The Romantic Generation 
by Charles Rosen.
HarperCollins, 723 pp., £30, November 1995, 0 00 255627 8
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... who in his descriptions of landscapes and glaciers is presented as a major (and completely unknown) anticipator of 20th-century thought. There is, alas, a sloppy garrulousness about some of Rosen’s exposition: not in his analysis of individual musical pieces, but in his relentless paraphrasing of, and haughty quotation from, intellectual and poetic ...

Boxes of Tissues

Hilary Mantel, 6 March 1997

As If 
by Blake Morrison.
Granta, 245 pp., £14.99, February 1997, 1 86207 003 2
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... podgy, pale, unlikable. He would prefer to like them, warm to them but cannot. The judge is an unknown quantity. The barristers are caricatures. The early witnesses are those who saw the baby on his death march. They are stiff, uneasy, conscious that they passed by on the other side; the setting intimidates them, the language is alien, they talk in ...

The Vanishing Brothel

Linda Nochlin, 6 March 1997

A Life of Picasso. Vol. II: 1907-1917 
by John Richardson and Marilyn McCully.
Cape, 500 pp., £30, November 1996, 0 224 03120 1
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Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man 
by Norman Mailer.
Little, Brown, 398 pp., £25, November 1996, 0 316 88173 2
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Picasso and the Spanish Tradition 
edited by Jonathan Brown.
Yale, 208 pp., £30, November 1996, 0 300 06475 6
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... it gives us access not only to iconographic material lost in the final version, to the impact of unknown sources and vanished influences, but also to the artist’s changing ideas. On the other hand, it has an unfortunate tendency to reduce the meaning of the finished painting to its origins, and to read into the final version material that is no longer ...

Every three years

Blake Morrison, 3 March 1988

Fifty Poems 
by Ian Hamilton.
Faber, 51 pp., £4.95, January 1988, 0 571 14920 0
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A Various Art 
edited by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville.
Carcanet, 377 pp., £12.95, December 1987, 0 85635 698 0
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Between Leaps: Poems 1972-1985 
by Brad Leithauser.
Oxford, 81 pp., £5.95, September 1987, 0 19 282089 3
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Eldorado 
by William Scammell.
Peterloo, 71 pp., £4.50, October 1987, 0 905291 88 3
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Disbelief 
by John Ash.
Carcanet, 127 pp., £6.95, September 1987, 0 85635 695 6
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The Automatic Oracle 
by Peter Porter.
Oxford, 72 pp., £4.95, November 1987, 0 19 282088 5
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Voice-over 
by Norman MacCaig.
Chatto, 64 pp., £5.95, February 1988, 0 7011 3313 9
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... The mysteries of the universe – the wheeling stars, the desperate predatoriness of animals, the unknown forebears, the languages beyond hearing, the bewildering inner spaces – seem borne over against him more than ever before, and in his at times manic isolation he turns for comfort to simple people and simple creatures: the old Highland woman whose hands ...
... were so strong that merely to visit a bookshop in Hamra Street was a perilous foray into the unknown – particularly after the bombing of Libya that was carried out by US planes, some of them flying from British airfield. The strike against Libya was partly engineered by Colonel North himself. It was perhaps three weeks after the Tripoli bombings ...

Letting them live

Alan Ryan, 4 August 1988

A History of the Jews 
by Paul Johnson.
Weidenfeld, 643 pp., £8.95, April 1988, 0 297 79366 7
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The Burning Bush: Anti-Semitism and World History 
by Barnet Litvinoff.
Collins, 493 pp., £17.50, April 1988, 0 00 217433 2
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Living with Anti-Semitism: Modern Jewish Responses 
edited by Jehuda Reinharz.
Brandeis/University Press of New England, 498 pp., £32.75, August 1987, 9780874513882
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... makes great play with the anti-semitism of Tsarist Russia, which was of a degree of nastiness unknown elsewhere. He quotes a chilling little conversation between the Tsarist Minister, Count Witte – by Russian standards a liberal and a moderniser – and Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, in the course of which Witte remarked: ‘I used to say to ...

Lucian Freud

Nicholas Penny, 31 March 1988

... Freud; moreover Freud’s nudes, unlike Degas’s, are not anonymous, even if their identity is unknown to us. Freud is concerned to get as close as possible to individuals; and what may seem to be a loss of dignity can be the pre-condition for his regard. The London exhibition contains a painting of a nude woman made by Freud before he discovered himself ...

