Monstrous Millinery

E.S. Turner, 12 December 1996

British Military Spectacle: From the Napoleonic Wars through the Crimea 
by Scott Hughes Myerly.
Harvard, 336 pp., £23.50, December 1996, 0 674 08249 4
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... gust of wind at a review was not. This misfortune befell the Duke of Wellington in Hyde Park on a May day in 1829. Much of the blame lay with his Guards bearskin cap, nearly two feet high, which he was wearing instead of his usual cocked hat. ‘Oh, what a falling off was there!’ exclaimed the caricaturist Paul Pry, showing the Duke in his white trousers ...

Austere and Manly Attributes

Patrick Collinson, 3 April 1997

The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and Elizabethan Politics 
by Blair Worden.
Yale, 406 pp., £40, October 1996, 0 300 06693 7
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... these Protestant politicians, including Walsingham and the Queen’s favourite of favourites, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, pulled off a small victory on the domestic front. They took the Queen off to East Anglia on a progress, where they stage-managed a local political revolution which threw out of office the leading Catholics of the region and ...

Down with Cosmopolitanism

Gillian Darley, 18 May 2000

Stylistic Cold Wars: Betjeman v. Pevsner 
by Timothy Mowl.
Murray, 182 pp., £14.99, March 2000, 9780719559099
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... policy, healthily excited by the new, politically and socially aware, but able to accommodate Robert (son of Edwin) Lutyens’s stores for Marks and Spencer as well as Richard Neutra’s blonde American beach houses. Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Freya Stark, even Penelope Chetwode (Mrs Betjeman) shared the pages with respected authorities ...

From Old Adam to New Eve

Peter Pulzer, 6 June 1985

The Conservative Party from Peel to Thatcher 
by Robert Blake.
Methuen/Fontana, 401 pp., £19.95, May 1985, 0 413 58140 3
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Westminster Blues 
by Julian Critchley.
Hamish Hamilton, 134 pp., £7.95, May 1985, 0 241 11387 3
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... Home Rule came closest to a threat: in the end, it too was absorbed. Where continuity reigns, we may expect the party of continuity to rule. No wonder Disraeli, an essential though not impartial witness, called Toryism ‘the English system’. Yet, as Maitland reminded us long ago, the past was once the future. ‘Who would have thought in the ...

Never the twain

Mark Amory, 4 March 1982

Evelyn Waugh, Writer 
by Robert Murray Davis.
Pilgrim Books, 342 pp., $20.95, May 1981, 0 937664 00 6
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... impasse. Never the twain shall meet.’ Not a new thought even thirty years ago, but, though we may run into one another occasionally in the corridors of the Humanity Research Center of the University of Texas (their territory), or share a train compartment on the way to Combe Florey (ours), it still holds good for those in the Waugh industry. The English ...

Skinned alive

John Bayley, 25 June 1987

Collected Poems 
by George Barker, edited by Robert Fraser.
Faber, 838 pp., £27.50, May 1987, 0 571 13972 8
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By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept 
by Elizabeth Smart, introduced by Brigid Brophy.
Grafton, 126 pp., £2.50, July 1987, 0 586 02083 7
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... love and all its smart,    Then sleep, dear, sleep. Apart from all this, the reader may receive an illusive impression that the whole thing must have been translated from the French, in which language it would at least sound very much more natural. And yet, amazingly, the emotion, the true and abject affliction, come through, and begin to move ...

Vivre comme chien et chat

Paul Delany, 20 August 1992

Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country 
by Mordecai Richler.
Chatto, 277 pp., £13.99, June 1992, 0 7011 4673 7
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... on, perhaps, the government could afford to be more conciliatory. The current Liberal regime of Robert Bourassa has toyed with proposals to soften the language laws, but has left them essentially unchanged in the interest of ‘social peace’ – fear of nationalist wrath if, for example, commercial signs in English were to be allowed. In recent years the ...

Saucy to Princes

Gerald Hammond: The Bible, 25 July 2002

The Book: A History of the Bible 
by Christopher de Hamel.
Phaidon, 352 pp., £24.95, September 2001, 0 7148 3774 1
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The Wycliffe New Testament 1388 
edited by W.R. Cooper.
British Library, 528 pp., £20, May 2002, 0 7123 4728 3
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... codex. As early as 125, what later became Biblical text already took the form of a book. The book may give way to the screen some time soon but it has been with us now for two thousand years – and de Hamel’s main argument is that it is essentially the product of our Biblical culture. So, the jagged triangle in the Rylands is the closest we can get to our ...

The Flight of a Clergyman’s Wife

Gareth Stedman Jones, 27 May 1993

Annie Besant: A Biography 
by Anne Taylor.
Oxford, 383 pp., £25, April 1992, 0 19 211796 3
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... set adrift from the respectability of marriage and driven to fight her battles in public. Besant may well have felt attracted to Bradlaugh and Stead, but what she most needed from men was companionship in the pursuit of moral ideals. Certainly, her life had a richly quirky and wilful side. But was it any more quirky than those of her male contemporaries ...

Was Weber wrong?

