In and out of the mind

Colin McGinn, 2 December 1993

Renewing Philosophy 
by Hilary Putnam.
Harvard, 234 pp., £19.95, January 1993, 9780674760936
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... at people and positions Putnam now deplores, including his own earlier, insensitive scientistic self. Where once he was a metaphysical realist and machine functionalist, now he repudiates the idea of a ‘ready-made world’ and disavows the computer model of mind. Notorious for his capacity to change his mind, he has come to see the whole analytic style of ...

Baby Power

Marina Warner, 6 July 1989

The Romantic Child: From Runge to Sendak 
by Robert Rosenblum.
Thames and Hudson, 64 pp., £5.95, February 1989, 0 500 55020 4
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Caldecott & Co: Notes on Books and Pictures 
by Maurice Sendak.
Reinhardt, 216 pp., £13.95, March 1989, 1 871061 06 7
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Dear Mili 
by Wilhelm Grimm, translated by Ralph Manheim and Maurice Sendak.
Viking Kestrel, £9.95, November 1988, 0 670 80168 2
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Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the ‘Tales’ 
by Ruth Bottigheimer.
Yale, 211 pp., £8.95, April 1989, 0 300 04389 9
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The one who set out to study fear 
by Peter Redgrove.
Bloomsbury, 183 pp., £13.95, April 1989, 0 7475 0187 4
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... journeys, is never buried very deep: here the path through trials and griefs to triumph leads to self-knowledge, and that is identified frequently with the carnal. The Grimms, as Bottigheimer shows, recast anything smacking of sex to identify it with retribution, especially where the female was concerned: Redgrove has turned their morality upside ...

Fixing it for heredity

Raymond Fancher, 9 November 1989

The Burt Affair 
by Robert Joynson.
Routledge, 347 pp., £25, August 1989, 9780415010399
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... not even mention Pearson in his early papers, Hearnshaw interprets Burt’s historical claim as a self-serving lie. Joynson, by contrast, accepts as plausible Burt’s autobiographical statement that he first obtained Pearson’s idea from a lecture rather than a published paper, which would account for the lack of formal citation. Upon closely analysing ...

Russians and the Russian Past

John Barber, 9 November 1989

The Long Road to Freedom: Russia and Glasnost 
by Walter Laqueur.
Unwin Hyman, 325 pp., £16.95, September 1989, 0 04 440343 7
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Glasnost in Action: Cultural Renaissance in Russia 
by Alec Nove.
Unwin Hyman, 251 pp., £15, September 1989, 9780044453406
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Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution 
by R.W. Davies.
Macmillan, 232 pp., £29.50, July 1989, 0 333 49741 4
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Beyond Perestroika: The Future of Gorbachev’s USSR 
by Ernest Mandel, translated by Gus Fagan.
Verso, 214 pp., £34.95, May 1989, 9780860912231
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Perestroika in Perspective: The Design and Dilemmas of Soviet Reform 
by Padma Desai.
Tauris, 138 pp., £14.95, July 1989, 1 85043 141 8
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... of many workers and political reforms which already give them much greater opportunity for self-organisation – will mobilise the workers to overthrow the bureaucracy. At long last the age of true socialism will dawn. The large element of wishful thinking here should not, however, obscure the one positive feature of Mandel’s analysis. His Trotskyist ...

Sickness and Salvation

Sylvia Lawson, 31 August 1989

Aids and its Metaphors 
by Susan Sontag.
Allen Lane, 95 pp., £9.95, March 1989, 0 7139 9025 2
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The Whole Truth: The Myth of Alternative Health 
by Rosalind Coward.
Faber, 216 pp., £12.99, June 1989, 0 571 14114 5
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... The reasons why one book is so much more productive than the other are mattters of writing, of the self-inscription of each writer in her work, of the legible understandings of the task in hand. One book exists because a highly-regarded writer has visited the domain of a destructive epidemic – much as she, and Jane Fonda, once visited Vietnam. Those visits ...

George Crabbe: Poetry and Truth

Jerome McGann, 16 March 1989

George Crabbe: The Complete Poetical Works, Vols I-III 
edited by Norma Dalrymple-Champneys and Arthur Pollard.
Oxford, 820 pp., £70, April 1988, 0 19 811882 1
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... lived a modest life, and his work mirrors that style of personal address. But this absence of self-display should not be misread. He was serious about his poetry, and his perilous moment of initiation in 1781 is an eloquent sign of just how serious he was – a sign far more eloquent, perhaps, than the better-known symbol produced by Keats in ‘The Fall ...

Leisure’s Utmost

Andrew Forge, 30 March 1989

Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 
by Patricia Mainardi.
Yale, 288 pp., £30, September 1987, 0 300 03871 2
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Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society 
by Robert Herbert.
Yale, 324 pp., £24.95, September 1988, 0 300 04262 0
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... beyond it. Herbert is out to break into this circle. The artists he is concerned with are the self-conscious Parisians: Manet, Degas, Morisot, Monet, Caillebotte and Renoir: not Pissarro, Sisley and Cézanne, for whom the city had no appeal. His period is the Sixties and Seventies. His method is to categorise the themes that these artists painted, and ...

