Angela and the Beast

Patricia Craig, 5 December 1985

Black Venus 
by Angela Carter.
Chatto, 121 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 7011 3964 1
Show More
Come unto these yellow sands 
by Angela Carter.
Bloodaxe, 158 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 906427 66 5
Show More
Mainland 
by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.
Hamish Hamilton, 285 pp., £9.95, October 1985, 0 241 11643 0
Show More
The Accidental Tourist 
by Anne Tyler.
Chatto, 355 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 7011 2986 7
Show More
Arrows of Longing 
by Virginia Moriconi.
Duckworth, 252 pp., £9.95, October 1985, 9780715620694
Show More
Show More
... her around. Thinking about herself, and her family life, past and present, produces a kind of self-congratulatory, fake amazement at the things required of her: ‘How has Eleanor stayed alive for so long?’ It’s unfair, of course, to implicate the author in the foibles of her character; but Susan Schaeffer doesn’t adopt any of the usual devices ...

Passing through

Ahdaf Soueif: William Golding’s ‘Egyptian Journal’, 3 October 1985

An Egyptian Journal 
by William Golding.
Faber, 207 pp., £12.95, July 1985, 0 571 13593 5
Show More
Show More
... out of the visit. He sums it up: ‘The patriarch and his piles, a grandfather wounded in his self-esteem by his grand daughter! The mother more bitter than anxious, the father no more concerned than the others, the educated son, smoothing things down and persuading everyone to do nothing.’ He has missed the entire point of the domestic crisis ...

Prussian Officers

William Doyle, 23 January 1986

Frederick the Great: A Military Life 
by Christopher Duffy.
Routledge, 407 pp., £17.95, September 1985, 0 7100 9649 6
Show More
Society, Government and the Enlightenment: The Experiences of 18th-Century France and Prussia 
by C.B.A. Behrens.
Thames and Hudson, 248 pp., £16, August 1985, 0 500 25090 1
Show More
Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg 1529-1819 
by Joachim Whaley.
Cambridge, 248 pp., £25, August 1985, 0 521 26189 9
Show More
Show More
... weak and friendless to resist her. This was success of a sort, though hardly the triumph of the self-confident autocracy so admired by Miss Behrens. It may well have been enough to convince the educated classes of Prussia that they lived under a system that worked; that they were part, indeed, of such a system, since the vast majority of them seem to have ...

Diary

Tam Dalyell: Nuclear Power after Chernobyl, 5 June 1986

... to withstand what they would consider ill-informed prejudice. In Britain we have no such self-confident cadre. Furthermore, it is difficult to be a friend of the nuclear industry. The easy arguments are all stacked in the hands of those who are against nuclear power. To argue convincingly for nuclear power requires some knowledge of engineering and ...

Bad Nights

D.A.N. Jones, 23 October 1986

The Casualty 
by Heinrich Böll, translated by Leila Vennewitz.
Chatto, 189 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 9780701129286
Show More
Augustus 
by Allan Massie.
Bodley Head, 339 pp., £9.95, September 1986, 0 370 30757 7
Show More
Gabriel’s Lament 
by Paul Bailey.
Cape, 331 pp., £9.95, September 1986, 0 224 02823 5
Show More
The Mind and Body Shop 
by Frank Parkin.
Collins, 221 pp., £9.95, September 1986, 0 00 217695 5
Show More
Show More
... consistently lively.’ This is pure Dryasdust, a pretended apology masking the author’s self-satisfaction. There are other Scottish characteristics in Augustus. The hero has a slave, called Septimus, a bonnie laddie from the Sabine Hills, ‘with ungrammatical Latin and long vowel sounds’, who recalls the despondent Augustus to his duty by ...

Pushing on

John Bayley, 18 September 1986

The Old Devils 
by Kingsley Amis.
Hutchinson, 294 pp., £9.95, September 1986, 0 09 163790 2
Show More
Show More
... impulses (‘caring ... compassionate’) must be made fun of if they are not to seem intolerably self-righteous: and yet he gives those things their real due with unemphatic force. One of the best things the book does and gives is the sense in which old devils feel warm for each other and try to look after each other, with a little help from the young: so ...

In qualified praise of Stephen Vizinczey

Bryan Appleyard, 24 July 1986

Truth and Lies in Literature: Reviews and Essays 
by Stephen Vizinczey.
Hamish Hamilton, 399 pp., £12.95, June 1986, 0 241 11805 0
Show More
In Praise of Older Women: The Amorous Recollections of A.V. 
by Stephen Vizinczey.
Hamish Hamilton, 192 pp., £8.95, February 1985, 0 241 11378 4
Show More
Show More
... selected, edited and juxtaposed around a theme. But they are not enhanced, and they are not given self-conscious substance by any 20th-century trickery. It works well. The narrative skims along with an extraordinary lightness, thanks partly to a swift editing and pointing of the significant matter but also to Vizinczey’s impatience with clutter. He has ...

