How Tudjman won the war

Misha Glenny, 4 January 1996

The Death of Yugoslavia 
by Allan Little and Laura Silber.
Penguin, 400 pp., £6.99, September 1995, 0 14 024904 4
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... offered by the bulk of the intelligentsia of Western Europe and the US for a Wilsonian concept of self-determination has been disastrous. Little and Silber are justly more sympathetic in their assessment of the 1993 Vance-Owen peace plan than most British commentators. Many British and American journalists, politicians and historians were withering in their ...

Cat’s Whiskers

Jerry Fodor, 30 October 1997

Points of View 
by A.W. Moore.
Oxford, 313 pp., £35, June 1997, 0 19 823692 1
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... in. And second, a point to which Moore is entirely alert, transcendental idealism looks to be self-refuting. If you really can’t say anything about the world except as it is represented, then one of the things that you can’t say is that you can’t say anything about the world except as it is represented. For, the intended contrast is between how the ...

Thoughts about Hanna

Gabriele Annan, 30 October 1997

The Reader 
by Bernhard Schlink, translated by Carol Brown Janeway.
Phoenix House, 216 pp., £12.99, November 1997, 1 86159 063 6
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... of 1968 as an attempt by the young to dissociate themselves from these crimes: ‘the parade of self-righteousness ... the sounds and noise ... were supposed to drown out the fact that their love for their parents made them irrevocably complicit.’ Michael marries a fellow law student called Gertrud, but they drift amicably apart. All he feels is pity for ...

Mauve Monkeys

William Fiennes, 18 September 1997

Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War 
by Philip Hoare.
Duckworth, 250 pp., £16.95, July 1997, 0 7156 2737 6
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... the Soho caverns. Billing became manager of the Richmond Theatre, invented a machine for making ‘self-lighting’ cigarettes, wrote plays, built his own bungalow in Crawley (it even had a well and some ‘little brick dairies’) and had a go at amateur farming. He flew planes. He trained as a barrister. Trying to cross the Solent to the Isle of Wight in his ...

A Very Good Job for a Swede

E.S. Turner, 4 September 1997

The Fu Manchu Omnibus: Vol. II 
by Sax Rohmer.
Allison and Busby, 630 pp., £9.99, June 1997, 0 7490 0222 0
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... steppes. So ends Volume Two. Thereafter Fu Manchu was transformed by his creator from an entirely self-serving villain to a dedicated anti-Communist. The idea of ‘the greatest menace to the West since Attila the Hun’ fighting flat out for democracy is almost too painful to contemplate, but the old China the Doctor was hoping to revive had itself been ...

Top of the Class

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 8 May 1997

The State Nobility 
by Pierre Bourdieu, translated by Lauretta Clough.
Polity, 475 pp., £45, November 1996, 0 7456 0824 8
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... a grating and often so low a way?’ This examiner was no doubt a norm-alien, searching for that self-conscious purity of intellectual style that would express itself, as another graduate of the ENS fondly recalled, in the fact that ‘everyone’ (that’s to say, every graduate from the rue d’Ulm) ‘knows perfectly well’ that every night in the ...
From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency: Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Disabilities 
edited by David Wright and Anne Digby.
Routledge, 238 pp., £45, October 1996, 9780415112154
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... all while effecting economies: the labour of ‘low-grade’ defectives would make such colonies self-financing. Who was to deny that such solutions made sense? Certainly, few of the mentally handicapped could raise voices of complaint (‘Mother says it done me good,’ wrote one imbecile of life in a colony). Time was when relatives had been quite ...

More aggressive, dear!

Zachary Leader, 31 July 1997

My Aces, My Faults 
by Nick Bollettieri and Dick Schaap.
Robson, 346 pp., £17.95, June 1997, 1 86105 087 9
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... match he complained of fatigue, one could see why: he’d been tight as a drum. Nick Bollettieri, self-styled ‘best tennis coach in the world’, claims he can help prevent such collapses, a view shared (for varying periods of time) by Andre Agassi, Boris Becker, Monica Seles, Mary Pierce, Jim Courier, Anna Kournikova and Mark Philippousis, among ...

Mme de Blazac and I

Anita Brookner, 19 June 1997

... in common with her father than with her mother, had, at the age of 17, run off with one of those self-same South Americans and was now living with him in Caracas. At this point, Mme de Blazac’s tiny hands were pressed to her eyes, while I maintained a respectful silence. To my relief I was never asked about myself, and in Mme de Blazac’s heartbroken ...

Leave it to the teachers

Conrad Russell, 20 March 1997

... reinforced by cultural change. It began with the invention of printing, and was reinforced by the self-conscious change from the culture of the image to the culture of the word implicit in the Reformation. This is the change which has gone into reverse since the invention of television. Increasingly, people wanting to capture the attention of a school class ...

Austere and Manly Attributes

Patrick Collinson, 3 April 1997

The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and Elizabethan Politics 
by Blair Worden.
Yale, 406 pp., £40, October 1996, 0 300 06693 7
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... or the indolent disposition to succumb to tyranny. Love can also lose its way amid idleness and self-absorption. The Arcadia is saturated with the language of political morality, but it also teems with references to a political pathology of the heart: ‘vehement love’, ‘torments’, ‘hellish agony’, ‘disease’. And here, too, we sense the ...

Back to the Ironing-Board

Theo Tait: Weber and Norman, 15 April 1999

The Music Lesson 
by Katharine Weber.
Phoenix House, 161 pp., £12.99, January 1999, 1 86159 118 7
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The Museum Guard 
by Howard Norman.
Picador, 310 pp., £12.99, February 1999, 9780330370097
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... also translates Native American stories). The Bird Artist was content to stay within this self-contained domain; The Museum Guard represents an attempt to break out – and is not entirely successful. From the fey, unreal atmosphere of Halifax we are suddenly transplanted to prewar Amsterdam. There is also an ill-advised change of narrator, with the ...

Untouched by Eliot

Denis Donoghue: Jon Stallworthy, 4 March 1999

Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems 
by Jon Stallworthy.
Carcanet, 247 pp., £14.95, September 1998, 1 85754 163 4
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... life, or at least his circumstances, up to 1961 or thereabouts. It is not an intimate self-portrait: there is far more intimacy in the poems. Rounding the Horn includes The Guest from the Future(1995), The Anzac Sonata (1986), A Familiar Tree (1978) and generous selections from Hand in Hand (1974), Root and Branch (1969), Out of Bounds (1963) and ...

What happened to Good Friday?

Garret FitzGerald, 2 September 1999

... open the way for such a development by committing itself publicly to the Irish people’s right to self-determination, a right to be exercised separately in the two parts of the island. This was to be accompanied by an Irish statement of willingness to abandon the clauses of the Constitution interpreted as containing a claim on the territory of Northern ...

Happy Knack

Ian Sansom: Betjeman, 20 February 2003

John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love 
by Bevis Hillier.
Murray, 736 pp., £25, November 2002, 0 7195 5002 5
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... comfort remains unclear. Hillier hints that Betjeman’s energies being directed towards his own self-satisfaction may have made him a less than exemplary father, although his daughter, Candida Lycett Green, clearly adored him – of his relationship with Cavendish, she has written, ‘I found the situation completely without conflict’ – and her ...