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Beckett’s Buttonhook

Robert Taubman, 21 October 1982

Ill seen ill said 
by Samuel Beckett.
Calder, 59 pp., £4.95, August 1982, 0 7145 3895 7
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Mantissa 
by John Fowles.
Cape, 192 pp., £6.95, October 1982, 9780224029384
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Sounding the terriotory 
by Laurel Goldman.
Faber, 307 pp., £7.95, September 1982, 9780571119622
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Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant 
by Anne Tyler.
Chatto, 303 pp., £7.50, September 1982, 0 7011 2648 5
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... they argue and quarrel. They prop themselves on their elbows, like figures on Etruscan tombs, and discuss sex, literature, psychiatry or ancient Greece. But what it always comes to in the end is the battle between the sexes, scenes from which are acted out, as in the pornographic bits, with the limited aid of stereotypes and jargon. In one role ...

Secret Signals in Lotus Flowers

Maya Jasanoff: Myths of the Mutiny, 21 July 2005

The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination 
by Gautam Chakravarty.
Cambridge, 242 pp., £45, January 2005, 0 521 83274 8
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... In a small yard outside the church, members of his multi-ethnic clan lie buried. Some of their tombs have crosses on top and epitaphs on the side in Persian – memorials to a period in Anglo-Indian history when European and Eastern cultures comfortably converged. Finding your way to St James’s Church takes a bit of ingenuity, at least on the part of ...

When Things Got Tough

Peter Green: The Sacking of Athens, 7 September 2017

Athens Burning: The Persian Invasion of Greece and the Evacuation of Attica 
by Robert Garland.
Johns Hopkins, 170 pp., £15, February 2017, 978 1 4214 2196 4
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... recapture some of their former splendour? Such thoughts were very much in my mind while reading Robert Garland’s retelling of Athens’s tribulations during those two fraught years of Persian invasion. It is a story that has been told countless times, but never before has the narrative concentrated primarily on the Athenians’ wholesale evacuation of ...

We know it intimately

Christina Riggs: Rummaging for Mummies, 22 October 2020

A World beneath the Sands: Adventurers and Archaeologists in the Golden Age of Egyptology 
by Toby Wilkinson.
Picador, 510 pp., £25, October, 978 1 5098 5870 5
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... First World War was over, but its aftershocks rippled on. Golden treasure, a boy pharaoh and lost tombs in the Valley of the Kings offered readers an escape. The inscrutable Orient and its discovery by the West made for a familiar storyline – a myth to meet the needs of empire, which endured as empires fell.Like his one-time colleague Howard Carter, Weigall ...

Bastilles and Battalions

Sarah Resnick: On Rikers Island, 22 September 2022

Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage 
by Jarrod Shanahan.
Verso, 433 pp., £20, May, 978 1 78873 995 5
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... begins in 1954. Modelling himself on his father, who was one of the architects of the New Deal, Robert Wagner Jr won the mayoral race promising a ‘New Deal for New York’. Reforming the city jail system was part of his vision. Just as now, jails were used to manage unemployment and instability in working-class life, with young Black people and those of ...

Diary

Stephen Spender: Towards a Kind of Neo-Paganism, 21 April 1983

... with weeds, there are the remains of quarters inhabited by the wealthy dead: monumental marble tombs looking all the grander for their dereliction, as do the crumbling rich quarters of bombed cities. Here are statues in marble or bronze, seated or standing, entrances through iron gratings into family vaults, with the names of the occupants chiselled above ...

Hammers for Pipes

Richard Fortey: The Beginnings of Geology, 9 February 2006

Bursting the Limits of Time 
by Martin Rudwick.
Chicago, 840 pp., £31.50, December 2005, 0 226 73111 1
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... it was abroad: indeed, the English ‘translation’ of Cuvier’s great works by the Scotsman Robert Jameson emphasised the concordance of the geological and the biblical record far more than the original had. In short, the traditional British drama, with its heroes and villains, is a romanticised confection designed to put our national achievements at ...

Mortal, can these bones live?

Anne Enright: Marilynne Robinson’s Perfect Paradox, 22 October 2020

Jack 
by Marilynne Robinson.
Virago, 309 pp., £18.99, September 2020, 978 0 349 01181 3
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... angels: ‘total they mix, union of pure with pure.’ They sit through the night among the tombs of the dead and talk. They discuss sin and God, harmlessness and predestination. What would happen if they were the only ones left, after the end of the world? It would be a place where they make the rules, one where they could live together as a ...

