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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... Artifice. In spurning both a polemical introduction and the biographical notes, this anthology may define itself against the run of post-war anthologies, but it does no favours for its contributors, whose work, itself doing no favours for the unprepared general reader, looks to have been written according to a set of undisclosed codes and precepts. It is ...

Swinging it

Mark Ford, 7 July 1988

S.J. Perelman: A Life 
by Dorothy Herrmann.
Simon and Schuster, 337 pp., £14.95, November 1987, 0 671 65460 8
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Don’t tread on me: The Selected Letters of S.J. Perelman 
edited by Prudence Crowther.
Viking, 372 pp., £14.95, October 1987, 0 670 81759 7
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... the six-page sportive essay, he brought to perfection. That the form has now more or less died may be partly because Perelman did it so well there was nowhere left for it to go. One of his most treasured accolades came from Robert Benchley, who wrote that Perelman did to our weak little efforts at ‘crazy stuff’ what Benny Goodman has done to ...

A Question of Breathing

John Bayley, 4 August 1988

Elizabeth Barrett Browning 
by Margaret Forster.
Chatto, 400 pp., £14.95, June 1988, 0 7011 3018 0
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Selected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning 
by Margaret Forster.
Chatto, 330 pp., £12.95, June 1988, 0 7011 3311 2
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The Poetical Works of Robert Browning: Vol. III 
edited by Ian Jack and Rowena Fowler.
Oxford, 542 pp., £60, June 1988, 0 19 812762 6
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The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Vol. VIII 
edited by Roma King and Susan Crowl.
Ohio/Baylor University, 379 pp., £47.50, September 1988, 9780821403808
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... that removed her from life, but in a different sense to the one she intended. Margaret Forster may have been right not to select from Aurora Leigh in her choice of the poems, since she could not give it all, yet the first part of it shows most about what might be called, in relation to Elizabeth and her husband, the Browning method. How intensely bookish ...

Wounds

Stephen Fender, 23 June 1988

Hemingway 
by Kenneth Lynn.
Simon and Schuster, 702 pp., £16, September 1987, 0 671 65482 9
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The Faces of Hemingway: Intimate Portraits of Ernest Hemingway by those who knew him 
by Denis Brian.
Grafton, 356 pp., £14.95, May 1988, 0 246 13326 0
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... Emerald Cunard remarking to Cyril Connolly that Hemingway struck her ‘as androgynous’. ‘You may think it bizarre of me.’ she added, ‘It is not the mot juste perhaps. But that is how he struck me.’ Bizarre no more. For if Lynn occasionally pushes the envelope (as they are supposed to say in test-flying circles) his thesis convinces. Why is it ...

Lordspeak

R.W. Johnson, 2 June 1988

Passion and Cunning, and Other Essays 
by Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Weidenfeld, 293 pp., £18, March 1988, 0 297 79280 6
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God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism 
by Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Harvard, 97 pp., £9.95, April 1988, 0 674 35510 5
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... has ridden out many revolts before now. The Pope’s extraordinary claims to moral authority may have received some challenge in Managua but that hardly constitutes three falls and a submission. What beats me is that O’Brien should ever have expected the Pope to behave differently: the man gets a weekly briefing from the CIA’s Rome ...

The Irresistible Rise of a Folk Hero

Gabrielle Cox, 3 March 1988

Stalker 
by John Stalker.
Harrap, 288 pp., £12.95, February 1988, 0 245 54616 2
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Stalker: The Search for the Truth 
by Peter Taylor.
Faber, 231 pp., £9.95, May 1987, 0 571 14836 0
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... Where were John Stalker’s principles then? This brief diversion into Greater Manchester affairs may help to put the Stalker controversy into some kind of context. The parallels are not coincidental. They stem from an overriding belief in the Police establishment that they know best, and from an implicit understanding that the ends justify the means. The ...

