Diary

Ian Hamilton: Who will blow it?, 22 May 1997

... refereeing blunders. At the same time, neither would be there without flashes of wondrously un-English brilliance from Zola and Juninho. These players – Zola for Chelsea, Juninho for Middlesbrough – have injected a new interest into our post-Gascoigne soccer scene, a new possibility of unexpectedness. Would we have loved them, though, if they had ...

Stories

Adam Morton, 18 April 1985

The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique 
by Adolf Grünbaum.
California, 310 pp., £15.60, December 1984, 0 520 05016 9
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Schizophrenia and Human Value: Chronic Schizophrenia, Science and Society 
by Peter Barham.
Blackwell, 223 pp., £19.50, December 1984, 0 631 13474 3
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... of the picture of schizophrenia which he presents, influenced in part by Alasdair Mac-Intyre and Richard Rorty, who themselves are transmitting a message from the hermeneutic writers Grünbaum attacks in his long introduction. His aim is to insist, without denying inherited dispositions, biochemical imbalances, and occasionally inescapable destinies, that ...

Boofy’s Bill

Alex Harvey, 18 September 1997

... vanguard of reform, many of Arran’s critics believed he was sabotaging the whole structure of English society. ARRAN HOMO was regularly painted in large red letters on walls outside his London clubs, and human excrement arrived along with the hate mail. Miss B., his secretary, opened these packages. Refusing to let Boofy see one pile, she said she had ...

Number One Id

Hilary Mantel: Idi Amin (Dada), 19 March 1998

The Last King of Scotland 
by Giles Foden.
Faber, 330 pp., £9.99, March 1998, 0 571 17916 9
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... in his desires. He is sincere when he lectures or comforts other rulers, when he suggests to Richard Nixon that he should come to Uganda to recuperate after Watergate, when he congratulates Mrs Thatcher on her fresh, charming and attractive appearance in her victory photographs. Her election as Tory leader exercises his mind, and the fall of Mr Heath is ...

Blighted Plain

Jonathan Meades: Wiltshire’s Multitudes, 6 January 2022

The Buildings of England: Wiltshire 
by Julian Orbach, Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 828 pp., £45, June 2021, 978 0 300 25120 3
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... artists rather flatters whoever designed it (Orbach proposes John James). The third prodigy of the English baroque, Thomas Archer, like Vanbrugh worked nearby in Dorset and Hampshire (both of which south Wiltshire might comfortably be part of). Vanbrugh is the possible author of Netherhampton House, between Salisbury and Wilton, a Venturi ‘shed’ avant la ...

Bitch Nation

Musab Younis: ‘Sex, France and Arab Men’, 7 February 2019

Sex, France and Arab Men 
by Todd Shepard.
Chicago, 317 pp., £37.50, February 2019, 978 0 226 49327 5
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... available Arab – by reading across a wide range of scholarship, fiction, poetry and art, mostly English and French, all of it produced in the imperial era. The threat – and the allure – of North Africa had always lain just beneath the surface. But by 1962 the Arab world was no longer under direct European control, and those dangers seemed imminent. From ...

Eaten Alive

Ruth Franklin: Stefan Zweig, 3 April 2003

The Royal Game 
by Stefan Zweig, translated by B.W. Huebsch.
Pushkin, 79 pp., £8, April 2001, 1 901285 11 1
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... plays and novels were eventually translated into 30 languages, and he knew everyone from Richard Strauss to Walther Rathenau. He even persuaded Mussolini to reduce a friend’s prison sentence. But though he courted the famous and the powerful, he insisted on his own indifference to politics. The account in his autobiography of his experiences during ...

Who was Silvestri?

Martin Clark: Ignazio Silone, 9 August 2001

L'Informatore: Silone, i Comunisti e la polizia 
by Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali.
Luni, 275 pp., lire 30,000, March 2000, 88 7984 208 0
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... on the subject of Fascism, The School for Dictators, and after the war achieved real fame in the English-speaking world with his first-hand account of Communism, published in Richard Crossman’s The God that Failed. He has often been compared to Orwell, and shared with Orwell a deceptively plain style (in fact, one full ...

