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Secrets are best kept by those who have no sense of humour

Alan Bennett: Why I turned down ‘Big Brother’, 2 January 2003

... tape over every offending apostrophe. My contradictory husband, who is sometimes known in his field as Write-it-Wrong Elbow, liberated a few of the apostrophes by pulling off the adhesive tape. 13 January. The canonisation of Dame Iris proceeds apace and the BBC are now preparing to show on Omnibus extracts from a video taken from an interview carried ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Didn’t Do in 2007, 3 January 2008

... open it up. Fortunately, though, there is an opening in the wall and we look through to a huge field of barley. Marooned in it are six or eight sets of huge 17th-century gateposts in brick and stone, their summits crowned with urns, the posts themselves set with cartouches and carved ornaments, a wonderful sight and all that remains, according to a guide ...

When that great day comes

R.W. Johnson, 22 July 1993

... allowed more than three-quarters of all Zambians voted to get rid of Kaunda and that he remains a frank advocate of single-party rule. It turns out, by the by, that the whole election was an imperialist plot against the people of Zambia and that the only reasonable outcome would have been for President Kaunda to continue his rule for ever: we have this on the ...

The Forty Years’ Peace

Keith Kyle, 21 October 1993

The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations and Provocations 
by John Lewis Gaddis.
Oxford, 301 pp., £19.50, July 1992, 0 19 505201 3
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Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953-71 
by Douglas Brinkley.
Yale, 429 pp., £22, February 1993, 0 300 04773 8
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The Quest for Stability: Problems of West European Security 1918-1957 
edited by Rolf Ahmann, A.M. Birke and Michael Howard.
Oxford, 546 pp., £50, June 1993, 0 19 920503 5
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... much matters: deterrence deterred and deterred both ways. It worked, for example, against plans by Frank Wisner of the CIA to commit paramilitary groups trained in West Germany to aid the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and it made the Russians generally cautious outside their own sphere. President Glafkos Cleridis of Cyprus has revealed that after the first ...

The Intrusive Apostrophe

Fintan O’Toole, 23 June 1994

Sean O’Faolain: A Life 
by Maurice Harmon.
Constable, 326 pp., £16.95, May 1994, 0 09 470140 7
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Vive Moi! An Autobiography 
by Sean O’Faolain.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 377 pp., £20, November 1993, 1 85619 376 4
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... the governors of the University, including the Bishop of Cork and the farmer he canvassed in his field whose only question was: ‘A professor of English? Can you talk Irish?’ He was overwhelmingly defeated for the job by Daniel Corkery, who had the same Republican credentials but a much more potent neo-Wagnerian ideology of race and nationality. When his ...

Representing Grandma

Steven Rose, 7 July 1994

The Astounding Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul 
by Francis Crick.
Simon and Schuster, 317 pp., £16.99, May 1994, 9780671711580
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... engineers manqué and are regarded with suspicion by those who spend their lives in the lab or the field. That Crick has largely – though never entirely – escaped this suspicion is a tribute both to his undisputed brilliance and to his success in choosing a series of superb experimentalists with whom to work. As he and Watson pointed out in their famous ...

Living Doll and Lilac Fairy

Penelope Fitzgerald, 31 August 1989

Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington 1893-1932 
by Gretchen Gerzina.
Murray, 342 pp., £18.95, June 1989, 0 7195 4688 5
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Lydia and Maynard: Letters between Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes 
edited by Polly Hill and Richard Keynes.
Deutsch, 367 pp., £17.95, September 1989, 0 233 98283 3
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Mazo de la Roche: The Hidden Life 
by Joan Givner.
Oxford, 273 pp., £18, July 1989, 0 19 540705 9
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Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby: A Working Partnership 
by Jean Kennard.
University Press of New England, 224 pp., £24, July 1989, 0 87451 474 6
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Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists 
by Susan Leonardi.
Rutgers, 254 pp., $33, May 1989, 0 8135 1366 9
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The Selected Letters of Somerville and Ross 
edited by Gifford Lewis.
Faber, 308 pp., £14.99, July 1989, 0 571 15348 8
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... arrivals in Bloomsbury from the outside. ‘Most people were at that time ordinary,’ said Frank Swinnerton, looking back with nostalgia to the beginning of the century, and Dora Carrington might have had the good luck to stay ordinary. David Garnett, introducing his selection of letters, felt that the reader might ask: ‘Who was this woman ...

Scholarship and its Affiliations

Wendy Steiner, 30 March 1989

... entails a deliberate splitting of art from political events: an ‘irrationalist fatalism’, as Frank Lentricchia would have it; or, for Terry Eagleton, a covert polemic against Marxism. And scholars whose entire orientation proceeds from Heidegger’s or de Man’s writing are forced to explain how a person can be both theoretically compelling and ...

