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Sour Notes

D.A.N. Jones, 17 November 1983

Peter Hall’s Diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle 
edited by John Goodwin.
Hamish Hamilton, 507 pp., £12.95, November 1983, 0 241 11047 5
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... spouses, trying not to irritate the performers with ‘hairsplitting Notes’. Play directors may come to suppose that everything can be done by Notes. When I was a student I appeared in a play by Michael Codron, directed by his friend, Adrian Brown: just before we went on, Codron appeared to give us a Note. ‘Adrian is making this too heavy and ...

Garret’s Crusade

Roy Foster, 21 January 1982

... coda: and the audience which desires secularisation primarily as a prelude to a united Ireland may not be nearly as sizeable or as committed as Dr Fitzgerald and his advisers evidently believe. It is too often assumed that ‘the Dublin view’ is the Republican view tout court. In fact, the last ten years have drastically moderated Southern ...

Submission

Robert Taubman, 20 May 1982

A Chain of Voices 
by André Brink.
Faber, 525 pp., £7.95, May 1982, 0 571 11874 7
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How German is it 
by Walter Abish.
Carcanet, 252 pp., £6.75, March 1982, 0 85635 396 5
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Before she met me 
by Julian Barnes.
Cape, 183 pp., £6.50, April 1982, 0 224 01985 6
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Providence 
by Anita Brookner.
Cape, 183 pp., £6.95, May 1982, 0 224 01976 7
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Getting it right 
by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
Hamish Hamilton, 264 pp., £7.95, May 1982, 0 241 10805 5
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... its detail that gives the novel its substance. What it has to say about the psychology of revolt may seem thin beside – and in any case is dependent on – the assurance with which it treats of Boer family life, Khoin legend, crops and cattle, stonework and mud walls, smithy and threshing-floor. The slave Galant grows up on the farm at Lagenvlei with his ...

The Quest for Solidarity

John Dunn, 24 January 1980

Politics and Letters: Interviews with ‘New Left Review’ 
by Raymond Williams.
New Left Books, 446 pp., £12.75, September 1980, 0 86091 000 8
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... but rather, to speak crassly, for what politically can be got out of it, for the services which it may offer in orientating and confirming political commitments which he judges beneficent. These preoccupations leave him with a complex and not altogether harmonious set of purposes, and one which he plainly finds almost as difficult to keep clear in his own mind ...

Mrs Thatcher’s Instincts

Barbara Wootton, 7 August 1980

Mrs Thatcher’s First Year 
by Hugh Stephenson.
Jill Norman, 128 pp., £6.50, June 1980, 0 906908 16 7
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A House Divided 
by David Steel.
Weidenfeld, 200 pp., £6.50, June 1980, 0 297 77764 5
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... critical capacity to apply tests of commonsense when it came to putting ideas into action’. It may be tempting to think that, had her university course included economics in place of chemistry, she might have clung less obstinately to these doctrines: at least she would have heard alternatives persuasively argued (she was ten years old when the publication ...

Re-reading the Bible

Stephanie West, 12 March 1992

The Unauthorised Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible 
by Robin Lane Fox.
Viking, 478 pp., £20, October 1991, 0 670 82412 7
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... wide range of questions which occur (or should have occurred) to any intelligent reader. The title may suggest a Qumranic fantastication, or something like Robert Graves’s King Jesus, but Lane Fox’s purpose, though ambitious, is sober enough. He offers an ancient historian’s view of the Bible. This is ‘a book about evidence and historical truth, not ...

Blake’s Tone

E.P. Thompson, 28 January 1993

Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s 
by Jon Mee.
Oxford, 251 pp., £30, August 1992, 0 19 812226 8
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... as much as from Paine that radicals adopted the notion of ‘priestcraft’. I think that Volney may have had an even more direct influence on Blake than Jon Mee acknowledges. Passages in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell echo Volney’s book, and ‘The Human Abstract’ follows its argument. (Jon Mee scarcely notices the Songs and remarks at one point that ...

No Exit

David Runciman, 23 May 1996

The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain 
edited by S.J.D. Green and R.C. Whiting.
Cambridge, 403 pp., £40, February 1996, 0 521 45537 5
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... what the term actually means. Instead, we try to make sense of it in conjunction with words that may come with it, and which we can understand well enough on their own – words like ‘welfare’, ‘intervention’, ‘sanction’, ‘control’, ‘security’. During the Eighties the key words were ...

What did they name the dog?

Wendy Doniger: Twins, 19 March 1998

Twins: Genes, Environment and the Mystery of Identity 
by Lawrence Wright.
Weidenfeld, 128 pp., £14.99, November 1997, 0 297 81976 3
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... identical twins: Babies actually do get lost or separated, and, however rare such an event may be, when a person finds his twin it feeds the common fantasy that any one of us might have a clone, a doppelgänger; someone who is not only a human mirror but also an ideal companion; someone who understands me perfectly, almost perfectly, because he is ...

What Hamas must do

Rashid Khalidi: The Challenge to Hamas, 6 July 2006

... whether and where you or your offspring live in the Occupied Territories is not up to you; you may or may not be allowed to keep the land your family has owned for generations; you may or may not be allowed to move outside your village, town, city or ...

More Interesting than Learning how to Make Brandy Snaps

Bernard Porter: Stella Rimington, 18 October 2001

Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5 
by Stella Rimington.
Hutchinson, 296 pp., £18.99, September 2001, 0 09 179360 2
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... lambasted it in the House of Commons for its ‘gross boastfulness’: ‘It is written, if I may say so, in the style of “How Bill Adams Won the Battle of Waterloo”. The writer has been so anxious to show how important he was, how invariably he was right, and how much more he could tell if only his mouth was not what he was pleased to call ...

It’s not about cheering us up

David Simpson: Terry Eagleton, 3 April 2003

Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic 
by Terry Eagleton.
Blackwell, 328 pp., £55, August 2002, 0 631 23359 8
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... an extended consciousness of one’s fate and the ability to articulate it for others. So tragedy may seem, to some of the critics Eagleton takes to task, the wrong word for the experience of those who died. But this must surely be false. While some will have died instantly others must have had time for conscious reflection. Certainly, most of those in the ...

Labour Vanishes

Ross McKibbin, 20 November 2014

... The​ Labour Party may be the largest party after the next election, and it may even secure a majority, but it could also do very badly. These alternatives show Labour’s decline since the first couple of years of the coalition, when a Labour victory in 2015 was (more or less) confidently predicted ...

Peter opened Paul the door

Leofranc Holford-Strevens: The Case for Case, 9 July 2009

The Oxford Handbook of Case 
edited by Andrej Malchukov and Andrew Spencer.
Oxford, 928 pp., £85, November 2008, 978 0 19 920647 6
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... that is the theory; actual usage is far more complex). There are also languages in which nouns may take more than one case-ending, as when in Old Georgian a noun in the genitive further adds the same case-ending as the noun it qualifies; but even English can contribute the double genitives hers and theirs, and shares with Danish the phrasal genitive the ...

Seen through the Loopholes

David Simpson: ‘War at a Distance’, 11 March 2010

War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime 
by Mary Favret.
Princeton, 262 pp., £18.95, January 2010, 978 0 691 14407 8
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... the media and the political interests that so often govern them. Evidence of death and destruction may be immediate, flashed across the world in real time by the major networks as on 11 September 2001, or it may take time to be sifted through alternative websites and sources (easier to access in some places than ...

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