Richard Davenport-Hines Life before

Viagra George Garnett The English

mob T. P. Wiseman Dates with Ovid
THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT JUNE 8 2007 www.the-tls.co.uk No 5436 UK £2.70 USA SS

Gulags without guards

I{ate Brown

To be a baker's boy
Bee Wilson

Bye-bye Blair
Michael White
THE TIM ES LIT ER ARY SU P P LE MEN T J UN E 8 2007 www.thc-tls.co.uk

3 SO C IAL STUD IES B eeWilson G oo d Bread is Back - A co n te m po rary hi story ofFrenc h br ead , the way it is m ade, an d th e peop le
w h o m ake it Steven La urence Ka p lan
Richard D av enport-Hines Impoten ce - A cu ltu ral hi sto ry A ng us M cLar en

6 HIST ORY K ateBrown C ann ibal Island - Death in a Siberian Gu lag N icolas We rt h . T h e U n kn ow n G ulag - The lo st
wo rld ofStalin' s special se ttlem ent s Lynne Viola. Gula g - Life an d death in side th e Soviet
co n ce n tratio n cJln ps T ornas Kizny
George Garnett The Eng lish N atio nal C h aracter - T h e hi sto ry o f an id ea from E d m u n d Burke to T o ny Blair Peter
M an dl er
Adam I. P . Sm ith The Declar ati on ofIndependen ce - A global h istory D a vid Armitage

10 P OLI T IC S Michael Whit e O ver T o You , Mr Brown A n t ho ny G iddens . Yo , I3lair! Geoffrey W heatcroft

12 P O ETRY TLSJFo yles po et ry com petition 20 07 - Sho rtlisted po em s

14 COMM ENTARY J.A.North Senate House ru les- The U n iver sity ofLondon in search of a new role
J. C . N ll: The sho rt story market, A n ew (ish) Elio t rhym e, Academi c freedom , Defenders o f One
Hugo WilIiams Freelan ce

15 P OE M S M atthew Sw eene y Part y

17 LE T TE R S T O T HE E D ITO R The importan ce o f cam o uflage, C o m m u n ist collapse. Offour back s, e te

18 A RTS Bharat T andon ll ollywood - A h isto ry Mihir B o se. Rafta, R afta. . . Ayu b Khan-Din (Lytte lton T h eatre)
G ilIian D arle y A Passion for lluilding - T h e am ateur architect in E ng land 1650-1 85 0 (SirJ oh n Soa ne' s Museum)
Robert Shore lli g W h ite Fog T heod ore Ward (Alme ida T h eatre)
J eremy Noel-Tod Steve Bell (N o rw ich Art s Ce n tre)

21 FI CTI O N So p h ie Ratcliffe Aft er Dark Haruki Mu rak ami; translated b y J a y Ru bin

P aul B inding The D arkroom ofDamocles W . F . H er m ans ; t ransl a ted b y In a Rilk e
Micha L az arus Moths Ka rI M an d er s
Oliver H arris Juliu s Winsom e Gerard D o n o van
M ark K amine Ab surd istan Ga ry Shteyngart
Andrew Rosenheim The Death ofth e D et ecti ve M ark Sm it h
N atasha C o o p er What th e D ead Know Laura Lipp man

24 L ITERAT URE Thomas Healy The Italian E nc ou n ter With T u do r En glan d - A cu ltural po liti cs oftran slation Mich ael Wyatt.
" W h o th e D evil Ta ug h t Thee So Mu ch Italian?" - Italian lan gua ge learning an d literary imitation in
early modern E ng lan d J aso n Lawren ce

25 LITERAR Y C R IT IC ISM J ames Carl ey Books U n de r Suspicion - C ensorsh ip and to leran ce ofrevelato ry w riting in late m edi eval En gland
Kat hryn Kerby-Fu lro n . C ensor sh ip an d C ult ur al Sens ibility - T he regu lation oflangu age in
Tudor -Stuart Eng lan d Debora Sh uger
P atrick D enman Fl an ery Imperial M asochi sm - British ficti on, fantasy, an d social class J ohn Ku ci ch

28 S C IEN C E Richard L e a C olossus- T h e secre ts of I3letc hley Park 's co deb reakingcom pu ter s B .J ac k Copeland, edito r.
The Bin ary R evolution - The hi sto ry an d development o f th e co m pu te r Neil Barrett
C harlie G e re Seen JU nseen - Art , scie nce and intuition from Leonardo to th e Hubble Telescope M ar ti n Ke m p

29 C LASSICS T . P . Wiseman A Com me n tary on O vid 's "Pa sti" - Book 6 R .J o y Littlew o o d . D esirin g Rome - Ma le
subj ect ivity and reading O vid 's "P asti" Richard} , K ing

30 R ELIGI O N D av id H empton Eva ng elicalism - A n Ameri cani zed C hristian ity R ichard Ky le
Alison Shell An gels in th e Early Modern World Pe ter M ar sh all an d A lexandra Walsham, editors
B ernic e M artin C h ristian Modern s- Freedom an d fetish in the mi ssion enc o u n te r Webb Kea ne
E amonDuffy The Pasto ral Role ofth e Roman C atho lic C hur ch in Pr c- Pamine Irelan d , 1750 - 1850 Ernmet
Lark in

32 I N B ru r r C u ttings - A year in th e garden with C h risto pher Lloyd C h ristop hc r L1oyd . Liverp ool 80 0 -
C ult ure , cha racter and histo ry J ohn Bel che rn , ed itor. T h e Offbeat Radicals - The British
tradition ofaltern ative dissent Geoffrey Ashe . A rt and Laught er Sheri Klein . Art and
Obscenity Ke rstein M e v. Art and Wa r Laura B rando n . H old Every th ing D ear - Di spatch es
on su rvival and resistan ce J ohn Berger . The M an Who N ever W as Ewen M ont agu .
Operation H eartbreak D u ff Cooper. C an A ny M ot her Help M e? Fifty years offriendship
through a secre t m agazin e J enna Ba iley . A C o n tract with God. A Life Forc e. Dropsie Aven ue
W iIIEisne r

35 T h is wee k 's co n tribu to rs 35 Autho r, Author 35 C ro sswor d

C ove r picture : © Jonath an Kant or Stu dio. O th er pict ures rep rodu ced by kind permission o f: p3 © R cutcr slJacky Na cgclcn : pf © G etty Images: p2 0 © Ca rhcrinc Ashmore ; p21 © T he R on ald Grant
Ar chi ve ; p24 © AK G Im agesfErich Lessing; p29 © AKG Im ages
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 SOCIAL STUDIES

Slaves to dough
The rebirth of French bread, with dignity but without sweat
o be a baker' s boy in eighteenth- B E E WIL SO N weig ht of do ugh will bake up to differe nt "washed out", "denatured" and essentially

