Touching the music

Paul Driver, 4 January 1996

Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship 
by Robert Craft.
Vanderbilt, 588 pp., £35.95, October 1994, 0 8265 1258 5
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“... was, however, saddled at this time as on several occasions with the chaotic if aristocratic poet Edward James (whose laugh Craft compares to ‘a hornbill in the jungle’). Ordinary people only really crop up as mad admirers of Auden or vague conquests – ‘the pretty blonde [a 1994 recollection] on the Cristoforo Colombo ... with an annoying Eskimostyle ...”

Dreamland

Jonathan Lamb: 18th-century seafaring, 20 March 2003

Voyages of Delusion: The Search for the Northwest Passage in the Age of Reason 
by Glyn Williams.
HarperCollins, 467 pp., £8.99, March 2003, 0 00 653213 6
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Voyage to Desolation Island 
by Jean-Paul Kauffmann, translated by Patricia Clancy.
Harvill, 177 pp., £14.99, October 2001, 1 86046 926 4
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“... by Philibert Commerson, who had himself joined Bougainville’s round the world expedition with a young woman dressed as a man) and whose evasive treatment of his own discovery appears to be symptomatic of inner conflict, is the bolder and more desperate of Kauffmann’s two heroes. ‘He had to face up alone to the disappointment of discovery, the fraud of ...”

Three Women

Andrew O’Hagan: Work in progress, 10 December 1998

“... a crowd to riot, and was said to be behind the suffragette burning of Leuchars Station. Netta held young Hugh in her arms. His mother climbed on a truck. She had words for the crowd, and was sure of them. But heaven knows she was shaking. ‘We know the laws of God well enough about here,’ she said, ‘and we know that justice will be ours, and is harmful ...”

The Great Lie

Charles Glass: Israel, 30 November 2000

The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World 
by Avi Shlaim.
Allen Lane, 670 pp., £25, April 2000, 9780713994100
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Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 
by Benny Morris.
Murray, 752 pp., £25, January 2000, 0 7195 6222 8
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A Blood-Dimmed Tide: Dispatches from the Middle East 
by Amos Elon.
Allen Lane, 354 pp., £20, August 2000, 0 7139 9368 5
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Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians’ 
by Efraim Karsh.
Frank Cass, 236 pp., £39.50, May 2000, 0 7146 5011 0
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From Herzl to Rabin: The Changing Image of Zionism 
by Amnon Rubinstein.
Holmes & Meier, 283 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 8419 1408 7
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“... Territories. This improvisational drama was like a miniature Truth Commission of the kind that Edward Said has urged, although it will be some time before an Israeli or PLO politician is likely to advocate anything of the sort. Both productions took place in an environment of increasing honesty about what Israelis have done to survive in the country that ...”

Too Much

Barbara Taylor: A history of masturbation, 6 May 2004

Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation 
by Thomas Laqueur.
Zone, 501 pp., £21.95, March 2003, 1 890951 32 3
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“... Rousseau wrote in Emile, it is essential that such images not be dwelt on, especially by young people who are liable to become addicted to them. Never leave a boy alone with his thoughts, he advised parents: ‘At the very least, sleep in his room . . . it is up to you to protect him from himself.’ This was not a counsel for sexual ...”

Big Bucks, Big Bangs

Chalmers Johnson: US intelligence and the bomb, 20 July 2006

Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea 
by Jeffrey Richelson.
Norton, 702 pp., £22.99, April 2006, 0 393 05383 0
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“... of the 1932 Nobel Prize, was said to be the head of Hitler’s atom bomb effort. He had also been Edward Teller’s PhD supervisor at Leipzig in 1930. In December 1944, the OSS, the CIA’s wartime predecessor, ordered one of its agents in Switzerland, Morris ‘Moe’ Berg, to attend a Heisenberg lecture in Zurich and to carry a pistol. He was to listen ...”

The Doctrine of Unripe Time

Ferdinand Mount: The Fifties, 16 November 2006

Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties 
by Peter Hennessy.
Allen Lane, 740 pp., £30, October 2006, 0 7139 9571 8
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“... We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy dedicates his book. Their increasingly grumpy pronouncements on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’ pepper the pages of Having It So Good. Of the new milk bars, for example, Hoggart ...”

How Shall We Repaint the Kitchen?

