At least they paid their taxes

Linda Colley, 25 July 1991

Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorised Biography 
by Kitty Kelley.
Bantam, 532 pp., £16.99, April 1991, 0 593 02450 8
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... is that a biography showing that Nancy Reagan isn’t a very nice woman is besides the point. She may have been and probably was a bad mother to her children. She may have indulged in lesbian practices at Smith, and been an expert at oral sex in Hollywood. Perhaps she did have a long-running affair with Frank ...

Hazlitteering

John Bayley, 22 March 1990

Hazlitt: A Life. From Winterslow to Frith Street 
by Stanley Jones.
Oxford, 397 pp., £35, October 1989, 0 19 812840 1
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Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730-1830 
by Jonathan Bate.
Oxford, 234 pp., £27, September 1989, 0 19 811749 3
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... won, making Shakespeare into ‘a true Englishman’ and ‘a sturdy John Bull’, and Bate may well be right in speculating that Wordsworth had at the back of his mind these sorts of class parody – reflecting Henry Crawford’s complacent comment in Mansfield Park – when he deplored the notion of a self-satisfied ‘taste’ for poetry, as if for ...

Touchez-pas à mon de Gaulle

Douglas Johnson, 19 February 1987

De Gaulle. Vol III: Le Souverain 
by Jean Lacouture.
Seuil, 870 pp., frs 145, August 1984, 2 02 006969 5
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... and discouragement more often than is generally thought. One such occasion occurred in May 1962. General Salan, one of the leaders of the unsuccessful putsch in Algiers the previous year and now the leader of the Organisation Armée Secrète which was trying to foment civil war, had been arrested and put on trial for his life. His lawyers turned ...

Heart of Darkness

Christopher Hitchens, 28 June 1990

Not Many Dead: Journal of a Year in Fleet Street 
by Nicholas Garland.
Hutchinson, 299 pp., £16.95, April 1990, 0 09 174449 0
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A Slight Case of Libel: Meacher v. Trelford and Others 
by Alan Watkins.
Duckworth, 241 pp., £14.95, June 1990, 0 7156 2334 6
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... reads this, or as he would probably prefer to say, if he has this ‘drawn to his attention’, he may care to know that more than one of the guests gave me separate but identical accounts of his conduct at this soirée. He evidently has a knack of inspiring affection and loyalty in his friends.) Now, I am merely a lone scribe living on my depleted wits. Do I ...

Christopher Hitchens states a prosecution case

Christopher Hitchens, 25 October 1990

Crossman: The Pursuit of Power 
by Anthony Howard.
Cape, 361 pp., £15.95, October 1990, 0 224 02592 9
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... the nickname itself derives from schooldays at Winchester rather than from Labour politics, and it may well be true that Crossman bore the title all his life. Still, I’m quite clear that he earned it afresh, as it were. There’s an old Claud Cockburn doggerel that goes (from my memory): Here lies the body of Dick Double-Crossman, Classical don with ...

Vomiting in the marital bed

Carolyn Steedman, 8 November 1990

Road to Divorce, England 1530-1987 
by Lawrence Stone.
Oxford, 460 pp., £19.99, October 1990, 0 19 822651 9
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Late Victorian Britain, 1875-1901 
by J.F.C. Harrison.
Fontana, 265 pp., £5.99, September 1990, 9780006861300
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... woman can become pregnant from a sexual encounter, but a man cannot.’ The men in Road to Divorce may be presented through the filter of modern notions like these: but it seems to me that as far as the women go, Stone has bought an entirely contemporary version of events and feelings. The women in this book are creatures of late 18th and early 19th-century ...

The Strangeness of Socrates

T.H. Irwin, 21 November 1991

Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher 
by Gregory Vlastos.
Cambridge, 334 pp., £35, April 1991, 0 521 30733 3
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... into exile to avoid execution. Some readers rightly admire Socrates’s moral convictions; others may find them pointlessly rigid; everyone ought to find them puzzling. It is even more puzzling that he claims to have found a rational defence of his convictions through the sorts of cross-examination that we find in Plato’s dialogues. Socrates conducts ...

Smocks

Rosemary Hill, 5 December 1991

Gertrude Jekyll 
by Sally Festing.
Viking, 323 pp., £17.99, October 1991, 0 670 82788 6
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People’s Parks 
by Hazel Conway.
Cambridge, 287 pp., £49.50, August 1991, 0 521 39070 2
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The History of Garden Design: The Western Tradition from the Renaissance to the Present Day 
edited by Monique Mosser and Georges Teyssot.
Thames and Hudson, 543 pp., £45, May 1991, 0 500 01511 2
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... garden of ideas sets off on a long decline towards the floral clock – which the digital watch may eventually render obscure in its turn. But though the editors comment regretfully on the increasing alienation of modern life, the contemporary parks that they include, Disneyland and the spectacular switchback at Valencia, are indications that although we ...

Down with Ceausescu! Long live Iliescu!