T centur y Paris must have been pretty

close to hell. You were effectively a
slave, both to your master and to the
intricate demands of sourdough fermentat ion .
The working "day" began close to midnig ht.
S t e v e n L aur e nc e K apl an
GOOD B R E A D I S BACK
A con tem porar y history of French bread , the way it
weig hts of bread ; and from their com petito rs,
for however miserable it might be baking bread,
they still wanted to sell as much of it as they
cou ld. Kaplan has already written the definitive
history of ancie n regime bakers - The Bakers of
tasteless. This is for all practical purpo ses the
bread that most French peopl e co ntinue to eat
today.
This new whiter-t han-w hite baguette was a
grote sque simulacrum of the old pre-war white
Wearing roug h, uncomfortable underwear is made, and the people who make it Paris and the Bread Question, 1700-1 775 bread, but this didn't stop consumers from
made from old flour sacks, you were forced to 376pp. Duke University Press. $27.95; distributed (1996 ). Good B read Is Ba ck co vers some of the buying it; they had forgo tten what good bread
in the UK by Co mbined Academic Publ ishers.
knead as much as 200 Ib of doug h at a time , same story from a differe nt ang le. A magnifi- tasted like. So grateful were they not to be ea t-
£16.99.
using nothing but your hands and - in despera- cent com bination of polemic and scholarship ing the "bread of deprivation" of wartime, that
978 08223 3833 8
tion - your feet. This kneading took place not (marred only by an inadequate index), it asks they did not care at first how ove r-puffy the
once but many times over the night, usually in a how the superlative French bread of the eight- crumb was on these new loaves, how the cr ust
clam my ce llar too dark for you to see what you extremely stringent and precise connotatio ns, eenth, nineteenth and early twentieth cent uries had no heft, and how it staled after less than a
were doing, and so hot that the dough well cruste d with an alveolated crumb, kneaded gave way to the disappointing industria l loaves day. The bakers had lina lly yielded to the mech-
sometimes melted before it had risen. The from white flour and made by a slow and of the 1960s on wards; and how these , in turn, anized, over-k neaded bread which France had
baker' s boy in charge of kneading was known arduous process of fermentation and baking. have been happily supplanted by a new genera- held out again st for so long. They had suc-
as le geindre, the groaner, on account of the All consumptio n has its costs . Wh ile the cost of tion of artisanal baguettes, batards and boules. cumbed to the cheap, speedy ways of yeast.
blood-curdling noises he made as he worked . Britain' s sweet toot h was the slave-dri ven sugar Kaplan recog nizes that the yearni ng of the Many facto rs determ ine the perfect loaf of
When you were finally granted rest, sometime colonies , the cost of France' s passion for bread French for "the good bread of yeste ryear" is French bread, and Kaplan anatomi zes them
in the morning , you were obliged to sleep in the was the terrible life of the baker. ofte n an exercise in nostalgia. This kind of wish- in great deta il: the choice of llo ur, the gentle
blinding heat of the bakery. After three hours, Eighteenth-ce ntury bakers were under threat ing and dreaming about bread can act ually be rhythms of kneading, the shaping of the
you were forced to wake up again , to minister from all sides - from their customer s, who, co unter-productive . It was exac tly this kind of unbaked loaves - or pdtons - and baking when
to the sourdoug h starter, which, like a newborn dependent on them for their subsiste nce, often nostalgia that ena bled the post-war baguette to the dough is "at the peak of its exa ltatio n", in an
child, req uired round-the-clock feeding . In treated them with an unwarrante d hatred and become so debased : eighteenth-ce ntury phrase. But nothing was as
1788, the journalist Louis-Seba stien Mercier suspicion; from millers, whom the bakers During the Second World War the only bread importa nt as the way that the bread was "fe r-
described how unhea lthy bakers' apprentices viewed as thieve s and scoundre ls, crea ming off ava ilable to the ord inary citizen in France was mented" from a sourdoug h culture. No less than
looked . Unlike butchers' boys, who were robust a portion of the wheat they sent them to mill; a heavy, coarse, and sticky dark bread (pain winemaking , French baking depend ed on a line
and ruddy, baker s' boys were flour-coated from the State, which fiercely reg ulated the bis) of dubious quality and thoroughly unappe- balance of fermentation. It was this, as the chem-
wretches, huddli ng in doorway s, haggard and price and weig ht of a loaf, sometimes setti ng tising. The resultant nostalgia for white wheat ist Antoine Parmentier observed in 1778, that
white . impossi ble standards on the bakers, such as the bread led to the development, after the war, of made bread-making such a " painful enslave-
All this misery was required to serve the pani- requ irement that all loaves be of a certain a new method, that produce d a voluminous and ment" . The sourdough starter or "chef create d
mania of the French. Bread signifie d more to weig ht, not allowing for the fact that the same very white bread, light and attractive but solely from the wild yeasts present in the atmos-
the French than it did to other nations. It was phere, needed to be refreshed almost con-
not just subsistence; it was a sacre d matter, as stantly, and contributed to the extremely slow
well as an affair of state. The Comm union rising time of French bread. By contras t, the
wafer was holy, but so was the ordinary white yeast baking of Brita in, where the by-products
sourdoug h loaf of eve ryday life. To turn a loaf of brewing were transfor med into "ale barm" or
upside down was con sidered bad luck, akin to later , bre we rs yeast, was fast and eas y_ Fo r all
sacrilege . Before eati ng, it was customary to that, Parmentier cou ld not cou ntenance the use
trace the sign of the cross over the bread using a of brewer ' s yeast as a leavening. Sourdough fer-
knife . In 1789, the Encyclopedic met hodique mentation was "the soul of breadmakin g". It
noted that " most peop le" in France " believe[d] contrib uted to the wonderful lloral complexity
they would die of hunger if there [were] no of the cru mb and the deep chewi ness of the
bread" - even if other food was availa ble. The crust. It was ju st a shame that this gastronomic
"tyrann y of bread", as Steven Laurence Kaplan perfection cou ld onl y be bought thro ugh the
has it, tied the French toget her. sleeplessness and swea t of the bakers' appren-
Kaplan, who probably knows more about tices; Kaplan suggests that sweat must have
French bread than anyone alive, does not make been like an extra ingredient in pre-ind ustrial
enough, perhaps, of how the French approac h to bread, "enriching (or infect ing) the doug h".
carbohydrates differed from that of their neigh- Such was "the hellish rhythm of a society that
bours. By 1789, the Italians were swapping the lived on bread, that could not get along without
crustiness of bread for the slipperiness of pasta. it for a moment" .
Across the channel, the British were abandon- "Stop being a slave to dough ; be its master
ing bread in favour of sugar. During the eight- instead" , urged a French advertisement for the
ee nth cen tury, British sugar co nsum ptio n Frigidaire refrigeration system in 1939. It
increased eightfold, to 16 lb per person per would be a decade or so before significant
year. W ith all these sweet ca lories, bread was numbers of French bakers made the switch to
no longer so vital, especially since much British industria l methods, but the appea l was obvious:
bread now came adulterate d with alum, an no more sleepless nights; no more sweat. The
astringent chemica l which co uld make white Thirty Glorious Years of post-war France saw
porou s loaves out of poor quality flou r. In high-speed mechanical mixers, dough lea vened
France, thoug h, bread remained relative ly pure with quick-rise yeast instead of tricky sour-
- and essen tial. Life without bread was unthink- dough, froze n partially cooked loaves - all of
able. To have "lost the taste for bread" was syn- which made the business of baking far easier. It
ony mous with losing the will to live. By the end was j ust a pity that what was produ ced by all
of the nineteenth ce ntury, the average French- this industria l innovation no longer counted as
man was still consumi ng close to a kilo of bread A French baker with a model made out of bread by Jean Paul Gaultier, at the " bread" in the old sense, but white soulless pap.
per day. And "bread" for the French had Cartier Foundation for Art, Paris, June 15,2004 Super markets opene d up " hot spots" where pre-

