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Art’ll fix it

John Bayley, 11 October 1990

The Penguin Book of Lies 
edited by Philip Kerr.
Viking, 543 pp., £15.99, October 1990, 0 670 82560 3
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... be the case, has caught on in a big way. It is all made up by the media, and by those faithful camp-followers of art who tell us on radio or TV what they were ‘trying to do’ when they wrote, painted or composed. The fashionably perceptive novel, like Julian Barnes’s memorable Flaubert’s Parrot, cannot find out what it is looking for, or what is ...

Post-Feminism

Dinah Birch, 19 January 1989

Cat’s Eye 
by Margaret Atwood.
Bloomsbury, 421 pp., £12.95, January 1989, 0 7475 0304 4
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Interlunar 
by Margaret Atwood.
Cape, 103 pp., £5.95, October 1988, 0 224 02303 9
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John Dollar 
by Marianne Wiggins.
Secker, 234 pp., £10.95, February 1989, 0 436 57080 7
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Broken Words 
by Helen Hodgman.
Virago, 121 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 9781853810107
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... story of the fall in paradise, and rewrites it in the bleakest terms. This is a book that makes William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the most eminent of its literary forefathers, look like a study in innocence – perhaps because its undeviating gaze focuses on Eve, not Adam. Like Atwood, Wiggins places her fall in remembered history. Charlotte and ...

From Sahib to Satan

Keith Kyle, 15 November 1984

The British Empire in the Middle East 1945-1951 
by William Roger Louis.
Oxford, 818 pp., £45, July 1984, 0 19 822489 3
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... on him much of the virulence of the anti-British propaganda campaign run by the American Zionist camp. Yet when the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry recommended the immediate entry of 100,000 Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine and the eventual creation after a period of UN trusteeship of a binational state in which Arabs and Jews should have equal ...

Shockers

Jeremy Treglown, 6 August 1992

Writers on World War Two: An Anthology 
edited by Mordecai Richler.
Chatto, 752 pp., £18.99, February 1992, 0 7011 3912 9
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Legacies and Ambiguities: Post-war Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan 
edited by Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer.
Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins, 323 pp., $35, February 1992, 0 943875 30 7
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... daring lies in its imaginative range, its matter-of-fact way of incorporating concentration-camp episodes into a large-scale realist novel with a dozen settings and scores of characters, each treated with impartial sympathy and curiosity. This man is a general, that one a physicist, the next, Eichmann. Grossman was also brave enough to equate the Nazi ...

Lights On and Away We Go

Keith Thomas: Happy Thoughts, 20 May 2021

The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 
by Ritchie Robertson.
Allen Lane, 984 pp., £40, November 2020, 978 0 241 00482 1
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... of North America. Cook’s journals and the reports of other enlightened travellers, including William Marsden’s History of Sumatra (1783) and Arthur Young’s studies of French agriculture (1787-89), were intended as major contributions to knowledge. Marsden’s work was inspired by his regular attendance at the Royal Society’s ‘philosophical ...

Gloomy/Cheerful

Tom Shippey: Norse mythology, 3 January 2008

From Asgard to Valhalla: The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths 
by Heather O’Donoghue.
Tauris, 224 pp., £20, April 2007, 978 1 84511 357 5
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... its stranglehold on Victorian Oxford and Cambridge, whatever was happening in Göttingen – and William Morris’s many poems, romances and saga translations. Morris, indeed, perhaps deserves more space. He kept up with the scholarship, travelled in Iceland, knew the languages first-hand, and created a semi-socialist northern wonderland of his own in his ...

If you don’t swing, don’t ring

Christopher Turner: Playboy Mansions, 21 April 2016

Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics 
by Beatriz Preciado.
Zone, 303 pp., £20.95, October 2014, 978 1 935408 48 2
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Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny 
by Holly Madison.
Dey Street, 334 pp., £16.99, July 2015, 978 0 06 237210 9
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... began defining ‘The Playboy Philosophy’ – a kind of ‘hedonistic utilitarianism’, as William F. Buckley put it. The magazine was originally designed, Hefner admitted, as a ‘romantic reflection of earlier times’. His achievement was to associate sex with upward mobility by making his readers feel they were part of an elite gentlemen’s ...

Where have all the horses gone?

Eric Banks: Horse Power, 5 July 2018

The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey through Human History 
by Susanna Forrest.
Atlantic, 418 pp., £9.99, October 2017, 978 0 85789 900 2
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Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of Our Relationship 
by Ulrich Raulff, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp.
Penguin, 448 pp., £9.99, February 2018, 978 0 14 198317 2
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... and inspired numerous copies and spin-offs.Few subjects or scenes were too ambitious or too camp to be treated as topics for a hippodrama. Audiences could see ‘Rocinante and Dapple flying to heaven on a cloud, blue-eyed cremello ghost horses carrying the spectres of defeated Indians, castles that go up in flames, Lady Godiva, horned horses, the ...

