Fear of Drying

Richard Eyre, 4 September 1986

Stage Fright: Its Role in Acting 
by Stephen Aaron.
Chicago, 156 pp., £13.95, July 1986, 0 226 00018 4Show More
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“... home and meet the world.’ But to rehearse a good play with a company of good actors (and that means intelligent, witty, energetic and entertaining people) is to experience the rare phenomenon of being part of a successful social group sharing common aims, mutual respect and pleasure in each other’s company. It is a paradigm, rarely achieved outside ...”

Must we pay for Sanskrit?

Michael Wood, 15 December 2011

“... about. But it was no fun losing all of the battles, and I am still trying to work out what it means that we should so thoroughly have lost all of them. What can we do about it? Let me put the matter as starkly as I can. If we can’t speak the language of our enemies, not only will they not listen to us – they might not listen to us anyway – but they ...”

Short Cuts

Paul Myerscough: The Pret Buzz, 3 January 2013

“... be news to mothers, nurses and prostitutes, but the massive swelling of the service economy means that emotional availability can no longer be dismissed as women’s work; it must be seen as a dominant commodity form under late capitalism. And it has to be real. ‘The authenticity of being happy is important,’ a Pret manager tells the ...”

At the Movies

Michael Wood: The gangster movie, 13 December 2007

American Gangster 
directed by Ridley Scott.
November 2007Show More
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“... from 70 years because he named the policemen he had been paying off. We know what ‘true story’ means in such instances: the basic facts are given but they are coloured and tilted by the rules of genre and the star system, which is to say by a shift into the realm of glamour and romance. But Scott wants to have it both ways, to give us both grim facts and ...”

Who’s on the Ropes Now?

Ross McKibbin: A Bad Week for Gordon Brown, 1 November 2007

“... only a couple of weeks ago and giving entirely good reasons why Gordon Brown was on top and David Cameron on the ropes now look faintly embarrassing. But at the beginning of October Brown was on top and no one can be faulted for failing to see his impending humiliation. Nor could they have predicted that the abandonment of a premature general election ...”

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Let the Right One In’, 14 May 2009

Let the Right One In 
directed by Tomas Alfredson.
November 2008Show More
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“... tempted to pick up on this suggestion because it recalls one of the greatest of all horror movies, David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), where so-called anger therapy results not only in a welcome release of psychic aggression but in teams of little people smashing in the heads of the people the patient doesn’t like. The real interest of Let the Right One ...”

Plastigoop

Stephanie Burt: Lucia Perillo, 17 November 2016

Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones: Selected and New Poems 
by Lucia Perillo.
Copper Canyon, 239 pp., $23, February 2016, 978 1 55659 473 1Show More
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“... personal essays, not far from the work of the so-called ‘ultra-talk’ poets (Albert Goldbarth, David Kirby) whose chatty, digressive work filled many magazines in the 1990s. Perillo told me at a recent reading that her favourite contemporary poet was C.K. Williams, whose famously long-lined, sometimes violent poems were as committed as she is to ...”

At the British Museum

Francis Gooding: Picasso’s Prints, 20 March 2025

“... Histoire naturelle rubs up against vitriolic anti-Franco cartoons; Cranach the Elder’s David and Bathsheba is subject to a fierce analytic glare. Throughout, Picasso’s lovers, friends and forebears drift in and out (Vollard, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, Jacqueline Roque, Manet, Rembrandt), taking one role then another in an endless play of ...”

What’s fair about that?

Adam Swift: Social Mobilities, 23 January 2020

Social Mobility and Its Enemies 
by Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin.
Pelican, 272 pp., £8.99, September 2018, 978 0 241 31702 0Show More
Social Mobility and Education in Britain 
by Erzsébet Bukodi and John Goldthorpe.
Cambridge, 249 pp., £19.99, December 2018, 978 1 108 46821 3Show More
The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged 
by Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison.
Policy, 224 pp., £9.99, January, 978 1 4473 3610 5Show More
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“... progressing across a desert. But that’s confusing: higher levels of social mobility may be a means to faster growth, but mobility and prosperity are best kept distinct.There are deeper disagreements over how to understand and measure the ‘social positions’ that people are – or aren’t – moving between. All mobility research is interested in the ...”