- 3- TLS J UNE 8 2 007

 SO CIAL STUDI E S

formed frozen loaves could be finished in the were his proud, independent, artisanal ways. farin, and an amendment of 1998, gave the arti- baguette, making slow-rise versions without
oven , deceiving the customer into thinking that Working in a boulangerie became the career sanal baker proper legal recognition at last. As additi ves, using industrial mixers but set to a
the bread had been made on the spot - "arti- choice of total no-hopers - baker s were "big , Raffarin himse lf commented, "It's humiliating gentle speed. One of Kaplan' s best chapters is
sanal mimickry ", in Kaplans words: false strong and stupid", as the cliche went. Bakers for real bakers to see people who sell bread man- devoted to these new baking "mavericks" who
bakers' boys "mad e" bread all day long in a who came of age in the post-war period ufactured elsewhere passing themselves off as combine a love of the old ways with a know-
theatrica l ambience ; the bread was always hot observed a "deg radation " in the profes sion. As bakers". Unde r the law of 1998, it became ille- ledge of modern science.
and fresh, and the air was infused with the Kaplan writes, "Poorly trained and badly coun- gal for a " boulangerie" sign to be placed except Kayser has even invented something which
pleasant aroma of baking . selled, baker s languished in a sort of anomie , where professionals had been "personally Parmentier in the eighteenth cen tury only
Compared to their genuine counterparts in turning in desperation to millers, equipment involved in the kneading of the dough , its fer- imagined - a sourdough ferment which is
the eighteent h century, at least these fake salesmen and purveyor s of improving additi ves mentation and its shaping ". At no stage of gastronomically idea l without enslaving the
appre ntices had a relatively easy life. On the in the hope of finding a way out". production were the products to be "deep- baker. "Fermento-levain" is a liquid leaven
other hand, their labour was lacking in dignity. The death knell for French bread was frozen or frozen" . This law gave a huge boost to machine which churns out a constant flow of
These new baker s' boys could no longer claim sounded many times in the nationa l press; pre- the baker as artisan . reliable sourdough, giving Kaysers baguett e
respon sibilit y for what they produced ; why maturel y, as it turned out, because it is now pos- Meanwhil e, from the mid-1990 s, a new gen- its "de lectab le" qualities - the toasty crust and
would they want to, in any case, since the cheap sible to buy bread of the finest artisana l quality eration of bakers were giving fresh dignity to hazelnutty crumb. Whatever yearning one
baguettes they hauled from freezer cabinet to again, all over Paris ; bread whose crust crackles the profession . Their inspiration was Lione l might feel for the bread of the eighteent h cen-
oven were so insipid? Bread- lovers began to with the aroma of honey and gingerbread and Poilane, who had never stopped making bread tury, the bread made by Kayser and his contem-
despair of baker s, who produced baguettes which does not lose its charms after only a few with integrit y, practising what he called "retro- porarie s is better. It is probab ly the best bread
"without joy, without feeling, without appe- hours. Good bread is back, as Kaplans title innovation ", developing new techniques for that France has ever tasted, because it is made
tite", as the actor and gastronome Jean-Pierre says. In the end, the symbolic pull of bread making bread in the old traditions. Poilane' s sig- by thinking men and women who have not
Coffe comp lained in 1992. French bread con- was too great for the French. The State, long nature loaf was the miche, a splendid sourdough sacrificed themse lves to the tyranny of doug h.
sumptio n plummeted - from the high of 900 regarded as an oppres sive force by the bakers , orb. The new retro-innovators such as Eric As Kaplan concl udes, "It is worth recalling,
grams per person per day at the start of the came ga lloping to their rescue . The so-called Kayser and Dominique Saibron , both bakers in the end, that good bread depen ds above all
twentiet h century to a low of 150 gram s. The Raffarin decree of 1995, named after the charis- with shops on the rue Monge in the Latin on the quality of the men and wome n who
status of the boulanger plummeted too. Gone matic Minister of Commerce Jean-Pierre Raf- Quarter, turned their hands to rein venting the make it".

--------------------------~--------------------------
ticles of a suicide onto his own scrotum reported

Fribbles and bobtails

alkin, pillock, fumbler, fribble, tion) stigmatised homosexuality as " psycho-
that his difficulties in performing auto-surgery at
an awkward angle had caused a nasty accident.
Male performa nce anxieties were aggrava ted
by the empha sis in early twentiet h-cent ury
RI CH ARD D A V E N P OR T -HI N E S American marita l textbooks on "sync hronize d

