Diary

David Thomson: ‘Vertigo’ after Weinstein, 21 June 2018

“... Had he known about it himself? He retires from the force but lives on in San Francisco in what may be masochism or self-loathing. As Hitchcock depicts it, San Francisco is a steep, perilous place – and a character in the film. If the city is not the best place for him, does Scottie’s vertigo speak to a deeper uneasiness? Scottie is played by James ...”

White Sheep at Rest

Neal Ascherson: After Culloden, 12 August 2021

Culloden: Battle & Aftermath 
by Paul O’Keeffe.
Bodley Head, 432 pp., £25, January, 978 1 84792 412 4
Show More
Show More
“... duke, a dotty recluse who prowled through underground mazes dug beneath his palace near Worksop, may have been indulging vaguely liberal prejudices. Today the tall stone pedestal survives: ‘In Gratitude for His Private Kindness, In Honor to His Publick Virtue’. Holes and scars suggest that there were once more inscriptions.Queen Victoria ordered the word ...”

A Pair of Yellow Gloves

Tim Parks: Stendhal’s ‘Italian Chronicles’, 19 October 2017

Italian Chronicles 
by Stendhal, translated by Raymond MacKenzie.
Minnesota, 344 pp., £20.99, May 2017, 978 1 5179 0011 3
Show More
Show More
“... bureaucrat, diplomat, sparkling conversationalist and incorrigible womaniser – that the reader may despair of conceiving any overall project undertaken by the man baptised Marie-Henri Beyle in 1783. Aside from ‘Stendhal’ there were scores of pseudonyms, any number of unfinished writings and thousands of letters and journal pages in which Beyle often ...”

Il Duce and the Red Alfa

Bee Wilson: Clara and Benito, 16 March 2017

Claretta: Mussolini’s Last Lover 
by R.J.B. Bosworth.
Yale, 312 pp., £18.99, February 2017, 978 0 300 21427 7
Show More
Show More
“... such as his affairs with Leda Rafanelli and Margherita Sarfatti in the 1910s and 1920s, may have broadened his perspective, at least a little, whereas Claretta only confirmed him in his worst prejudices. With Leda Rafanelli, a pacifist who presided over a Milanese salon, he wrote of wanting to read ‘Nietzsche and the Quran together’. Margherita ...”

Thunderstruck

Tim Parks: Victor Hugo’s Ego, 4 May 2017

The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of ‘Les Misérables’ 
by David Bellos.
Particular, 307 pp., £20, January 2017, 978 1 84614 470 7
Show More
Show More
“... But among all the gifts France has given to Hollywood, Broadway and the common reader wherever she may be, Les Misérables stands out as the greatest by far. This reconstruction of how this extraordinary novel arose, how it was published, what it means and what it has become is my way of saying thank you to France.Never abandoning this celebratory tone, The ...”

Mothers were different

Susan Pedersen: The Breadwinner Norm, 19 November 2020

Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy 
by Emma Griffin.
Yale, 389 pp., £20, April 2020, 978 0 300 23006 2
Show More
Show More
“... In​ 1894, Mary Molloy married Jimmy O’Meara, a Liverpool docker. She was 30 and he was 37. Mary may well have fallen in love, but the marriage made economic sense too. Although she had worked since girlhood, she earned only 12 shillings a week – just above the average women’s wage at the turn of the century, but not really enough for her to live comfortably on her own ...”

It’s Our Turn

Rory Scothorne: Where the North Begins, 4 August 2022

The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country 
by Tom Hazeldine.
Verso, 290 pp., £11.99, September 2021, 978 1 78663 409 2
Show More
Show More
“... party. If there is little that resembles a distinctly northern civil society (though this may be changing), neither is there much sign of an ‘official North’ as constructed by the state. What does exist is ‘no more than a caprice of the Whitehall mind’, its boundaries flowing around a series of ill-fated ministries and schemes. The North has ...”

My Castaway This Week

Miranda Carter: Desert Island Dreams, 9 June 2022

“... to write up a pretty good ‘pastiche of [his guests’] conversational style’. History may beg to differ. The early recordings are painfully stagey. The first, from 1951, features Margaret Lockwood (best known for playing feisty period heroines opposite James Mason, who himself did Desert Island Discs in 1961 and 1981) sounding as if she’s ...”

