Brecht’s New Age

Margot Heinemann, 1 March 1984

Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches 
by John Willett.
Methuen, 274 pp., £12.50, February 1984, 0 413 50410 7
Show More
Brecht: A Biography 
by Ronald Hayman.
Weidenfeld, 423 pp., £18.50, September 1983, 0 297 78198 7
Show More
Show More
... to passionate romantic attachments, his male arrogance encouraged by the fact that, thanks to the war, there were, in his generation, far more girls around than boys. The considerable amount of material now available from diaries and letters on his early relationships with Paula Banholzer (who bore his first son, Frank, killed in the Wehrmacht in 1942) and ...

Capitalism’s Capital

Jackson Lears: The Man Who Built New York, 17 March 2016

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York 
by Robert Caro.
Bodley Head, 1246 pp., £35, July 2015, 978 1 84792 364 6
Show More
Show More
... Lippmann and J. Robert Oppenheimer – cultivated Jewish men at ease among the gentile ruling class of the early 20th century. Moses’s father, Emanuel Moses, owned a flourishing department store in New Haven and had begun to buy up real estate in the town. But he was ‘too slow and quiet’ for the Cohens, who thought Bella had married beneath her. She ...

Fifteen years on

Elaine Showalter, 20 October 1994

No Man’s Land. Vol. III: Letters from the Front 
by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.
Yale, 476 pp., £25, October 1994, 0 300 05631 1
Show More
Show More
... intellectual mitosis, into three books,’ under the general title No Man’s Land. The first, War of the Words (1988), offered a theoretical overview of male and female writers from the 1890s to the present. It represented the battle between the sexes as a linguistic and literary struggle that generated Modernism itself. Twentieth-century woman ...

Lord Vaizey sees the light

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 20 October 1983

In Breach of Promise 
by John Vaizey.
Weidenfeld, 150 pp., £9.95, September 1983, 0 297 78288 6
Show More
Show More
... by the slump. They were all excited by the political changes and administrative advances of the war. Four of them entered the Commons soon after. They were all convinced that with Keynes, Beveridge, most of Whitehall, Transport House and even Smith Square behind them, they could do something towards a more decent society. They did not, of course, all always ...

Vonnekit

Michael Mason, 7 February 1980

Jailbird 
by Kurt Vonnegut.
Cape, 246 pp., £5.50, October 1980, 0 224 01772 1
Show More
Show More
... oddly well-timed. The hero of this novel, Walter F. Starbuck, joins the Communist Party before the war while still at Harvard. Later he becomes a civil servant, and in 1949 is investigated by a Congressional committee on Communism. After the hearing he is simply demoted, but in his testimony he mentions the Communist affiliations of a former friend who is now ...

Short Cuts

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Remembering D.A.N. Jones, 2 January 2003

... Arabic literature, the conservation of ancient buildings, internal politics and the conduct of the war against Iran’. At the time that seemed a bit naive to us – and so, you could say, it proved, though it’s hard to see what harm was done. He only learned that he was expected to lay a wreath on Britain’s behalf as he walked up the steps to the ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: ‘The Dinner Party’, 19 May 2005

... than eating too much asparagus or thinking mushy peas were guacamole – waging an illegal war, for example. Whoever the target is, however, the implications of the charge are the same: behind their shutters, in their comfortable homes, tucking into their magrets de canard, the dinner-party crowd don’t know what’s going on in the real world. The ...

Distance

Raymond Williams, 17 June 1982

... and of fires and corpses, turned public opinion, in the United States and elsewhere, against the war in Vietnam. There is no certainty that this is true. That war lasted so long that patience was exhausted with quite other political consequences than the present action is likely to give rise to. But it was in any case the ...