M bungler, bobtail , domine-so-little

and John Cannot are some of the
old sobriquets for an impotent
man. This is the dishearte ning subject of Angus
McLaren 's latest book , which assesses the
Ang us Mc La ren
IMPOTE NCE
A cultural history
sexual impotence". The ineffab le Ernest Jones
defined potency as the ability to perform
vagina l intercour se, by which delinition homo-
sexuals must " be regarded as impotent ", he
insisted, "and I think rightly so, however potent
orgasms", which supposedly produced both
happier marriage s and superior offspring . Some
sexologists classified any ejacu lation before the
woman climaxed as premature: the same author-
ities estimated that the average man took one or
vocabu lary, notions of manhood and concomi- 352pp. University of Chicago Press. Paperback, they may be with member s of their own sex" . two min utes to clima x and the average woman
tant beliefs associated with impotence throug h $30; distributedin the UK by WiIey. £ 19. The psychoanalytica l treatment of male thirty, which intensilied the anxiet y and frustra-
9780226500768 impotence, on McLaren ' s evidence, contrib uted
the centurie s. Though chielly concerned with tion of their unhappy readers. Masters and
men's "loss of courage", as impotence was massively to "the problemati zing of sexualit y". Johnson (who emerge with the least tarnished
called, he also treats the problem s of inferti lity witchcraft or sin: the Inquisitor Genera l blamed Freudians indicte d an impotent man's mother reputations among the specialist s studied by
("debilitated loins") and premature ejac ulation . Charles 11 of Spain ' s failure to father a child on as bearing the primar y guilt, and secondari ly McLaren) identilied monoton y, work anxiety,
The preoccupations of each successive epoch , the bewitchment of his semen rather than the the wife. It was a long, difticu lt task to treat fatigue, over-eating and over-drinking as causes
he show s, are evident in its nostrums to treat physiological cause of premature ejacu lation, men for impotence , conclude d a Freudian ana- of impotence, but highlighted the onerou s bur-
impotence. Bedroom fiascos have been attrib- and prescribed holy oils, fasting and exorci sm, lyst investigating unconsum mated marriages , den of male respo nsibilit y in intercour se as the
uted to witc hcraft, masturbation , libertinism, with so little effect that Europe was torn asun- but "in a few weeks we can make them potent chief trigger of performance anx ieties ca using
homosexuality, contraception, venerea l disea se, der by the War of the Spanish Succession . After by treating their wives" and enforcing a submi s- erectile dysfunctions.
shell shock , the stresses of motoring , the Oedi- 1700 impotence was increasing ly regarded as a sive role: "if the woman allows the husband to Urology rather than sex therapy has increas-
pal comp lex, prudish upbringing, alcoholism , corporeal problem, and totemic of materia l be aggre ssive, and even enjo ys it, it might give ingly taken the lead since the 1980s, especia lly
obesity and - since the observations of the sexol- power, as McLaren describes in his lluent, more to him than any psychiatric treatment " . in the United States: impotence has been seen
ogists William Masters and Virginia Johnson in authoritative account of attitudes to impotence McLaren writes well on nineteenth-century as a fixable mechanica l failure rather than an
the 1960s - to depres sion , anger, monoton y, and masculine authorit y during the Enlighten- France, including a splendid passage from Stend- affective prob lem. McLaren conc ludes with a
fear and boredom. ment. Sexual dysfunction was seen by some hal on impotence, so it is regrettab le that he does mistrustful account of the deve lopment of
Professor McLaren gets off to a slow start. nineteenth- centur y physicians as the price that not mention Alphonse Daudet' s novel Le Nabab Viagra, and its mass marketing since 1998.
His two opening chapter s, on classical Greece Christian white men paid for their advance d (1877), which depicts Paris beaux using arsenic There are vivid, striking quotations in each
and Rome and early Christian Europe , contain civi lization: the atavism of their subject races to achieve and sustain their erections. Though chap ter of Impotence illustrating imbecility, cru-
some analysis, but essentially provide a useful was shown in their greater capacit y for venery. the dependency of Napoleon Ill 's half-brother, elty, arrogance , humour and distre ss in ever y
compendium of quotation s on manhood, impo- Contraception - especia lly coit us interruptu s - the Due de Morny, on arsenic as a prototype Via- age. Marie Stopes instructs her readers that pen-
tence and cognate topics. He provides a careful was condemned by medica l opinion as a cause gra killed him, Sir Richard Quam 's Dictionary of etration is a "racia l act" that "should only take
summar y of printed texts from Ovid , Petronius, of impotence. An American proponent of cir- Medicine (1882) continued to list arsenic and place at special times and at rather infreq uent
Catu llus, Plato, Marti al, Aristotle, Galen, Plu- cumcision - the fanatica l author of "The Pre- strychnine as well as phosphorous and cannabis intervals " and that "the penis, even from the
tarch, Augustine and St Thom as Aq uinas to puce as an Outlaw " - insisted that mass male as treatments for impotence . Serge Voronoff hour of birth", is constructed to fulfil "the vital
Shakespeare and Mont aigne , and con structs a mutilation wou ld cure impotence. studied eunuchs in Egypt before in 1920 implant- importance of this duty to the race". Alfred
credi ble narrative, although we cannot know If the nymphomaniac represented all that was ing testicular tissue from chimpanzees and Kinsey consoles the sexua lly inept: "it would
the discrepancies between what a few literary unwoman ly for the Victorian s, the impotent baboons inside the scrotums of patients seeking be difficu lt to find another situation in which an
men wrote and what the unlettered actua lly rather than the highly sexed male represented rejuvenation. Among Voronoff' s contemporar- individual who was quick and intense in his
thought and did. The narrative takes off in the all that was unman ly. Women were increas- ies, the San Quentin prison doctor implanted tes- responses was labelled anything but superior,
seventeent h century with Madame de Sevigne ingly blamed for male dysfunction : wives were ticles from executed convicts as an aid to tumes- and that is .. . exactly what the rapid ly ejacu lat-
laughing uproariou sly with her son over his fail- so cu lpably unresponsive that they quenched cence while the German physician Eugen Stein- ing male is, howe ver inconvenient and unfort u-
ure to be aroused by his poplolly: it is to their husbands' ardour, and unmanned them; or ach pioneered vasec tomies as a means of sexua l nate his qualities may be from the standpoint of
McLaren 's credit that he appreciates the role of women (usua lly not wives) were so shame- rejuvenation. A satisfied patient who had paid the wife". Despite Angus McLaren ' s brisk, com-
sex in humour and the importance of laughter in lessly insatiab le in their sexual needs that they £700 for a Steinach vasectomy booked the Royal passionate humour and fair-minded j udgement ,
sexual history. "We stern culture has simultane- destro yed a man' s virility. Twe ntieth-century Albert Hall in 1nl to give a lecture entitled his story of centurie s of humiliation and frustra-
ously regarded impotence as life' s greate st trag- Freudian s asserted that men practised homo- "How I Was Made Twenty Years Younger", but tion cannot avoid being discouraging. His book
edy and life' s greate st joke ", he says. sexuality as a cover to avoid their exposure as dropped dead just before going to the podium. will leave many readers wishing they had been
For centurie s impotence was attributed to impotent or (without any sense of contradic- An American physician who transplanted the tes- born as oyster s.