Ian Hacking: The Colour Red, 1 November 2007

Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind 
by G.E.R. Lloyd.
Oxford, 201 pp., £27.50, April 2007, 978 0 19 921461 7
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“... of the LRB feel liberated by learning the details of female circumcision? In the same decade, Edward Sapir, analysing many North American languages, advanced the doctrine that a language reflects the way that its speakers understand the world – a way that may be incomprehensible without the language. Kant’s a prioris, structures of the human ...”

A Terrier and a Camel

Tobias Gregory: Milton’s Theology, 19 February 2026

Milton’s Theological Process: Reading ‘De Doctrina Christiana’ and ‘Paradise Lost’ 
by Jason A. Kerr.
Oxford, 299 pp., £82, October 2023, 978 0 19 887508 6
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“... this in Milton’s day. The last two men burned for heresy in England, Bartholomew Legate and Edward Whiteman in 1612, were antitrinitarians. In the mid-1650s, when Milton was working on De Doctrina Christiana, his contemporary John Biddle was imprisoned and interrogated by a parliamentary committee for publishing antitrinitarian views; Cromwell had ...”

Raised on Spam

Owen Hatherley: British Communist Art, 9 July 2026

Comrades in Art: Artists against Fascism 1933-43 
by Andy Friend.
Thames & Hudson, 360 pp., £40, September 2025, 978 0 500 02741 7
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“... raft of publications and exhibitions about the Bloomsbury Group, as well as renewed interest in Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious. Friend’s previous books have included splashy illustrated tomes on Ravilious and on John Nash, but here he turns from figurative British artists in love with British tradition towards figurative British artists who wanted to ...”

Husbands and Wives

Terry Castle: Claude & Marcel, Gertrude & Alice, 13 December 2007

Don’t Kiss Me: The Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore 
edited by Louise Downie.
Tate Gallery, 240 pp., £25, June 2006, 1 59711 025 6
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Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice 
by Janet Malcolm.
Yale, 229 pp., £16.99, October 2007, 978 0 300 12551 1
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“... register with the German Kommandatur. Over the succeeding months, convinced that most of the young German soldiers they met were not Nazis and could be persuaded to rebel against their officers, she and Moore began a DIY subversion campaign of quite startling temerity and panache. Moore knew German well enough to write it almost like a native speaker, so ...”

Every Field, Every Yard

James Meek: Return to Kyiv, 10 August 2023

“... through Russia and four other countries.Anna Zvyagintseva’s photograph The Same Hair shows a young child sitting on the floor in a patch of sunlight, covering her face with her forearms and chaotic strands of her long, fair curling hair. Above it is a screenshot from a message thread written in English. ‘How are you?’ the first message asks. Two and ...”

From a Novel in Progress

James Wood, 9 May 2002

“... in Essex, and his son, my father, Peter Bunting, fought with distinction, while only a very young man, in the Second World War, and after it was over went up to Brasenose College, Oxford – the first time a Bunting had been so elevated, and unfortunately the last, since I was a student only at University College London. After Oxford, Peter Bunting met ...”

Call me Ahab

Jeremy Harding: Moby-Dick, 31 October 2002

Moby-Dick, or, The Whale 
by Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker.
Northwestern, 573 pp., £14.95, September 2001, 0 8101 1911 0
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Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in 
by C.L.R. James.
New England, 245 pp., £17.95, July 2001, 9781584650942
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Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival 
by Clare Spark.
Kent State, 744 pp., £46.50, May 2001, 0 87338 674 4
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Lucchesi and the Whale 
by Frank Lentricchia.
Duke, 104 pp., £14.50, February 2001, 9780822326540
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“... our adulation for Prometheans. Ahab might work better for us as a rebel without a cause, a young Turk with a high opinion of himself. In fact he’s a vanguard figure and a bully, whereas Ishmael the consensualist is aggressively democratic. His solidarity extends beyond the society of men to express itself in a range of imaginative affinities with the ...”

Cute, My Arse

Seamus Perry: Geoffrey Hill, 12 September 2019

The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 148 pp., £20, April 2019, 978 0 19 882952 2
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“... resulting in numerous comical episodes. ‘Likely lad’: n. (b) British a working-class young man; a young man with characteristics stereotypically associated with the working class. (OED) Hill has been very well served by the excellent Kenneth Haynes, who saw both his prose and his poetry into the magnificence of ...”