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Among the Sandemanians

John Hedley Brooke, 25 July 1991

Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist 
by Geoffrey Cantor.
Macmillan, 359 pp., £40, May 1991, 0 333 55077 3
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... even his eternal power and Godhead.’ In Faraday’s Bible, also prominently on display, the same passage is marked. The message is even spelled out for the inattentive: Faraday belonged to a small Christian sect, the Sandemanians, and ‘believed firmly that in studying science he was investigating the laws written into the Universe by God.’ This is not ...

Dreadful Beasts

Mark Ridley, 28 June 1990

Wonderful Life 
by Stephen Jay Gould.
Hutchinson Radius, 347 pp., £14.95, February 1990, 0 09 174271 4
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... a mountain quarry in British Columbia. Fossils had first been discovered there by a US geologist, Charles Walcott, in 1909 (as Gould convincingly shows, from Walcott’s diaries). In the next eight years, Walcott collected over eighty thousand specimens and deposited them in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He never found the time to work on them as ...

Strangers

John Lanchester, 11 July 1991

Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon 
edited by Stephen Egger.
Praeger, 250 pp., £33.50, October 1990, 0 275 92986 8
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Serial Killers 
by Joel Norris.
Arrow, 333 pp., £4.99, July 1990, 0 09 971750 6
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Life after Life 
by Tony Parker.
Pan, 256 pp., £4.50, May 1991, 0 330 31528 5
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American Psycho 
by Bret Easton Ellis.
Picador, 399 pp., £6.99, April 1991, 0 330 31992 2
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Dirty Weekend 
by Helen Zahavi.
Macmillan, 185 pp., £13.99, April 1991, 0 333 54723 3
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Silence of the Lambs 
by Thomas Harris.
Mandarin, 366 pp., £4.99, April 1991, 0 7493 0942 3
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... certainly do. The essays edited by Egger (not all of which are as execrably written as that passage) and Serial Killers, the energetic but infuriatingly sloppy book by a psychologist called Joel Norris, could hardly be more alarming about the extent of the phenomenon. Norris cites an unspecified report from the FBI to the effect that, in ...

Phantom Jacks

John Bayley, 5 January 1989

Jack: C.S. Lewis and His Times 
by George Sayer.
Macmillan, 278 pp., £14.95, November 1988, 0 333 43362 9
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J.B. Priestley 
by Vincent Brome.
Hamish Hamilton, 512 pp., £16.95, October 1988, 9780241125601
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Eddy: The Life of Edward Sackville-West 
by Michael De-la-Noy.
Bodley Head, 341 pp., £16, October 1988, 0 370 31164 7
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... in an incongruous inner ring of like-minded persons, including Tolkien, a Catholic convert, and Charles Williams, a Cockney original with a decidedly creepy inner life, and an extraordinary talent for updating the mystico-religious poetic attitudes of the Fin-de-Siècle. Thus was born the Inklings, an unexclusive but very characteristic group of like-minded ...

Sexist

John Bayley, 10 December 1987

John Keats 
by John Barnard.
Cambridge, 172 pp., £22.50, March 1987, 0 521 26691 2
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Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare 
by R.S. White.
Athlone, 250 pp., £25, March 1987, 0 485 11298 1
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... was, which was why Taylor and Hessey, the young firm which took over Keats’s Poems of 1817 from Charles Ollier, were prepared to treat him so generously. They did the same for Clare. In the event, neither poet made it commercially: in Keats’s case, because success had to be on his own terms, and these went against the grain of his natural genius. He did ...

Dr Blair, the Leavis of the North

Terence Hawkes: English in Scotland, 18 February 1999

The Scottish Invention of English Literature 
edited by Robert Crawford.
Cambridge, 271 pp., £35, July 1998, 0 521 59038 8
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... world was proposed at St Andrews in 1720, its odd title hinting at French roots, and the career of Charles Rollin, Professeur d’Eloquence au Collège Roial et associé à L’Académie Roiale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, encouraging Crawford to conclude that, together with the phrase ‘Belles Lettres’, ‘Eloquence’ begins effectively to map out ...

Unreal Food Uneaten

Julian Bell: Sitting for Vanessa, 13 April 2000

The Art of Bloomsbury 
edited by Richard Shone.
Tate Gallery, 388 pp., £35, November 1999, 1 85437 296 3
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First Friends 
by Ronald Blythe.
Viking, 157 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 670 88613 0
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Bloomsbury in France 
by Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright.
Oxford, 430 pp., £25, December 1999, 0 19 511752 2
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... definitive in its field, handsomely produced, and has the virtue of introducing the Provençal Charles Mauron – who possessed one of the most incisive intellects associated with the group – to a hitherto unacquainted anglo-phone readership. Blythe’s story starts in 1912, when the Nashes and Carrington emerge from the Slade School, and trails past the ...