Stardom

Megan Vaughan: Explorers of the Nile, 8 March 2012

Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure 
by Tim Jeal.
Faber, 510 pp., £25, September 2011, 978 0 571 24975 6
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... them? In the course of twenty years in the mid-19th century a group of British explorers – Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, Samuel Baker (with his wife, Florence), Henry Morton Stanley and James Grant – slogged out on their respective expeditions through East and Central Africa, and engaged in an intense and bitter battle over ...

Nothing could have been odder or more prophetic

Gillian Darley: Ruins, 29 November 2001

In Ruins 
by Christopher Woodward.
Chatto, 280 pp., £12.99, September 2001, 9780701168964
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... carried out the plan made during their occupation in 1812 to lay it out in the fashion of the English landscape garden, a tasteful ruff of trees around each monument. Too many sites with their own particular abandoned qualities have been lost to the dead hand of over-zealous interpretation and expensive presentation. In 1855, ...

Mr and Mrs Hopper

Gail Levin: How the Tate gets Edward Hopper wrong, 24 June 2004

Edward Hopper 
edited by Sheena Wagstaff.
Tate Gallery, 256 pp., £29.99, May 2004, 1 85437 533 4
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... three canvases. He struggled to find inspiration: he read widely in philosophy, fiction, poetry in English and French; frequently went to movies and plays; sometimes drove thousands of miles to New England, Mexico or the American West, yet found little to spark new work. Often his wife would provoke him by starting a picture herself. Often they would create ...

But Stoney was Bold

Deborah Friedell: How Not to Marry if You’re a Millionaire, 26 February 2009

Wedlock 
by Wendy Moore.
Weidenfeld, 359 pp., £18.99, January 2009, 978 0 297 85331 2
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... Erminia, who loves a Christian. Although Linnaean classifications were ‘too smutty’ for English women – all those reproductive organs – she was an ardent botanist, and sent expeditions to Africa, to bring back geraniums. While other bluestockings might have found themselves unmarriageable, her father’s early death had left her everything, and ...

Two Sharp Teeth

Philip Ball: Dracula Studies, 25 October 2018

Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote ‘Dracula’ 
by David J. Skal.
Norton, 672 pp., £15.99, October 2017, 978 1 63149 386 7
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The Cambridge Companion to ‘Dracula’ 
edited by Roger Luckhurst.
Cambridge, 219 pp., £17.99, November 2017, 978 1 316 60708 4
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The Vampire: A New History 
by Nick Groom.
Yale, 287 pp., £16.99, October 2018, 978 0 300 23223 3
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... Both Dracula and Frankenstein owed their immediate afterlife to unfortunate theatre adaptations. Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823) turned Mary Shelley’s book into a moralistic tale of hubris, as well as making the creature mute and introducing Victor Frankenstein’s pantomimic assistant (here called Fritz). The ...

On the Shelf

Tom Crewe, 13 April 2023

... early that it was my duty to imitate them’), and his making his son do ‘exercises in early English history and the book of the Peerage’. When Harry proudly performs his knowledge, he comes to expect their landlady’s ‘invariable whisper: “Blood Rile,” she said; and her friends all said “No!” like the run of a finger down a ...

How to Plan an Insurrection

Niamh Gallagher: Appropriating James Connolly, 30 November 2023

James Connolly: Socialist, Nationalist and Internationalist 
by Liam McNulty.
Merlin, 398 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 0 85036 783 6
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... politics and Irish history. But Connolly’s work has not always been taken seriously. Last year, Richard Bourke and I tried to remedy this by publishing a selection of his writings in The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution.* Liam McNulty’s new book also helps us to understand the international and transnational contexts that shaped Connolly’s ...