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Diary

Christopher Hitchens: Keywords, 13 September 1990

... resolve is in prospect, the figure of Hitler is as difficult to exclude as the head of King Charles. The drawback in the analogy is that, from a Hitler, it is impossible to demand much less than his complete destruction or unconditional surrender. Still, other keywords such as ‘expansion’ and ‘poison gas’ do keep on creeping in. Partly as a ...

Their Way

Jose Harris: On the Origin of Altruism, 12 March 2009

The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain 
by Thomas Dixon.
British Academy, 420 pp., £60, May 2008, 978 0 19 726426 3
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... the natural scientist John Tyndall, and many social scientists and social reformers such as Charles Booth and Beatrice Potter (later Webb). Moreover, many who could not accept the whole package of Comtean positivism still tacitly or explicitly acknowledged its intellectual inspiration. Both Darwin and Herbert Spencer, for example, appear to have worked ...

Did Lady Brewster faint?

Eric Korn, 24 April 1997

Huxley: Evolution’s High Priest 
by Adrian Desmond.
Joseph, 372 pp., £20, March 1997, 0 7181 3882 1
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... Sister Bill had failed.) Victorian families (like all families) were a reliable source of tragedy (Charles and Emma’s adored Annie, three-year-old Noel Huxley, gone with no secure promise of extra reunion); but Huxley’s kindred provided an extra element of disreputable uproar. His father was a maths teacher in a small and failing public school: it ...

Enlarging Insularity

Patrick McGuinness: Donald Davie, 20 January 2000

With the Grain: Essays on Thomas Hardy and Modern British Poetry 
by Donald Davie.
Carcanet, 346 pp., £14.95, October 1998, 1 85754 394 7
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... a number of essays, directly or obliquely related, spanning almost forty years: on Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.M. Synge, David Jones, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Daryush and the fraternity of poets anthologised by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville in A Various Art. It also includes a number of ...

Burnished and braced

Alethea Hayter, 12 July 1990

A Second Self: The Letters of Harriet Granville 1810-1845 
edited by Virginia Surtees.
Michael Russell, 320 pp., £14.95, April 1990, 0 85955 165 2
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... not only of the famous. She brings alive for the reader a host of lesser characters: the cuckolded Charles Bagot, ‘pink, erect in native dignity, and, I hope, not valuing her’ – his wife – ‘a pinch of snuff’; old Lady Carlisle in a portrait ‘attitudinising with vases’; the hunting-mad Duke of Beaufort and the ‘brisk intelligent alacrity with ...

Carnival of Self-Harm

Tom Crewe: Good Riddance to the Tories, 20 June 2024

Haywire: A Political History of Britain since 2000 
by Andrew Hindmoor.
Allen Lane, 628 pp., £35, June, 978 0 241 65171 1
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No Way Out: Brexit from the Backstop to Boris 
by Tim Shipman.
William Collins, 698 pp., £26, April, 978 0 00 830894 0
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The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life 
by Theresa May.
Headline, 368 pp., £12.99, May, 978 1 0354 0991 4
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The Conservative Party after Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation 
by Tim Bale.
Polity, 368 pp., £25, March 2023, 978 1 5095 4601 5
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Johnson at 10: The Inside Story 
by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell.
Atlantic, 640 pp., £12.99, April, 978 1 83895 804 6
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The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson 
by Nadine Dorries.
HarperCollins, 336 pp., £25, November 2023, 978 0 00 862342 5
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Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within 
by Rory Stewart.
Vintage, 454 pp., £10.99, June, 978 1 5299 2286 8
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Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room 
by Liz Truss.
Biteback, 311 pp., £20, April, 978 1 78590 857 6
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Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party 
by Samuel Earle.
Simon & Schuster, 294 pp., £10.99, February, 978 1 3985 1853 7
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... Dacre, long-time editor of the Mail, appointed as head of the media regulator, Ofcom; and to have Charles Moore, former editor of the Telegraph and the Spectator (and still a columnist), appointed as chair of the BBC. In the end, he had to make do with putting them both in the Lords (Moore is happily ensconced; but ...

On Octavio Paz and Marie-José Tramini

Homero Aridjis, translated by Chloe Aridjis, 21 November 2019

... by poets – Giuseppe Ungaretti, Allen Ginsberg, Ingeborg Bachmann, Rafael Alberti, John Berryman, Charles Tomlinson, Stephen Spender – we felt en famille. Paz and I and our wives drove to Assisi to see Giotto’s frescos, wandered about the Chiostro dei Morti, and climbed to the Eremo delle Carceri, home to Saint Francis’s stone bed. ‘The only Western ...

