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His Own Peak

Ian Sansom: John Fowles’s diary, 6 May 2004

John Fowles: The Journals, Vol. I 
edited by Charles Drazin.
Cape, 668 pp., £30, October 2003, 9780224069113
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John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds 
by Eileen Warburton.
Cape, 510 pp., £25, April 2004, 0 224 05951 3
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... conceal that in order to make life livable.’ Anyone who’s ever read, say, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, or D.H. Lawrence’s Letters, or indeed virtually any of the canonical works of 20th-century English literature, will be more than familiar with this profound self-love, which is the leitmotif of Modernism and one of the sustaining myths of Sunday ...

At the Amsterdam

Steven Shapin: A Wakefull and Civill Drink, 20 April 2006

The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffee House 
by Brian Cowan.
Yale, 364 pp., £25, January 2006, 0 300 10666 1
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Coffee House: A Cultural History 
by Markman Ellis.
Phoenix, 304 pp., £8.99, November 2005, 0 7538 1898 1
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... in a public house of promiscuous, face-to-face talk and unregulated cheap print was explosive. As Adrian Johns has noted, ‘the alliance of coffee and print transformed authorship, communication and conversation.’ But precisely because coffee houses were places where people freely spoke their minds on matters that were supposed to be none of their ...

The Last Hundred Days

Peter Wollen: Kassel’s Mega-Exhibition, 3 October 2002

Documenta 11 
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... Louise Bourgeois, Leon Golub, Alfredo Jaar, On Kawara, Glenn Ligon, Shirin Neshat, Gabriel Orozco, Adrian Piper and Lorna Simpson, all of whom are widely recognised and esteemed. A smaller number are based on the West Coast, including Allan Sekula and Raymond Pettibon in California, together with Stan Douglas, Ken Lum and Jeff Wall, all born and based in ...

Mortal Scripts

Christopher Norris, 21 April 1983

Writing and the Body 
by Gabriel Josipovici.
Harvester, 142 pp., £15.95, September 1982, 0 7108 0495 4
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The Definition of Literature and Other Essays 
by W.W. Robson.
Cambridge, 267 pp., £19.50, November 1982, 0 521 24495 1
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... up to terminal exhaustion, a latterday pact with the forces of demonic unreason. The composer Adrian Leverkühn renounces the expressive resources of Western tradition in exchange for a repertoire of calculated styles and parodic devices which work to deconstruct the very bases of musical meaning and value. His masterpiece is described (albeit rather ...

Bunnymooning

Philip French, 6 June 1996

The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives 
by Sebastian Faulks.
Hutchinson, 309 pp., £16.99, April 1996, 0 09 179211 8
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... met Jeremy in December 1954, at the end of our first term, when the editor-designate of Isis, Adrian Mitchell, appointed me as the next term’s deputy news editor and Jeremy as one of his two Union reporters (the other being Christopher Driver). I knew him by reputation. There were people quite as clever as Jeremy, several of them his friends, but ...

The Tangible Page

Leah Price: Books as Things, 31 October 2002

The Book History Reader 
edited by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery.
Routledge, 390 pp., £17.99, November 2001, 0 415 22658 9
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Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays 
by D.F. McKenzie, edited by Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez.
Massachusetts, 296 pp., £20.95, June 2002, 1 55849 336 0
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... computer. Yet in taking ‘book’ to imply ‘printed’, the Book History Reader denies itself room for manoeuvre – no case studies taken from classical antiquity, nothing on (or in) digital media or hypertext. As a result, we lose the recent insistence of scholars such as Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass that the most useful analogy for the advent ...

Singing the Blues

Noël Annan, 22 April 1993

A History of Cambridge University. Vol. IV: 1870-1990 
by Christopher Brooke.
Cambridge, 652 pp., £50, December 1992, 9780521343503
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... omission. He describes the genesis of physiology under Michael Foster but never mentions Adrian, Hodgkin or Huxley, all Nobel Laureates and masters of Trinity, who immediately after the war worked in the most prestigious biological department which pullulated with FRS. The greatest change in social life? Brooke is in no doubt. Women. He writes with ...

