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Uncaging the beast

Sheldon Rothblatt, 16 February 1989

Victorian Anthropology 
by George Stocking.
Collier Macmillan, 429 pp., £22, October 1987, 0 02 931550 6
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... apparent, he has anticipated the arguments of Victorian Anthropology. In his 1970s studies of James Cowles Prichard, the Early Victorian physician who is the ‘link’ between 18th and 19th-century forms of evolutionism, Stocking was the first to make us consider the central importance of the English Evangelical revival to the pre-Darwinian ...

Short Cuts

Inigo Thomas: At the Ladbroke Arms, 22 February 2018

... their incarceration. I saw a form for a prisoner convicted of stealing sheep in Sussex in 1851. James Mill’s sentence was ten years in Australia. The character of the convict since his arrest and prior to his departure was said to be ‘Good’. He left behind his wife and five children. The harshness of British justice ...

Societies

Perry Anderson, 6 July 1989

A Treatise on Social Theory. Vol. II: Substantive Social Theory 
by W.G. Runciman.
Cambridge, 493 pp., £35, February 1989, 0 521 24959 7
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... of the social sciences have the confidence to invoke the ideals of Herbert Spencer and Henry James simultaneously. In his second volume, Runciman proceeds to his own substantive social theory. He remarks at the outset that he will here be concerned only with the explanatory segment of his overall prescriptions. But this involves no shrinkage of horizon ...

In Praise of Vagueness

Richard Poirier, 14 December 1995

Henry James and the Art of Non-Fiction 
by Tony Tanner.
Georgia, 92 pp., £20.50, May 1995, 9780820316895
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... at Southern Georgia University in 1993, is a celebration of the stylistic elaborations in Henry James’s travel writings, literary criticism and autobiographical works, most of which belong to his later or, as it is often called, major phase that includes, more famously, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. Tanner takes evident ...

Who’ll be last?

Jenny Diski, 19 November 2015

... race of her own, staying shtum publicly, her death a surprise except to the few who knew. So Clive James (announced May 2011 – ?) and Diski (announced 11 September 2014 – ?) still battle it out for third place. In the other kind of race, last man standing, James and Diski would be meandering towards first and second ...

Liza Jarrett’s Hard Life

Paul Driver, 4 December 1986

The Death of the Body 
by C.K. Stead.
Collins, 192 pp., £9.95, August 1986, 0 00 223067 4
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Kramer’s Goats 
by Rudolf Nassauer.
Peter Owen, 188 pp., £10.50, August 1986, 0 7206 0659 4
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Mefisto 
by John Banville.
Secker, 234 pp., £9.95, September 1986, 9780436032660
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The Century’s Daughter 
by Pat Barker.
Virago, 284 pp., £9.95, September 1986, 9780860686064
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Love Unknown 
by A.N. Wilson.
Hamish Hamilton, 202 pp., £9.95, August 1986, 0 241 11922 7
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... breathes something of that ‘air of reality (solidity of specification)’ which seemed to Henry James ‘the supreme virtue of a novel – the merit on which all its other merits ... helplessly and submissively depend’. Unfortunately, that one – Pat Barker’s The Century’s Daughter – is also a consciously ‘working-class’ fiction whose claim to ...

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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... abstract painting, say, and find much to comment on. It may equally be the case that without some prior exposure to a form I simply don’t register an example of it as an artwork (as with Stockhausen). And it also seems to be the case that some kinds of knowledge (though not all) help me to get started in my response. Rather than being a function of my ...

Skipwith and Anktill

David Wootton: Tudor Microhistory, 10 August 2000

Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England 
by David Cressy.
Oxford, 351 pp., £25, November 1999, 0 19 820781 6
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A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the Second Earl of Castlehaven 
by Cynthia Herrup.
Oxford, 216 pp., £18.99, December 1999, 0 19 512518 5
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... is the record of a verdict. Star Chamber, a prerogative court, is an important exception (hence James Sharpe’s recent The Bewitching of Anne Gunter), and church court records are sometimes quite full. Thus Cressy can tell us the stories of an excommunicated Catholic, buried illegally by night in the chancel of her parish church; of a young man who dressed ...

