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Christopher Clark: What would Bismarck do?, 26 September 2019

... deputies refused to support it. Wilhelm I dissolved Parliament and called elections, in the hope of producing a more pliable house. But the new chamber was even more resolutely liberal than the old. In the spring of 1862, this parliament, too, was dissolved, but the new elections of May 1862 merely confirmed the intractability of the standoff. More than ...

The Mouth, the Meal and the Book

Christopher Ricks, 8 November 1979

Field Work 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 64 pp., £3, June 1979, 0 571 11433 4
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... likewise gives us food for thought, but this time the food is not outré like oysters. What hope is there, after a killing? Only this – and if we insist on prefacing it with ‘only’, we have already sold the pass:And today a girl walks in home to usCarrying a basket full of new potatoes,Three tight green cabbages, and carrotsWith the tops and mould ...

Under the Flight Path

August Kleinzahler: Christopher Middleton, 19 May 2016

... Christopher Middleton​ hated New York. Among the things he particularly disliked, I suspect, is New York’s position as a cultural bazaar, where reputations are bought, sold and traded, with the attendant buzz of speculation. He was incapable of schmoozing, and his career suffered accordingly. New York’s greatest draw, people action and brute energy, would have been lost on him ...

Poetry Inc.

Christopher Reid, 18 September 1986

A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke 
by Donald Prater.
Oxford, 472 pp., £25, March 1986, 9780198157557
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Letters: Summer 1926 
by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva and Rainer Maria Rilke, edited by Yevgeny Pasternak and Yelena Pasternak.
Cape, 251 pp., £15, May 1986, 0 224 02376 4
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... To read Donald Prater’s biography of Rilke in the hope of getting to know the poet in depth would be a tantalising exercise. Lack of information is not the problem. There is no shortage of documentary evidence available to the investigator and Prater has made full use of it. Rilke himself supplied his large share in letters of a princely egocentricity, upon which he appears to have lavished a formidable outlay of time and creative energy ...

Recyclings

Christopher Ricks, 17 June 1982

From the Land of Shadows 
by Clive James.
Cape, 294 pp., £7.95, April 1982, 0 224 02021 8
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... He practises the usual self-compiler’s device of using his introduction to review his book: ‘I hope that the truly serious reader will be able to detect, in even the least grave of the following essays, a certain disinclination to make cheap jokes, or at any rate a determination to make only expensive ones if I can.’ He finds that the reviews of two ...

I’m here to be mad

Christopher Benfey: Robert Walser, 10 May 2018

Walks with Robert Walser 
by Carl Seelig, translated by Anne Posten.
New Directions, 127 pp., £11.99, May 2017, 978 0 8112 2139 9
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Girlfriends, Ghosts and Other Stories 
by Robert Walser, translated by Tom Whalen, Nicole Köngeter and Annette Wiesner.
NYRB, 181 pp., £9.99, October 2016, 978 1 68137 016 3
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... illness. Until recently, aside from a pioneering selection of stories assembled by the translator Christopher Middleton in 1982, his work has barely been available in English. But now, thanks to a steady accumulation of volumes from New York Review Books, and a gifted group of translators willing to wrestle with the often fiendish difficulties of his strange ...

Diary

Christopher de Bellaigue: ‘Mummy est morte’, 19 March 2020

... of his stairs wearing the red leather slippers and grey cardigan that meant he was off duty. ‘Christopher,’ he greeted me in a kindly voice. ‘Hello, sir,’ I said, with a vague sense of relief that I wasn’t to be punished. He was holding the telephone receiver. ‘It’s your father on the telephone.’‘...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: Andy Warhol at MoMA, 12 October 1989

... of Utah, of all places, and had the students demanding their thousand-dollar fee back? Warhol’s hope had been, ‘Maybe they’ll like him better than me,’ but surely there was some faint private relief on his part that this particular con didn’t work. It’s a warm evening and MOMA has thrown open her garden. No sweet scent of the exotic cheroot taints ...