China’s Crisis

Mark Elvin, 5 November 1992

The Dragon’s Brood: Conversations with Young Chinese 
by David Rice.
HarperCollins, 294 pp., £16.99, April 1992, 0 246 13809 2Show More
Time for telling truth is running out 
by Vera Schwarcz.
Yale, 256 pp., £20, April 1992, 0 300 05009 7Show More
The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China’s Crisis 
by W.F.J. Jenner.
Allen Lane, 255 pp., £18.99, March 1992, 0 7139 9060 0Show More
Beyond the Chinese Face: Insights from Psychology 
by Michael Harris Bond.
Oxford, 125 pp., £8.95, February 1992, 0 19 585116 1Show More
Chinese Communism 
by Dick Wilson and Matthew Grenier.
Paladin, 190 pp., £5.99, May 1992, 9780586090244Show More
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“... of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese history, and ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... is being demanded is national, social and political self-determination: in concrete terms this means a humanistic social democracy. Even if fear results in a Unionist majority, all are agreed that things will never be the same again. And if Scotland wins, perhaps the tired lull of English politics will also be disrupted. Tariq Ali As I debate​ what to ...”

Period Pain

Patricia Beer, 9 June 1994

Aristocrats 
by Stella Tillyard.
Chatto, 462 pp., £20, April 1994, 0 7011 5933 2Show More
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“... of course highly topical. The publication of Aristocrats has more or less coincided with that of David Cannadine’s Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain, which follows some of the themes of his earlier book, Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. Tillyard’s modishly-titled contribution is an enormous account of four ...”

Action and Suffering

Marilyn Butler, 16 April 1981

Ideas and the Novel 
by Mary McCarthy.
Weidenfeld, 121 pp., £4.95, February 1981, 9780297778967Show More
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“... attorneys and Parisian attorneys and how that affects the jailing of a man for debt.’ By such means, the illusion that a world has been invented by the novelist is kept subordinate to the illusion that the real world is being mirrored by him. When the artist quietly demotes art in this way, he insinuates that life matters more than books. He makes the ...”

Celtic Revisionism

Patrick Parrinder, 24 July 1986

A Short History of Irish Literature 
by Seamus Deane.
Hutchinson, 282 pp., £15, March 1986, 0 09 161360 4Show More
The Peoples of Ireland 
by Liam de Paor.
Hutchinson, 344 pp., £15, April 1986, 9780091561406Show More
Portrait of Ireland 
by Liam de Paor.
Rainbow, 192 pp., £13.95, May 1986, 1 85120 004 5Show More
The Complete Dramatic Works 
by Samuel Beckett.
Faber, 476 pp., £12.50, April 1986, 0 571 13821 7Show More
The Beckett Country: An Exhibition for Samuel Beckett’s 80th Birthday 
by Eoin O’Brien and James Knowlson.
Black Cat, 97 pp., £5, May 1986, 0 948050 03 9Show More
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“... It is ironic that Deane misses Montague’s Wordsworthian reverence for the dolmens, which by no means belong to a ‘dead’ landscape (whatever that might be), and ironic too that he expresses his distaste for these monuments of Irish prehistory by means of a metaphor derived from ancient Greek mythology. Above all, what ...”

Humanitarian Juggernaut

Alex de Waal, 22 June 1995

War and Law since 1945 
by Geoffrey Best.
Oxford, 434 pp., £25, October 1994, 0 19 821991 1Show More
Mercy under Fire: War and the Global Humanitarian Community 
by Larry Minear and Thomas Weiss.
Westview, 247 pp., £44.50, July 1995, 0 8133 2567 6Show More
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“... of enforcement has further swivelled the concerns of IHL – ‘protection’ is ensured not by means of discreet diplomacy, but with troops and tanks. UN Security Council Resolutions 770 on former Yugoslavia and 794 on Somalia (both adopted in 1992) pioneered a new doctrine: the physical protection of the humanitarians. This was the prime mandate given to ...”
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