My Millbank

Seumas Milne, 18 April 1996

The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? 
by Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle.
Faber, 274 pp., £7.99, February 1996, 0 571 17818 9
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... that the Hartlepool Mephistopheles is riding for a fall – have by contrast largely treated the self-proclaimed ‘inside account of New Labour’s plans’ with contempt. ‘We’ve been reading passages out to each other in the corridors,’ one Labour MP says gleefully. ‘It is a work of utter risibility. Mandelson wanted to be the new Anthony Crosland ...

Half a Million Feathers

Peter Campbell, 4 April 1996

Oceanic Art 
by Nicholas Thomas.
Thames and Hudson, 216 pp., £6.95, May 1995, 0 500 20281 8
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... artists who have taken the internationalist shilling, Thomas has illustrations which suggest more self-confident exchanges. There is one of Kaipel Ka standing beside a shield he has made – ‘used in contemporary fighting in the Papua New Guinea Highlands’, according to the caption. It is decorated with the logo of ‘South Pacific Export Lager’. Kaipel ...

The Verity of Verity

Marilyn Butler, 1 August 1996

Essays in Appreciation 
by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 363 pp., £25, March 1996, 0 19 818344 5
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... is characterised by its degree of elaboration, concentration, completeness, abstraction, self-consciousness, explicitness, regression, recession and technicality.’ Or he hits the note of hurt pride: ‘It is a short step from the risky handy proposition that to think at all is to theorise, to the oppositely risky handy one that only theorists think ...

Cool It

Jenny Diski, 18 July 1996

I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination 
by Francis Spufford.
Faber, 356 pp., £15.99, June 1996, 9780571144877
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... and the English Imagination’) that the mythic status of Captain Oates’s fruitless self-sacrifice is the direct result of the accretion of meaning around the idea of the snowy wastes. To the cultural historian, just to call Oates’s walk into the snow ‘fruitless’ is to declare oneself a member of the postwar generation. Until the Fifties ...

‘Famous for its Sausages’

David Blackbourn, 2 January 1997

The Politics of the Unpolitical: German Writers and the Problem of Power, 1770-1871 
by Gordon A. Craig.
Oxford, 190 pp., £22.50, July 1995, 0 19 509499 9
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... for a kind of political writing that was (to use Craig’s own terms) modish, shrill, noisy and self-important. Eight of these essays are concerned with the contemporary careers of Craig’s chosen writers, whether public servants or members of the oppositional awkward squad. The odd ones out are reception studies, on Hölderlin and Heine. They are among ...

Cheesespreadology

Ian Sansom, 7 March 1996

Garbage 
by A.R. Ammons.
Norton, 121 pp., £7.50, February 1995, 0 393 31203 8
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Tape for the Turn of the Year 
by A.R. Ammons.
Norton, 205 pp., £8.95, February 1995, 0 393 31204 6
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Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow 
by August Kleinzahler.
Faber, 93 pp., £6.99, April 1995, 0 571 17431 0
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The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs 
by Charles Simic.
Michigan, 127 pp., £30, January 1996, 0 472 06569 6
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Frightening Toys 
by Charles Simic.
Faber, 101 pp., £6.99, April 1995, 0 571 17399 3
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The Ghost of Eden 
by Chase Twichell.
Faber, 78 pp., £6.99, April 1995, 0 571 17434 5
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... of American poets brought together and brought over to England by Faber, in what is clearly and self-consciously a re-establishing of what Faber is calling its ‘American Connection’. The American poets – Simic, August Kleinzahler, and Chase Twichell – have all been done out in plain white-cover paperbacks, with modish modern art miniatures on the ...

Me First

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 March 1996

Peter York’s Eighties 
by Peter York and Charles Jennings.
BBC, 192 pp., £12.99, January 1996, 0 563 37191 9
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... By 1990, I was onto something new, and the world of before was a little behind me. I had all the self-absorption that was common, and I settled on a plan (in a very Eighties way, I guess) to make my way towards a point at some distance from my childhood. And for all the Eighties were in some ways terrible in my eyes, for all they looked like a decade that ...