TL S J UNE 8 2007 - 4-
100 BUTTERFLIES AND MOTHS THE CLASH WITHIN
Portraits from theTropical Forests of Costa Rica Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future
JEFFREY C. MILLER, DANIEL H. JANZEN AND MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
WINIFRED HALLWACHS "This isanextraordinarily interesting book ona very difficult subject. Martha
Gathered bybiologists Daniel Janzen and Winifred Hallwachs in theforests of Nussbaum's commanding familiarity withculturally related political issues across
northwestern Costa Rica, 100tropical butterflies and moths represent thediversity theworld, past and present, combines immensely fruitfully here with herinvolve-
in large-format photographs byJeffrey Millerthatdocument thedizzying variety ment and understanding of India." -Amartya Sen, Harvard University
of shapes, colors, and markings. The photographs are accompanied byspecies Belknap Press / newincloth
accounts and images of thecorresponding caterpillar.
Belknap Press / 221 colorillus./ newincloth THE CASE AGAINST PERFECTION
Ethics in theAge of Genetic Engineering
DIVAGATIONS MICHAEL J. SANDEL
Inorder to grapple withtheethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions
STEPHANE MALLARME
largely lostfrom viewin themodern world. As these questions verge ontheology,
TRANSLATED BY BARBARA JOHNSON
modern philosophers and political theorists tend to shrink from them. Butournew
As anexpression of theSymbolist movement and asa contribution to literary
powers of biotechnology make these questions unavoidable. Addressing them is
studies, Divagations isvitally important. Butit isalso, in Johnson's masterful trans-
thetask of thisbook, byone ofAmerica's preeminent moral and political thinkers.
lation, endlessly mesmerizing.
Belknap Press / newincloth
Belknap Press / newincloth

THE ACCIDENTAL MIND PROPHET OF INNOVATION

How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction
Memory, Dreams, and God THOMAS K. MCCRAW
"Much honored asaneconomic prophet, Joseph Schumpeter has had to wait
DAVID J. LINDEN
halfa century afterhis death forthissplendid full-dress biography covering his
Ina work at once deeply learned and wonderfully accessible, theneuroscientist
ideas, life, and times. [This is]a fat,learned biography byThomas McCraw, one of
David Linden counters thewidespread assumption thatthebrain isa paragon of
America's most respected business historians, theauthor of a Pulitzer prize-win-
design-and in itsplace gives usa compelling explanation of howthebrain's ser-
ning history of therise of regulation." -THE ECONOMIST
endipitous evolution has resulted in nothing short of ourhumanity.
Belknap Press / newincloth
Belknap Press / newincloth

PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF

STEPHEN JAY GOULD
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Five years afterhis untimely death, Punctuated Equilibrium (originally published as JOHN RAWLS
thecentral chapter of Gould's masterwork, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory) EDITED BY SAMUEL FREEMAN
offers hisonlybook-length testament onanidea hefiercely promoted, repeatedly "Anyone seriously interested in thedevelopment of Rawls's thinking and his sense
refined, and tirelessly defended. of therelations between hisapproach and those of major predecessors in the
Belknap Press / newincloth history ofAnglophone liberalism will findtheinsight it provides onnumerous
points indispensable." -John Dunn, TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT
Belknap Press / newincloth
EVERYDAY JIHAD
The Rise of Militant Islam among Palestinians in Lebanon
THE EARLY CHINESE EMPIRES
BERNARD ROUGIER
Qin and Han
TRANSLATED BY PASCALE GHAZALEH
By staying very close to thereligious actors, theirdiscourse, perceptions, and means MARK EDWARD LEWIS
of persuasion, Rougier helps usto understand howradical religious allegiances GENERAL EDITOR TIMOTHY BROOK
overcome traditional nationalist sentiment and howjihadist networks grab hold in The firstof a six-volume series onthehistory of imperial China, The Early Chinese
communities marked byunemployment, poverty, and despair. Empires illuminates many formative events in China's long history of imperial-
newincloth lsm-eevents whose residual influence can stillbediscerned today.
Belknap Press / newincloth
 HI S T OR Y

know something is wrong when you wrote, the Gula g was built on "self-reliant, mili-

