Handbooks

Valerie Pearl, 4 February 1982

The Shell Guide to the History of London 
by W.R. Dalzell.
Joseph, 496 pp., £12.50, July 1981, 0 7181 2015 9
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... and from old materials thrown hurriedly together without a due attempt to ascertain what they may have lost of their value from age.’ The Shell Guide is not altogether in that category, although it is not much of a recommendation for the author to claim that he has relied in part on ‘books written by two magnificent Victorians, Edward Walford and ...

Chatwins

Karl Miller, 21 October 1982

On the Black Hill 
by Bruce Chatwin.
Cape, 249 pp., £7.50, September 1982, 0 224 01980 5
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... these is Meg, and another her friend Theo. Such names, such circumstances, are no coincidence, and may make this a Christian romance – the exemplum without the sermon, so to speak. The Joneses have the interest – and no other – of the significance which can be read into their reclusiveness, and that significance may be ...

Trust the Coroner

John Bossy: Why Christopher Marlowe was probably not a spy, 14 December 2006

Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy 
by Park Honan.
Oxford, 421 pp., £25, October 2005, 0 19 818695 9
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... Honan is deeper into his life than his works, and if his grasp of the context is loose, we may be nervous about his judgment on matters of major fact. The chief cause of nervousness appears in his subtitle: ‘Poet and Spy’. We are to imagine that these two aspects of Marlowe’s life are equivalent, or equally established. They are not. Marlowe the ...

Moggiopoli

John Foot: The Great Italian Football Scandal, 6 July 2006

... the transfer market and agents under their control; in this way success was assured. In May 2006, this system was laid bare. Juventus are used to coming first. By 1994, they had won the Italian football championship – or scudetto – a record 22 times. Yet by their high standards they were in a slump. One scudetto in nine seasons was not enough to ...

Clarissa and Louisa

Karl Miller, 7 November 1985

Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady 
by Samuel Richardson, edited with an introduction by Angus Ross.
Viking, 1533 pp., £19.95, August 1985, 0 670 80829 6
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Memoire of Frances, Lady Douglas 
by Lady Louisa Stuart, edited by Jill Rubenstein.
Scottish Academic Press, 106 pp., £9.50, August 1985, 0 7073 0358 3
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... work. They stand at opposite ends of the century that runs from the 1740s to the 1840s, but they may be thought to bear each other out, in ways which affect an understanding of the family life of that time, and of its incorporation in the literature of Romanticism – that part of it, in particular, which is premised on conceptions of the divided or multiple ...

Excellence

Patrick Wright, 21 May 1987

Creating excellence: Managing corporate culture, strategy and change in the New Age 
by Craig Hickman and Michael Silva.
Allen and Unwin, 305 pp., £12.50, April 1985, 0 04 658252 5
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Intrapreneuring: Why you don’t have to leave the corporation to become an entrepreneur 
by Gifford Pinchot.
Harper and Row, 368 pp., £15.95, August 1985, 0 06 015305 9
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The IBM Way: Insights into the World’s Most Successful Marketing Organisation 
by Buck Rodgers.
Harper and Row, 224 pp., £12.95, April 1986, 0 06 015522 1
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Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage 
by Richard Foster.
Macmillan, 316 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 333 43511 7
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Ford 
by Robert Lacey.
Heinemann, 778 pp., £15, July 1986, 0 434 40192 7
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Company of Adventurers: The Story of the Hudson’s Bay Company 
by Peter Newman.
Viking, 413 pp., £14.95, March 1986, 0 670 80379 0
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Augustine’s Laws 
by Norman Augustine.
Viking, 380 pp., £12.95, July 1986, 9780670809424
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Peak Performers: The New Heroes in Business 
by Charles Garfield.
Hutchinson, 333 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 09 167391 7
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Going for it: How to Succeed as an Entrepreneur 
by Victor Kiam.
Collins, 223 pp., £9.95, May 1986, 0 00 217603 3
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Take a chance to be first: The Secrets of Entrepreneurial Success 
by Warren Avis.
Macmillan, 222 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 02 504410 9
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The Winning Streak 
by Walter Goldsmith and David Clutterbuck.
Weidenfeld/Penguin, 224 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 297 78469 2
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The Roots of Excellence 
by Ronnie Lessem.
Fontana, 318 pp., £3.95, December 1985, 0 00 636874 3
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The New Management of Local Government 
by John Stewart.
Allen and Unwin, 208 pp., £20, October 1986, 0 00 435232 7
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... The business imagination has been coming into its own in other ways as well. Management Studies may still be considered disreputable in some quarters of the university, but it is no longer that makeshift department of Nissen huts kept off the well-tended preserves of the traditional academic disciplines. The liberal academy’s green-belt areas are now well ...

