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Why We Weep

Peter de Bolla: Looking and Feeling, 6 March 2003

Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings 
by James Elkins.
Routledge, 272 pp., £14.99, October 2001, 0 415 93713 2
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... exposure and dedicated attention, I can improve my responses. Perhaps, through practice, I can ward off the demons of mutism. Again, my own experience bears this out: when I was younger I found it difficult to discover much of interest in some forms or works, whereas now I can breeze into a show of abstract painting, say, and find much to comment on. It ...

Bin the bric-à-brac

Joanne O’Leary: Sara Baume, 4 January 2018

A Line Made by Walking 
by Sara Baume.
Heinemann, 320 pp., £12.99, February 2017, 978 1 78515 041 8
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... She reveals most about her own shortcomings when she reflects on other people’s. Thinking about Peter Friedl’s presentation of a stuffed giraffe at the 2007 Documenta show in Kassel, for instance, she registers a worry about her own inability to execute a living likeness: Works about Zoos, I test myself: ...

The Need for Buddies

Roy Porter, 22 June 2000

British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800: The Origins of an Associational World 
by Peter Clark.
Oxford, 516 pp., £60, January 2000, 0 19 820376 4
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... digesting the Times at the Reform or Athenaeum, before sorting out the world’s evils. But as Peter Clark, Britain’s leading urban historian, notes in a characteristically fact-packed but thoughtful study, that most English of institutions was going strong long before then. Indeed, Sam Johnson’s beloved ‘clubbable’ men must have been in clover in ...

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

... Four, but for the closely related cases of the Maguire family, the Birmingham Six, Judith Ward? What did it mean for the system of justice in England? Some years earlier, in a judgment in the Birmingham Six case, Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls, had summed up the broader significance of such a reversal. If the six men win, it will mean that the ...

Vienna discovers its past

Peter Pulzer, 1 August 1985

Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and their Experiences 
by Lewis Coser.
Yale, 351 pp., £25, October 1984, 0 300 03193 9
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The Viennese Enlightenment 
by Mark Francis.
Croom Helm, 176 pp., £15.95, May 1985, 0 7099 1065 7
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The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity 
by Marsha Rozenblit.
SUNY, 368 pp., $39.50, July 1984, 0 87395 844 6
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... Faculty of Medicine, in which the patients are not the halt and the lame of the hospital ward but souls in torment, and from that to the unvarnished sexuality of Schiele’s couplings is to come face to face with a unity of time and place. The same unity links the architectural puritanism of Adolf Loos (‘no eyebrows,’ the Emperor complained of ...

Rejoicings in a Dug-Out

Peter Howarth: Cecil, Ada and G.K., 15 December 2022

The Sins of G.K. Chesterton 
by Richard Ingrams.
Harbour, 292 pp., £20, August 2021, 978 1 905128 33 4
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... has such devotion been shown by one brother to the memory of another,’ wrote Maisie Ward, Chesterton’s first biographer; ‘never has the greater man exalted the lesser to such a pedestal.’Cecil was a stinker by all accounts, including the admiring ones. Ada begins The Chestertons with the story of her first meeting with the brothers at a ...

Neurotic Health

Michael Shepherd, 17 December 1981

Becoming Psychiatrists 
by Donald Light.
Norton, 429 pp., £10.95, June 1981, 0 393 01168 2
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... help, counsel and advise his patients. Now the American consumer appears to have rumbled what Sir Peter Medawar has termed the most stupendous confidence-trick of the 20th century. To be sure, the numbers of mentally sick and worried well have not diminished. They are still in search of help, but they are turning more and more to drugs, to ...

Dingy Quadrilaterals

Ian Gilmour: The Profumo Case, 19 October 2006

Bringing the House Down: A Family Memoir 
by David Profumo.
Murray, 291 pp., £20, September 2006, 0 7195 6608 8
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... At the Cliveden swimming-pool Jack met, not for the first time, Astor’s osteopath, Stephen Ward, ‘the Doctor’ of the quadrilateral, and the exceptionally pretty Christine Keeler. Profumo, as he later put it, ‘was extremely taken by Christine, whom I thought was Ward’s girlfriend, but he did not seem to be ...

Life Pushed Aside

Clair Wills: The Last Asylums, 18 November 2021

... J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a locked ward in the hospital for many years. He was incontinent and unable to speak clearly. He drew vigorously on the only paper he could find.’ Adamson, who was tasked with introducing art therapy to the hospital, brought Beegan to his studio and gave him an ...

A Reparation of Her Choosing

Jenny Diski: Among the Sufis, 17 December 2015

... she could handle me. It’s true that she thought I would be going away to boarding school, like Peter. So there would only be the holidays, during which, anyway, she gave up on work to accommodate Peter’s presence. I think she really felt that she could cope with anything, anyone difficult because she wrote about such ...

He speaks too loud

David Blackbourn: Brecht, 3 July 2014

Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life 
by Stephen Parker.
Bloomsbury, 704 pp., £30, February 2014, 978 1 4081 5562 2
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... at Munich University; the following year he served briefly as an orderly, first in an amputation ward, then in a ward for sexually transmitted diseases, which provided material for the scurrilous work that was becoming his trademark. He knew which side he was on during the revolutionary upheavals at the end of the war ...

No Surrender

Tom Shippey: Vikings, 22 July 2010

The Hammer and the Cross: A New History of the Vikings 
by Robert Ferguson.
Allen Lane, 450 pp., £30, November 2009, 978 0 7139 9788 0
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... helmets, is plain wrong), but there is also an established scholarly agenda, well exposed by Bryan Ward-Perkins’s The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation (2005). Briefly, after World War Two the Edward Gibbon view of late antique history – Latin civilisation destroyed by Germanic barbarians – became thoroughly unwelcome in the new Europe, as too ...

Straight to the Multiplex

Tom McCarthy: Steven Hall’s ‘The Raw Shark Texts’, 1 November 2007

The Raw Shark Texts 
by Steven Hall.
Canongate, 368 pp., £12.99, March 2007, 978 1 84195 902 3
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... no coincidence that the first objects that fall from the incised stomachs of captured sharks in Peter Benchley’s Jaws are car parts: as Benchley points out at the novel’s outset, like some grotesque über-car the great white must perpetually keep moving. My sister then held up as evidence The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, in which ...

Unshockable Victorians

John Bayley, 19 June 1986

The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Vol. II: The Tender Passion 
by Peter Gay.
Oxford, 490 pp., £19.50, June 1986, 0 19 503741 3
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... into its own: its complacencies, tyrannies and inhibitions now seem positively seductive. Peter Gay proposes to write a series of six volumes on ‘The Bourgeois Experience’, of which this is the second, and it is clear that he is on the way to sales and success. Shrewdly, the first two volumes deal respectively with sex and love as parts of the ...

Diary

Inigo Thomas: My Father, Hugh Thomas, 15 June 2017

... an unsurprising consequence in stroke patients, as I now know. The doctors on the acute stroke ward at Charing Cross do rounds of their patients in the mornings. Despite all the machinery, or because of it, the constant measurement – heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen saturation – makes the atmosphere in hospital wards enervating. When Hugh was ...

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