Sweetie Pies

Jenny Diski, 23 May 1996

Below the Parapet: The Biography of Denis Thatcher 
by Carol Thatcher.
HarperCollins, 303 pp., £16.99, April 1996, 0 00 255605 7
Show More
Show More
... I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses’) to cheer myself up. There may have been a touch of the Ahabs in Denis’s genealogy. Thomas Thatcher, grandfather of the present baronet, was a bit of an adventurer, sailing to New Zealand in the 1870s to seek his fortune rather than following his father and grandfather into farming near ...

Russian hearts are strange

Andrew Solomon, 20 June 1996

The Romanovs: The Final Chapter 
by Robert Massie.
Cape, 308 pp., £17.99, November 1995, 0 224 04192 4
Show More
The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution 
by Mark Steinberg and Vladimir Khrustalev.
Yale, 444 pp., £18.50, November 1995, 0 300 06557 4
Show More
Show More
... of the Russian sate.’ In a telegram from the soldiers of the Nikolaevsky Maritime Battery, on 21 May 1917, comes: ‘We ask for the immediate transfer of Nicholas, Alexandra and their family to the Peter and Paul Fortress in order to institute strict surveillance and to prosecute all those sympathetic to the Romanovs as traitors to the freedom of the Russian ...

Well, was he?

A.N. Wilson, 20 June 1996

Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman 
by Sally Peters.
Yale, 328 pp., £18.95, April 1996, 0 300 06097 1
Show More
Show More
... when he kissed her hand. It was, Shaw said, ‘a wholly satisfactory love affair ... Let those who may complain that it was all on paper remember that only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue and abiding love.’ Shaw’s only certain physical involvement with another human being was an affair with Jenny Patterson, an ...

La Bête républicaine

Christopher Prendergast, 5 September 1996

The Dreyfus Affair: ‘J’Accuse’ and Other Writings 
by Emile Zola, edited by Alain Pagès, translated by Eleanor Levieux.
Yale, 208 pp., £25, June 1996, 0 300 06689 9
Show More
Zola: A Life 
by Frederick Brown.
Farrar, Straus, 888 pp., £37.50, May 1996, 0 374 29742 8
Show More
Show More
... had praised the modern press as an instrument of democratic enfranchisement: ‘Vulgar though it may be, the press accomplishes a useful task; it is the avant-garde of democracy, it makes reading commonplace and enlarges our public. I know that this enlarged public is precisely what vexes retired literati and young aesthetes. But why should we tremble before ...

Diary

John Lloyd: Report from Moscow, 4 July 1996

... is not the Communist candidate, but the nominee of the National Patriotic Bloc of parties. That may be true; but the Communist Party, after its breakthrough victories in the Duma elections in December, was hugely more influential than any of the others. The second most powerful party was Working Russia, led by Victor Anpilov, another ranting anti-semitic ...

For and against Romanistan

Nicholas Xenos, 22 August 1996

Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey 
by Isabel Fonseca.
Chatto, 322 pp., £18.99, October 1995, 0 7011 3851 3
Show More
Show More
... but sympathetic view of the Gypsies, almost forces herself to believe that these conferences may mark a turning-point. She observes that, like others before them, this new élite has been rejected by many Gypsies, who consider them to have crossed over into the gadjo world. In many respects they have indeed crossed over, and become ‘career ...

Notes on Cézanne

David Sylvester, 7 March 1996

... have a narrative content, the fantastic pictures almost seem to have been painted in the way we may have to recount the night’s bad dreams over breakfast before we can get on with the day. His antidote to the diable au corps, his path to sublimation, was to dedicate himself to working patiently, sanely, soberly, from nature, a course taken from about 1872 ...

Boy-Crazy

Janet Sayers, 20 July 1995

Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst’s Search for Self-Understanding 
by Bernard Paris.
Yale, 270 pp., £22.50, November 1994, 0 300 05956 6
Show More
Show More
... women’s ‘hero worship’. In doing so, and like his subject, at least in her later work, he may not tell us much about psychoanalysis. But he tells us a great deal about both Horney and ourselves – men as well as ...

When in Bed

David Blackbourn, 19 October 1995

Reflections on a Life 
by Norbert Elias.
Polity, 166 pp., £35, October 1994, 0 7456 1383 7
Show More
The Civilising Process 
by Norbert Elias.
Blackwell, 558 pp., £50, March 1994, 0 631 19222 0
Show More
Show More
... first part). And his medical training, the importance of which he emphasises in the Reflections, may explain why he writes so well about the body, gestures and facial expressions. It is a pity he never wrote about Lavater and physiognomy. These virtues are combined with high theoretical ambition. Like many writers of the Frankfurt School, Elias played Marx ...

Glee

Gabriele Annan, 7 September 1995

1920 Diary 
by Isaac Babel, edited by Carol Avins, translated by H.T. Willetts.
Yale, 126 pp., £14.95, June 1995, 0 300 05966 3
Show More
Collected Stories 
by Isaac Babel, translated by David McDuff.
Penguin, 364 pp., £6.99, June 1995, 0 14 018462 7
Show More
Show More
... found the cowed, emaciated, dirty Hassids of the Pale strange and often repulsive. The synagogues may have moved him, but so did sightings of things he associated with Western culture: a classical façade on a Polish manor house; a German bookshop in Brody, where there was even a Hotel Bristol (but can it have been any less seedy than Joseph Roth’s Galician ...

Diary

Geoffrey Hawthorn: Watch the birdy!, 2 November 1995

... rain, however, a sodden tent, and the arrival over two weeks of just one Meadow Pipit (which may well have been hopping along the coast), convinced me that Popper was absolutely right about the importance of falsification and that I myself wanted to have nothing more to do with it. I tried verification also, taking my turn in another tent on a marsh in ...

How he got out of them

Anne Hollander, 24 September 1992

Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg ‘Fin-de-Siècle’ 
by Mark Anderson.
Oxford, 231 pp., £30, May 1992, 0 19 815162 4
Show More
Show More
... create a perfect nakedness for the imperfect, disharmonious body of the aspiring artist. A writer may proudly wear it in Elysium, where it can rightly show his true genius to be free of ornamental lumber and awkward posing. But Kafka, with all his swiftly crystallised artistic ambition, was nevertheless deeply ambivalent about the aspect of life embodied in ...

Diary

Sean Maguire: In Sarajevo, 10 September 1992

... members – the heads of the only three resident Serbian families and one Croat. The Partisans may have carried the idea of local self-management down from the mountains with the ideological fervour of Marxists, but here power was still yoked to ethnicity. Ironically, a Jew saved Nikola Blazevic’s life. As railway superintendent, Blazevic had used his ...

Did he or didn’t he?

Ronald Fraser, 20 August 1992

The Interior Castle: A Life of Gerald Brenan 
by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 660 pp., £25, July 1992, 1 85619 137 0
Show More
Show More
... to be essential reading. But those long appreciative of Brenan’s thought and his sober style may well prefer to stay with the ‘fantasies and evasions’, the distortions of truth, convinced that they served Gerald to distil more important ...

Diary

Ian Aitken: Closing Time at the Last Chance Saloon, 6 August 1992

... public interest, on the other. We have no means of knowing how his brush with the tabloid press may have affected his attitude, either consciously or subconsciously, now that some kind of decision on the need for a privacy law seems imminent. No doubt that was part of the reasoning behind Mr Mellor’s honourable offer to resign his post. But the Prime ...