Y Off the streets

OU
find yourself longing to be lying on a tary discipline" and it had "economic l1exibilit y
wooden plank in a Gulag barrack s. The and experience in overcoming obstacles arising
"residents" of Nazino Island could only wish from harsh en vironment s".
for the stark comforts and liminal order of a Henryk Iagoda , then deput y director of
labour camp over the ghastly scenario that KAT E BROW N the Soviet Bureau of State Securit y (OGP U),
played out before them in the early spring of pounced on Eikhmanss memo. Prisons and
1933 in Western Siberia. In the middle of the Nico la s W erth labour camp s, he pronounced, were a vestige
night, they were dumped on a small, barren of the bourgeois past. Soviet penal authorities
island in the midst of an icy, roaring river hun- CANN I BA L ISLA ND would conquer the frontier with groups of
dreds of miles from civilization . With no food, Death in a Sib erian Gul ag inmates, self-reliant, hardworking, who would
no shelter, not much for clothing, 6,000 people, 248pp. Princeton University Press. £15.95 establish settlements, where they would build
plucked from the streets of Moscow a few (US $24.95). their own homes, raise their own produce and
978 06 9 1 13083 5
weeks before, found themselves wondering livestock, while workin g in mines and logging
how their lives had taken this ghoulish and, for Lynn e Viola operations. Wom en could go along and be
most, fatal turn. allowed to marry. And, he reasoned, since most
Nicolas Werth' s Can nibal Island: Death in a TH E UNKN OWN G ULAG of the prisoners were agrarian types (deport ed
Th e lost wor ld of Stalin' s special settleme nts
Siberian Gulag recount s a chapter in a horribl y kulaks) who pined for the soil, they would not
278pp. Oxford University Press. £17.99 (US $30).
train-wrecked experiment in penal reform. run away from the settlements, remo ving the
978 0 19518769 4
Werth sifts the story of Nazino or "Cannibal" need for guards. Soundin g as though he had
Island , from an assortment of Soviet archives Tomas Kizny cribbed Frederick Jack son Turner ' s frontier
to illustrate arguably the worst nightmare of thesis, Iagoda dreamed how the settlements
the whole liendish Gulag enterprise. He tells G UL AG would one day become the outpo sts for a Soviet
Life and death inside the Soviet concentration
the story admirably, setting it in context of the manifest destiny. "In a few years", Iagoda
camps
trauma that took hold of Soviet society with the fantasized, "these settlements will become
496pp. Firetly. $69.95; distributed in the UK
tremors of collectivi zation, the first live-ye ar by Orca. £39.95. proletarian mining towns."
plan and the resulting fam ine. 978 155297 964 8 With Iagoda' s blessing, Eikhman s wasted no
The tragedy grew out of a junction in Soviet time. He emerged ju st a few month s later stand-
penal history when Soviet leaders dreamed of ing on the bridge of a ship steaming across the
doin g away with guards, barbed wire and in huge sweeps of territory run by the Gulag White Sea. He had with him one hundred prison-
labour camps in favour of human e settlements adm inistration. Lynne Viola' s The Unknown ers, a handful of guards, and a few chem ists
where prisoners would till the soil, log the Gulag : The lost world of Stalin 's specia l sett le- and geologists to start a mining settlement on
forests and become producti ve citizens in self- ments maps out the creation and spread of Vaigach Island. Tomas Kizny' s poignant collec-
reliant frontier communi ties. The se new com- this less well-known department of the Gulag tion of photos and essays, Gula g: Life and
munities, called "special settlements", existed administration. Viola shows how the settle- A R ussian or pha n, near Kiev, 1934 death inside the Sovi et concentration camps,
describes the short history of this experiment in
ments grew out of the need in 1930 to relocate polar expedition married to penal rehabilitation .
New American Studies from LSU ~( P R E S S hundreds of thousands of farmers uprooted as
kulaks during the drive to collectivi zation. Des-
Like Alaskan prospector s, the settler-convicts,
swaddled in native fur, relied initially on the
ignating virgin territor y for the deport ees and indigeno us Nenet s of the island and shipments
shipping them to remote regions became an from across the frozen sea. Reportedly,
answer to the problem of swelling number s of Eikhman s ran a humane settlement. Prisoners
banished people corralled at train stations await- were not guarded. They worked an eight-hour
ing their fate. In the case of Nazino, "social day in the mines. After work they were free to
undesirables" who were caught begging, wander about and purcha se cheese, sausage,
thiev ing, black-mark eteering or simply stand- choco late and clothin g at the expedition com-
ing on the street durin g a round-up were sent to missary. Prisoners fraternized with the guards
the remo te Narym region of We stern Siberia. and profession als.
Instead of fellin g the thick forest for the social- They formed clubs, a choir, wrote a news-
ist cau se, starving people turned on each paper and took literacy classes. When prisoners
other, on their guards and doctors, killing, went out to the tundra, they were issued guns to
marauding and dying. Only the predator y fend off the polar bears. On Vaigach Island, in
Troubled Commemoration Reading Melville's Pierre; or, The survived. Two-third s expired while Soviet fact, the chief function of guard s and guns
The American Civil War Centennial, 1961- 1965 Ambiguities officials stood by. seems to have been in confrontation, not with
ROBERT J. COOK BRIAN HIGGINS and HERSHEL PARKER What were the Gulag planner s thinkin g? crim inals, but with nature. In one photo , a Chek-
"This book will stand up for a long time as the stan - "With impeccable scholarl y precision . .. Higgins and Who would send hungry, unshod people to the ist stands in a classic trophy-huntin g pose with
dard treatment we have needed of this tro ubled and Parker provide a fascina ting account of geographical, Siberian Taiga without supplies, shelter and a foot on the belly of a felled white dolphin. In
enlightening story:'- DavldW. Blight, author of Bsyond ths familial, philosophical, religious, and literary forces tools in the midst of a fam ine in order to build another picture, Eikhman s' s wife, a prisoner
Battlefield: Race, Memory & theAmericanCivilWar that inform the creat ion of th e fiction."-John Wenke,
a brave new world? If this wasn't sheer sadism, herself, is skiing, trailed by an armed guard,
Making th e Mode rn South I David Goldfield, Series Editor authorof MBlvllfB's MusB:LltBrary CrBatlon andthB Formsof
PhilosophicalFiction
but really a utopian project, as Werth , I think there to protect her from bears.
$45.0 0
rightly, asserts, who could imagine success? Eikhmans' s settlement was the shining
$35.0 0
Oddly enough, the dump-pri soners-on- model for an alternat ive to Gula g labour camp s:
Rites ofAugust First frigid-island model had proved success ful ju st a a Turnerian vision of free, self-reliant and
Emancipation Day in theBlackAtlantic World River of Dreams
Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain few years before. Feodor Eikhman s, a decor- dynamic settlers who, in conquering the fron-
J. R. KERR-RITCHIE ated security officer, probably first came up tier , forged "pro letaria n mining town s" . In the
THOMASRUYS SMITH
"A well-done, solidly researched, and innovative work. with the idea. In a 1930 report, he noted that vast Soviet Union, this scene could have played
There are many works that link English and continen- "River of Dreams pulled me along as irres istibl y as the the Soviet Union had miles of hard-to-reach , out endless ly: plent iful, untapped land continu-
tal and American abolitionism, but few if any mak e Mississippi itself. . . . Though this book deserves rapt scarcely settled frontier overl1owing with treas- ously receding before the resourcefulness of
solid parallels between African American and West attention for its own insights and appreciativen ess,
Indian abolition movements as Kerr-Ritchi e's work
ures: coal, timber, furs, fish, gold, lead, oil and Gulag frontiersmen, who, at the brutal but vital
explicators of Adventures of HuckJeberry Finn shou ld
does ."-Graham Russell Hodges, author of Slavery,Freedom absorb it before traveling further with or into Huck ,
silver. As director of the notoriou s Solovetsky junc ture of savagery and civili zation , temper
& CultureamongEarly AmericanWorkers on the river or on shore."- LouIs J. Budd, coeditor of A Labour Camp, he boasted, he had made over convi cts into proletarian citizens. Admitt ed ly, it
Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World Companion to Mark Twain the barren Murman sk region into a flourishing is hard to imagine Iagoda and Eikhman s, com-
R. J. M. Blacken and lames Brewer Stewart , Series Editors centre of industry, education and socialist gov- mitted Soviet security officer s, as idealists look-
Southern Lite rary Studies I Fred Hobson , Series Editor
Illu st rated, $38.00 ernm ent. Exploit ing this frontier required skill, ing to make a better world . Yet it is important
he wrote, and organizationa l acumen, tough- not to overlook the idealism even in institutions
"",.
LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS - - - - - - - - - - - -
ness, and lots and lots of manpo wer. No civilian
agency cou ld accompli sh this gargantu an task.
as dreadfu l as the Gulag, for ideals can have a
self-blinding agency. Sadly, this humane vision
..It\. (800)861-3477 • (800)305·4416FAX • Order online at Www. /su.edullsupress • Shipping charges will apply Only the Gulag could manage it because, he of self-reliant convict settlements was put into

