Four Poems

Donald Davie, 21 March 1985

... shall recuperate the Malvinas, les Malouines, into renewed restiveness and the wasps of doubt, of self-doubt, of resolution, of intelligences swarm? ‘a culture of regressive repetitions ... ’ Brave men and a gallant ship, her namesake also sank in World War Two by bomber aircraft. Carried aboard were large mediaeval nails from the bombed cathedral, formed ...

Skiving

P.N. Furbank, 1 April 1982

You, You and You: The People Out of Step with World War Two 
by Pete Grafton.
Pluto, 169 pp., £2.95, February 1982, 9780861043606
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... suspicious of books produced by the tape-recorder, for they offer endless scope for deception and self-deception. It is perfectly possible for such a book to be saying nothing whatever for long stretches, and no one, not even the compiler, will have noticed. Or it can be saying something important which, again, the compiler never intended and is not aware ...

England’s Troubles

Frank Kermode, 17 October 1996

The Scent of Dried Roses 
by Tim Lott.
Viking, 275 pp., £16, September 1996, 0 670 86460 9
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... He is convinced that their descent into the meaningless reflects that of England, ‘confused, self-hating England’, where the plague of depression is ‘spreading like a virulent, dimly understood virus’. Consequently, he attends closely to the condition of the country in his mother’s youth and his own. He nominates 1956, the year of his own ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: Pasolini’s ‘Teorema’, 2 April 2020

... but do not form a coherent picture. Paolo, as we have seen, gives his factory away; Pietro is the self-hating painter we have looked at; Odetta becomes catatonic and is carted away to hospital; Lucia starts picking up and sleeping with young men who look a little like the visitor; and, most interestingly, Emilia returns to her native village and speaks to no ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Breathless’, 22 July 2010

Breathless 
directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
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... would take as a compliment, a sign that he was living up to his sense of his properly disreputable self. At the end of the film, as Belmondo lies dying on the street – the law has caught up with him, Seberg has given him away – he says: ‘C’est vraiment dégueulasse.’ He means disgusting in the sense of shitty, a raw deal, a mess, but what is he ...

Short Cuts

James Meek: Fan-Owned Politics, 1 June 2017

... internet in general, promise to fill in the gaps between society’s three cardinal points: the self (individual, spectator, voter), the masses (population, audience, electorate) and power (party, spectacle, government). The promise is partly kept. Individuals can and do form flash commonwealths of mutual interest. For me, it was merely reassuring to ...

At the Whitechapel

Peter Campbell: ‘Faces in the Crowd: Picturing Modern Life from Manet to Today’, 6 January 2005

... In both cases the faces seem to look inward – painfully (in the case of Kollwitz) or in stolid self-defence (in the case of Evans). Kollwitz insists that you feel; Evans presents faces which don’t offer the connections with a painterly tradition of facial expression that more formal or overtly poetic photographs would. Although less obviously so than ...

Kindness rules

Gavin Millar, 8 January 1987

A Life in Movies 
by Michael Powell.
Heinemann, 705 pp., £15.95, October 1986, 9780434599455
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All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema 
edited by Charles Barr.
BFI, 446 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 85170 179 5
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... Powell’s claims for the act of writing it. They are pitched with characteristic fervour and self-confidence: There are a few other men who know from their own experience as much about the film business as I do, but, as far as I know, most of them can’t, or won’t, put it down. It needs to be written ... I didn’t intend to write another ...

Who did you say was dumb?

Mary Midgley, 5 February 1987

Adam’s Task: Calling animals by name 
by Vicki Hearne.
Heinemann, 274 pp., £10.95, February 1987, 0 434 31421 8
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... habit of mind.) ... In order to hide, it was carefully explained, one had to have a concept of self. Not only that, one had to have the concept of self given by the ability to speak academic language, or at least a standard human language – a concept of self that depends on the ...

Designing criminal policy

David Garland, 10 October 1991

Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830-1914 
by Martin Wiener.
Cambridge, 391 pp., £30, February 1991, 9780521350457
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... it could well have served as a collective title for the historiography of the post-war period. The self-confidence and sense of achievement which sustained this reformist vision disappeared during the Seventies. Rising crime rates suggested the ineffectiveness of police and prisons; critics of the treatment approach pointed to the invasive and discriminatory ...

Who ruins Britain?

Peter Clarke, 22 November 1990

Friends in High Places: Who runs Britain? 
by Jeremy Paxman.
Joseph, 370 pp., £16.99, September 1990, 0 7181 3154 1
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The Sunday Times Book of the Rich 
by Philip Beresford.
Weidenfeld, 336 pp., £18.95, October 1990, 0 297 81115 0
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... editors conclude, ‘the balance in the top 200 is an almost equal one between establishment and self-made money: 102 Old Rich play 98 New Rich.’ But it is well to remember that the Old Rich team, as one would expect, has a more stable composition, being recruited through heredity, historically consolidated, above all, in land. Just over a quarter of the ...

Buttoned

Michael Ignatieff, 20 December 1990

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years 
by Brian Boyd.
Chatto, 607 pp., £20, November 1990, 0 7011 3700 2
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... irrelevant. It merely takes us back to the Nabokovian premise that fiction is not an exercise in self-disclosure, but in imagining yourself to be other than what you are. Moreover, is a Life necessary where the artist himself has left behind a masterpiece of autobiography? Anyone who has read Speak, Memory comes to Nabokov’s fiction with an absolutely ...

Out of the house

Dinah Birch, 30 August 1990

The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800 
by Janet Todd.
Virago, 328 pp., £12.99, April 1989, 0 86068 576 4
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Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian Britain 
by Mary Poovey.
Virago, 282 pp., £12.99, February 1989, 1 85381 035 5
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The Woman Question. Society and Literature In Britain and America, 1837-1883: Vols I-III 
edited by Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets and William Veeder.
Chicago, 146 pp., £7.95, February 1989, 0 226 32666 7
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Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood 
by Cynthia Eagle Russett.
Harvard, 245 pp., £15.95, June 1989, 9780674802902
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... private over the public as such critics do may be interpreted as a feminist gesture. But it’s a self-limiting challenge, for their language often chooses to exclude the wider community, operating in terms of jokes and quarrels shared within a closely-knit intellectual family. The repressive fathers are simply shut out, excluded by language. Feminist ...

Making things happen

Ross McKibbin, 26 July 1990

Heroes and Villains: Selected Essays 
by R.W. Johnson.
Harvester, 347 pp., £25, July 1990, 9780745007359
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... their strategies were demonstrably wrong and often absurd – and also, in the case of the GLC, self-serving. It went on to conclude that the Labour Party could never win an election under Mr Kinnock because he is ‘quite irretrievably’ just a ‘student union politician’. He is also ‘vacuous, verbose and comprehensively not up to it. The notion of ...

The Court

Richard Eyre, 23 September 1993

The Long Distance Runner 
by Tony Richardson.
Faber, 277 pp., £17.50, September 1993, 0 571 16852 3
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... the career, and to be unsanctimoniously unembarrassed about being serious – in short, he taught self-respect. With this he combined an approach that demanded that the text came first, and that the director and designer served it with clarity, lucidity, realism and grace. Lindsay Anderson cites the Periclean ideal as the model for Devine’s aesthetic: ‘We ...