Advanced Thought

William Empson, 24 January 1980

Genesis of Secrecy 
by Frank Kermode.
Harvard, 169 pp., £5.50, June 1979, 0 674 34525 8
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... are some details, such as those about the Crucifixion, which the writers claimed as fitting in. Robert Graves has made splendid use of this line of explanation in The Nazarene Gospel Restored, deducing an entirely credible character. According to Mark and Matthew, the last words of Jesus were ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’, though the other two ...

Wormwood

Walter Patterson, 29 October 1987

Sarcophagus 
by Vladimir Gubaryev, translated by Michael Glenny.
Penguin, 81 pp., £3.50, April 1987, 0 14 048214 8
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The Star Chernobyl 
by Julia Voznesenskaya.
Quartet, 181 pp., £10.95, August 1987, 0 7043 2631 0
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Chernobyl: A Novel 
by Frederick Pohl.
Bantam, 355 pp., £4.95, September 1987, 0 553 05210 1
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Mayday at Chernobyl 
by Henry Hamman and Stuart Parrott.
Hodder, 278 pp., £2.95, April 1987, 0 450 40858 2
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State of the World 1987: A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress toward a Sustainable Society 
by Lester Brown.
Norton, 268 pp., £14.95, April 1987, 0 393 02399 0
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... people; the medics in Kiev and Moscow Hospital 6 who attended the injured and irradiated; and Dr Robert Gale, the American surgeon who joined them. You have Mikhail Gorbachev, the charismatic, controversial Soviet leader, castigated for remaining silent from 26 April to 14 May, who nevertheless seized on the Chernobyl accident to add powerful impetus to his ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1999, 20 January 2000

... satire and after. He asks me if we ever had any alternative titles to Beyond the Fringe, which was Robert Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ...

Stroking

Nicholas Penny, 15 July 1982

Victorian Sculpture 
by Benedict Read.
Yale, 414 pp., £30, June 1982, 0 300 02506 8
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... did not mean them to disturb. Sculpture now has very few of its old commemorative functions. The tombs of the great compete in modesty and have no effigies. Few of us who have political heroes would seriously propose erecting bronze statues of them. To discover how, when and why these functions fell into disrepute must be one of the ambitions of the serious ...

Like a Meteorite

James Davidson, 31 July 1997

Homer in English 
edited by George Steiner.
Penguin, 355 pp., £9.99, April 1996, 0 14 044621 4
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Homer’s ‘Iliad’ 
translated by Stanley Lombardo.
Hackett, 584 pp., £6.95, May 1997, 0 87220 352 2
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Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ 
translated by Robert Fagles.
Viking, 541 pp., £25, April 1997, 0 670 82162 4
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... for them seventy years later. Indeed, when the classical Greeks discovered Geometric graves and tombs they not only failed to connect them with their greatest poet, but denied they were Greek at all. The more we find out about Homer’s period, the more his poetry comes as a surprise. With so little information coming from elsewhere, our only certain ...

Montale’s Eastbourne

Michael Hofmann, 23 May 1991

The Coastguard’s House 
by Eugenio Montale, translated by Jeremy Reed.
Bloodaxe, 223 pp., £7.95, December 1990, 1 85224 100 4
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... made such an impact on me was that it wasn’t among the ten Montale poems that appeared in Robert Lowell’s 1961 book of translations, Imitations. I am saying, I suppose, that Lowell spoiled the ground in making it accessible. At this moment I would guess that Imitations is more influential than any other aspect of Lowell’s poetic practice: the idea ...

If they’re ill, charge them extra

James Meek: Flamingo Plucking, 21 March 2002

Salt: A World History 
by Mark Kurlansky.
Cape, 452 pp., £17.99, February 2002, 0 224 06084 8
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Salt: Grain of Life 
by Pierre Laszlo, translated by Mary Beth Mader.
Columbia, 220 pp., £15.95, July 2001, 0 231 12198 9
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... different kind of sodium salt. In the 19th century, when archaeologists began excavating Egyptian tombs and shipping out their contents, mummies were taxed as salted fish before the authorities allowed them to enter Cairo. The ancient Egyptians knew their salt. Haunted by the threat of famine on their marginal Nile lands, they were prepared to ...

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