What are we there for?

Tom Stevenson: The Gulf Bargain, 9 May 2019

AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain 
by David Wearing.
Polity, 275 pp., £15.99, September 2018, 978 1 5095 3203 2
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... the US still has troops stationed at al-Asad airbase north-west of Baghdad (once nicknamed ‘Camp Cupcake’ for its luxuries). In Saudi Arabia itself, the US operates a military training mission based in Eskan village. Only Iran, which broke away from the US system in 1979, houses no American military bases. An agreement​ signed by British ...

Putting things in boxes

Adam Kuper: Margaret Mead, 24 May 2007

To Cherish the Life of the World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead 
edited by Margaret Caffrey and Patricia Francis.
Basic Books, 429 pp., £17.99, September 2006, 0 465 00815 1
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... is. He gets all the points, is extraordinarily sensitive to people.’ Mead and Fortune set up camp on the shore of Lake Chambri near Bateson’s field site, and began a four-month study of Tchambuli fishermen and traders. The Tchambuli had been driven from their homes by the Iatmul – the tribe that Bateson was studying – and had returned only in ...

No Law at All

Stephen Sedley: The Governor Eyre Affair, 2 November 2006

A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law 
by R.W. Kostal.
Oxford, 529 pp., £79.95, December 2005, 0 19 826076 8
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... called Duberry Ramsay, a Crimean War veteran, who had been put in charge of a temporary prison camp at Morant Bay, where he had prisoners flogged and hanged at random. He was charged with the murder of one of them, but in spite of clear direction from an upright Scottish judge, Alan Ker, the grand jury of local property-owners would not indict him. This ...

The Young Man One Hopes For

Jonathan Rée: The Wittgensteins, 21 November 2019

Wittgenstein’s Family Letters: Corresponding with Ludwig 
edited by Brian McGuinness, translated by Peter Winslow.
Bloomsbury, 300 pp., £20, November 2018, 978 1 4742 9813 1
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... before, he decided to forget about his book and move on.When Wittgenstein got back from prison camp in Italy, he spent a year in Vienna training as a teacher, after which he worked with pre-adolescent children in a series of village schools in the Austrian Alps. His methods were in keeping with his approach to philosophy: he did not lay claim to any ...

There isn’t any inside!

Adam Mars-Jones: William Gaddis, 23 September 2021

The Recognitions 
by William Gaddis.
NYRB, 992 pp., £24, November 2020, 978 1 68137 466 6
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JR 
by William Gaddis.
NYRB, 784 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 68137 468 0
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... idea of literature, and a peculiar division of labour between writer and reader. Their author, William Gaddis, who won the National Book Award with JR, might actually have felt short-changed by the accolade of the imprint, to judge by a riff in JR deploring the way ‘longer works of fiction [are] now dismissed as classics and … largely unread due to the ...

Old Verities

Brian Harrison, 19 June 1986

The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832-1867 
by Catherine Gallagher.
Chicago, 320 pp., £23.25, September 1985, 0 226 27932 4
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Victorian Prison Lives: English Prison Biography 1830-1914 
by Philip Priestley.
Methuen, 311 pp., £14.85, October 1985, 0 416 34770 3
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The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers and Vivisection in Edwardian England 
by Coral Lansbury.
University of Wisconsin Press, 212 pp., £23.50, November 1985, 0 299 10250 5
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‘Orator’ Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism 
by John Belchem.
Oxford, 304 pp., £25, October 1985, 0 19 822759 0
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... in some way untypical, and here the accounts we have are largely those of the better-off. Lord William Nevill, Lady Constance Lytton, Jabez Balfour and the suffragettes: their views reflect the redoubled degradation felt by prisoners drawn from a better social class. In other words, his overall picture does not compensate sufficiently for the fact that, as ...

Daisy Chains

Emma Hogan: Sappho 1900, 20 May 2021

No Modernism without Lesbians 
by Diana Souhami.
Head of Zeus, 464 pp., £9.99, February, 978 1 78669 487 4
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... favourite English-language book). On the walls were photographs of Oscar Wilde, drawings by William Blake and examples of Walt Whitman’s early writings. Émigré writers and French intellectuals flocked there, and to the larger shop on rue de l’Odéon, where it moved in 1922. ‘From that moment on,’ Beach said, ‘for over twenty years, they ...

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