Thank God for John Rayburn

Mark Ford, 24 January 1991

Hunting Mister Heartbreak 
by Jonathan Raban.
Harvill, 428 pp., £14, November 1990, 0 00 272031 0
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... negotiating to buy a ‘unit’ in anticipation of his own decease. Life in contemporary America may be resolutely unquantifiable, but it’s always possible to put a price on death: ‘It’ll cost you,’ the cemeteries manager tells him, ‘$825 ...

The SDP’s Chances

William Rodgers, 23 October 1986

... major sickness in our society. Where will those voters be on Polling Day, perhaps as early as next May, but probably in October 1987? At the time of the Limehouse Declaration of 1981, two underlying themes were dominant in the minds of the Gang of Four. The first related to the growing polarisation of politics, marked, on the one hand, by the era of Mrs ...

Over-Achievers

C.H. Roberts, 5 February 1987

Pagans and Christians 
by Robin Lane Fox.
Viking, 799 pp., £17.95, October 1986, 0 670 80848 2
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... after a two-year apprenticeship. Most of them belonged to the humbler classes and a majority may have been women, although Pliny, writing to Trajan, had already noted that they were ‘of every age, rank and sex’. They offered an alternative society open on terms of spiritual equality to all. In the middle of the third century Christian villagers in ...

The Man in White

Edward Pearce, 11 October 1990

The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia 
by Lawrence James.
Weidenfeld, 404 pp., £19.50, August 1990, 0 297 81087 1
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... sent Colonel Lawrence DSO, CB into the ranks of the Army and Air Force, the lure of anthropology may have played a part. The Mint, published posthumously as an account of the foul-mouthed soldiery he knew, lineal descendants of the goddams of Harfleur, could have been the product of a cool, interested expedition among the marsh Arabs. The boy Ned Lawrence ...

Diary

John Lanchester: Watching the World Cup, 12 July 1990

... League has attempted to take on the best teams in the world. They’ve already done well and they may do better, largely because they have such a strong identity – an identity derived from the way they play. Everyone knows what they’re supposed to do: as Charlton puts it, ‘we don’t play our game, we inflict our game on other people.’ There ...

The Crumbling of Camelot

Peter Riddell, 10 October 1991

Kennedy v. Khrushchev: The Crisis Years 1960-63 
by Michael Beschloss.
Faber, 816 pp., £18.50, August 1991, 0 571 16548 6
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A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy 
by Thomas Reeves.
Bloomsbury, 510 pp., £19.99, August 1991, 0 7475 1029 6
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... at a time when US-Soviet relations had improved considerably from the low point of 1961-62, and he may be said to have made his contribution to this. Yet his earlier actions had helped to perpetuate the Cold War and ensure that Fidel Castro has remained in power to this day as one of the few relics of Marxist-Leninism Beschloss concludes that throughout his ...

God loveth adverbs

Jonathan Glover, 22 November 1990

Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity 
by Charles Taylor.
Cambridge, 601 pp., £25.95, November 1989, 0 521 38331 5
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... and ‘Goethe’, but much of the time He lurks just off the page.) And, while Taylor may be friendly to liberalism, he is certainly less so to empiricism and utilitarianism, both of which he sees as one-dimensional theories. In the part of Taylor that is critical of the Enlightenment, it is sometimes hard to separate his reaction to the ...

Right-ons

Jenny Turner, 24 October 1991

Gaudi Afternoon 
by Barbara Wilson.
Virago, 172 pp., £4.99, August 1991, 1 85381 264 1
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The players come again 
by Amanda Cross.
Virago, 229 pp., £12.99, August 1991, 1 85381 306 0
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Poetic Justice 
by Amanda Cross.
Virago, 176 pp., £4.99, August 1991, 1 85381 025 8
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Birth Marks 
by Sarah Dunant.
Joseph, 230 pp., £13.99, April 1991, 0 7181 3511 3
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Burn Marks 
by Sara Paretsky.
Virago, 340 pp., £4.99, April 1991, 9781853812798
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Deep Sleep 
by Frances Fyfield.
Heinemann, 198 pp., £13.99, September 1991, 0 434 27426 7
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... the head. With real, seriously-intended and well-written literature, no matter how rebarbative it may at first appear, there is always the possibility that it can spark some of its energy onto anyone who picks it up. But smirky little in-jokes can only ever work to exclude everybody for whom they are not designed. And, to be perfectly clear, this means ...