Bardic

Richard Wollheim, 22 June 1995

Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society 
by Meyer Schapiro.
Braziller, 253 pp., £19.95, October 1994, 0 8076 1356 8
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... dignity. In his warmth and spontaneity the artist is a model of the natural, productive, self-fulfilling man. Feeling and thought are equally active in him and joined to a truly social nature. Through this freedom and full individuality he serves others, including a future mankind That is not the staple teaching of art history, but it is the belief ...

The Great NBA Disaster

John Sutherland, 19 October 1995

... century, it may take some uncomfortable decades before the book trade rediscovers the virtues of self-restraint and the internal strength to reimpose it. What follows in the short term? Bad things, but different bad things depending on which countries you look at. In Australia, which abolished its NBA twenty years ago, the consequences seem to have been ...

Mao’s Pleasure

Leslie Wilson, 5 October 1995

The Private Life of Chairman Mao 
by Li Zhisui, translated by Tai Hung-Chao.
Chatto, 682 pp., £20, November 1994, 0 7011 4018 6
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... was never made to suffer for China’s misfortunes. After the Great Leap Forward, he did make a self-criticism of sorts; ‘For all errors directly or indirectly attributable to the central authority, I am responsible.’ But then he immediately added: ‘Many others also have a share in the responsibility.’ Whereupon Vice-Chairman Lin Biao ...

Maggiefication

Peter Clarke, 6 July 1995

The Path to Power 
by Margaret Thatcher.
HarperCollins, 656 pp., £24, June 1995, 0 00 255050 4
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... work, pride and independence have – miraculously but inspiringly – survived among ordinary self-respecting people despite half a century of liberal condescension. The fact is that Margaret Roberts left Grantham a long time ago. A place at Somerville College, Oxford was the means of making good her escape in 1943. As a woman she could not join the Union ...

Above the Consulting-Room

John Sturrock, 26 March 1992

Le Séminaire, Vol VIII 
by Jacques Lacan.
Seuil, 464 pp., frs 190, March 1991, 2 02 012502 1
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Le Séminaire, Vol XVII 
by Jacques Lacan.
Seuil, 251 pp., frs 140, March 1991, 2 02 013044 0
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Lacan 
by Malcolm Bowie.
Fontana, 256 pp., £5.99, February 1991, 0 00 686076 1
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Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis 
by Samuel Weber.
Cambridge, 184 pp., £30, November 1991, 0 521 37410 3
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... of Lacan all along the line: he takes exception, for one thing, to Lacan’s ‘gloating, self-righteous “not-I-but-the-signifier” refrain’, which he likens to ‘the language of fundamentalism’ in seeming to impose a ‘supra-human authority’ on us as poor Speaking Subjects; and he seconds some of the arguments used by feminists against ...

Lady Thatcher’s Bastards

Iain Sinclair, 27 February 1992

Class War: A Decade of Disorder 
edited by Ian Bone, Alan Pullen and Tim Scargill.
Verso, 113 pp., £7.95, November 1991, 0 86091 558 1
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... some nominated other. The challenge for the authors of Class War: A Decade of Disorder, as self-appointed bailiffs of a vanishing tribe, is to publish something more meaningful than a cover version of the rancid tabloids they so obviously model themselves upon. It is perhaps worth making it clear that Class War came into being as a loose federation of ...

A Diagram of Power in the Arab World

Michael Gilsenan, 2 October 1997

Master and Disciple: The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism 
by Abdellah Hammoudi.
Chicago, 195 pp., £30.50, September 1997, 0 226 31527 4
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... migration and unemployment on patriarchy, family and gender.) The ascetic disciplines of self-abnegation in the Orders are open only to men. Their severity characterises the inversions which anthropologists have noted in rites of separation and passage into another state. It also characterises a specifically male set of trials. Moreover, such ...

Monsieur Apollo

John Sturrock, 13 November 1997

Victor Hugo 
by Graham Robb.
Picador, 682 pp., £20, October 1997, 0 330 33707 6
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... and study than Hugo’s numbing spontaneity. Hugo has come down to us as the dubious paragon of self-assertion, at home, where he had it easy, but just as much in politics or in literature, as a writer whose pen too readily outran his great intelligence. Too much, however, can be made of this arrogance, as if the satirical purchase that it provides were the ...