Bad John

Alan Bennett: John Osborne, 3 December 1981

A Better Class of Person 
by John Osborne.
Faber, 285 pp., £7.95, November 1981, 0 571 11785 6
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“... from?’ then I imagine it is his father who would take the credit. His father was born on 8 May 1900. And it was on 8 May 1956 that Look back in anger opened at the Royal Court. Osborne notes that it is the one unforgettable feast in his calendar. I generally assume that childhoods more or less ended with the First ...”

Jean-Paul

Alan Hollinghurst, 19 November 1981

Gemini 
by Michel Tournier, translated by Anne Carter.
Collins, 452 pp., £8.95, September 1981, 0 00 221448 2
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The Death of Men 
by Allan Massie.
Bodley Head, 249 pp., £6.50, October 1981, 0 370 30339 3
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Tar Baby 
by Toni Morrison.
Chatto, 309 pp., £6.95, October 1981, 0 7011 2596 9
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“... in his immobility he contemplates life as if it were a miniature Zen garden in which only the eyes may walk. Like Cain and Romulus founding cities after their fratricides, Paul’s eventual achievement of singleness is accompanied by the sublimation of his physical self into a new state of identification with the natural world, with the meteors ...”

Leonardo’s Shortcomings

Charles Hope, 18 March 1982

Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man 
by Martin Kemp.
Dent, 384 pp., £14.95, August 1981, 0 460 04354 4
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“... frequently recorded that he had begun a new book on some topic, but in practice any scheme that he may have had which involved arranging his thoughts in a coherent way was always abandoned after a few pages. It is no accident that the most carefully organised body of his statements on any subject, the so-called Treatise on Painting, preserved in a manuscript ...”

Diary

Clive James, 20 May 1982

“... gets its wires uncrossed. Sighs of relief are heaved but somewhat louder The first bombs fall. It may or may not suit you, But those who are about to die salute ...”

London Review of Crooks

Robert Marshall-Andrews, 15 July 1982

Rough Justice: The Extraordinary Truth about Charles Richardson and his Gang 
by Robert Parker.
Fontana, 352 pp., £1.95, October 1981, 0 00 636354 7
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Web of Corruption: The Story of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith 
by Raymond Fitzwalter and David Taylor.
Granada, 282 pp., £12.50, October 1981, 0 246 10915 7
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Inside Boss: South Africa’s Secret Police 
by Gordon Winter.
Penguin, 640 pp., £7.95, October 1981, 9780140057515
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Crime in Wartime: A Social History of Crime in World War II 
by Edward Smithies.
Allen and Unwin, 219 pp., £12.50, January 1982, 0 04 364020 6
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“... These operations were restored to topicality after Charles Richardson’s escape from prison in May 1980 and his subsequent letter to the Times. The first question which needs to be asked is whether such books should be written at all. And if they are written, should any serious notice be taken of them? The existence of violent, sadistic and resourceful ...”

Riches to riches

John Brooks, 20 November 1986

Bend’Or, Duke of Westminster: A Personal Memoir 
by George Ridley.
Robin Clark, 213 pp., £9.95, November 1985, 0 86072 096 9
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Getty: The Richest Man in the World 
by Robert Lenzner.
Hutchinson, 283 pp., £9.95, November 1985, 0 09 162840 7
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“... to reward or punish those he still had traffic with. It seems from Mr Lenzner’s book that he may have nursed a certain resentment about having so much money, because there was no way he could prevent his family from eventually getting some of it. He found at least a partial solution: in his will he left all his Getty Oil shares, the bulk of his ...”

Whapper

Norman Page, 8 January 1987

Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton 
by Flora Fraser.
Weidenfeld, 410 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 297 78895 7
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Loving Emma 
by Nigel Foxell.
Harvester, 201 pp., £8.95, March 1986, 0 7108 1056 3
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“... Social prejudice and literary convention conspire, however, to make it difficult, try as one may, to take seriously someone who writes like one of Dickens’s or Smollett’s grotesques. There is abundant evidence, too, that she spoke as she wrote: one aristocratic lady noted that Emma’s pronunciation was ‘very vulgar’; an earl more charitably ...”

