Electroplated Fish Knife

Peter Howarth: Robert Graves’s Poems, 7 May 2015

Robert Graves: Selected Poems 
edited by Michael Longley.
Faber, 136 pp., £15.99, August 2013, 978 0 571 28383 5
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... name after it was taken up by a group of poet-critics led by Graves and Riding’s one-time allies John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate to fight a turf war within the American academy. Ransom and Tate were convinced that the sociological or philological approaches of their colleagues couldn’t cope with poetry as poetry. The use of external, comparative ...

Whalers v. Sealers

Nicholas Guyatt: Rebellion on the Tryal, 19 March 2015

Empire of Necessity: The Untold History of a Slave Rebellion in the Age of Liberty 
by Greg Grandin.
Oneworld, 360 pp., £25, May 2014, 978 1 78074 410 0
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... robs another of his country, his wealth and his liberty; and then says he is a brute, and not a Christian.’ He gives a sympathetic account of Islamic worship in Indonesia, and says that China has ‘one of the best regulated governments in the world’. Amid much sermonising, the book has moments of disorienting candour. Delano recounts falling overboard ...

In Fiery Letters

Mark Ford: F.T. Prince, 8 February 2018

Reading F.T. Prince 
by Will May.
Liverpool, 256 pp., £75, December 2016, 978 1 78138 333 9
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... a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both Hill and Ashbery have explored Prince’s ...

Rambo and Revelation

Malise Ruthven, 9 September 1993

Fire and Blood: The True Story of David Koresh and the Waco Siege 
by David Leppard.
Fourth Estate, 182 pp., £5.99, June 1993, 1 85702 166 5
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Preacher of Death: The Shocking Inside Story of David Koresh and the Waco Siege 
by Martin King and Marc Breault.
Signet, 375 pp., £4.99, May 1993, 0 451 18000 3
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... on earth. Most mainstream Churches have interpreted these passages in Revelation as an allegory of Christian life, but others of a more evangelical disposition hold the Post-Millennialist view that Christ will return only after the Millennium, when humans have set the world to rights. Post-Millennialism has inspired a great deal of evangelical action in ...

A heart with testicles

D.J. Enright, 9 May 1991

Goethe: The Poet and the Age. Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, 1749-1790 
by Nicholas Boyle.
Oxford, 827 pp., £25, May 1991, 0 19 815866 1
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... a heathen? Well, after all, I had Gretchen executed and Ottilie starve to death; isn’t that Christian enough for these people?’ Boyle’s overvaluation of Werther goes with an undervaluation of Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission, which has more to offer, I would venture, than he allows; the fact that it is not a ‘realistic novel’ is of no ...

Admiring

Stephen Wall, 26 March 1992

Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green 
edited by Matthew Yorke.
Chatto, 302 pp., £18, February 1992, 0 7011 3900 5
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Pack my bag 
by Henry Green.
Hogarth, 242 pp., £9.99, February 1992, 0 7012 0988 7
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Loving 
by Henry Green.
Harvill, 225 pp., £6.99, February 1992, 0 00 271185 0
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... grandson Matthew Yorke, and rounded off with a touching if too brief memoir by Sebastian Yorke. John Updike contributes a gracefully enthusiastic introduction. For Green, writing fiction was so demanding – partly because he could only work at it in the evenings and at weekends, and partly because he rewrote so much – that it’s not surprising that he ...

Was Carmen brainwashed?

Patrick Parrinder, 5 December 1985

Life goes on 
by Alan Sillitoe.
Granada, 517 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 246 12709 0
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Men and Angels 
by Mary Gordon.
Cape, 239 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 224 02998 3
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Heavenly Deception 
by Maggie Brooks.
Chatto, 299 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 9780701128647
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Love Always 
by Ann Beattie.
Joseph, 247 pp., £9.95, October 1985, 0 7181 2609 2
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... motorways which currently criss-cross pastoral England. One would have to go back to the days of John Buchan to find an English fictional hero capable of squeezing so much fun out of driving a car. Should Cullen blow the gaff on Lord Moggerhanger’s exploits? And could the British social fabric survive their exposure? Life goes on has a plot which hinges on ...

Behind the Veil

Richard Altick, 6 March 1986

The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England 1850-1914 
by Janet Oppenheim.
Cambridge, 503 pp., £25, March 1985, 0 521 26505 3
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... intellectual and social credentials. In the 18th century, the foundations of received Christian faith, undermined by deism, had been shored up for some time by the physico-theology of Bishop Joseph Butler, later assisted by the Rev. William Paley’s Natural Theology: or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. According to ...