Snobs

Jon Elster, 5 November 1981

La Distinction: Critique Sociale du Jugement 
by Pierre Bourdieu.
Editions de Minuit, 670 pp., £9.05, August 1979, 2 7073 0275 9
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... breakdown if participation became widespread. Seen in isolation, poverty and political alienation may appear undesirable, but in the wider perspective one can argue that even the worst-off would be made worse-off by attempts to improve their situation. Sociodicy as a legitimating device has been closely wedded to functionalism as an explanatory ...

Three Poems

Charles Simic, 23 August 2001

... reefers And take long pees in the dark. The Prom Queen This neighbourhood seems familiar to me. It may have been on this very street I stuffed snow in the back of schoolgirls’ coats, So that now with the night falling I may yet run into one of their ghosts. I remember a large cage with a tiger Unloaded from a circus ...

Ásta’s Song

Anne Carson, 27 July 2023

... Mengi’ event, Brooklyn, 12 May 2023 she does a performance that involves screamingmore formally you might say vocal improv I would say screamingwhat I think of it I’m not yet loosened up enough to saythey are quite pale the musicians mostly Icelanders mostly improvwho has trouble with improv, well, who do ...

How We Remember

Gilberto Perez: Terrence Malick, 12 September 2013

... the human attempt to represent it wanting. And Malick would not exempt his own attempt: his images may be more realistic than the painter’s billboard, but he invites us to wonder whether they’re really so different from it, to note how his images too are dwarfed and decentred when set against the real thing. Visually as well as verbally Malick is an ...

Attila the Hus

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 4 November 1982

Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley 1896-1933 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Secker, 274 pp., £8.95, October 1982, 0 436 28849 4
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... parents, Cynthia Curzon and Oswald Mosley, were married in the Chapel Royal, St James’s on 11 May 1920: ‘Cimmie’s wedding dress had a design of green leaves in it, in defiance of a superstition that green at a wedding was unlucky: there was also a superstition that it was unlucky to be married in May. Cimmie herself ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Britney’s Biggest Fan, 21 June 2001

... also complained about its shying away from sex. The title of An Act of Treachery suggests things may be set to change; but we shouldn’t forget the words of St Matthew (the convent schoolgirl wouldn’t): ‘whosoever looketh on a woman’ – or Nazi officer – ‘to lust after’ etc. All will be revealed in January, so long as the leadership of the Tory ...

Making and Breaking in Shakespeare’s Romances

Barbara Everett: The Late Plays, 22 March 2007

... were probably in composition or in rehearsal. Against this context of tragedies Shakespeare may already have had the idea for a new play, a comedy, to be given the dottily pseudo-tragic title, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. A majority verdict now sees the work as not only badly printed but decidedly collaborative, though it strikes me as wholly ...

Short Cuts

Andrew O’Hagan: With the Hackerati, 19 August 2010

... much worse than we thought has been happening in Afghanistan, and, second, that journalism may never be the same again. Daniel Ellsberg, who, once upon a time, released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, has been quick to see the WikiLeaks stuff as being bigger than anything. Back in June 1971, the documents revealed Johnson’s escalation of ...

Stuck in Sicily

Daniel Trilling, 5 May 2016

... associations that make up Italy’s asylum system – will help her, she is only half right. They may help her. They may recognise her as a survivor of human trafficking; temporarily house her in a place where the ‘madam’ she was assigned to can’t reach her; grant her asylum and provide the education, psychological ...