That’s America

Stephen Greenblatt, 29 September 1988

‘Ronald Reagan’, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology 
by Michael Rogin.
California, 366 pp., £19.95, April 1987, 0 520 05937 9
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... imposition of the fraud. On the contrary, his now legendary staying-power is compatible with and may even depend upon a widespread popular acceptance of a gap between performance and reality. The reality never comes into focus – even Rogin hesitates to say whether Reagan is the unconscious instrument of psychosocial forces beyond his control or the cunning ...
British Social Attitudes: The 1987 Report 
edited by Roger Jowell, Sharon Witherspoon and Lindsay Brock.
Gower, 260 pp., £28.50, October 1987, 0 556 00740 9
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Educational Opportunity and Social Change in England 
by Michael Sanderson.
Faber, 164 pp., £3.95, September 1987, 9780571148769
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Wealth and Inequality in Britain 
by W.D. Rubinstein.
Faber, 167 pp., £3.95, August 1986, 0 571 13924 8
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AProperty-Owning Democracy? Housing in Britain 
by M.J. Daunton.
Faber, 148 pp., £3.95, September 1987, 0 571 14615 5
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The Government of Space: Town Planning in Modern Society 
by Alison Ravetz.
Faber, 154 pp., £3.95, August 1986, 9780571145683
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... many who do not share its views. The authors conclude, with some reason, that while the Eighties may be the decade of Mrs Thatcher, they have not been a decade of popular Thatcherism. The 1987 survey also throws light on another aspect of politics which has returned to centre-stage in early 1988 – the Liberal-SDP Alliance. It suggests that the attitudes of ...

Performing Art

Rosalind Krauss: The Sanctification of Rebecca Horn, 12 November 1998

Rebecca Horn: The Glance of Infinity 
edited by Carl Haenlein.
Scalo, 400 pp., £47.50, January 1997, 3 931141 66 7
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... as part of the content of any serious work – a collapse given a final push by the events of May’68. As a variety of cultural spaces were then requisitioned and occupied by their users – students at the Sorbonne, for example – and as the authorities began to move against these occupations, two things became clear to the participants. One was that ...

The Good Parasite

Lorna Scott Fox: Who was Calvert Casey?, 1 April 1999

The Collected Stories 
by Calvert Casey.
Duke, 224 pp., £11.50, May 1998, 0 8223 2165 3
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... seemed exhausted, and now we find ourselves obliged to renew our vigilance, because the process may continue. The simulator’s mock-academic investigation of the ‘meaning of life’ has effectively bypassed the more problematic, overworked ‘meaning of living’. Casey’s own interest in a materialist form of transcendence eventually led him to ...

Diary

John Upton: No bail for Mr X, 29 October 1998

... it will be a waste of my time making an application for bail because no matter how sympathetic he may be to the arguments advanced on behalf of my client, he is not prepared to grant it, even technically, because Mr X is a serving prisoner. His decision is expressed in fluent legalese with mention of statutory powers and sub-sections of the Bail Act and is ...

Two Jackals on a Leash

Jamie McKendrick: Eugenio Montale, 1 July 1999

Eugenio Montale: Collected Poems 1920-54 
translated by Jonathan Galassi.
Carcanet, 626 pp., £29, November 1998, 1 85754 425 0
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... conditions of Fascist Italy (the Racial Laws were enacted in 1938) and the imminent threat of war may well have shaped these choices and given rise to an encoded quality in the writing. But how hermetic are the poems? Arrow-smith appended voluminous notes to his translations. Galassi, too, includes 170 pages or so of notes in small print, quoting from a range ...

California Noir

Michael Rogin: Destroying Los Angeles, 19 August 1999

Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster 
by Mike Davis.
Picador, 484 pp., £18.99, June 1999, 9780330372190
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... to Oklahoma City, LA does not become the new tornado capital of the United States. No, Los Angeles may not have the exceptional ecology that Davis claims, but yes, science and not fiction discovers the natural hazards in its erratic environment. Ecology of Fear would lose none of its force if it stuck with what it does so well, excavating the hidden history of ...

Fuss, Fatigue and Rage

Ian Gilmour: Two Duff Kings, 15 July 1999

George IV 
by E.A. Smith.
Yale, 306 pp., £25, May 1999, 0 300 07685 1
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... for him to impose his mistress, Lady Jersey, on his wife as her lady-in-waiting was odious. George may have come to be called ‘the first gentleman of Europe’, but he was not, as the Duke of Wellington is said to have told him, a gentleman. At his famous first meeting with Caroline, she evidently smelt; he called for brandy and then boorishly left the ...

Eric the Nerd

Ian Hamilton: The Utterly Complete Orwell, 29 October 1998

The Complete Works of George Orwell 
edited by Peter Davidson.
Secker, £750, July 1998, 0 436 20377 4
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... to mid-Forties, Orwell’s scolding certitudes – his ‘honesty’, his ‘decency’ – may well have grated on the nerves; and not just because he was so good at sniffing out hypocrisies. A natural sceptic, Orwell rarely seemed to be in doubt, and he had no patience with the routine ifs and buts of political discourse. Quite a few people who knew ...