Patrons

Peter Burke, 15 October 1987

Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy 
edited by F.W. Kent and Patricia Simons.
Oxford/Humanities Research Centre, 331 pp., £35, June 1987, 0 19 821978 4
Show More
Pienza: The Creation of a Renaissance City 
by Charles Mack.
Cornell, 250 pp., $43.95, June 1987, 9780801416996
Show More
Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice: Bellini, Titian and the Franciscans 
by Rona Goffen.
Yale, 285 pp., £30, July 1986, 0 300 03455 5
Show More
Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance 
by Margaret King.
Princeton, 524 pp., £42.90, April 1986, 0 691 05465 7
Show More
The Venetian Patriciate: Reality versus Myth 
by Donald Queller.
Illinois, 386 pp., $29.95, September 1986, 0 252 01144 9
Show More
Tradesman and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c.1250-c.1650 
by Richard MacKenney.
Croom Helm, 289 pp., £35, January 1987, 0 7099 1763 5
Show More
Florence, Rome and the Origins of the Renaissance 
by George Holmes.
Oxford, 273 pp., £25, November 1986, 0 19 822576 8
Show More
From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in 15th and 6th-Century Europe 
by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine.
Duckworth, 224 pp., £29.95, January 1987, 0 7156 2100 9
Show More
Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France 
by J.H.M. Salmon.
Cambridge, 306 pp., £30, June 1987, 0 521 32769 5
Show More
Show More
... given the credit which was his due. Thus the paintings in the Frari record a rivalry almost in the class of the one described a quarter of a century ago by Francis Haskell, between Francesco Morosini, the Venetian Captain-General of the Sea in the later 17th century, and Antonio Barbaro, his subordinate in the war of ...

The way we live now

Ross McKibbin, 11 January 1990

New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s 
edited by Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques.
Lawrence and Wishart/Marxism Today, 463 pp., £9.95, November 1989, 0 85315 703 0
Show More
Show More
... turn, grew out of the mass trade unions, which were created by Fordism in the first place. Working-class politics were masculine and collective, based on a social identity as much moulded by the factory as the standardised products it turned out. Fordist working-class parties sought access to and, if possible, control of the ...

Diary

Keith Thomas: Two Years a Squaddie, 5 February 2015

... from home before and, having grown up in the countryside, knew little about the industrial working class. I found myself surrounded by miners, steel-workers and labourers, who had never possessed pyjamas, who when they spoke of ‘books’ meant the Dandy or the Beano, and whose conversation was an unbroken stream of obscenity. The gloom was leavened only by ...

Diary

Fraser MacDonald: Remembering Nan Shepherd, 23 January 2025

... were practical rather than intellectual. Shepherd was an exception. Her English literature class was for her students’ educational benefit rather than that of the children they might one day teach. ‘I loved her from the first class we had with her,’ my mother said. When my parents moved out to Cults a decade or ...

That Damn Smooth Stuff

Jefferson Cowie: Louisiana Demagogue, 19 March 2026

American Populist: Huey Long of Louisiana 
by Thomas E. Patterson.
Louisiana State, 704 pp., £43, February 2025, 978 0 8071 8299 4
Show More
Show More
... Patterson, a Chicago attorney who is sympathetic to Long’s project, paints him as a determined class warrior with serious, modernising goals. He was ‘cynically realistic’, Patterson writes, in his pursuit of ‘real ideals’. He may have been ruthless, but in a corrupt world it was better to trample legislative tradition and get bills through than, as ...

Condy’s Fluid

P.N. Furbank, 25 October 1990

A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture 
by Samuel Hynes.
Bodley Head, 514 pp., £20, October 1990, 0 370 30451 9
Show More
Killing in Verse and Prose, and Other Essays 
by Paul Fussell.
Bellew, 294 pp., £9.95, October 1990, 0 947792 55 4
Show More
Show More
... That the ‘Great War’ is still deeply disturbing to the imagination came home to one last year, when a First World War tank stood on display in the forecourt of the British Museum. One reacted to the sight with a shudder of horror, and also an obscure resentment – at the idea, which seemed to be implied, that we must now proudly regard this appalling object as part of our ‘heritage ...

For ever England

John Lucas, 16 June 1983

Sherston’s Progress 
by Siegfried Sassoon.
Faber, 150 pp., £2.25, March 1983, 9780571130337
Show More
The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon 
by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Faber, 160 pp., £5.25, March 1983, 0 571 13010 0
Show More
Siegfried Sassoon Diaries 1915-1918 
edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Faber, 288 pp., £10.50, March 1983, 0 571 11997 2
Show More
Show More
... that Englishman. But the Memoirs are really more fiction than fact, and the publication of his war diaries now allows us to understand just how carefully Sassoon created his image of Sherston as Englishman out of chaotic material and experiences which threatened his sense of identity. In his celebrated book The Great ...