Gone to earth

John Barrell, 30 March 1989

Sporting Art in 18th-Century England: A Social and Political History 
by Stephen Deuchar.
Yale, 195 pp., £24.95, November 1988, 0 300 04116 0
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... to what was being alleged to their detriment, so every sporting picture, by representing the self-image of the sporting world, also embodied an account of the view of sport which that image was an attempt to deny or to ignore. The history Deuchar proposes has four phases. The first, in the early decades of the century, is treated as more or less a ...

Acapulcalypse

Patrick Parrinder, 23 November 1989

Christopher Unborn 
by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Alfred MacAdam.
Deutsch, 531 pp., £13.95, October 1989, 0 233 98016 4
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The Faber Book of Contemporary Latin American Short Stories 
edited by Nick Caistor.
Faber, 188 pp., £11.99, September 1989, 0 571 15359 3
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Hollywood 
by Gore Vidal.
Deutsch, 543 pp., £12.95, November 1989, 9780233984957
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Oldest living Confederate widow tells all 
by Allan Gurganus.
Faber, 718 pp., £12.99, November 1989, 9780571142019
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... is first and foremost a deliberate verbal artefact, full of vertiginous punning and Post-Modernist self-consciousness. At one point Christopher, the foetus-narrator, expounds his own literary genealogy, which includes Tristram Shandy, Nikolai Gogol, Pierre Menard (author of Don Quixote) and many others of what he calls the ‘Sons of La Mancha’. Fuentes has ...

Someone else’s shoes

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 23 November 1989

A Treatise on Social Justice. Vol. I: Theories of Justice 
by Brian Barry.
Harvester, 428 pp., £30, May 1989, 0 7450 0641 8
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Innocence and Experience 
by Stuart Hampshire.
Allen Lane, 195 pp., £16.95, October 1989, 0 7139 9027 9
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... He is far too modest. Anyone who tries now actually to derive what could in any but a trivial and self-serving sense be called fair division from calculations of advantage will be very brave, or a knave, though a wizard if he succeeds. We also have the most powerful account yet, in a very high pile, of Rawls himself. But what of Barry’s own more positive ...
Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England 
by Stephen Greenblatt.
Oxford, 205 pp., £22.50, April 1988, 0 19 812980 7
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Representing the English Renaissance 
edited by Stephen Greenblatt.
California, 372 pp., $42, February 1988, 0 520 06129 2
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... are concerned with representation in a fairly strict sense of the term – representations of the self, of gender, of power, of England. Like Greenblatt, several contributors employ the strategy of the surprising juxtaposition, placing the work of Shakespeare, Spenser, Nashe and Jonson side by side with Elizabethan miniatures, the Wunderkammern of the late ...

Montale’s Eastbourne

Michael Hofmann, 23 May 1991

The Coastguard’s House 
by Eugenio Montale, translated by Jeremy Reed.
Bloodaxe, 223 pp., £7.95, December 1990, 1 85224 100 4
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... the Piranesi streets of old Leghorn. The sky was gentian, no tragedians consoled the binding self-truth of my age; I couldn’t even claim to be your father. The effort is so eerie it seems to me Montale must have a hand in it as well as the translator. It would be interesting to know whether Montale – who published late books called Diario del ’71 ...

Goodbye to the Comintern

Martin Kettle, 21 February 1991

About Turn. The Communist Party and the Outbreak of the Second World War: The Verbatim Record of the Central Committee Meetings 1939 
edited by Francis King and George Matthews.
Lawrence and Wishart, 318 pp., £34.95, November 1990, 9780853157267
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... men in the grip of a huge existential crisis. Pollitt is the most imposing, a tough fanatic of self-evident ability, confident of his views, struggling to reconcile his Englishness and his Bolshevism. ‘Please remember, Comrade Dutt,’ he says at one point, ‘you won’t intimidate me by that language. I was in this movement practically before you were ...

Fudging the news

J. Arch Getty, 9 May 1991

Stalin’s Apologist. Walter Duranty: The ‘New York Times’ Man in Moscow 
by S.J. Taylor.
Oxford, 404 pp., £15, August 1990, 0 19 505700 7
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... distinctly unreal ... His nose was large and prominent. His eyes ... added to the appearance of self-parody. With a slightly pathetic expression on his face ... he seemed a caricature of the man he once was. What puzzles Taylor is that so many women were willing to ‘leap into his bed’. Walter Duranty was a complex man, as the author clearly shows. What ...

Disturbingly Slender Waists

Miriam Rothschild, 25 October 1990

The Ants 
by Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson.
Springer, 732 pp., DM 198, March 1990, 3 540 52092 9
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... selection produce selfish genes that prescribe unselfishness? The examples of the workers’ self-denying behaviour, performed for the benefit of the colony, are mind-boggling: desert ants, which store the honeydew they collect in their crops, and which are specialised to serve as food storage receptacles (the repletes); foraging workers, in whom the ...