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Pissing in the Snow

Steven Rose: Dissidents and Scientists, 18 July 2019

Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science 
by Audra J. Wolfe.
Johns Hopkins, 302 pp., £22, January 2019, 978 1 4214 2673 0
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... for state planning in The Social Function of Science. In response the Oxford geneticist John Baker set up a Society for Freedom in Science, with a passionate attack on any attempt to tell scientists what they should work on or the methods they should use. The conflict between Bernalian and Bakerian views of science runs throughout Freedom’s ...

Smorgasbits

Ian Sansom: Jim Crace, 15 November 2001

The Devil's Larder 
by Jim Crace.
Viking, 194 pp., £12.99, September 2001, 0 670 88145 7
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... According to Henry James, reviewing John Cross’s life of George Eliot, the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr Cross’s volumes than the absence of any indication, up to the time the Scenes of Clerical Life were published, that Miss Evans was a likely person to have written them; unless it be the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors ...

Trouble down there

Ferdinand Mount: Tea with Sassoon, 7 August 2003

Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet 1886-1918 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Duckworth, 600 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 0 7156 2894 1
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Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches 1918-67 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Duckworth, 526 pp., £30, April 2003, 0 7156 2971 9
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Sassoon: The Worlds of Philip and Sybil 
by Peter Stansky.
Yale, 295 pp., £25, April 2003, 0 300 09547 3
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... out of practice in company. His wife, Hester, had long since been turfed out and their only son, George, was away and for the moment estranged, too. But this was Sassoon’s normal way of talking (his poetry readings at the height of his fame had often been more or less inaudible), and it was no obstacle to a formidable eloquence when he got going. He talked ...

The Road to West Egg

Thomas Powers, 4 July 2013

Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of ‘The Great Gatsby’ 
by Sarah Churchwell.
Virago, 306 pp., £16.99, June 2013, 978 1 84408 766 2
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The Great Gatsby 
directed by Baz Luhrmann.
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... the garage. Scholars have long known that the leading women in Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker, were based on Fitzgerald’s early girlfriend, Ginevra King, and her classmate at the Westover School in Connecticut, Edith Cummings, a noted golfer. The men in the story are not so easy to pin down, beginning with Nick Carraway, the narrator. Carraway ...

Down with DWEMs

John Sutherland, 15 August 1991

ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education 
by Charles Sykes.
St Martin’s, 304 pp., $9.95, December 1989, 0 312 03916 6
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Tenured Redicals: How politics has corrupted our Higher Education 
by Roger Kimball.
HarperCollins, 222 pp., $9.95, April 1991, 0 06 092049 1
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... is a professor of theological ethics at Duke. Also cited as symptomatic of the times was Houston Baker’s cryptic remark that choosing between authors like Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck ‘is like choosing between a hoagy and a pizza. I am one whose career is dedicated to the day when we have a disappearance of those standards.’ ...

Motherly Protuberances

Blake Morrison: Simon Okotie, 9 September 2021

After Absalon 
by Simon Okotie.
Salt, 159 pp., £9.99, January 2020, 978 1 78463 166 6
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... germane to their investigation and must be exhaustively scrutinised before being ruled out. George Eliot talked about the human need to filter, lest madness ensue: ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the ...

Bastilles and Battalions

Sarah Resnick: On Rikers Island, 22 September 2022

Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage 
by Jarrod Shanahan.
Verso, 433 pp., £20, May, 978 1 78873 995 5
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... Carter, 25, hanged himself two days after returning to Rikers from a state psychiatric hospital. George Pagan, 48, was plainly ill during the nine days he spent on the island, eating little and urinating, defecating and vomiting on himself. He died of sepsis, after staff failed to take him to any of his nine scheduled medical appointments. Emanuel ...

What are they after?

William Davies: How Could the Tories?, 8 March 2018

... alternative to work, was quickly eradicated. And there was a new iteration under David Cameron and George Osborne, in the form of austerity. The hypothesis of ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’, touted by Osbornites during the first years of the coalition government, is that cuts to public spending can lead to economic growth, by creating more opportunities ...