TLS J UNE 8 2007 - 6-

 HISTORY
FRO ILOSOPHY
ac tion, and in so doin g ca used a great deal of
suffe ring , in Nazi no and e lsew here in the vast
and spreadi ng Gul ag terri tories.
Vi ola ' s ma gn ificentl y wide-rang ing resear ch
offered T sepko v a refug e, a way to shove out of
sight the sava gery he kne w was com ing. He had
see n it before .
The guards ca st the ex iles off on the island
vetry +)

shows how the tragedy of Cann ibal Island was and then unlo aded bags of llou r. But , because The Law of God
mult ipli ed across the So viet frontier, in the the llou r bags were in sho rt supply , they pou red The Philosophical History of an Idea
No rthern Terri tori es, in the Fa r East, in Sib eria the flour dir ectl y on the gro und, a mountain of Remt Brague
and Kazakh stan , as hal f a milli on peopl e di ed grai n, soo n rot ting. Prison ers lined up to ge t Translated by Lydia G, Cochrane
of hun ger , co ld and ex haust ion in Gul ag speci al the ir ra tion. Fe w prison er s had containers and "Brague's sense of intellectual adventure is what makes his work
genuinely exciting to read. The Law of God offers a challenge that
sett leme nts in the 1930 s. Rather th an so they held out their hats, shi rt tail s, or dirt y anyone concerned with today's religious struggles ought to take up."
Eikhman s' s carefull y plann ed se ttle me nt, local palm s. In a snow fall, wi th no cooking utens ils, -Adam Kirsch, NewYork Sun
sec uri ty officer s were told to prep are for ten s of the fami shed prison er s ran to the river to mi x "A description and analysis of divine law,from prehistory to today,
thou sand s of ex iles in a few months' time, with the flou r with wa ter and gulp it do wn . Man y fell done with great economy and accuracy-altogether a feast for
few re sour ces. Wh en deport ees arrive d, few sick with d ysent ery. Oth ers dropped from hypo- the mind."-Harvey Mansfield
prep ara tion s we re wa iting . Dumped on har sh thermia. Within days, gangs organ ized to con - Cloth £20.00
THE LAW O F GOD
and und esirable territory, pri son er s usuall y had trol the llou r rations and the y starte d hunt ing T.. . T~ .. ..-..r "IC U 1~' n <MT o;N' .... I,....
Selected Poems of
to build their own hom es, scru b up some food, the we ak, the go ners. As the gangs grew bold er,
fullil quotas for loggin g or mining, or peri sh . the y attack ed healthy peopl e, their guards and ~ r:MI I'lkACUfl:
Luis de Gongora
•• ... .. ~~c.-...
And many did . Oth ers fled the ungu arded doctors. Some g uards lled . Oth er s began trad -
A BilingualEdition
Edited and Translated by
se ttle me nts, wa lking , hitchin g rides, j um ping ing wit h gang leader s, exchang ing food for gold
John Dent-Young
trains back hom e or to cities to disapp ear. Of fillin gs stolen from co rpses. Rumours of ca nni-
"Luis de Gongora was the James Joyce of his time,
1.3 m illion kul ak s deport ed from 1930 to 1933, bali sm lloated do wnri ver to the authori ties in more labyrinthine in diction and allusion, more daring
only 970 ,000 were in the se ttleme nts to be Western Sib eria . Tsepkovs bosses dressed him in the icy constellations of his mental and mythicalmetaphor.
co unted in Dec emb er 1934. do wn . He showe d up at the island , wrung his As a word inventor three hundred years ahead of his time, he
And so, the speci al sett leme nts bega t a new hand s, bark ed some ord er s and left agai n. was abused and adored."-Willis Barnstone, Indiana University
probl em in So viet socie ty; hundred s of thou - Tsepkov wa s a very unimportant man in the Cloth £19.00
san ds of esca ped "co nvicts", living on forge d So viet sys tem. Yet his name , actio ns, ev en his
Historical
papers and borrowed time . For lagod a, these thoughts ha ve perc olated do wn from his lon ely
mi splac ed peopl e we re a sec urity threat and river sid e outpost deep in the taiga bound by ice
Knowledge.
just pla in unsightl y. In the spring of 1933 and snow from Octob er to Ma y. Wh y do we
Historical Error
the Politburo ord er ed a clean sin g of Mo sco w, kno w so mu ch abo ut T sepko v, Naz ino and the A Contemporary Guide to Practice
Lenin grad and the posh Blac k Sea resort to wns horrors of the special se ttle me nts which Viol a AJlan Megill
whe re the leader ship vaca tio ned. Thi s cleansin g and Wer th set out ? Of fici a lly, the So viet Union
"Megill's argument deserves attention from everybody who wonders
about where the discipline of history might be headed once the dust
tossed up another 300,000 peopl e, of who m deni ed the ex istence of the Gu lag sys tem. has settled on the tired debates over objectivityversus relativist
ev entua lly 6,000 we re se nt to Nazi no. Som e Kno wled ge of the Nazi no tragedy cou ld easi ly skepticism."-Dipesh Chakrabarty, Universityof Chicago
we re indee d kulaks or crim inal s on the run . A have rem ained hidd en in the interior. Yet the Paper£16.00
fa ir number, ho we ver, were good wo rkers, eve n same Mo scow officials who ordered the depor-
party memb er s caught in the dr agn ets. On e tation s and se t fant astic all y optimistic goa ls for
fe llow had stepped ou t to smoke a cigar ett e colonizin g frontiers with starv ing prison er s, Reflections PRUL RICUEUR
be fore the movies. A wo ma n was in Mo sco w ordered inves tigations into "abuses" , when the y on the Just
on official party business . Th ey a ll were se nt ine vitabl y occurred . Th e qu ant ity of do cu- Paul Ricoeur

"1'H'E' .' .
to Naz ino, asserting, like every prison er , their mentary evi de nce is astonis hing . Wh y did Translated by DavldPellauer
loyalt y and innocenc e. So viet officials write abo ut the abu ses in the Consisting of fifteen thematically organized
In the spring of 1933, Dmi tri Tsepk ov, Gul ag first place , and then in such detail ? essays, Reflections ontheJust continues and
expands on the work Ricoeur began with his
commander o f the Narym Region, recei ved a Lynn e Viola argues that So viet leader s
"little ethics" in Oneself asAnother and The Just.