Footpaths

Tom Shippey, 26 July 1990

England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry, 1688-1900 
by John Lucas.
Hogarth, 227 pp., £18, February 1990, 0 7012 0892 9
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The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism 
by Ian Ousby.
Cambridge, 244 pp., £45, February 1990, 0 521 37374 3
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Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems, 1616-1660 
by Gerald Hammond.
Harvard, 394 pp., £24.95, March 1990, 0 674 30625 2
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... diary for the visitors, ‘Remember to peruse Shakespeer’s plays and bee versed in them, yt I may not bee ignorant in yt matter’; the old woman quoted by Wordsworth in her reaction to tourism and the picturesque – ‘Bless me! folk are always talking about prospects: when I was young there was never sic a thing neamed!’ Yet there is a strong tension ...

They were all drunk

Michael Brock, 21 March 1991

The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. Vol I: 1872-1889 
edited by Thomas Pinney.
Macmillan, 386 pp., £45, November 1990, 0 333 36086 9
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The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. Vol II: 1890-1899 
edited by Thomas Pinney.
Macmillan, 386 pp., £45, November 1990, 0 333 36087 7
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... were constantly apparent during the 1890s. His decision to have his brother-in-law arrested in May 1896 led to his humiliating retreat from Vermont. In 1898 he acknowledged the folly of his attack on Harpers over copyright some years earlier, and then in the following year attacked Putnam over a similar issue with still more disastrous results. In ...
Body Work 
by Peter Brooks.
Harvard, 325 pp., £39.95, May 1993, 0 674 07724 5
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... sort of body I have. Badgers and squirrels can’t be said to have souls, however winsome they may be, because their bodies are not the kind that can work on the world and so necessarily enter into linguistic communion with those of their kind. Soulless bodies are those which do not speak. The human body is that which is able to make something of what ...

Vengeful Susan

Linda Colley, 22 September 1994

Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England 1660-1753 
by Lawrence Stone.
Oxford, 295 pp., £16.95, September 1992, 0 19 820253 9
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Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England 1660-1857 
by Lawrence Stone.
Oxford, 373 pp., £16.95, June 1993, 0 19 820254 7
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... about immorality among the aristocracy at the end of the 18th century. As Stone shows, there may indeed have been a rise in patrician adultery at this time. The number of divorce bills coming before Parliament doubled in the 1780s and 1790s to 41 per decade. Yet what most provoked anxiety at this time were the American and French Revolutions abroad, and ...

Underneath the Spreading Christmas Tree

Gareth Stedman Jones, 22 December 1994

Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain 1870-1914 
by José Harris.
Oxford, 283 pp., £17.95, June 1993, 0 19 820412 4
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... the continued vitality of the libertarian texture of early 20th-century British society. But this may have been more of a legacy from the past than an aspect of modernity itself and therefore have led her to underestimate the extent to which the acceptance of hierarchy and obedience to authority had become strongly internalised within all classes. What ...

An Inspector Calls

John Sutherland, 10 November 1994

Assessment of the Quality of Education: Circular 3/93 
Higher Education Funding Council for England, 17 pp., March 1993Show More
1996 Research Assessment Exercise: Circular RAE96 1/94 
Higher Education Funding Council for England, 23 pp., January 1994Show More
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... average, and easily earned hero-worship from gifted (and not infrequently beautiful) young people, may, in a tiny proportion of cases, encourage a tendency to idleness, conceit and complacency. It is normal, as a survey in October 1994 indicated, for university teachers to work hard (although the reported 55 hours a week over a 48-week year strains ...

In and out of the mind

Colin McGinn, 2 December 1993

Renewing Philosophy 
by Hilary Putnam.
Harvard, 234 pp., £19.95, January 1993, 9780674760936
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... must, in part at least, be immediate and a priori. Like our previous a priori judgments, they may be elicited by experience ... But it is fairly obvious that they cannot be proved by experience ... Knowledge as to what is intrinsically of value is a priori in the same sense in which logic is a priori. Thus, for Russell, ethical knowledge enjoys the ...