Treating the tiger

Ian Jack, 18 February 1988

Tales from Two Cities: Travel of Another Sort 
by Dervla Murphy.
Murray, 310 pp., £12.95, November 1987, 0 7195 4435 1
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... and Browns living in grossly over-crowded conditions, can lead to an out-of-control degradation unknown in the worst of Third World slums.’ Thoughts of the future make her ‘heartsick’: a country that cannot look after its own white ‘sub-proletariat’ offers little hope to Browns and Blacks. And yet, by its end, this is not a pessimistic book. White ...

A Suspect in the Eyes of Super-Patriots

Charles Simic: Vasko Popa, 18 March 1999

Collected Poems of Vasko Popa 
translated by Anne Pennington.
Anvil, 464 pp., £12.95, January 1998, 0 85646 268 3
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... biggest joke is that the pack has no joker. The cycle, ‘Give Me Back My Rags’, personifies the unknown joker and attempts to exorcise his power. The speaker of the poem refuses to play the game: Damn your root and blood and crown And everything in life The thirsty pictures in your brain The fire-eyes on your fingertips And every every step To three ...

Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge

Linda Nochlin: The Surprising Boldness of Mary Cassatt, 15 April 1999

Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman 
edited by Judith Barter.
Abrams, 376 pp., £40, November 1998, 0 8109 4089 2
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Mary Cassatt: Painter of Modern Women 
by Griselda Pollock.
Thames and Hudson, 224 pp., £7.95, September 1998, 0 500 20317 2
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... relation is a frame, a space within which two beings coexist, at ease, yet their thoughts are unknown to each other. Pollock’s reading of these representations is subtle and incisive. While she draws heavily on psychoanalytic theory for her interpretations, she never neglects the formal specificity of individual works, for it is only their concrete ...

Dead but Not Quite Buried

Charles van Onselen: The desecration industry in South Africa, 29 October 1998

... members; the police and state mortuaries are often stacked to the ceiling with the bodies of unknown paupers and accident or murder victims whose next of kin cannot readily be traced. Even when corpses are claimed, however, poor families often find it hard to meet the cost of a coffin or of transporting the body to the cemetery of their choice. Nor do ...

Slapping the Clammy Flab

John Lanchester: Hannibal by Thomas Harris, 29 July 1999

Hannibal 
by Thomas Harris.
Heinemann, 496 pp., £16.99, June 1999, 0 434 00940 7
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... years after the events described in The Silence of the Lambs, with Lecter still free, whereabouts unknown, and Clarice still in the FBI. Her career, however, has stalled, thanks to a combination of jealous colleagues and her own anti-talent for office politics. This is the first big change in the world of the new book: the FBI of the first two novels ...

The First Person, Steroid-Enhanced

Hari Kunzru: Hunter S. Thompson, 15 October 1998

The Rum Diary 
by Hunter S. Thompson.
Bloomsbury, 204 pp., £16.99, October 1998, 9780747541684
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The Proud Highway: The Fear and Loathing Letters. Vol. I 
by Hunter S. Thompson, edited by Douglas Brinkley.
Bloomsbury, 720 pp., £9.99, July 1998, 0 7475 3619 8
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... Brando in The Wild One, the ideal of ‘true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences’. That outlaw pose adopted in his teenage conflicts with Southern authority has never been dropped. In ‘The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved’, an influential essay written in 1970, he described a day at the ...

Clipping Their Whiskers

John Reader: Slavery, 28 October 1999

The Physician and the Slave Trade: John Kirk, the Livingstone Expeditions, and the Crusade against Slavery in East Africa 
by Daniel Liebowitz.
Freeman, 314 pp., £17.95, May 1999, 0 7167 3098 7
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... also found time to make a collection of plants for the Kew herbarium, including specimens hitherto unknown) gave him a taste for foreign fields, and in 1857 he applied to join David Livingstone’s expedition to the upper reaches of the Zambezi. Livingstone had sailed to South Africa as a missionary in 1841 and returned to England 15 years later to find that ...

Diary

Rosemary Dinnage: Evacuees, 14 October 1999

... number of refugee children from Europe, many of them Jewish or whose parents’ whereabouts were unknown, were turned down, after some discussion. Nineteen batches of children went out: eleven to Canada, three to Australia, three to New Zealand and two to South Africa. Sixteen arrived safely at their destinations. With French bases at their disposal, the ...