Richard Davenport-Hines

Richard Davenport-Hines has written the entries on Jack the Ripper and other serial killers for the New Dictionary of National Biography. The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics 1500-2000 was published in 2001.

When Tennyson and Jowett sat up late together, it was to talk of murders. The Victorians took a ghoulish pleasure in every phase of their more ghastly homicides; from the moment a corpse was found the hunt for morbid thrills was intense. After seven members of the Marshall family were hacked to death at Denham in 1870, ‘pleasure vans’ brought hordes of day-trippers from London to...

Letter

11 September

4 October 2001

Marjorie Perloff notes that ‘the man who takes care of our garden in Pacific Palisades’, a Latino from Mexico, calls her ‘Marjorie’: ‘yes, in California, one only has a first name.’ This informality, she boasts, is part of a class structure that ‘makes the US unique’. Perloff’s combination of the folksy, the smug and the reactionary is unbeatable. The idea that the appalling policies...

Doing Some Measuring ahead of Time: Sade in Prison

Richard Davenport-Hines, 9 August 2001

‘I learned to ski in prison,’ Gregory Corso wrote, having discovered that there’s nothing much for prisoners to do except imagine, fantasise and, what often follows, masturbate. Although the chief interest in Sade’s Letters from Prison lies in tracing the stimulus incarceration gave to his literary imagination, one should honour in passing his phenomenal achievements...

Spliffing: drugs

Richard Davenport-Hines, 2 November 2000

‘Marijuana has no therapeutic value, and its use is therefore always an abuse and a vice,’ trumpeted Harry Anslinger, the implacable Commissioner of the US Bureau of Narcotics in 1953:

While opium can be a blessing or a curse, depending on its use, marijuana is only and always a scourge which undermines its victims and degrades them mentally, morally and physically...

Letter

Thatcherbiz

7 September 2000

Linda Colley in her review of John Campbell's Margaret Thatcher (LRB, 7 September) suggests that Thatcher's omission from her Who's Who entry of any mention of her mother suggests emotional or social repudiation. But four other postwar Prime Ministers – Attlee, Churchill, Eden and Macmillan – similarly omitted their mother. Of these, all but Eden cherished the memory of their mother most tenderly....

Take a bullet for the team: The Profumo Affair

David Runciman, 21 February 2013

Britain in the early 1960s was a divided country, torn by conflicting impulses, towards the past and the future, tradition and experimentation, dignity and fun.

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Even before the ship sank the century of progress was pregnant with the Titanic’s fate.

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Allergic to Depths: gothic

Terry Eagleton, 18 March 1999

All over the world, postgraduate students of English who might once have written on Wordsworth or Mrs Gaskell are now turning out theses on vampires, monsters, sado-masochism and mutilation. Most...

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Concierge

John Lanchester, 16 November 1995

Pound died in 1972; Auden, who was 22 years younger, in 1973. Both writers underwent the usual posthumous dip in attention and reputation. This familar dégringolade is a mysterious process, and...

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Baring his teeth

Peter Clarke, 25 June 1992

On 10 January 1957 the momentous news reached the family publishing house in St Martin’s Lane. ‘Mr Macmillan has just been made prime minister,’ his elder brother Daniel was...

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