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Dear God

Claude Rawson, 4 December 1980

Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert, Milton, Dante and St John 
by A.D. Nuttall.
Methuen, 147 pp., £8.95, September 1980, 0 416 73980 6
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... Imagine – if you can – God reading this poem.’ So begins this brief, stylish book, citing Herbert’s ‘Dialogue’ (‘Sweetest Saviour, of my soul …’) and asking afterwards: ‘Is God pleased with what he reads?’ Professor Nuttall’s point is that such a question would have seemed perfectly natural in the 17th century ...

Phattbookia Stupenda

Nicholas Spice, 18 April 1985

Illywhacker 
by Peter Carey.
Faber, 600 pp., £9.95, April 1985, 0 571 13207 3
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... his prose along with all the exuberant free energy of a boy thwacking a hoop with a stick. To Herbert Badgery – funny man, raconteur and compère extraordinary of Illywhacker – the notion that a book might seem slimmer than it is, would be commonplace, that his own book should practise such a trick, inevitable. Sleight of being, or the ability to ...

Ich bin ein Belieber

Michael Herbert Miller: Ich bin ein Belieber, 21 March 2013

The Love Song of Jonny Valentine 
by Teddy Wayne.
Free Press, 285 pp., £24.95, February 2013, 978 1 4767 0585 9
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... its video was viewed eight million times in 24 hours on the music website VEVO. It doesn’t matter that Bieber’s songs don’t hold much appeal for anyone who isn’t between the ages of six and 16 and female. The mania surrounding his celebrity extends to adults, as when Bieber, at the age of 17, was forced to take a paternity test after highly ...

Jackson breaks the ice

Andrew Forge, 4 April 1991

Jackson Pollock: An American Saga 
by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith.
Barrie and Jenkins, 934 pp., £19.95, March 1990, 0 7126 3866 0
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Abstract Expressionism 
by David Anfam.
Thames and Hudson, 216 pp., £5.95, August 1990, 0 500 20243 5
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Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston 
by Musa Mayer.
Thames and Hudson, 256 pp., £8.95, February 1991, 0 500 27633 1
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... as if he had been rushing towards his death for a long time. Talking about watching Pollock work, Herbert Matter said: ‘The way he stood, the way he looked at the canvas, the way he worked it, always made me think of a farmer.’ For Pollock the identification was precise. He spoke of memories that would come to him as he worked of standing by his ...

Blowing over the top of a bottle of San Pellegrino

Adam Mars-Jones: Protest Dance Pop, 15 December 2005

Plat du Jour 
by Matthew Herbert.
Accidental
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... Matthew Herbert’s Plat du Jour is an album of dance tracks united by the theme of food. Herbert has made a name for himself as a producer from collaborations with Róisín Murphy and Björk, but Plat du Jour is a different kettle of fish, a personal project that has taken a couple of years to devise and record ...

Johnson’s Business

Keith Walker, 7 August 1980

A Dictionary of the English Language 
by Samuel Johnson.
Times, 2558 pp., £45, June 1980, 0 7230 0228 2
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Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s Middle Years 
by James Clifford.
Heinemann, 372 pp., £10, February 1980, 0 434 13805 3
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... of other writers. To illustrate his reading, and use of quotations, consider the case of George Herbert. Herbert was not much read during the 18th century: there was no edition of his works between 1709 and 1799, although he appears from time to time in anthologies, and was regularised for hymn singing by Samuel ...

The Shoreham Gang

Seamus Perry: Samuel Palmer, 5 April 2012

Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer 
by Rachel Campbell-Johnston.
Bloomsbury, 382 pp., £25, June 2011, 978 0 7475 9587 8
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... of surpassing fruitfulness’, and its fecundity lies as much in its manner as in its subject matter: ‘We must not begin with medium, but think always on excess, and only use medium to make excess more abundantly excessive,’ Palmer instructed himself in his sketchbook. The sheer thickness of the gummy ink feels wonderfully supererogatory, a spirit ...

The Central Questions

Thomas Nagel: H.L.A. Hart, 3 February 2005

A Life of H.L.A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream 
by Nicola Lacey.
Oxford, 422 pp., £25, September 2004, 0 19 927497 5
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... of his ideas and the course of his career. But this, it turned out, was usually the case, because Herbert Hart himself moved seamlessly back and forth in his diaries between personal and professional preoccupations, and sought increasingly to draw links between them. Though some readers may feel that I have been too generous in my use of the personal material ...

