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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... man’s life in the life of another.’ Stoker’s was, he went on, ‘the strongest love that man may feel for man’. One might assume from this that Stoker was a repressed homosexual. But what that actually means isn’t straightforward. In her essay in the Cambridge Companion, Heike Bauer writes that it was only in Stoker’s day that the boundaries of ...

Chonkin’s Vicissitudes

Graham Hough, 1 October 1981

Pretender to the Throne: The Further Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin 
by Vladimir Voinovich, translated by Richard Lourie.
Cape, 358 pp., £7.95, September 1981, 9780224019668
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The Temptation of Eileen Hughes 
by Brian Moore.
Cape, 224 pp., £6.50, October 1981, 0 224 01936 8
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Silver’s City 
by Maurice Leitch.
Secker, 181 pp., £6.95, September 1981, 0 436 24413 6
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The Christmas Tree 
by Jennifer Johnston.
Hamish Hamilton, 167 pp., £6.50, September 1981, 0 241 10673 7
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... Party officials, NKVD officers, a scatter of little people keeping their heads down as best they may. Chonkin is no wily Yossarian figure: he is an innocent, and so is his Nyurka. So, strangely enough, are some of the other characters, even among the least sympathetic. Degraded as their lives and actions are, we are made to feel that they have been caught up ...

Viva la joia

Roy Porter, 22 December 1983

Montaigne: Essays in Reading 
edited by Gérard Defaux.
Yale, 308 pp., £8.95, April 1983, 0 300 02977 2
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Montaigne and Melancholy: The Wisdom of the ‘Essays’ 
by M.A. Screech.
Duckworth, 194 pp., £19.50, August 1983, 0 7156 1698 6
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... in the limited sense of the person who put the words on the page.’ Abominating what we may call the ‘ET’ heresy (Extra-Textuality), our authors (or should we say abstractions?) flee the referent for the signifier, and embark upon their philological odyssey through the ‘texts’. The ‘author’, once patriarch of literary property, having ...

Funny Water

Frank Kermode: Raban at Sea, 20 January 2000

Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings 
by Jonathan Raban.
Picador, 435 pp., £16.99, November 1999, 0 330 34628 8
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... that Raban’s boat could not possibly have survived to let him tell the tale) I might choose Richard Hughes on hurricanes, but for all less overwhelming though still astonishing manifestations of troubled water Raban must surely be the man. Auden wrote about ‘the pluck and knock of the tide’, which is a good but tersely elementary way of talking ...

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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... the Whitney, with a note stating: ‘Since I took the trouble of having a photostat made of it, it may indicate that I am not so modest as I am said to be.’ Writing to Flexner himself, Hopper dismissed the interpretation and told the astonished critic that the painting depicted ‘a tuberculosis sanatorium’. The Hoppers had read The Magic Mountain with ...

Among the Rouge-Pots

Freya Johnston: ‘Yellow Book’ Lives, 16 November 2023

Decadent Women: ‘Yellow Book’ Lives 
by Jad Adams.
Reaktion, 388 pp., £20, October, 978 1 78914 789 6
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... and endorsed by James’s fellow contributors. Among the other pieces in the first number were Richard Le Gallienne’s torrid, gothic poem ‘Tree-Worship’ (‘With loving cheek pressed close against thy horny breast,/I hear the roar of sap’); Max Beerbohm’s ‘Defence of Cosmetics’ (‘Artifice must queen it once more in the town … If men are ...

A Comet that Bodes Mischief

Sophie Smith: Women in Philosophy, 25 April 2024

How to Think like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind 
by Regan Penaluna.
Grove, 296 pp., £9.99, March, 978 1 80471 002 9
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The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy 
edited by Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro.
Routledge, 638 pp., £215, June 2023, 978 1 138 21275 6
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... but show herself twice a fool … a woman is always a woman – that is, a fool, whatever part she may have chosen to play.’In medieval and early modern Europe, philosophers – with help from learned lawyers, medics and theologians – developed what became the dominant view in Western philosophy: that women were neither made for, nor capable of, reasoned ...

