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No Fol-de-Rols

Margaret Anne Doody: Men in suits, 14 November 2002

The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England 1550-1850 
by David Kuchta.
California, 299 pp., £29.95, May 2002, 0 520 21493 5
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... could be purchased more and more readily by more and more persons possessing money rather than class, the nobility could not uphold their image. Ceremonial and hierarchical display of gold brocade and velvet came to be seen as meretricious: the clothing of upstarts. ‘Luxury’ has always been a hot political issue; for Kuchta, the language of clothes is ...

Breeding

Frank Kermode, 21 July 1994

The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner 
edited by Claire Harman.
Chatto, 384 pp., £25, June 1994, 0 7011 3659 6
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Sylvia and David: The Townsend Warner/Garnett Letters 
Sinclair-Stevenson, 246 pp., £20, June 1994, 1 85619 341 1Show More
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... but Lolly Willowes, which got her off to such a good start, is about a downtrodden middle-class woman who escapes her male oppressors and becomes a witch. This reminds one of Keith Thomas’s observation that medieval women, if they wanted a hearing, had to become prophets (‘the best hope of gaining an ear for female utterances was to represent them ...

Only Sentences

Ray Monk, 31 October 1996

Wittgenstein’s Place in 20th-Century Analytic Philosophy 
by P.M.S. Hacker.
Blackwell, 368 pp., £50, October 1996, 0 631 20098 3
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Wittgenstein: Mind and Will, Vol. IV of an Analytical Commentary on the ‘Philosophical Investigations’ 
by P.M.S. Hacker.
Blackwell, 742 pp., £90, August 1996, 0 631 18739 1
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... in history as a perverse preoccupation with the mistakes of the past. History was for second-class minds; first-class minds could safely ignore it and get on with the job in hand. Such an attitude, however, could only survive so long as there existed a rough consensus as to what the job in hand was. In the Fifties, the ...

Gone to earth

John Barrell, 30 March 1989

Sporting Art in 18th-Century England: A Social and Political History 
by Stephen Deuchar.
Yale, 195 pp., £24.95, November 1988, 0 300 04116 0
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... The post-war saloon-bar modernisation programme began in the era of Macmillan and the Affluent Society. Like most such programmes in England, its main intention was to resist the modern: the character of a pub, or so the landlord would tirelessly reassure his regulars, was not going to be changed, just ‘brought out’, much as monosodium glutamate brings out the true flavour of food ...

Landlocked

Lorna Sage: Henry Green, 25 January 2001

Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green 
by Jeremy Treglown.
Faber, 340 pp., £25, September 2000, 0 571 16898 1
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... and unappreciated in the London literary world when he first tried to set up as a writer after the war. The truth, as it turns out, is that by the 1950s Green was in his way as much of an outsider as Dahl. His literary friends and fans, too, were un-English – the Americans Eudora Welty and Terry Southern (author of The Magic Christian and the famously dirty ...

Wild Hearts

Peter Wollen, 6 April 1995

Virginia Woolf 
by James King.
Hamish Hamilton, 699 pp., £25, September 1994, 0 241 13063 8
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... characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes. Williams also noted the importance of the Imperial bureaucracy in this ...

The Open Society and its Friends

Christopher Huhne, 25 October 1990

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe 
by Ralf Dahrendorf.
Chatto CounterBlast Special, 154 pp., £5.99, August 1990, 0 7011 3725 8
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... when considered historically. It traditionally refers to the ownership of capital by a restricted class of entrepreneurs. What does the capitalist Britain of the second railway boom, where the ownership of wealth was concentrated entirely in the hands of individuals, have in common with a modern Britain where, despite Mrs Thatcher’s best efforts at ...