Oh, My Aching Back

Roy Porter, 2 November 1995

The History of Pain 
by Roselyne Rey, translated by Elliott Wallace and J.A. Cadden , and S.W. Cadden.
Harvard, 394 pp., £25.50, October 1995, 0 674 39967 6
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... Rey shows, is not always conducive to understanding. In The Basis of Sensation (1928), Lord Adrian rightly stated that ‘whatever our views about the relation of mind and body, we cannot escape the fact that there is an unsatisfactory gap between such events as the sticking of a pin into my finger and the appearance of a sensation of pain in my ...

Rough Trade

Steven Shapin: Robert Hooke, 6 March 2003

The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Strange and Inventive Life of Robert Hooke 1635-1703 
by Stephen Inwood.
Macmillan, 497 pp., £18.99, September 2002, 0 333 78286 0
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... at once wholly natural and deeply problematic in Restoration scientific circles. As Rob Iliffe and Adrian Johns have shown, it was the norm for mechanics and tradesmen vigorously to contest intellectual property rights and to withhold secrets that might lead to financial gain: after all, their business was at stake. Mathematicians followed similar ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2019, 2 January 2020

... gust from Storm Gareth, and fall heavily in the road. I lie there for a minute or two, and it’s Adrian, one of the builders from next door, who picks me up. I haven’t broken anything, but it’s the third time I’ve come off in the last six months, and it leaves me shaken and bruised, and Rupert shaken too when he comes downstairs. Now I lie on the sofa ...

So much was expected

R.W. Johnson, 3 December 1992

Harold Wilson 
by Ben Pimlott.
HarperCollins, 811 pp., £20, October 1992, 0 00 215189 8
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Harold Wilson 
by Austen Morgan.
Pluto, 625 pp., £25, May 1992, 0 7453 0635 7
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... since the famous Boy Scout photo was taken of him posing in front of No 10. This is just the way Adrian Mole might have proposed to Pandora: in one breathless rush telling her that he is going to go to Oxford, then become an MP and eventually prime minister. The hand of Mole is even more discernible in Harold’s later comment: ‘Had she believed all ...

A Use for the Stones

Jacqueline Rose: On Being Nadine Gordimer, 20 April 2006

Get a Life 
by Nadine Gordimer.
Bloomsbury, 187 pp., £16.99, November 2005, 0 7475 8175 4
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... them to his village, realises that her sense of self has relied on the physical dimensions of a room. The recognition tears into the white liberalism in which she had taken such misjudged pride: ‘The absolute nature she and her kind were scrupulously just in granting to everybody was no more than the price of the master bedroom.’ (It is a racialised ...

The wind comes up out of nowhere

Charles Nicholl: The Disappearance of Arthur Cravan, 9 March 2006

... strides like conquering giants,’ she wrote. They set up home, very poor, in a ‘terrible’ room with arum lilies on the patio and ‘old sorceresses’ squatting on the pavement outside. Brown describes Loy cooking tortillas on a charcoal stove in their ‘dark, earthern-floored cave . . . in the garbaged outskirts’, but a letter of 30 April gives ...

Why should you be the only ones that sin?

Colm Tóibín, 5 September 1996

Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature 
by Anthony Heilbut.
Macmillan, 636 pp., £20, June 1996, 9780394556338
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Thomas Mann: A Biography 
by Ronald Hayman.
Bloomsbury, 672 pp., £20, March 1996, 0 7475 2531 5
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Thomas Mann: A Life 
by Donald Prater.
Oxford, 554 pp., £20, September 1995, 0 19 815861 0
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... destinies of most of his heroes – Hanno Buddenbrooks, Tonio Kröger, Aschenbach, Hans Castorp, Adrian Leverkuhn, Felix Krull – are shaped by their uneasy and ambiguous homosexuality. For Mann being German came first, and he learned, as Anthony Heilbut rather quaintly puts it, to read German history as one long queer epic – he alluded to Frederick the ...

His Own Sort of Outsider

Philip Clark: Tippett’s Knack, 16 July 2020

Michael Tippett: The Biography 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 750 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4746 0602 8
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... elsewhere. He took conducting lessons from Sargent and charmed his way onto the podium to watch Adrian Boult conduct student orchestras. It wasn’t Boult’s technique as a conductor that interested him, he said later: ‘I was listening to the sound. I knew quite early I had an ear for texture.’ Composition lessons at the RCM were focused too ...

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