Johnson’s Business

Keith Walker, 7 August 1980

A Dictionary of the English Language 
by Samuel Johnson.
Times, 2558 pp., £45, June 1980, 0 7230 0228 2
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Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s Middle Years 
by James Clifford.
Heinemann, 372 pp., £10, February 1980, 0 434 13805 3
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... confuses Samuel Johnson the writer with Dr Johnson the ogre and bully portrayed by Boswell. James Murray, the author of the OED, succumbed to the same confusion, perhaps, when in a dream he imagined that Johnson was speaking of his Dictionary and Boswell, in an impish mood, asked ‘What would you say, Sir, if you were told that in a hundred ...

Planes, Trains and SUVs

Jonathan Raban: James Meek, 7 February 2008

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent 
by James Meek.
Canongate, 295 pp., £16.99, February 2008, 978 1 84195 988 7
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... James Meek’s last, bestselling novel, The People’s Act of Love, published in 2005 to great critical acclaim, was set in 1919, in ‘that part of Siberia lying between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk’. Anglophone readers who can locate ‘that’ part of Siberia without a good atlas deserve spot prizes. The historical date and exotic location gave Meek a fictional and cultural space in which extraordinary events and people could seem believable, when placed inside a landscape rendered in exact and first-hand detail ...

Newspaperising the World

Sadakat Kadri: The Leveson Inquiry, 5 July 2012

Dial M for Murdoch 
by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman.
Allen Lane, 360 pp., £20, April 2012, 978 1 84614 603 9
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... News International over the past year have given us many memorable moments, but Rupert and James Murdoch’s appearance before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons last July is first among them. While James cut a predictably bitter figure, his octogenarian father could hardly have seemed ...

Catacomb Graffiti

Clive James, 20 December 1979

Poems and Journeys 
by Charles Johnston.
Bodley Head, 97 pp., £3.90
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Eugene Onegin 
by Alexander Pushkin, translated by Charles Johnston.
Penguin Classics, 238 pp., £1.50
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... stanza which Johnston insists on referring to as Childe Harold, although really Spenser has the prior title. Johnston’s mastery of the latter form was already proven. But by this time he could read fluent Russian and had obviously become fascinated with the breakneck measure in which Eugene Onegin unfolds its story. The Onegin stanzas of ‘In Praise of ...

Consider Jack and Oskar

Michael Rossi: Twin Studies, 7 February 2013

Born Together – Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study 
by Nancy Segal.
Harvard, 410 pp., £39.95, June 2012, 978 0 674 05546 9
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... first to women named Linda then to women named Betty, and had sons with nearly identical names (James Alen and James Allen). The reunited twins in the study often became friends; in one instance, they became lovers. These eerie inventories of common traits and interests weren’t, according to Mistra researchers, simply ...

After Strachey

Adam Phillips: Translating Freud, 4 October 2007

... translation, and like many people really did think of it as the standard edition. Like the King James Bible, if I can use that unfortunate analogy, it is so good – or we have been so educated to see its goodness – that it seems like the real thing. It’s true that I wondered, when Penguin first phoned me, whether Freud sounded different in other ...

Hiveward-Winging

Robert Irwin, 3 July 1997

Quarantine 
by Jim Crace.
Viking, 243 pp., £16.99, June 1997, 0 670 85697 5
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... strange and super-human. Crace’s evocations of his sufferings and physical deterioration prior to death and transfiguration are detailed and persuasive, but not strictly accurate. A person who refuses food but who takes water can survive for quite a long time. The Irish hunger-strikers of 1980-1 ceased to feel hunger pangs after the third or fourth ...

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