetched metaphorical sense? Both history ...”

ˆ

John Sturrock, 4 January 1996

L’Accent du souvenir 
by Bernard Cerquiglini.
Minuit, 165 pp., frs 99, September 1995, 2 7073 1536 2
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“... quite a simple reason: to make a strange name look stranger still. Whoever or whatever Salammbô may turn out to be, whether place or person, he, she or it cannot be French. There is a first evidence of that in the unnatural combination of a double m followed by a b; and the final circumflexed ô clinches it. Salammbô is a Punic name, and some measure at ...”

Wayne on a Warm Day

Duncan Campbell, 20 June 1996

Bad Business 
by Dick Hobbs.
Oxford, 140 pp., £14.99, November 1995, 0 19 825848 8
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“... and studied without anyone having to leave town. Hobbs has been speaking to some of the people who may one day end up incarcerated there: bad businessmen, dope-dealers and racketeers and thieves and threateners, many of them just the kind of people whose misbehaviour could also have led them to a messy end in that icy country lane. One of Hobbs’s previous ...”

Seething

Colin McGinn, 21 March 1996

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Cambridge Letters 
edited by Brian McGuinness and Georg Henrik von Wright.
Blackwell, 349 pp., £45, November 1995, 0 631 19015 5
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“... If I’m not worth your making an exception for me even in some STUPID details then I may as well go to Hell directly, and if I am worth it and you don’t do it then – you might go there.  The whole business is too stupid and too beastly to go on writing about it so – L.W.Wittgenstein to Bertrand Russell:During the last week I have thought ...”