It’s Been a Lot of Fun

David Runciman: Hitchens’s Hitchens, 24 June 2010

Hitch-22: A Memoir 
by Christopher Hitchens.
Atlantic, 435 pp., £20, June 2010, 978 1 84354 921 5
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... In his book about religion, Peter Hitchens has a lot more to say about his brother Christopher than Christopher has to say about Peter in his book about himself.* ‘Some brothers get on,’ Peter writes mournfully, ‘some do not. We were the sort that just didn’t.’ He continues: At one stage – I was about nine, he nearly 12 – my poor gentle father actually persuaded us to sign a peace treaty in the hope of halting our feud ...

Ancient Exploitation

Christopher Hill, 4 February 1982

The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests 
by G.E.M. de Ste Croix.
Duckworth, 732 pp., £38, December 1981, 0 7156 0738 3
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... and fall of the Roman Empire was accelerated by the social conflicts which he depicts? Let us hope that the young will read him, despite the length and the cumbrous organisation of his book, and despite its alarming price. An abbreviated paperback soon would seem to be the ...

Mirror Images

Christopher Andrew, 3 April 1986

World of Secrets: The Uses and Limits of Intelligence 
by Walter Laqueur.
Weidenfeld, 404 pp., £25, November 1985, 0 297 78745 4
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... time to denounce publicly those journalists who had dared to print the name of the head of MI6, Christopher Curwen. The heads of the CIA and the KGB, William Casey and Victor Chebrikov, are of course public figures. But that, as Mr Ingham would say, is not the point. What the point is remains obscure. In 1932 the novelist Compton Mackenzie was tried for a ...

Masters

Christopher Ricks, 3 May 1984

Swift: The Man, His Works and the Age: Vol III. Dean Swift 
by Irvin Ehrenpreis.
Methuen, 1066 pp., £40, December 1983, 0 416 85400 1
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Swift’s Tory Politics 
by F.P. Lock.
Duckworth, 189 pp., £18, November 1983, 0 7156 1755 9
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Jonathan Swift: Political Writer 
by J.A. Downie.
Routledge, 391 pp., £25, March 1984, 0 7100 9645 3
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The Character of Swift’s Satire 
edited by Claude Rawson.
Associated University Presses, 343 pp., £22.50, April 1984, 0 87413 209 6
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... of his country parish. Yet he endured all the strain not merely for the pleasures involved, or the hope of advancing his career, but for the fame such friendships conferred. And now they all crowd like a levee in the footnotes to his letters. Sometimes the irony finds its happiness in that a good motive was alive in the unfortunate circumstance, as when ...
Canteen Culture 
by Ike Eze-anyika.
Faber, 295 pp., £9.99, March 2000, 0 571 20079 6
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Charlieunclenorfolktango 
by Tony White.
Codex, 158 pp., £7.95, December 1999, 1 899598 13 8
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Filth 
by Irvine Welsh.
Vintage, 392 pp., £5.99, August 1999, 0 09 959111 1
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... or implicitly claim to deal with questions of police power and its abuses, it’s hard not to hope for something more than straightforward inversions of the mythic neighbourhood bobby. Unfortunately, the only one of these books with any insight into the daily grind of law enforcement and the attitudes it engenders is a failure as a novel; the other ...

In a flattened world

Richard Rorty, 8 April 1993

The Ethics of Authenticity 
by Charles Taylor.
Harvard, 142 pp., £13.95, November 1992, 0 674 26863 6
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... prevalent among the chattering classes of northern California, you will probably agree with Christopher Lasch that theirs is a culture of narcissism. If you rather admire these people’s attitudes and way of life, you may describe it as a culture of tolerance. If you have mixed feelings, you might settle for the description Charles Taylor suggests: it ...

Diary

Christopher de Bellaigue: Getting married in Iran, 5 July 2001

... del be del, va omid, omid ast’ (‘marriage is the exchange of one heart for another, and hope is hope’). The Iranians reward him with whooping. Emboldened, he gives them a burst of Hafez, the best loved of all the poets. More exclamations of delight: ‘Bah! Bah!’ When the applause dies down, my father calls ...

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