State Theatre

Peter Burke, 22 January 1987

The Rome of Alexander VII: 1655-1667 
by Richard Krautheimer.
Princeton, 199 pp., £16.80, November 1985, 9780691040325
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Firearms and Fortifications: Military Architecture and Siege Warfare in 16th-century Siena 
by Simon Pepper and Nicholas Adams.
Chicago, 245 pp., £21.25, October 1986, 0 226 65534 2
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“... literary and artistic – Krautheimer’s judgment that he was ‘decidedly no intellectual’ may err on the side of severity. Like his ancestor Agostino Chigi, who had employed Raphael and Baldassare Peruzzi to decorate his villa, Alexander was a great patron of the arts. He does not seem to have cared very much for painting, but he loved ...”

It ain’t him, babe

Danny Karlin, 5 February 1987

No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan 
by Robert Shelton.
New English Library, 573 pp., £14.95, October 1986, 0 450 04843 8
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“... phrase fatally unaware of what the word ‘intriguing’ might imply), readers of this book, too, may need reassurance. I have little to give them as far as Shelton’s own opinions, style or narrative ability are concerned. They are, respectively, uninteresting, impoverished and nil. Shelton sees himself as an investigative insider, neither fully privileged ...”

The Elstree Story

John Gau, 7 August 1986

The Last Days of the Beeb 
by Michael Leapman.
Allen and Unwin, 229 pp., £12.95, June 1986, 0 04 791043 7
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“... introducing commercial television to break the BBC’s monopoly. And look what happened. Reports may get pigeonholed, but they have a tendency to set the agenda for years to come. Thanks to Peacock, what was once scarcely worth consideration is now an option. His book is an entertaining account, mainly of the boardroom battles which have gone on in the BBC ...”
“... Section IV (ii) (d) of this Act it had already been provided that no matter of public interest may be published unless first issued to a duly-accredited lobby correspondent (or registered serf) on the authority of the Office of the Auditors of Official Leaks. Had this provision been enforced, then the Court would not have been troubled by the case now ...”

Almighty Gould

Roy Porter, 23 April 1987

Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time 
by Stephen Jay Gould.
Harvard, 219 pp., £15.50, May 1987, 0 674 89198 8
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“... calls his own Earth-history vision ‘punctuated equilibrium’). Single metaphors may blinker the mind no less than single vision. To borrow a phrase Darwin used about his Origin of Species, Gould’s book is one sustained argument, exhilarating, illuminating, challenging. Avoiding the crass Whiggish habit of awarding points for ...”

One’s Thousand One Nightinesses

Steven Connor: ‘The Arabian Nights’, 22 March 2012

Stranger Magic 
by Marina Warner.
Chatto, 540 pp., £28, November 2011, 978 0 7011 7331 9
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“... this is a further chapter in Warner’s unfolding of the power – the magical power as it may be – of the magical imagination. Occasionally, her efforts to extol the ‘torrential energies of the irrational’ seem about to lead her into a reflex anti-rationalism, as when she describes the way in which The Arabian Nights taught Goethe ‘how to give ...”

Wizard Contrivances

Jon Day: Will Self, 27 September 2012

Umbrella 
by Will Self.
Bloomsbury, 397 pp., £18.99, August 2012, 978 1 4088 2014 8
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“... perambulations around the changing city. He worked on the buses: ‘Over there, madam, you may espy a Thornycroft ’bus,’ he says. ‘Yonder, by the portico of the Apollo, that there is the Fischer ’bus.’ Audrey works in an umbrella factory and falls in love with an ineffectual radical called Gilbert, under whose influence she becomes a ...”

Never Mind the Bollocks

Hilary Rose and Steven Rose: Brains and Gender, 28 April 2011

Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences 
by Rebecca Jordan-Young.
Harvard, 394 pp., £25.95, September 2010, 978 0 674 05730 2
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“... the logic might work the other way round: that’s to say, the experiences of everyday life may influence our brain structures or activities. It has been found that the posterior part of the hippocampus of black-cab drivers is enlarged by comparison with a control group (though one London cabbie told us he didn’t believe a word of it as he’d been a ...”