Portrait of a Failure

Daniel Aaron, 25 January 1990

Henry Adams 
by Ernest Samuels.
Harvard, 504 pp., £19.95, November 1989, 9780674387355
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The Letters of Henry Adams: Vols I-VI 
edited by J.C Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee and Viola Hopkins-Winner.
Harvard, 2016 pp., £100.75, July 1990, 0 674 52685 6
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... commercial, ugly harbingers of an ugly future. He detected their handiwork in every war and panic, and studied them as barometers of social disintegration. Observing the Jews and the Moors in Spain gave him, he quipped, a more liberal view of the Inquisition. The presence of 450,000 Jews in New York City alone, ‘doing Kosher’, proved to him ...

Syme’s Revolution

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 24 January 1980

Roman Papers 
by Ronald Syme, edited by E. Badian.
Oxford, 878 pp., £35, November 1980, 0 19 814367 2
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... Romans ever did,’ writes Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘instead of trying to see how the Roman ruling class built the system of their own government to ensure order in the State and continuity to their own rule.’ Mommsen’s influence lasted long, particularly in England, where the ‘Whig’ approach to modern history had its counterpart in the study of ...

Retreat of the Male

Eric Hobsbawm: Revolution in the Family, 4 August 2005

Between Sex and Power: Family in the World 1900-2000 
by Göran Therborn.
Routledge, 379 pp., £24.99, February 2004, 0 415 30078 9
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... records 368 million items under the word ‘family’, as against a mere 170 million under ‘war’. All governments have tried to encourage or discourage procreation and passed laws about human coupling and decoupling. All the global religions (with the possible exception of Buddhism) and all the 20th-century ideologies have strong convictions on these ...

Defanged

Eric Foner: Deifying King, 5 October 2023

King: The Life of Martin Luther King 
by Jonathan Eig.
Simon & Schuster, 669 pp., £25, May, 978 1 4711 8100 9
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... rural Georgia and through hard work and self-discipline managed to join Atlanta’s Black middle class. The elder King established strong connections with the city’s white power brokers – so strong, in fact, that even while speaking out against racism he urged parishioners, including the ten-year-old Martin, dressed as a slave, to take part in a gala ...

It’s Our Turn

Rory Scothorne: Where the North Begins, 4 August 2022

The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country 
by Tom Hazeldine.
Verso, 290 pp., £11.99, September 2021, 978 1 78663 409 2
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... is why the North fell so much further than was necessary. In the aftermath of the First World War, the economies of the South-East and the North were ‘roughly on level pegging’, contributing 35 and 30 per cent of GDP respectively; by the end of the 20th century, the figures were 40 and 21 per cent, with London gaining another 5 percentage points ...

Born to Lying

Theo Tait: Le Carré, 3 December 2015

John le Carré: The Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Bloomsbury, 652 pp., £25, October 2015, 978 1 4088 2792 5
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... in property, but he also ran for Parliament in order to avoid being called up during the war, which he spent as a spiv, selling chocolate, benzedrine, nylon stockings and ballpoint pens on the black market. Eventually, he was briefly and ingloriously conscripted. Afterwards, he styled himself Colonel Cornwell, but would pretend to be embarrassed by ...

Get a Real Degree

Elif Batuman, 23 September 2010

The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing 
by Mark McGurl.
Harvard, 480 pp., £25.95, April 2009, 978 0 674 03319 1
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... Pynchon), ‘high cultural pluralism’ (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by aesthetic sub-tendencies such as maximalism and minimalism. Despite his professed indifference to the pro-con ...

No Crying in This House

Jackson Lears: The Kennedy Myth, 7 November 2013

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy 
by David Nasaw.
Allen Lane, 896 pp., £12.35, September 2013, 978 0 14 312407 8
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Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch 
by Barbara Perry.
Norton, 404 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 393 06895 5
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... enterprise, whose life often seems little more than an endless round of state dinners and high-class shopping. In the end, Perry does as well as any biographer can with a woman who kept her inner life sealed off from scrutiny. Indeed her preoccupation with surfaces may have been her deepest trait. Joe and Rose Kennedy led separate lives: he pursued ...

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