Wodehouse in America

D.A.N. Jones, 20 May 1982

P.G. Wodehouse: A Literary Biography 
by Benny Green.
Joseph, 256 pp., £8.95, October 1981, 0 907516 04 1
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Wodehouse on Wodehouse: Bring on the girls (with Guy Bolton), Performing Flea, Over Seventy 
Penguin, 655 pp., £2.95, September 1981, 0 14 005245 3Show More
P.G. Wodehouse: An Illustrated Biography 
by Joseph Connolly.
Eel Pie, 160 pp., £3.95, September 1981, 0 906008 44 1
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P.G. Wodehouse: A Centenary Celebration 1881-1981 
edited by James Heineman and Donald Bensen.
Oxford, 197 pp., £40, February 1982, 0 19 520357 7
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The World of P.G. Wodehouse 
by Herbert Warren Wind.
Hutchinson, 256 pp., £5.95, October 1981, 0 09 145670 3
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... Consider the wartime movie, Pimpernel Smith, in which the stupid and wicked German reads out a passage of Wodehouse, alleging that it is unfunny: ‘so how can ve onderstand zis nation of madmen?’ British audiences laughed smugly. The hero of that movie was a sleepy, gentlemanly don who suddenly turned up trumps in the anti-Nazi struggle, like a Percy ...

Dishonoured

Michael Wood, 5 May 1983

The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformation 
by Ian Donaldson.
Oxford, 203 pp., £15, October 1982, 0 19 812638 7
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The Rape of Clarissa 
by Terry Eagleton.
Blackwell, 109 pp., £10, September 1982, 0 631 13031 4
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Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters 
by Carol Houlihan Flynn.
Princeton, 342 pp., £17.70, May 1982, 0 691 06506 3
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... garments’ – she has been raped by this time anyway. But she is being posed by Richardson in a passage like the following, and someone’s fantasies are being indulged. The marquis is not far away.    Her dress was white lustring, exceeding neat; but her stays seemed not tight-laced. I was told afterwards, that her laces had been cut, when she fainted ...

Rebellion

C.K. Stead, 7 May 1981

I passed this way 
by Sylvia Ashton-Warner.
Virago, 499 pp., £12, October 1980, 0 86068 160 2
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Spinster 
by Sylvia Ashton-Warner.
Virago, 269 pp., £2.95, October 1980, 0 86068 161 0
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Teacher 
by Sylvia Ashton-Warner.
Virago, 224 pp., £2.95, October 1980, 0 86068 162 9
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... attempt to consider all her work, he was publicly rebuked for it by Landfall’s former editor, Charles Brasch, who declared Ashton-Warner unworthy of such attention. That is not the end of the story, however. More books have followed including a novel set in London, Three, which is as economical as Incense to Idols is copious, and which is ...

Hofstadterismus

Andrew Hodges, 17 April 1986

Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern 
by Douglas Hofstadter.
Viking, 852 pp., £18.95, September 1985, 0 670 80687 0
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Ada: A Life and a Legacy 
by Dorothy Stein.
MIT, 321 pp., £17.50, January 1986, 9780262192422
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... relationship to consciousness. Here, to give an example of hardcore Hofstadterismus, is a telling passage buried for the assiduous or serendipitous reader to spot in the bibliography: Gebstedter, Egbert B. Thetamagical Memas: Seeking the Whence of Letter and Spirit. Perth: Acidic Books, 1985. A curious pot-pourri, bloated and muddled – yet remarkably ...

Being two is half the fun

John Bayley, 4 July 1985

Multiple Personality and the Disintegration of Literary Character 
by Jeremy Hawthorn.
Edward Arnold, 146 pp., £15, May 1983, 0 7131 6398 4
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Doubles: Studies in Literary History 
by Karl Miller.
Oxford, 488 pp., £19.50, June 1985, 9780198128410
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The Doubleman 
by C.J. Koch.
Chatto, 326 pp., £8.95, April 1985, 9780701129453
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... They are not referred to again, but they have their place, like the towns and caves in A Passage to India, to remind us that separations are of the order of existence. Like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ‘The Secret Sharer’ is one of the classic texts about duality and doubles. But as Miller’s book shows, the theme is often the more revealing the more ...

Perfect Light

Jenny Diski, 9 July 1992

Diana: Her True Story 
by Andrew Morton.
Michael O’Mara, 165 pp., £14.99, June 1992, 1 85479 191 5
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Shared Lives 
by Lyndall Gordon.
Bloomsbury, 285 pp., £16.99, April 1992, 0 7475 1164 0
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Antonia White: Diaries 1958-1979 
edited by Susan Chitty.
Constable, 352 pp., £19.95, May 1992, 0 09 470660 3
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... for doing’, she has decided to allow the world to know all that she has to put up with. Prince Charles is a cad – he walks away when she flings herself head-first down the stairs, he mocks her when he finds her reading Jungian texts on death and holding the hands of dying friends, he is petulant about her popularity with the population. Worst of all is ...

Diary

Suzy Hansen: In Istanbul, 7 May 2015

... when it comes to Beyoglu. In 1939, ‘while new government offices were rising in Ankara,’ Charles King writes in Midnight at Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul, ‘the Turkish government organised an international design competition to solicit proposals for solving the problem of Istanbul’s future development.’* The winner was Henri ...

Pork Chops and Pineapples

Terry Eagleton: The Realism of Erich Auerbach, 23 October 2003

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature 
by Erich Auerbach.
Princeton, 579 pp., £13.95, May 2003, 9780691113364
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... boundless humdrum detail, is one of the great revolutionary conceptions in human history, which Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self claims as Christian in inspiration. The modern equivalent of Moll Flanders in this respect is EastEnders. Auerbach’s Mimesis, one of the great works of literary scholarship, was written between 1942 and 1945 in ...

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