Malise Ruthven, 18 August 1994

The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World 
by Gilles Kepel.
Polity, 200 pp., £39.50, December 1993, 0 7456 0999 6
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Pious Passion: The Emergence of Modern Fundamentalism in the United States and Iran 
by Martin Riesebrodt.
California, 272 pp., £30, September 1993, 0 520 07463 7
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... which ‘lent themselves to presentation in apocalyptic terms’. Disenchantment may be part of this story; but it does not provide a sociologically satisfying explanation. It places too much emphasis on the intellectual minority who articulate the new religiosity without explaining why they have become so influential. Martin Riesebrodt opts ...

Boy/Girl

Stephen Bann, 4 August 1983

George beneath a Paper Moon 
by Nina Bawden.
Macmillan, 192 pp., £7.95, July 1983, 0 333 35380 3
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The Ice-House 
by Nina Bawden.
Macmillan, 236 pp., £7.95, July 1983, 0 333 35244 0
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A Dance to the Glory of God 
by Hugh Fleetwood.
Hamish Hamilton, 183 pp., £8.95, July 1983, 0 241 11088 2
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The Ice Monkey, and Other Stories 
by John Harrison.
Gollancz, 144 pp., £8.95, June 1983, 0 575 03259 6
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Arabic Short Stories 
translated by Denys Johnson-Davies.
Quartet, 173 pp., £6.95, July 1983, 0 7043 2367 2
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The Changelings: A Classical Japanese Court Tale 
translated by Rosette Willig.
Stanford, 248 pp., $19.50, May 1983, 0 8047 1124 0
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... spell in a Chilean prison to take up a one-sided relationship with a former friend living in Rome. Robert, in the story of the same name, is ‘a black American of indeterminate age with a rather grand manner’ who carries his paintings (and his desperate idealism) around with him in a black tin trunk. We catch our last sight of Pat as he stumbles pointlessly ...

Incompetents

Stephen Bann, 16 June 1983

Worstward Ho 
by Samuel Beckett.
Calder, 48 pp., £5.50, April 1983, 0 7145 3979 1
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That Voice 
by Robert Pinget, translated by Barbara Wright.
Red Dust (New York), 114 pp., $10.95, May 1983, 0 87376 041 7
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King Solomon 
by Romain Gary, translated by Barbara Wright.
Harvill, 256 pp., £7.95, May 1983, 0 00 261416 2
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A Year in Hartlebury, or The Election 
by Benjamin Disraeli and Sarah Disraeli.
Murray, 222 pp., £8.50, May 1983, 0 7195 4020 8
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The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire 
by Doris Lessing.
Cape, 180 pp., £7.95, May 1983, 0 224 02130 3
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... comparison with Beckett would be neither irrelevant nor absurd. The French novelist and playwright Robert Pinget was put forward in the 1960s as an exponent of the ‘nouveau roman’. But his affiliation with Beckett was always stronger than the temporary association with Robbe-Grillet’s travelling circus, and Beckett paid him the compliment of making an ...

Other Things

J.I.M. Stewart, 2 February 1984

Soor Hearts 
by Robert Alan Jamieson.
Paul Harris, 166 pp., £6.95, January 1984, 0 86228 072 9
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The Life and Loves of a She-Devil 
by Fay Weldon.
Hodder, 240 pp., £8.95, January 1984, 9780340332283
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Cathedral 
by Raymond Carver.
Collins, 230 pp., £8.95, January 1984, 0 00 222790 8
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The Cannibal Galaxy 
by Cynthia Ozick.
Secker, 162 pp., £7.95, January 1984, 0 436 35483 7
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The Collected Works of Jane Bowles 
introduced by Truman Capote.
Peter Owen, 476 pp., £10.95, January 1984, 0 7206 0613 6
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Let it come down 
by Paul Bowles.
Peter Owen, 318 pp., £8.95, January 1984, 0 7206 0614 4
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... escapes through the roof of the burning building, and departs for New Zealand. In a prefatory note Robert Alan Jamieson calls his book ‘a yarn’, and if the yarn doesn’t read too convincingly it is perhaps because he is chiefly interested in other things: the face of external nature in Shetland, and the quality of life – narrow, enduring, heroic ...

Naderland

Jackson Lears: Ralph Nader’s novel, 8 April 2010

Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! 
by Ralph Nader.
Seven Stories, 733 pp., $27.50, September 2009, 978 1 58322 903 3
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... must also come to terms with him as a political thinker. His critique of corporate capitalism may not be theoretically sophisticated, but it is coherent and powerful – and very American. Indeed, his provincial Americanism may be both a strength and a weakness: he has never been able to bring foreign policy into ...

Stainless Steel Banana Slicer

David Trotter, 18 March 2021

Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form 
by Sianne Ngai.
Harvard, 401 pp., £28.95, June 2020, 978 0 674 98454 7
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... at once over and underperform to an extent that other commodities do not. For Ngai, the gimmick may take the shape of an idea, technique or thing-like device, but is best understood as a performance: it is ‘both a wonder and a trick’, she argues, in a formulation which launches the book’s series of case studies. These are performances that elicit ...