Captain Swing

Eric Hobsbawm, 24 November 1994

The Duke Ellington Reader 
edited by Mark Tucker.
Oxford, 536 pp., £19.95, February 1994, 0 19 505410 5
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Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America 
by David Stowe.
Harvard, 299 pp., £19.95, October 1994, 0 674 85825 5
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... on an idea or two between sets; although what most of them remembered – it was then virtually unknown – was the public encouragement of inter-racial sex. (Nevertheless, the tradition of apartheid was so strong that older musicians like Sidney Bechet forbade his sidemen to fraternise with white women even at Camp Unity, for fear that it might cost him ...

Pull the Other One

Ian Hacking, 26 January 1995

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life 
by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray.
Free Press, 845 pp., £25, November 1994, 0 02 914673 9
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... instrument to determine the position of an object such as a heavenly body. There was a real, true unknown value. If the measurements were unbiased, their average, or mean, would be that value, and the curve of error modelled the deviation around that real true value. 2. Biometric distributions. About fifty years later a Belgian astronomer, Quetelet, noted ...

Dat’s de Truth

Terence Hawkes, 26 January 1995

Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune: A Life of Scott Joplin 
by Susan Curtis.
Missouri, 265 pp., £26.95, July 1994, 0 8262 0949 1
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King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era 
by Edward Berlin.
Oxford, 334 pp., £19.99, September 1994, 0 19 508739 9
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... the Negro type,’ blustered another, adding that ‘with the latter, sexual restraint is almost unknown.’ The not unhappily named Karl Muck, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and one of a number of Germans imported to ensure that American musical life fulfilled its European destiny, felt moved to comment in almost urethral terms: ‘I think what ...

Castration

Lorna Scott Fox, 24 November 1994

Mea Cuba 
by G. Cabrera Infante, translated by Kenneth Hall.
Faber, 497 pp., £17.50, October 1994, 0 571 17255 5
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Before Night Falls 
by Reinaldo Arenas, translated by Dolores Koch.
Viking, 317 pp., £16, July 1994, 0 670 84078 5
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... gays and delinquents, Arenas denounced himself at a local police station where his name was unknown. He passed the Queer Walking Test, evaded the State Security net on the beach, nearly drowned – and was out. ‘Now I was in a plastic world, lacking all mystery, where loneliness was often much more invasive ... I knew I could not live in ...

The First Emperor

Jonathan Spence, 2 December 1993

Records of the Grand Historian: Qin Dynasty 
by Sima Qian, edited and translated by Burton Watson.
Columbia, 221 pp., $50, June 1993, 0 231 08166 9
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... its greatest challenge to the reader in its opening chapter, ‘The Basic Annals of Qin’: the unknown names come thick and fast, and the action is tersely described and often opaque in motivation to those without any background in Chinese history. But certain themes swiftly begin to emerge: the force of omens in the Qin rise, the skills with animals shown ...

Denatured

Rosemary Hill, 2 December 1993

Karl Friedrich Schinkel: ‘The English Journey’ 
edited by David Bindman and Gottfried Riemann, translated by F. Gagna Walls.
Yale, 220 pp., £35, July 1993, 0 300 04117 9
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The Modernist Garden in France 
by Dorothée Imbert.
Yale, 268 pp., £40, August 1993, 0 300 04716 9
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... glory of the nation state were both satisfied. He brought to his subject a moral seriousness quite unknown in England at the time. During his visit he nevertheless hoped to meet someone who occupied a professional position in London similar to his own in Berlin. One possible equivalent was John Nash, the royal architect: had they met, their interview would ...

Carved Cosmos

Tom Lowenstein, 5 August 1993

Amaravati: Buddhist Sculpture from the Great Stupa 
by Robert Knox.
British Museum, 247 pp., £40, November 1992, 0 7141 1452 9
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... starting around 300 BC. Whether Amaravati was intentionally destroyed or simply fell to pieces is unknown. The first record of it is in 1797, when Colonel Colin Mackenzie, later Surveyor-General of India, visited the site and describe ‘a great low mound, the upper part of which rose in a turreted shape to the height of twenty feet’, with a diameter at the ...

