Mending the curtains

Rosalind Mitchison, 24 January 1991

Naomi Mitchison: A Biography 
by Jill Benton.
Pandora, 192 pp., £15.95, September 1990, 0 04 440460 3
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... generosity: it includes power, security, company. Who can say where and with what force jealousy may strike? The politics of the Left were those of people in a hurry who believed that a victory at the polls would mean a transformation of society. Under a Labour or a Communist government old vices would disappear. The most impatient, like Naomi’s brother ...

La Perestroika

Harold Perkin, 24 January 1991

The Second Socialist Revolution: An Alternative Soviet Strategy 
by Tatyana Zaslavskaya, translated by Susan Davies.
Tauris, 241 pp., £19.95, February 1990, 1 85043 151 5
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... bad name, and if Eastern Europe is a role model, the Russian people and the fragmenting republics may reject it altogether. On the other hand, I found, on my last visit in June, that many Russians were already fed up with perestroika and wanted only to find food in the shops. Many more said that things were better under Brezhnev. A radical deputy of the ...

Music as Message

Asa Briggs, 23 May 1991

The World of the Oratorio 
by Kurt Pahlen.
Scolar, 357 pp., £27.50, February 1991, 0 85967 866 0
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The Making of the Victorian Organ 
by Nicholas Thistlethwaite.
Cambridge, 584 pp., £50, December 1990, 0 521 34345 3
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... orchestra), impart their message without using scenery, require none of the trappings of theatre, may be either of a secular or sacred nature, and possess a certain level of intellectual and musical development.’ Leaving on one side vagueness – and the last phrase is very vague, like many other phrases in the book – there are other difficulties in this ...

Skullscape

Jonathan Coe, 12 July 1990

Hopeful Monsters 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Secker, 551 pp., £14.95, June 1990, 0 436 28854 0
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... learning which Mosley outlined in one of his essays. The third level, he claimed, ‘is that which may be necessary for survival ... It is the chance for a man to see not just the patterns of his behaviour but also the patterns of his ability to see – and by this, not just to be free of patterns, but possibly to influence them.’ Hopeful Monsters finds the ...

One for the road

Ian Hamilton, 21 March 1991

Memoirs 
by Kingsley Amis.
Hutchinson, 346 pp., £16.99, March 1991, 0 09 174533 0
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... verse’). Larkin is named as Amis’s second-favourite poet (Housman is tops, though he may not have stayed tops, we suspect, if Amis had ever sat next to him at Trinity High Table), and as his ‘best friend’. Mysteriously, though, the pair of them seem rarely to have met: in thirty years, Larkin never invited Amis up to Hull – not even to look ...

Diary

Giles Gordon: Experimental Sideshows, 7 October 1993

... be reluctant to agree with the Reverend Sterne that ‘writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is), is but a different name for conversation’ – but much of the reason we relish the new novelists in English is that their experiences are not often our experiences, their way with our language not our way with their language. I’d ...

Being there

Ian Hamilton, 7 October 1993

Up at Oxford 
by Ved Mehta.
Murray, 432 pp., £17.99, September 1993, 0 7195 5287 7
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... Oxford’s spell, or under the spell of an Oxford he never quite managed to locate. The young Ved may have been a trifle gauche and smarmy but the old Mehta is quite proud of him. We hear of the boy’s lively debating skills, his conscientiousness, his charm, and we are left in no doubt that, after a somewhat shaky start, he was eventually moving in the ...

After Smith

Ross McKibbin, 9 June 1994

... ground: he seems neither likely to win an election nor to be an adventurous prime minister. This may be a misreading of him. He clearly has not been helped by having to propound the quasi-Treasury view that John Smith imposed on him. This is bad luck – but his recent attempts to recover lost ground have not been convincing. Margaret Beckett, though she has ...

No More Feudalism

Rosemary Horrox, 23 February 1995

Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted 
by Susan Reynolds.
Oxford, 544 pp., £20, August 1994, 0 19 820458 2
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... but enforcing, their new, ‘feudal’ rights over the lands of their leading subjects. Lawyers may have a weakness for tidying away messy realities, but they cannot generally create an intellectual model out of nothing, or force its adoption if it is too far out of step with contemporary norms. Reynolds meets the first point by arguing that the theory of ...

Tears in the Café Select

Christopher Prendergast, 9 March 1995

Paris Interzone: Richard Wright, Lolita, Boris Vian and Others on the Left Bank 1946-1960 
by James Campbell.
Secker, 305 pp., £20, September 1994, 0 436 20106 2
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Foreign Correspondent: Paris in the Sixties 
by Peter Lennon.
Picador, 220 pp., £16.99, April 1994, 0 330 31911 6
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The Good Ship Venus: The Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press 
by John de St Jorre.
Hutchinson, 332 pp., £20, September 1994, 0 09 177874 3
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... more carnivalesque mood) in connection with ’68, whose beginnings he describes: not in May but in February, with the demonstration over Malraux’s sacking of Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinémathèque. (‘The battles with riot police were spiced with the saucy presence of Marlene Dietrich.’) However congenial and informative these two ...

Sometimes a Cigar Is More Than a Cigar

David Nokes, 26 January 1995

The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 
edited by Lynn Hunt.
Zone, 411 pp., £24.25, August 1993, 9780942299687
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... the intriguingly subversive suggestion that the formidable Catholic dévote, Madame de Maintenon, may have had a hand in composing L’Ecole des filles. Pornography knows no party-line, and is as much the preserve of aristocratic libertines as of zealous anti-court satirists. What are we to make of all those Restoration tributes to Charles II’s saucy ...

Diary

Mike Marqusee: On the Indian Plague of 1994, 8 December 1994

... flooded earlier in the summer, littering Surat with decaying garbage and animal carcases, which may have nurtured bacillus-carrying fleas. The local street-cleaners’ union demanded extra staff and new equipment to deal with the mess, but the municipal government refused to comply. In mid-September, a mysterious ‘Surat fever’ started to claim lives in ...

Machu Man

Jonathan Coe, 2 December 1993

Tintin in the New World 
by Frederic Tuten.
Marion Boyars, 239 pp., £14.95, October 1993, 0 7145 2978 8
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... and joined the rest of your kind, and in doing so have come closer to knowing me, beneath you as I may seem to be in my doggy ways.’ Tintin, for his part, apologises to his companion ‘for having been so unkind and arch with you in the past when you have swayed from duty or from even your normal stroll beside me to bound away after some lady dog’. After ...

Situations Vacant

Dinah Birch, 20 October 1994

The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below 
by Bruce Robbins.
Duke, 261 pp., £13.95, June 1993, 0 8223 1397 9
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... secret will be talked over by those men at their club in the public house tonight The admirers may be faithful, but these servants will not be. They know too much. Does the reader identify with the common pragmatism of servants, or with the more exalted ambitions of the characters they serve and observe? Robbins suggests that much of the novel’s rising ...

Absent Authors

John Lanchester, 15 October 1987

Criticism in Society 
by Imre Salusinszky.
Methuen, 244 pp., £15, May 1987, 0 416 92270 8
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Mensonge 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Deutsch, 104 pp., £5.95, September 1987, 0 233 98020 2
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... not have the complete use of both arms. The reason I ask you what is the source of that is that it may well have had a determining effect on making you more bookish as a child.’ It is hard to know what is most grotesque about this: the initial attempt at charm, the question itself, or the discrepancy between the assumptions implicit in the question and the ...