D.J. Enright

Did I imagine that romantic story? – England 1919, and the war just over, It was raining hard, and she could see A soldier, looking lost, was getting wet. Her umbrella offered decent room for two: And that was how they met.

He didn’t rejoin the Dublin Fusiliers, Didn’t go back to Ireland, Little work there, lots more rain. Better to stay and be a British husband.

Did our...

‘The woman who kills is exactly what she is supposed not to be,’ Beatrix Campbell declares in her foreword to Women Who Kill. Killing is reckoned unnatural in a woman, or lownright impossible: if she does kill, she isn’t a woman. Unlike men. Ann Jones says, women usually confine themselves to killing their intimates, their husbands, lovers, children. (They are selective, not serial or mass murderers.) And the murders they commit, Beatrix Campbell protests, are ‘not seen in the context of the domination and subordination in which the genders live together but instead it becomes a matter of the perpetrator’s abnormal character.’ What weight is to be given to circumstance, what to character, is always a ricky problem. Beatrix Campbell is less convincing when she says that Myra Hindley might have helped us to understand the conditions in which women are likely to participate in the sexual abuse of children, but was never given the chance ‘because she was buried beneath a plethora of fantasies abouts transgressive femininity’. This strikes me as rather worse than obscurely expressed: it was the children who were buried.

Since the object in question is a modern poem, A police spokesman stated yesterday, It is hard to tell whether it has been damaged Or not or how badly.

Summoned to the scene, officers were uncertain As to whether the work had been turned upside down Or kcab to front Or whether parts of it were [missing].

A doctor of letters has been called in Together with experts on scansion and...

The anthologist’s job is or ought to be a happy one. Less so the reviewer’s, especially if the reviewer is himself an herself an anthologist, and sick and tired of the standard ploys. One reviewer of a recent anthology on the subject of friendship deplored the insufficiency of homoerotic material; well, the editors had striven to avoid eroticism of any sort, as far as was possible. Another complained that the editors had neglected feminist fiction: a just observation, albeit in extenuation it might be pleaded that the theme was friendship, not unfriendliness.

‘I want to draw some connections between Samuel Johnson, the amateur doctor and enthusiast for medicine, and the Doctor Johnson who figures so largely in the cultural imagination … If we focus on the figure of Samuel Johnson, the unco-ordinated, discontinuous events of 18th-century medicine will seem momentarily at least to converge. He lived a life within medicine, intimate with some of the age’s chief practitioners, learned in both the classical and contemporary branches of the art, receiving upon and within his body its various ingenuities and interventions.’ Using a mass of material drawn from Johnson’s writings and those of contemporary medical men, besides the testimonies of friends and strangers, John Wiltshire examines Johnson as both sufferer and physician (or healer). Hence his punning subtitle. Some of Johnson’s best friends, starting with his god-father, were doctors, and in addition to being himself a monumental patient, he was ready to give others the benefit of his advice. He emerges as both the most morbidly disordered of men and the sanest, and a typical virtue of his medical pronouncements, whether somatic or psychological, is that they are cool, measured and carefully framed. Boswell was at his most Johnsonian when he observed that since the exercise of his reason was Johnson’s ‘supreme enjoyment’, any threat to that faculty was ‘the evil most to be dreaded’: ‘He fancied himself seized by it [insanity], or approaching to it, at the very time when he was giving proofs of a more than ordinary soundness and vigour of judgment.’