Friends

Eugene Goodheart, 16 March 1989

The company we keep: An Ethics of Fiction 
by Wayne Booth.
California, 485 pp., $29.55, November 1988, 0 520 06203 5
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... criticism nowadays knows that the appeal to objectivity will no longer do. Indeed, any such appeal may even be suspected – for instance, in the case of Huckleberry Finn – of masking a racist bias. Booth does not admit a racist bias in the invoking of academic norms, but he is convinced that the peremptory dismissal of Moses’ challenge to a canonical work ...

Regicide Rocks

Clare Jackson, 17 November 2022

Act of Oblivion 
by Robert Harris.
Hutchinson Heinemann, 480 pp., £22, September, 978 1 5291 5175 6
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... his son-in-law, was the fourteenth signatory; Ludlow was the fortieth.After the Restoration in May 1660, the signatories found themselves hunted regicides. Ludlow left London for Dieppe in August and spent more than three decades in exile, in Geneva, Lausanne, Vevey and Bern. Revolutionary change in 1689 prompted him to risk returning to England, but this ...

Why would Mother Nature bother?

Jerry Fodor, 6 March 2003

Freedom Evolves 
by Daniel Dennett.
Allen Lane, 347 pp., £20, February 2003, 0 7139 9339 1
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... parenthetical) passage, Dennett sort of ‘fesses up to this: ‘hard determinists . . . may find in subsequent chapters that [their] considered view is that whereas free will – as [they] understand the term – truly doesn’t exist, something rather like free will does exist, and it’s just what the doctor ordered for shoring up your moral ...

The kind of dog he likes

W.G. Runciman: Realistic Utopias, 18 December 2014

Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy 
by David Miller.
Cambridge, 254 pp., £18.99, January 2013, 978 1 107 61375 1
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... defined and applied to which different philosophers respond in mutually irreconcilable ways. They may agree that liberty of conscience is a basic entitlement in a just society, while conceding that there are some creeds whose behavioural expression a just, or even minimally decent, society would be bound to outlaw. But in a multicultural society, there ...
Founders of the Welfare State 
edited by Paul Barker.
Gower, 138 pp., £14.95, February 1985, 0 435 82060 5
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The Affluent Society 
by John Kenneth Galbraith.
Deutsch, 291 pp., £9.95, February 1985, 0 233 97771 6
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... Europe and extends imperfectly into France and northern Italy. We are also describing an era which may be ending. Certainly full employment is no more. And Keynesianism is out of fashion. At the same time, there is in most countries, not merely in Britain, a more specific ‘crisis of the Welfare State’. This ‘crisis’ – the quotation-marks are to ...

Mere Party

Robert Stewart, 22 January 1987

Pillars of Government, and Other Essays on State and Society c.1770-c.1880 
by Norman Gash.
Arnold, 202 pp., £25, June 1986, 0 7131 6463 8
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Sir Robert Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel after 1830 
by Norman Gash.
Longman, 745 pp., £12.50, July 1986, 0 582 49722 1
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... entirely wrong to regard Gash, Tory or not, as a narrow historian. His notions of history-writing may not accommodate the wilder ambitions of Whigs like John Morley, who said that ‘the history of England ought to end with something that might be called a moral,’ or Professor Seeley, whose Expansion of England, invigorating though it is, gave ample proof ...

Arabia Revisita

Reyner Banham, 4 December 1980

Travels in Arabia Deserts 
by Charles Doughty.
Dover, 674 pp., £11.35, June 1980, 0 486 23825 3
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... chapter. However, later remarks in unconnected conversations have given me to think that there may have been a deeper motive: as an avowed homosexualist with an extensive and curious knowledge of medical/military affairs in Cairo in the First World War, Monck (and not alone in that generation) had some kind of needle about the virtual sanctification of ...

Damp Souls

Tom Vanderbilt, 3 October 1996

Snow Falling on Cedars 
by David Guterson.
Bloomsbury, 316 pp., £5.99, September 1996, 0 7475 2266 9
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The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind 
by David Guterson.
Bloomsbury, 181 pp., £5.99, January 1996, 0 7475 2561 7
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... town would have brought Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird to mind. Now, the novel’s appeal may have more to do with our conflicting feelings about the trial and how it should have been conducted. In Guterson there are no lecherous journalists chasing exclusives or high-powered lawyers negotiating film rights. The sessions do not take place under the ...