Diary

Paul Muldoon: Hiberno-English Shenanigans, 1 July 1999

... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...

The Great Scots Education Hoax

Rosalind Mitchison, 18 October 1984

The Companion to Gaelic Scotland 
edited by Derick Thomson.
Blackwell, 363 pp., £25, December 1983, 0 631 12502 7
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Experience and Enlightenment: Socialisation for Cultural Changes in 18th-Century Scotland 
by Charles Camic.
Edinburgh, 301 pp., £20, January 1984, 0 85224 483 5
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Knee Deep in Claret: A Celebration of Wine and Scotland 
by Billy Kay and Cailean Maclean.
Mainstream, 232 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 906391 45 8
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Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland: Schools and Universities 
by R.D. Anderson.
Oxford, 384 pp., £25, July 1983, 0 19 822696 9
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Scotland: The Real Divide 
edited by Gordon Brown and Robin Cook.
Mainstream, 251 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 906391 18 0
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Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment 
edited by Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff.
Cambridge, 371 pp., £35, November 1983, 0 521 23397 6
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... or the counterweight Protestant myth in Northern Ireland in which William III for ever rides a white horse. The interest of the Scottish sample of such beliefs lies in the fact that Scottish myths are not an expression of either successful or of frustrated nationalism. They mostly involve Scots holding with immense pride, but little input of ...

Double Bind

Julian Barnes, 3 June 1982

The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857 
by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Chicago, 627 pp., £17.50, January 1982, 0 226 73509 5
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Sartre and Flaubert 
by Hazel Barnes.
Chicago, 449 pp., £17.50, January 1982, 0 226 03720 7
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... had shared at a station buffet on their honeymoon half a century earlier: ‘He took all the white and left me the green.’ A way of life rich in matured rancour. Sartre also records how his paternal grandfather, a country doctor, discovered on the day after his wedding that his wife’s family – supposedly rich Périgord landowners – were in fact ...

My Americas

Donald Davie, 3 September 1981

... of the sacredness which the Tewa people saw in, for instance, sunrise, yet when Ortiz told his white American audience that if they wanted to be saved they would have to go to the Indian, Carne-Ross rightly rebelled, because ‘the pieties Ortiz held up to us could come across only as picturesquely technicolored Native Customs,’ and because ‘an ...

Newtopia

Christopher Hitchens, 24 August 1995

To Renew America 
by Newt Gingrich.
HarperCollins, 260 pp., £18, July 1995, 9780060173364
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... than many sentimental retrospectives allow. But now it is the Republican Party which shelters the white supremacists and religious bigots. Gingrich didn’t really hate the Sixties. But for tactical reasons, he needs the people who did. Much of this book is taken up with a restatement of the Contract with America on which the GOP took both Houses in ...

Peroxide Mug-Shot

Marina Warner: Women who kill children, 1 January 1998

... as an accolade in itself. The picture’s viewing conditions, with two guards on either side and a white line demarcating the area in front of it, like the scene of a crime, have served ostensibly to forestall further assaults, but they also incriminate in perpetuum the figure of Myra, as the picture is familiarly titled. Hindley may want to present herself as ...

Which Face?

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Emigrés on the Make, 6 February 2020

Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia 
by Benjamin Tromly.
Oxford, 329 pp., £75, September 2019, 978 0 19 884040 4
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The Dissidents: A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 1960-90 
by Peter Reddaway.
Brookings, 337 pp., £25.50, February, 978 0 8157 3773 5
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... wave’ of Russian emigration. But others, including the organisations of monarchists, White Army veterans and ‘Solidarists’, had their roots in the first-wave emigration that had left Russia after the Revolution. First-wave émigrés – more comfortably settled than the DPs into an anti-communist stance, and, above all, savvy veterans of the ...

Paper or Plastic?

John Sutherland: Richard Powers, 10 August 2000

Gain 
by Richard Powers.
Heinemann, 355 pp., £15.99, March 2000, 0 434 00862 1
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... scientist and a troupe of cosmopolitan nerds start work together on their tabula rasa, an empty white room – a ‘fantasy sandbox’. Beginning with CAD ‘crayons’ they build up, first to a virtual re-creation of Henri Rousseau’s jungle, then to Van Gogh’s room in Arles, and finally – this is their VR masterpiece – Yeats’s ...

Balloons and Counter-Balloons

Susan Eilenberg: ‘The Age of Wonder’, 7 January 2010

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science 
by Richard Holmes.
HarperPress, 380 pp., £9.99, September 2009, 978 0 00 714953 7
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... and balloons; in Thomas Beddoes, the doctor, and his Pneumatic Institute, and his wife, Anna; in Michael Faraday, the physicist; in Charles Babbage, the mathematician and inventor of the difference engine; in Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron; in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein’s monster’s creator; in everyone’s connections and ...

The Doctrine of Unripe Time

Ferdinand Mount: The Fifties, 16 November 2006

Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties 
by Peter Hennessy.
Allen Lane, 740 pp., £30, October 2006, 0 7139 9571 8
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... Comets. We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy dedicates his book. Their increasingly grumpy pronouncements on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’ pepper the pages of Having It So Good. Of the new milk bars, for example, Hoggart ...

Watching Dragons Mate

Patricia Lockwood: Edna O’Brien’s ‘Girl’, 5 December 2019

Girl 
by Edna O’Brien.
Faber, 230 pp., £16.99, September 2019, 978 0 571 34116 0
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... memoir, Mother Ireland, published in 1976. This is a marvellous mix of Bowen’s Court, The White Goddess, and one of those travel books that’s narrated entirely from the back of a cab, because the writer is suffering from a bygone illness that requires them to have a blanket over their legs. It describes O’Brien’s 1940s upbringing in County Clare ...

Dangerous Misprints

M.F. Perutz, 26 September 1991

Genome 
by Jerry Bishop and Michael Waldholz.
Touchstone, 352 pp., £8.99, September 1991, 0 671 74032 6
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... a few times, or from the membrane surrounding an eight-week-old embryo, or it might be an adult white blood cell. The information derived from such a genetic screen may bear on a person’s future health, life-expectancy and mental stability. Science has presented us with these far-reaching new possibilities before their implications have been thought ...

Bringing Down Chunks of the Ceiling

Andy Beckett: Manchester, England: The Story of the Pop Cult City by Dave Haslam, 17 February 2000

Manchester, England: The Story of the Pop Cult City 
by Dave Haslam.
Fourth Estate, 319 pp., £12.99, September 1999, 1 84115 145 9
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... background as you reach for a shelf of cashmere sweaters, or see your food approaching on a big white plate. In Manchester these days, such pretend utopias are part of the landscape. Moderately prosperous people, and those who would like to be, can spend wet Saturdays as if they were in Milan or Madrid, consuming and coffee-sipping and practising their ...

Suffering Souls

Marina Warner: Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 18 June 1998

Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society 
by Jean-Claude Schmitt, translated by Theresa Lavender Fagan.
Chicago, 290 pp., £26.50, May 1998, 0 226 73887 6
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... through the little girl; the bishop sent a questionnaire, to which William, prompted by Saint Michael who had appeared in support, gave full replies – about death, the afterlife and the structure of heaven and hell. He uses the word ‘purgatory’ – an early instance of the noun – and clarifies the condition of the bodies of the dead: they are but ...

Diary

Clive James, 20 May 1982

... With all of the appropriate delights Top-level cricket is reserved for whites. You must be white to wear the proper cap And have a drink while you watch Boycott bat And during lunch go down and meet the chap And slap him on the back and have a chat And go back up and take a little nap And finally he’s run out and that’s that. Yes, that was ...