Nuclear Fiction

D.A.N. Jones, 8 May 1986

The Nuclear Age 
by Tim O’Brien.
Collins, 312 pp., £10.95, March 1986, 0 00 223015 1
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Acts of Faith 
by Hans Koning.
Gollancz, 182 pp., £8.95, February 1986, 9780575037441
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A Funny Dirty Little War 
by Osvaldo Soriano, translated by Nick Caistor.
Readers International, 108 pp., £7.95, March 1986, 0 930523 17 2
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Maps 
by Nuruddin Farah.
Picador, 246 pp., £3.50, March 1986, 0 330 28710 9
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Tennis and the Masai 
by Nicholas Best.
Hutchinson, 176 pp., £8.95, March 1986, 0 09 163770 8
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Dear Shadows 
by Max Egremont.
Secker, 310 pp., £9.95, March 1986, 0 436 14160 4
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... enjoying his well-told story as an adventure yarn, a mystery. His narrator, John Baltasar, is an American journalist of Dutch descent. Travelling in Spain, during Franco’s regime, he got involved with terrorists, the Basque nationalist movement, and he feels guilty that he was too frightened to help them. Spain preys on his mind in ...

Vienna discovers its past

Peter Pulzer, 1 August 1985

Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and their Experiences 
by Lewis Coser.
Yale, 351 pp., £25, October 1984, 0 300 03193 9
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The Viennese Enlightenment 
by Mark Francis.
Croom Helm, 176 pp., £15.95, May 1985, 0 7099 1065 7
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The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity 
by Marsha Rozenblit.
SUNY, 368 pp., $39.50, July 1984, 0 87395 844 6
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... Johnston, William McGrath, Carl Schorske, Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin, Andrew Whiteside and John Boyer testify.* There are a number of plausible reasons for this. The first and most obvious is the great diaspora of Central European scholars brought about by the rise of Nazism in the 1930s – though some intellectuals, like Wittgenstein and ...

Valorising Valentine Brown

Patricia Craig, 5 September 1985

Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 
by W.J. McCormack.
Oxford, 423 pp., £27.50, June 1985, 0 19 812806 1
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Across a Roaring Hill 
edited by Gerald Dawe and Edna Longley.
Blackstaff, 258 pp., £10.95, July 1985, 0 85640 334 2
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Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980 
by Seamus Deane.
Faber, 199 pp., £15, July 1985, 0 571 13500 5
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Escape from the Anthill 
by Hubert Butler.
Lilliput, 342 pp., £12, May 1985, 0 946640 00 9
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... to ‘a monkey house at feeding time’. It was in the same year, 1951, Deane tells us, that John Montague, also writing in The Bell, called for an end to the apathy which seemed the predominant feeling about cultural matters, and at the same time ‘demanded of his generation that it reflect Catholicism as a living force in Irish life’. His ...

My Life with Harold Wilson

Peter Jenkins, 20 December 1979

Final Term: The Labour Government 1974-76 
by Harold Wilson.
Weidenfeld/Joseph, 322 pp., £8.95
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... progress. His style with the press was flattering to young reporters. He would single us out by Christian name at press conferences, and refer to articles we had written in order to show that he had read them. He seemed to have read everything. He would seldom, on those long railway journeys or over a nightcap in his hotel room, ask for our opinions, but he ...

Boswell’s Bowels

Neal Ascherson, 20 December 1984

James Boswell: The Later Years 1769-1795 
by Frank Brady.
Heinemann, 609 pp., £20, November 1984, 0 434 08530 8
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... death. He knew exactly what he was looking for. He wanted repentings, deathbed returns to the Christian fold, eyes glowing with assurance of hope even on the scaffold. What he most dreaded was what he got from David Hume: placid, apparently good-humoured acceptance that identity – physical and spiritual – ended with death. In his book The Needs of ...

Honours for Craziness

Frank Cioffi, 17 June 1982

Psycho Politics 
by Peter Sedgwick.
Pluto, 292 pp., £4.95, January 1982, 0 86104 352 9
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The Voice of Experience 
by R.D. Laing.
Allen Lane, 178 pp., £7.50, April 1982, 0 7139 1330 4
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... feel, imagine or remember which, in their judgment, requires to be curtailed or cancelled.’ John Wing is taken to task for remarking that a young woman’s grief-stricken response to the death of her husband is a ‘typical depressive reaction’: ‘Her grief and mourning are looked upon as a pathological syndrome. The basic decisions are of a ...

Goddesses and Girls

Nicholas Penny, 2 December 1982

... as Downes proposes, following a learned article by Svetlana Alpers, possess a ‘philosophical and Christian significance’? Are we to suppose that he was devising a highly sophisticated test for the pious, akin to decorating a prayer-book with erotica? Both Downes and Alpers try to reconcile the ‘surface’ meaning of the painting with other, higher ...