Pulping Herbert Read in a Washing-Machine

Nicholas Jose: Chinese art, 10 June 1999

Inside Out: New Chinese Art 
edited by Gao Minglu.
California, 223 pp., £35, November 1998, 0 520 21747 0
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Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the 20th Century 
by Wu Hung.
Chicago, 216 pp., £31.95, September 1999, 0 935573 27 5
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A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of 20th-Century China 
by Julia Andrews and Kuiyi Shen.
Abrams, 336 pp., $85, September 1998, 0 8109 6909 2
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... China’s place in the world and insist that China must be allowed to pursue its own path in the matter of human rights, family planning, intellectual property, open markets, the Hollywood invasion and everything else that elicits Western concern. At once atavistic, populist and trendy, such attitudes are as likely to be found on the street as they are in ...

Flaubert’s Bottle

Julian Barnes, 4 May 1989

Flaubert: A Biography 
by Herbert Lottman.
Methuen, 396 pp., £17.95, April 1989, 0 413 41770 0
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... in recent years has been disguised as the two-volume Steegmuller edition of the Letters. Now comes Herbert Lottman, the diligent biographer of Camus. Pre-eminently a dredger and sifter, an archive-pounder and source-badgerer, Mr Lottman arrives approximately a hundred years too late, yet still needed. He arranges the known facts about Flaubert’s life, and ...

Grumbles

C.K. Stead, 15 October 1981

Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait 
by Patrick White.
Cape, 272 pp., £7.95, October 1981, 9780224029247
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... for impressive autobiography (it didn’t in Hardy’s case either). So much of White’s subject-matter seems trivialised here by gossip, occasional bitchiness, and even snobbery, in his anecdotes about people (Joan Sutherland, the Queen, Sidney Nolan etc), and by a refusal to find excitement or grandeur or anything at all except dreariness in public ...

No wonder it ached

Dinah Birch: George Eliot, 13 May 1999

The Journals of George Eliot 
edited by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston.
Cambridge, 447 pp., £55, February 1999, 0 521 57412 9
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George Eliot: The Last Victorian 
by Kathryn Hughes.
Fourth Estate, 384 pp., £20, November 1998, 1 85702 420 6
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... intellect so formidable was its capacity to receive and absorb whatever lay within its reach, no matter how recondite, dull or challenging. Nothing lay outside her scope: all the everyday business of life was material for analysis. Testing every assumption, twisting it this way and that, her sceptical mind turned the novel inside out. Eliot’s first ...

Common Ground

Edmund Leach, 19 September 1985

A Social History of Western Europe 1450-1720: Tensions and Solidarities among Rural People 
by Sheldon Watts.
Hutchinson, 275 pp., £7.95, October 1984, 0 09 156081 0
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Kinship in the Past: An Anthropology of European Family Life 1500-1900 
by Andrejs Plakans.
Blackwell, 276 pp., £24.50, September 1984, 0 631 13066 7
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Interests and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship 
edited by Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean.
Cambridge, 417 pp., £35, June 1984, 0 521 24969 4
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... It is surprising because, although social anthropology, under the influence of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, first developed as a kind of grand-scale, synthetic history in which the data of ethnography were used as illustrations of a priori theories of social evolution or historical diffusion, it later developed into a self-consciously non-historical ...

Our Hero

C.H. Sisson, 25 January 1990

Richard Aldington: A Biography 
by Charles Doyle.
Macmillan, 379 pp., £19.95, November 1989, 0 333 46487 7
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... had appeared in 1929, and was eminently suitable – or unsuitable, as you look at it – reading-matter for the very young in the early Thirties. For anyone interested in poetry and – in the shadowy way of adolescents – himself a poet, Aldington existed also as the author of A Dream in the Luxembourg (1930) – the intellectual’s version of a lovely ...

Visa Requirement

D.D. Guttenplan: Whitehall and Jews, 6 July 2000

Whitehall and The Jews 1933-48 
by Louise London.
Cambridge, 313 pp., £30, March 2000, 0 521 63187 4
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... born here, most of them. Irving: Are we talking about blacks or Jews now? Rampton: It does not matter. They are all English. 3) A traffic jam in North London. To pass the time, my daughter and I start to argue about whether having been born here makes her English. On her mother’s side her grandparents were Greek refugees; on her father’s ...

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