Here is a little family

Amit Chaudhuri, 9 July 1992

After Silence 
by Jonathan Carroll.
Macdonald, 240 pp., £14.99, June 1992, 0 356 20342 5Show More
The Law of White Space 
by Giorgio Pressburger.
Granta, 172 pp., £12.99, March 1992, 0 14 014221 5Show More
Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree 
by Tariq Ali.
Chatto, 240 pp., £14.99, May 1992, 0 7011 3944 7Show More
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“... nitty-gritty of finding out, through marriage, what marriage is about, and what raising a child means. Here is a little family, already magically complete, and only in need of a man. The charm and potential eeriness of this situation could not have been possible fifty years ago: for then there were too few divorces, and when they occurred, they ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

Who shall we blame it on?

Yitzhak Laor: Lament for the Israeli Left, 20 February 2003

“... parties that offer only military solutions? No, the average reader would reply, yet here normality means indifference and indifference is a shield through which information does not penetrate. Thousands of Israelis have participated in the Occupation, thousands have done their bit to implement the Oslo Accords, have measured out their checkpoint ...”

What was it that drove him?

David Runciman: Gordon Brown, 4 January 2018

My Life, Our Times 
by Gordon Brown.
Bodley Head, 512 pp., £25, November 2017, 978 1 84792 497 1Show More
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“... Given how busy he was, it would have taken some special prescience to think of this as his means of winning over the public, especially since many of them had little idea of what Twitter was even when he left office three years later. ‘During my time as an MP,’ he writes, ‘I never mastered the capacity to leave a good impression or sculpt my ...”

Neutered Valentines

David Bromwich: James Agee, 7 September 2006

‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, ‘A Death in the Family’, Shorter Fiction 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 818 pp., $35, October 2005, 1 931082 81 2Show More
Film Writing and Selected Journalism 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 748 pp., $40, October 2005, 1 931082 82 0Show More
Brooklyn Is 
by James Agee.
Fordham, 64 pp., $16.95, October 2005, 0 8232 2492 9Show More
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“... existence or dream, perceived anywhere remotely toward its true dimension.’ How then, given the means and possibilities of his assignment, does he hope to convey a truth of life in its physical and spiritual dimensions? The method is sometimes ostensive, close to a recitation of a catechism, simply asking, for example, ‘how it can be that a stone, a ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

A Bit of Ginger

Theo Tait: Gordon Burn, 5 June 2008

Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel 
by Gordon Burn.
Faber, 214 pp., £15.99, April 2008, 978 0 571 19729 3Show More
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“... famous doesn’t just mean ‘enduring the bizarre projections of others’, Cogan explains, it means constantly being besieged by their ‘shivering, shaking bodies hanging around waiting to put themselves next to mine out in the dark every night’, being ‘terrorised by the instant access that being well known seemed to give me to the ...”

What to Tell the Axe-Man

Jeremy Waldron: Hypocrisy and Mendacity, 6 January 2011

Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond 
by David Runciman.
Princeton, 272 pp., £13.95, September 2010, 978 0 691 14815 1Show More
Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics 
by Martin Jay.
Virginia, 241 pp., $24.95, April 2010, 978 0 8139 2972 9Show More
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“... the mendacity or hypocrisy of a public man who says one thing and privately does another. In 2007, David Runciman devoted his Carlyle Lectures at Oxford to the subject of hypocrisy – not hypocrisy in general, but hypocrisy in politics. It is a wonderful topic. Everyone knows that politics is partly a matter of ritual and ceremony, deception and ...”

Clairvoyant, Rich and Lucky

Chloë Daniel: Berlin 1904-2014, 30 November 2017

Hannah’s Dress: Berlin 1904-2014 
by Pascale Hugues, translated by C. Jon Delogu and Nick Somers.
Polity, 250 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 5095 0981 2Show More
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“... got married. They met at the soup kitchen. His name is Günther Cohn. He’s a Polish Jew. That means that Susanne goes from the German waiting list to the Polish waiting list, and the latter is interminably long.’ News of Susanne’s deportation was sent by a friend who followed the car that took her to the train station. Years later, Hannah went to an ...”

Boots the Bishop

Barbara Newman: Albert the Magnificent, 1 December 2022

Albertus Magnus and the World of Nature 
by Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell.
Reaktion, 272 pp., £16.95, August 2022, 978 1 78914 513 7Show More
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“... it inspired a rich store of legends about his astonishing feats of magic. As the medievalist David Collins asked, is it Magnus or Magus, Albert the Great or Albert the Magician? Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell, who have long toiled on the Albertian corpus, provide a lively, accessible introduction to his life and thought. Albert joined the Dominican ...”

Bye-bye Firefly

Edmund Gordon: Carnival of the Insects, 12 May 2022

The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World 
by Oliver Milman.
Atlantic, 260 pp., £16.99, January 2022, 978 1 83895 117 7Show More
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse 
by Dave Goulson.
Vintage, 328 pp., £9.99, May 2022, 978 1 5291 1442 3Show More
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“... Dalí’s skulking grasshoppers and swarming ants, Frida Kahlo’s grizzled caterpillars, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and David Cronenberg’s The Fly.Goulson finds our aversion to insects mysterious. He has a point: outside malarial zones, the danger they pose to human health is limited. People living in the Global ...”
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