Uplifting Lust

E.S. Turner: Mills and Boon, 6 January 2000

Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills and Boon 
by Joseph McAleer.
Oxford, 322 pp., £25, November 1999, 0 19 820455 8
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The Romantic Fiction of Mills and Boon 1909-1995 
by Jay Dixon.
UCL, 218 pp., £11.99, November 1998, 1 85728 267 1
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... had to be kept apart for 200 pages by misunderstandings, misadventures and backchat. Boon had to field objections not only from the tyrannous ‘Biddy’ Johnson of Woman’s Weekly and the stern male law-givers of Dundee, but from Mrs Mary Bonnycastle, of Harlequin Books in Winnipeg, to whom he supplied doctor-nurse novels in an endless stream and who was ...

Inexhaustible Engines

Michael Holroyd, 1 March 1984

Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography, Vols I and II 
by Dan Laurence.
Oxford, 1058 pp., £80, December 1983, 0 19 818179 5
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Bernard Shaw. Vol. I: 1856-1907 
by Margery Morgan.
Profile, 45 pp., £1.50, July 1982, 0 85383 518 7
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The Art and Mind of Shaw: Essays in Criticism 
by A.M. Gibbs.
Macmillan, 224 pp., £20, October 1983, 0 333 28679 0
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... deduce that, like Edgar, he has all these years pretended to be mad? Or that the bibliographer’s field has been as ravaged by fearful elements as King Lear’s heath? Perhaps, more romantically, Mr Laurence pictures himself as Browning’s supernatural knight, anxious and enigmatic, whose savage trample to the dark tower over the bones of his predecessors ...

Distance

Raymond Williams, 17 June 1982

... pass a bonfire of rags and oil in the village and suddenly, in an overwhelming moment, I was in a field in Normandy and the next tank, with my friends in it, was burning and about to explode. I think I then understood the professional culture of distance. Its antiseptic presentation of the images of war was skilled but childish. This sense was deepened by the ...

Facts of Life

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 1 July 1982

Ethology 
by Robert Hinde.
Oxford/Fontana, 320 pp., £9.50, February 1982, 0 19 520370 4
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Social Anthropology 
by Edmund Leach.
Oxford/Fontana, 254 pp., £9.50, February 1982, 0 19 520371 2
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Religion 
by Leszek Kolakowski.
Oxford/Fontana, 235 pp., £9.50, February 1982, 0 19 520372 0
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Historical Sociology 
by Philip Abrams.
Open Books, 353 pp., £12, April 1982, 0 7291 0111 8
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... arguments finally break out and break down. BS501 (and PS501 too) await their textbook writers. Frank Kermode’s masterguides are not such men. As Leach, for instance, explains, he is not offering stock answers to any stock questions. Indeed, he warns, anyone who read him for this would be put down by most examiners as ...

Economic Performance

Sydney Checkland, 19 April 1984

The Victorian Economy 
by François Crouzet, translated by Anthony Forster.
Methuen, 430 pp., £18, June 1982, 0 416 31110 5
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British Economic Growth 1856-1973 
by R.C.O. Matthews, C.H. Feinstein and J.C. Odling-Smee.
Oxford, 712 pp., £37.50, October 1982, 0 19 828453 5
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The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. Vol. VII: The Industrial Economies: Capital, Labour and Enterprise 
edited by Peter Mathias.
Cambridge, 832 pp., £13.50, June 1982, 0 521 28800 2
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... to become residuals (and hence very difficult to relate to anything real). Solow and Temin are frank: ‘The usual routine, in the absence of anything better, is to treat technology as the ultimate residual ... This is particularly unsatisfying to the historian.’ So it is that many historians, while finding the national income aggregative approach ...

Banksability

Ian Sansom: Iain Banks, 5 December 2013

The Quarry 
by Iain Banks.
Little, Brown, 326 pp., £18.99, June 2013, 978 1 4087 0394 6
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... up. The Quarry also shares a number of similarities with The Wasp Factory: like the psychopathic Frank in The Wasp Factory, The Quarry’s narrator, Kit, is a troubled teen stuck in a house with strange and unpredictable adults. What, the novel seems to be asking, is normal adult behaviour? What is innocence? What is youth? How shall we then live? In both ...

Gaslight and Fog

John Pemble: Sherlock Holmes, 26 January 2012

The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England 
by Haia Shpayer-Makov.
Oxford, 429 pp., £30, September 2011, 978 0 19 957740 8
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... because, like Robinson Crusoe, he’s fiction that’s become myth. ‘Fictions,’ according to Frank Kermode, ‘can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive.’ The fictiveness of Sherlock Holmes was uncertain from the start. The letters addressed to him sent to Conan Doyle for redirection, the landladies who wanted to ...

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