Don’t tread on me

Galen Strawson, 6 October 1994

Humiliation and Other Essays on Honour, Social Discomfort and Violence 
by William Ian Miller.
Cornell, 270 pp., £20.95, December 1993, 0 8014 2881 5
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... None of these statements seems true. As for 1. there are lives in which humiliation is a rare or unknown occurrence, and in which fear of humiliation is not a major consideration. As for 2. there are many areas of normal life where humiliation is not a serious threat, and some less normal areas where it is impossible. (It is impossible in the case of sexual ...

Do not disturb

Bernard Williams, 20 October 1994

The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Princeton, 558 pp., £22.50, June 1994, 0 691 03342 0
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... the fact that the Stoics, in particular, recognised unconscious operations of the mind that were unknown to earlier philosophy, we are surely bound to find the Epicureans too rationalistic, the Sceptics too procedurally self-obsessed, the Stoics (at least in their Roman incarnation) too unyieldingly pompous for us to take entirely seriously, not just their ...

At war

Iain McGilchrist, 25 January 1990

The Faber Book of Fevers and Frets 
edited by D.J. Enright.
Faber, 364 pp., £12.99, November 1989, 0 574 15095 1
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... Hell consigned to ruin, Whose friend was God, but God swore not to aid me! – and the, to me, unknown poem by Ivor Gurney, addressed to God, which he wrote in Barnwood Mental Hospital, as much as a portrayal of what used to be done to patients in the name of sanity as of the insanity itself: Why have you made life so intolerable And set me between four ...

The big drops start

John Bayley, 7 December 1989

Coleridge: Early Visions 
by Richard Holmes.
Hodder, 409 pp., £16.95, October 1989, 0 340 28335 1
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Wordsworth: Romantic Poetry and Revolution Politics 
by John Williams.
Manchester, 203 pp., £29.95, November 1989, 0 7190 3168 0
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Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays 
by Bradford Keyes Mudge.
Yale, 287 pp., £18.95, September 1989, 0 300 04443 7
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... steep Beyond the limits which my feet had trod, Was like a guide into eternity, At least to things unknown and without bound. That brings before us what roads once were, and are no longer: as so often with Wordsworth, the hiatus between past and present seems complete, the nature of lakes and mountains having changed more subtly but as completely as that of ...

Joke Book?

A.D. Nuttall, 23 November 1989

The Anatomy of Melancholy: Vol. I 
by Robert Burton, edited by Thomas Faulkner, Nicholas Kiessling and Rhonda Blair.
Oxford, 675 pp., £70, October 1989, 0 19 812448 1
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... devised by Burton himself shortly before his death, can be translated (I think): ‘Known to few, unknown to fewer, here lies Democritus Junior, to whom Melancholy gave life and death.’ The words are designedly of Delphic obscurity. They mean, we guess, that no one really knew Burton despite his fame, and that the black humour from which he made a ...

Reader, he married her

Christopher Hitchens, 10 May 1990

Tom Driberg: His Life and Indiscretions 
by Francis Wheen.
Chatto, 452 pp., £18, May 1990, 0 7011 3143 8
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... proletarian, and – though this condition might be varied when demand outpaced supply – unknown to Tom before the encounter. I still wish I had listened more attentively to the stories he told about those who, like him, yearned for anonymous sex and its corollary, which was, as he hurried to point out excitedly, dangerous sex. (Certainly, I wasn’t ...

Umbah-Umbah

Jerome McGann, 22 June 1989

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century 
by Greil Marcus.
Secker, 496 pp., £14.95, June 1989, 0 436 27338 1
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... absolutists for whom René Char’s question is a living demand: ‘how can we live without the unknown before us?’ The answer is ‘we’ cannot, and that impossibility contains an awful series of catastrophic microhistories – madnesses, suicides, ruined souls and ruined bodies for whom, in Guy Debord’s words, ‘oblivion is our ruling ...

With the wind in our shrouds

Mary Beard, 26 July 1990

The Making of ‘The Golden Bough’: The Origin and Growth of an Argument 
by Robert Fraser.
Macmillan, 240 pp., £35, July 1990, 0 333 49631 0
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... experience of every reader of The Golden Bough – embarking on a journey into a frightening and unknown world, then returning safely to familiar civilisation, but now with a heightened awareness of the taboos and constraints of their own culture. In The Great Taboo, The Golden Bough shows its true colours as a voyage of exploration. There were, of ...