Creamy Polished Globes

Blake Morrison: A.E. Coppard’s Stories, 7 July 2022

The Hurly Burly and Other Stories 
by A.E. Coppard, edited by Russell Banks.
Ecco, 320 pp., £16.99, March 2021, 978 0 06 305416 5
Show More
Show More
“... in the Dirty Realist era of short fiction, his work was mostly out of print again.His realism may not be quite as dirty as Raymond Carver’s but the title story of The Hurly Burly encapsulates what’s enduring about Coppard. Split into three sections over twelve pages, it’s centred on Phemy, ‘a charity girl taken from the workhouse’, who at 21 is ...”

Massive Egg

Hal Foster: Skies over Magritte, 7 July 2022

Magritte: A Life 
by Alex Danchev with Sarah Whitfield.
Profile, 420 pp., £30, November 2021, 978 1 78125 077 8
Show More
Show More
“... can never do justice to the object; it is foreign to it, as if indifferent. But the unknown name may also hurl us into a world of ideas and images … where we encounter things wondrous and strange and come back full of them.’ In November 1927, Magritte went a step further with his ‘metamorphosis’ paintings, which show ‘an object merging into an ...”

Defoe or the Devil

Pat Rogers, 2 March 1989

The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe 
by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens.
Yale, 210 pp., £20, February 1988, 0 300 04119 5
Show More
The ‘Tatler’: Vols I-III 
edited by Donald Bond.
Oxford, 590 pp., £60, July 1987, 0 19 818614 2
Show More
The ‘Spectator’: Vols I-V 
edited by Donald Bond.
Oxford, 512 pp., £55, October 1987, 9780198186106
Show More
Show More
“... and ‘external’ evidence. Furbank and Owens rate the latter much more highly, but this may be in part because they associate internal evidence with the dredging up of ‘favourite phrases’ allegedly used by Defoe. In extreme cases these are as marvellously implausible as, for example, the expression ‘in fine’ – perhaps Henry James might be ...”

Singing the Blues

Noël Annan, 22 April 1993

A History of Cambridge University. Vol. IV: 1870-1990 
by Christopher Brooke.
Cambridge, 652 pp., £50, December 1992, 9780521343503
Show More
Show More
“... as nothing could be put to the vote of the Regent House (i.e. the whole body of dons) between mid-May and mid-October, one had to be pretty nippy to get a proposal brought to a vote before the year was out. Oxford took the Robbins criticisms to heart and in 1964 set up a commission of inquiry under Oliver Franks. Franks took evidence in open session and was ...”

Tale from a Silver Age

Peter Clarke, 22 July 1993

Edward Heath: A Biography 
by John Campbell.
Cape, 876 pp., £20, July 1993, 0 224 02482 5
Show More
Show More
“... and steel. He had warned the Labour Government that ‘by standing aside form the discussions, we may be taking a very great risk with our economy – a very great risk indeed.’ He had pointed out how important it was to be in at the formative stages, when the structure could be moulded. ‘Now we may be left with the ...”

Credibility Brown

Christopher Hitchens, 17 August 1989

Where there is greed: Margaret Thatcher and the Betrayal of Britain’s Future 
by Gordon Brown.
Mainstream, 182 pp., £4.95, May 1989, 1 85158 233 9
Show More
CounterBlasts No 3: A Rational Advance for the Labour Party 
by John Lloyd.
Chatto, 57 pp., £2.99, June 1989, 0 7011 3519 0
Show More
Show More
“... that amounts almost to a rewrite of history. Cogent though Brown’s facts and Lloyd’s rhetoric may be, both authors show a fatal eagerness to please. How odd it is that a decade of Thatcher has not taught Labourites the essential distinction between being liked and being respected. The Prime Minister has demonstrated a willingness to take life and to risk ...”

America Deserta

Richard Poirier, 16 February 1989

America 
by Jean Baudrillard, translated by Chris Turner.
Verso, 129 pp., £12.95, November 1988, 0 86091 220 5
Show More
America Observed: The Newspaper Years of Alistair Cooke 
by Ronald Wells.
Reinhardt, 233 pp., £12.95, November 1988, 1 871061 09 1
Show More
American Journals 
by Albert Camus, translated by Hugh Levick.
Hamish Hamilton, 155 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 241 12621 5
Show More
Show More
“... to its adherents, it is only an hypothesis, like any other. The degree of assent you give it may depend on how little or how much the process is complicated by bringing into it the possibilities of human resistance and discrimination with respect to signs. Or it may depend on the degree to which the process is or is ...”