The Bad News about the Resistance

Neal Ascherson: Parachuted into France, 30 July 2020

A Schoolmaster’s War: Harry Rée, British Agent in the French Resistance 
edited by Jonathan Rée.
Yale, 204 pp., £14.99, March 2020, 978 0 300 24566 0
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... in the Resistance, and had a career as a right-wing politician after the war. The other book was George Millar’s Maquis. Millar, a brave and very talented Scottish journalist, was recruited by the SOE and parachuted into the Franche-Comté, just after the sorely wounded Harry Reé left it.For a teenager on this side of the Channel, these books suggested an ...

It’s not me who’s seeing

Blake Morrison: Jon Fosse’s Methods, 5 January 2023

Septology 
by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls.
Fitzcarraldo, 825 pp., £16.99, November, 978 1 80427 006 6
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Aliss at the Fire 
by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls.
Fitzcarraldo, 74 pp., £10.99, November, 978 1 80427 004 2
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... High School, The Art School, The Hardware Store, The Beach, The Dock, The Shore, The Fiddler, The Baker, The Baker’s Wife, The Bartender, The Landlady, The Bus Driver, Mother, Father, Sister. The capitalisations confer a generality, as though we could be anywhere and with anyone. Perhaps a similar instinct leads Fosse to ...

White Power

Thomas Meaney, 1 August 2019

Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America 
by Kathleen Belew.
Harvard, 330 pp., £23.95, April 2018, 978 0 674 28607 8
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Revolutionaries for the Right Anti-Communist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War 
by Kyle Burke.
North Carolina, 337 pp., June 2018, 978 1 4696 4073 0
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... strongly critical of some of his appointments, especially of ‘internationalists’ such as George H.W. Bush, James Baker and Caspar Weinberger. Weinberger was one of the few figures in the administration to show concern about white extremism. Reagan only made matters worse by allying himself with Jewish ...

Sod off, readers

John Sutherland, 26 September 1991

Rude Words: A Discursive History of the London Library 
by John Wells.
Macmillan, 240 pp., £17.50, September 1991, 0 333 47519 4
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Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English 
by Geoffrey Hughes.
Blackwell, 283 pp., £16.95, August 1991, 0 631 16593 2
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... chose to commit suicide there. Hunt had asked at the issue desk for the second volume of George Henry Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind but discovered that it was out. Lewes’s wife had been his father’s mistress, which may have had something to do with the tragedy that followed. The young man went to the Magazine Room, where he shot himself in ...

The sea is the same sea

Adam Shatz: Bibi goes to Washington, 30 August 2018

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu 
by Anshel Pfeffer.
Hurst, 423 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 84904 988 7
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... himself, at one point denouncing American policy as ‘based on lies and distortions’. James Baker, George Bush’s secretary of state, barred him from entering the State Department. ‘I was offended by his glibness and his criticism of US policy – not to mention his arrogance and outlandish ambition,’ Robert ...

Seeing Stars

Alan Bennett: Film actors, 3 January 2002

... twice a week and we generally went on a Monday and a Saturday. Comedies were best, particularly George Formby, but we took what was on offer, never knowing whether a film had any special merit. Some came with more of a reputation than others, Mrs Miniver for instance with Greer Garson, Dangerous Moonlight (with the Warsaw Concerto) and Now, Voyager with the ...

One and Only

Malcolm Bull, 23 February 1995

The Holocaust in Historical Context. Vol. I: The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age 
by Steven Katz.
Oxford, 702 pp., £40, July 1994, 0 19 507220 0
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... at issue. In literary and philosophical discussions of the Holocaust it is often assumed that (as George Steiner put it) ‘each of us has been diminished by the enactment of a potential subhumanity latent in all of us.’ This belief inevitably leads to the question: if this is man, what does it mean to be human? If the Holocaust is unique, that question ...

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