Owen Bennett-Jones, 12 July 1990

... the miners’ union leaders throughout their stay in Bucharest. Whatever else the Ceausescu regime may have been responsible for, it did not resort to open violence on this scale. Using the miners to suppress the opposition was a tactic original to the new regime and had fascistic elements. The miners’ racism became evident when they made a particular target ...

Strangers

John Lanchester, 11 July 1991

Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon 
edited by Stephen Egger.
Praeger, 250 pp., £33.50, October 1990, 0 275 92986 8
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Serial Killers 
by Joel Norris.
Arrow, 333 pp., £4.99, July 1990, 0 09 971750 6
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Life after Life 
by Tony Parker.
Pan, 256 pp., £4.50, May 1991, 0 330 31528 5
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American Psycho 
by Bret Easton Ellis.
Picador, 399 pp., £6.99, April 1991, 0 330 31992 2
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Dirty Weekend 
by Helen Zahavi.
Macmillan, 185 pp., £13.99, April 1991, 0 333 54723 3
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Silence of the Lambs 
by Thomas Harris.
Mandarin, 366 pp., £4.99, April 1991, 0 7493 0942 3
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... myself plagues them with the mystery of why and how a living person can actually do things which may be only those dark images and acts secretly within them. I believe they can identify with these ‘dark images and acts’ and loathe anything which reminds them of this dark side of themselves. The usual reaction is a flood of popular self-righteous ...

’Oly, ’Oly, ’Oly

D.A.N. Jones, 20 December 1990

From Early Life 
by William Cooper.
Macmillan, 180 pp., £13.95, August 1990, 0 333 52367 9
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Son of Adam 
by Denis Forman.
Deutsch, 201 pp., £12.99, September 1990, 9780233985930
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A Welsh Childhood 
by Alice Thomas Ellis and Patrick Sutherland.
Joseph, 186 pp., £15.99, September 1990, 0 7181 3292 0
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Alarms and Excursions: Thirty Years in Israel 
by Naomi Shepherd.
Collins, 220 pp., £16, August 1990, 0 00 215333 5
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Birds of Ill Omen 
by Marie Seurat, translated by Dorothy Blair.
Quartet, 168 pp., £10.95, September 1990, 0 7043 2694 9
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... where the author is so hard on his characters that the reader wants to leap to their defence: it may embarrass male readers, making them uneasy about their own fatherhood and sonship. Nevertheless, despite the grimness, Sir Denis often refreshes the imagination with enlivening accounts of what was, to all seeming, a happy and enviable boyhood. The book is ...

Among the Bobcats

Mark Ford, 23 May 1991

The Dylan Companion 
edited by Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman.
Macmillan, 338 pp., £10.99, April 1991, 0 333 49826 7
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Bob Dylan: Performing Artist. Vol. I: 1960-73 
by Paul Williams.
Xanadu, 310 pp., £14.99, February 1991, 1 85480 044 2
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Dylan: Behind the Shades 
by Clinton Heylin.
Viking, 528 pp., £16.99, May 1991, 0 670 83602 8
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The Bootleg Series: Vols I-III (rare and unreleased) 1961-1991 
by Bob Dylan.
Columbia, £24.95, April 1991
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... May the 24th is Bob Dylan’s 50th birthday. To anyone involved with Dylan in the mid-Sixties, say during his medicine-fuelled blaze with the Band through Australia and Europe in 1966, the fact that he is not only alive but still performing twenty-five years later must in itself seem utterly extraordinary. One of the key aspects of the Dylan myth during those roller-coaster years was that he wouldn’t be around much longer ...
Ablaze: The Story of Chernobyl 
by Piers Paul Read.
Secker, 478 pp., £16.99, May 1993, 0 436 40963 1
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... had been run through, is more or less true. Some five hundred scientists gathered in Vienna in May 1991 to say that the genetic abnormalities which had occurred since Chernobyl were not statistically higher than they would have been, had there been no accident, and that the incidence of cancers was relatively low. They were simply not believed, nor are ...

Thick Description

Nicholas Spice, 24 June 1993

The Heather Blazing 
by Colm Tóibín.
Picador, 245 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 330 32124 2
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... is style, there is inevitably density, Dichtung. There’s no end to the ways in which reality may be thought about and, therefore, written about, written about and, therefore, thought about. The repertoire of possible styles is infinite. Density can be achieved in a simple sentence as well as in an elaborate one. So a fairer comparison for the sentences ...

Exporting the Royals

Robert Tombs, 7 October 1993

Maximilian and Juárez 
by Jasper Ridley.
Constable, 353 pp., £16.95, March 1993, 0 09 472070 3
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Maximilian’s Lieutenant: A Personal History of the Mexican Campaign, 1864-7 
by Ernst Pitner, translated and edited by Gordon Etherington-Smith.
Tauris, 256 pp., £35, October 1993, 9781850435600
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... as in so many of his barrack-room card games, he ended up with misère: Querétaro fell on 15 May 1867. Maximilian tried ineffectually to escape and then surrendered. He and his two leading Mexican generals were court-martialled and sentenced to be shot. European and American intercession failed to win a reprieve: feelings in the liberal camp ran too ...