Unmuscular Legs

E.S. Turner, 22 August 1996

The Dictionary of National Biography 1986-1990 
edited by C.S. Nicholls.
Oxford, 607 pp., £50, June 1996, 0 19 865212 7
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... in spite of the authoritative nature of their church.’ The second longest entry is on Henry Moore, that £1 million-a-year taxpayer whose sculpture was (and perhaps still is) prominently displayed in fifty cities and two hundred museums. Wisely, he retrained from philosophising and left the interpretation of his work to others. He was ‘the maker ...

With Slip and Slapdash

Frank Kermode: Auden’s Prose, 7 February 2008

The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. Vol. III: Prose, 1949-55 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 779 pp., £29.95, December 2007, 978 0 691 13326 3
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... Pauline epigraph: ‘I had not known sin, but by the law.’ He always had gurus – Gerald Heard, Charles Williams, Georg Groddeck, Homer Lane. Some quietly faded away, but with a few he enjoyed an enduring sympathy: Forster and Virginia Woolf, for instance, and Eliot, with the respect due to the publisher of his first book of poems, but staying well short of ...

Todd Almighty

Peter Medawar, 16 February 1984

A Time to Remember: The Autobiography of a Chemist 
by Alexander Todd.
Cambridge, 257 pp., £15, November 1983, 0 521 25593 7
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... the German model of our own. I believe the only two others who have won this double are Henry Moore and Sir Ronald Syme. Nothing could be more interesting than to learn such a man’s views on unilateral nuclear disarmament, the Greenham Common women, the exhaustion of fossil fuels and the fitness of women for Holy Orders, but Todd had no intention of ...

Heavy Lifting

John Palattella: John Ashbery, 7 June 2001

Other Traditions 
by John Ashbery.
Harvard, 168 pp., £15.50, October 2000, 0 674 00315 2
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John Ashbery and American Poetry 
by David Herd.
Manchester, 245 pp., £45, September 2000, 0 7190 5597 0
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... receptive to both, but immune to the enervating forces of each. Other Traditions, a series of Charles Eliot Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1989-90, is the poet’s most recent answer to the conundrum, and suggests that it is possible for an individual to consort with a tradition without becoming locked in an oedipal struggle or a fatal ...

To Serve My Friends

Jonathan Parry, 27 January 2022

Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and Its Empire, 1600-1850 
by Mark Knights.
Oxford, 488 pp., £35, December 2021, 978 0 19 879624 4
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... for ‘Treasury control’ over other departments’ spending. No one was keener on this than Charles Trevelyan, its chief civil servant from 1840 to 1859, who had made his reputation in India, aged 22, with a campaign against East India Company officials who took gifts.Yet it was impossible to root out all vested interests – not least because there ...

Getting on

Paul Addison, 9 October 1986

On Living in an Old Country 
by Patrick Wright.
Verso, 262 pp., £5.95, September 1985, 0 86091 833 5
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Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England. Vol. II: Assaults 
by Maurice Cowling.
Cambridge, 375 pp., £30, November 1985, 0 521 25959 2
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... modernity of contemporary England and the apostasy of its people from the Anglican faith of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Given the chance, he would restore in modern dress the divine right of kings and the doctrinal authority of a state church preaching supernatural Christianity. Wright and Cowling have much in common in their alienation from society ...

Ayer, Anscombe and Empiricism

Alasdair MacIntyre, 17 April 1980

Perception and Identity: Essays presented to A.J. Ayer with his replies to them 
edited by G.E. MacDonald.
Macmillan, 358 pp., £15, December 1979, 0 333 27182 3
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Intention and Intentionality: Essays in Honour of G.E.M. Anscombe 
edited by Cora Diamond and Jenny Teichmann.
Harvester, 205 pp., £16.95, December 1979, 0 85527 985 0
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... he shared with the native analytical school of philosophers who had learnt their methods from G.E. Moore – Susan Stebbing and John Wisdom, for example – saw himself as above all in debt to and an adherent of the views and arguments of the Vienna Circle. But, in retrospect, what is remarkable is the extent to which he had already domesticated Austrian ...

Pound & Co.

August Kleinzahler: Davenport and Kenner, 26 September 2019

Questioning Minds: Vols I-II: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner 
edited by Edward Burns.
Counterpoint, 1817 pp., $95, October 2018, 978 1 61902 181 5
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... of Buster Keaton, W.B. Yeats, Abraham Cowley, a ‘Franco-Cantabrian Muralist’, Andy Warhol and Charles Babbage, among others. Davenport published his first book of short fiction (or ‘assemblages’ as he called it), Tatlin! Six Stories, as well as translations of the fragments of Archilochos (the first work by Davenport I encountered and was gripped ...

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