Experience

Christopher Peacocke, 18 December 1986

Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson 
edited by Ernest LePore.
Blackwell, 520 pp., £29.50, April 1986, 0 631 14811 6
Show More
Show More
... is some third thing which makes sentences true; nor does anti-realism. In accordance with his self-description, Davidson falls squarely on the realist side of this dispute. If he did not, he would not take truth as primitive for the reasons he does. He would regard a wedding of truth with warranted assertibility as made in heaven. Part of the reason he ...

Games-Playing

Patrick Parrinder, 7 August 1986

The Golden Gate 
by Vikram Seth.
Faber, 307 pp., £9.95, June 1986, 0 571 13967 1
Show More
The Haunted House 
by Rebecca Brown.
Picador, 139 pp., £8.95, June 1986, 0 330 29175 0
Show More
Whole of a Morning Sky 
by Grace Nichols.
Virago, 156 pp., £9.95, July 1986, 0 86068 774 0
Show More
The Piano Tuner 
by Peter Meinke.
Georgia, 156 pp., $13.95, June 1986, 0 8203 0844 7
Show More
Tap City 
by Ron Abell.
Secker, 273 pp., £10.95, July 1986, 0 436 00025 3
Show More
Show More
... form to tell a story of contemporary Californian life would have daunted a less determined and self-assured writer – though at least ‘Onegin’ can be rhymed with ‘Reagan’: How can I (careless of time) use The dusty bread molds of Onegin In the brave bakery of Reagan? The answer is that he can, and does. The chief characteristic of Pushkin’s ...

Knives, Wounds, Bows

John Bayley, 2 April 1987

Randall Jarrell’s Letters 
edited by Mary Jarrell.
Faber, 540 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 571 13829 2
Show More
The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore 
edited by Patricia Willis.
Faber, 723 pp., £30, January 1987, 0 571 14788 7
Show More
Show More
... doubt that the wonderfully monstrous Gertrude in Pictures from an Institution, is really a kind of self-portrait, like Flaubert’s of Madame Bovary, based on Jarrell’s knowledge of his own will. At the same time there is something extremely likeable about him, and his need to give and receive affection, and this comes through in all the letters. Marianne ...

Literal meaning and fictional utterance

John McDowell, 17 April 1980

Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts 
by John Searle.
Cambridge, 187 pp., £8.50, December 1979, 0 521 22901 4
Show More
Show More
... are between these. A book is not just a lot of words on one subject: it should aspire to a certain self-containedness. These pieces do not take up one another’s loose ends: even juxtaposed, they retain the characteristic feel of articles. Of course this question of genre need not matter much, even if we do make sense of it. Good journal articles are probably ...

Grand Old Man

Robert Blake, 1 May 1980

The Last Edwardian at No 10: An Impression of Harold Macmillan 
by George Hutchinson.
Quartet, 151 pp., £6.50, February 1980, 0 7043 2232 3
Show More
Show More
... Eton means nothing in this context. Both men have been for most of their lives rich, confident and self-assured. Neither belongs to the aristocracy, though Mr Macmillan married into it. And what does ‘aristocracy’ really mean in a world of endless absorption and assimilation? All this chip-on-the-shoulder fussication about social class, exploited ...

The Everyday Business of Translation

George Steiner, 22 November 1979

The True Interpreter 
by Louis Kelly.
Blackwell, 282 pp., £15
Show More
Show More
... prominence has redirected scholarship to the history of the subject. Noting, with the authority of self-evidence, that from the Roman Empire to the Common Market Western Europe (and he might have added North America) owes its civilisation to translators, Louis Kelly sets out to investigate the history of the art from both a theoretic and a pragmatic ...

Montereale

Christopher Hill, 6 November 1980

The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a 16th-Century Miller 
by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi.
Routledge, 177 pp., £7.95, October 1980, 0 7100 0591 1
Show More
Show More
... of monogamy. Milton’s rebel angels argued that they were not created by God but were ‘self-begot’. Milton’s heresies are traditionally attributed to Classical sources: Ginzburg’s remarkable book reinforces the suggestion that we should think rather about Milton’s relationship to popular culture. The Cheese and the Worms is enthralling ...

Seeing things

Rosemary Dinnage, 4 December 1980

The Story of Ruth 
by Morton Schatzman.
Duckworth, 306 pp., £6.95, September 1980, 0 7156 1504 1
Show More
Show More
... Ruth to practise hallucinating friends, relatives, her children; then himself, then her ‘self’: that is, she would hallucinate another Ruth across the room and act out a dialogue with her in order to gain insight into her troubles. She hallucinated her husband making love to her and reported it to be very satisfactory. As the psychoanalysand ...