J~Sl
telegram wi th wo rd to prepare for a large contin- ord ered reports becau se they begrud ged the lost
"Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy-c-critical,
gent of special sett lers . Th e new shi pme nt eco no mic potential of fami shed labour force s. economical, and clear."- New York Times Book Review
wo uld mor e than doubl e the popul ation of the Nicola s W erth lays the blam e on a stubborn Cloth £16.00
already famis hed and goods-starve d regi on of insistence on en gin eerin g a utopia n world,
4,000 peopl e. Th e news was worris ome. T sep- desp ite all evi de nce of its failu re. Th ey are, of The Scientific
kovs previou s gro up of deportees had gone cou rse, both right. Econom ic rat ional e dro ve the Literature
wild. Dropped on the edge of to wn with no crea tion and e leva tion of the specia l settlements. A Guided Tour
jobs, hom es and food, the deportees had shifte d And ideology propped them up. Ideologically Edited with Commentaries by
fro m beggin g to robb ing the local population , and physica lly, ku lak s and " social unde sirabl es" Joseph E. Harmon and AJan G. Gross
until fin all y locals had hunted do wn and shot were ex penda ble in the dri ve for soci alism. But The ScientificLiterature is a collectionof writings--excerpts from
the remai ning se ttlers . Th e Na rym Region was I am not wholly con vinced that these were the scientific articles, letters, memoirs, proceedings, transactions, and
magazines-that illustrates the origin of the scientific article in
not exce ptional. By 1933, ro ving band s of onl y reasons for the excess of document s chroni- 1665 and its evolution over the next three and a half centuries.
escaped outl aws ra ided, ra ped, killed and gene r- clin g governme nt- issue nightm ares. I ha ve sat in Contributors include Robert Boyle, Cornte deBuffon, MarieCurie,
ally terrorized the lone Gul ag sheri ffs and their the tiny readin g room in the Mo sco w "s pecial A1bert Einstein, Etienne Francois Geoffroy. Stephen Jay Gould,
sma ll posses all along the So viet fron tier. archi ve" , and read the accounts from Gula g James Hutton, Thomas Jefferson, GottfriedLeibniz, Isaac Newton,
T sepkov cho se to se nd the latest gro up of agent s in the field. Man y of these are dry tex ts, Gregor Mendel, Joseph Silk, JamesWatson. and Sewall Wright.
se ttlers to the barren Nazino Island, not in the gro und out at the end of a wearyi ng day. But Paper £18.50
hope s of duplicat ing Eikhmans's success on others are startling in their immediacy and poign-
Vai gach Island , but bec au se he wa s terrilied of anc y. Th ere is something to the full-throated
this new group of prisoners. To give Tsepko v disgorging of horror in these reports that emits a
credit, he did try to di vert the ine vitabl e di sas- mournful hum an cry. Th e men ex press shock, Ethnographic Sorcery
ter. Before the deportees' arriva l, he tried to get sorrow but also of fence at bein g forc ed to wit- Harry G. West
wood and labo ur to buil d she lters, but the Gulag ness and take part in human degradation and "West is concerned with the question of how
offi cials failed to send funds . He asked loc al destructi on . In other words, in 1930 , the utop ian Muedans use sorcery discourse, both 'to speak about the world
and to act within it.' I found this bookconsistently fascinating,
collecti ve farm dir ectors to fork ou t food , but visionaries reconce ived industry, agriculture
subtle, and deeplygrounded in localunderstandings of a
they refu sed , be ing hun gry the mse lve s. Wh en and penal detention, as piring to rem ake "The complexand ambiguous worldand in anthropologicaltheory."
the se ttle rs cam e early on a listin g barge , World " in the ima ge of socialism. In 1933, local -Donald Brenneis, Universityof California,Santa Cruz
already sta rvi ng , dressed in rags, wit h onl y bags security offic er s inherited the violence and suf- Paper£9.00
of raw llour to keep the m, he sco ure d his region ferin g of the dystop ia the se visionaries inspired.
for cooking uten sil s and supplies . In a wee k of I have often thou ght that some of these "com-
searching, he du g up some tool s, a few hundred pany men " , the duti ful So viet sec urity officials,
pairs of felt boot s, and a bolt of cloth . So were tryin g, ho wever feeb ly and hopelessl y, to
Nazino Island, seve nty kilom etr es up river , make their world a little less aw ful.

- 7- TLS J U NE 8 20 0 7
 HISTORY

he phrase " national character " occur s of Liberal Anglica n intellectu als like Thomas

T on ly once in the works of Charl es Dick -

ens. In the midst of the least read of his
novel s, Barn aby Ru dge (1841), Mr Chester, "an
Riotous Arno ld, whose lectu res inspired Free man. He
quotes Stubb s saying in a letter to Freem an: "I
do not believe that a Dissenter could write a
elegant and polite, but heartl ess and unprinci- histor y of England" ; but there is little sign that
pled ge ntleman", is soliloquizing about his liter- GEORG E GARN ETT nent to Mand ler' s theme that he adopt ed this he understand s why Stubb s was right to see the
ary tastes. "Shakespeare was undoubtedl y very name only on marriage), Sharon Turner, John Reform ation as fundam ental to the definition of
fine in his way; Milton good, though pro sy; P eter Mandler Kemble , Lord Macaulay, Thom as Amold, Engli shness. Man y of the virtues which came to
Lord Bacon deep, and decidedly kno win g; Charles Kingsley, J. A. Fro ude, Bishop Stubb s, be seen as characteri stic of the Engli sh, includ -
but the writer who should be his country' s THE E N G L I S H NATIO NAL E. A. Freeman and J. H. Round are all shown to ing libert y and self-reliance, were defined , at
pride, is My Lord Che sterfiel d." "This enli ght- CHARACT ER have contributed to that remarkable efflore s- least in part, in terms of Protestant ism.
ened writer" merits such an acco lade because The history of an idea from EdmundBurke to cence in English historical writing which meant M andler' s argum ent that the defin ition o f
he has introduced Mr - later Sir John - Che ster Tony B lair
that, by 1900, proport ionatel y more books were Engli sh nationa l charact er was a respon se to
320pp. Yale University Press. £ 19.99 (US $35).
to certain "capti vatin g" hypocri sies and "super- being publi shed on Engli sh history than ever the wide ning of the franch ise and , in its Briti sh
978 03 00 120523
lative" selfishnesses with which he had previ- before or since. Of cour se, they were preponder- man ifestat ion , to the intracta ble prob lem of
ou sly been unacquainted. And this despite the antly historian s of medieval England; but Man- Ireland and the exp ansion o f the Emp ire,
fact that Mr Chester had always Ilatter ed him - "exquisite comprehension of the nationa l char- dler gives little sense of why this should be so. means that his accoun t of twent ieth -century
self " that I was pretty well versed in all tho se acter and mann ers". Almo st a century later , that One reason is the Norm an Conque st, the subject de velopm ent s mu st lose some of its earlier
little arts and graces which di stingui sh men of is also how Geor ge Or well , for instance, read of Freeman' s magnum opu s. Another is the his- drive. Th e e ventual granti ng of uni ver sal suf-
the world from boor s and pea sants, and separate him (whil e commending him for his "lack of torica l writers of medieval England, particularl y frage, the creatio n of the Irish Free State, and
their charact er from those intensely vulgar senti- vulgar nation ali sm"). It is there fore striking, of post-Conquest England , whose attempt s to the turn of the imperial tide, did not mean , how-
ments which are ca lled the nation al char acter". and odd , that Peter Mand ler almost entir ely reconn ect their England with the prc-Conquest eve r, that investigation of Engli sh or Bri tish
It is clear that Dick ens takes a dim view of ignore s Dicken s in his attempt to write a history past have shaped all subsequent English histo- charact er ran out of steam. Rath er , it took on a
Mr Che ster , and of the rule s of etiquette com- of Engli sh national charac ter between the late ries, includin g those of the nineteenth centu ry. far wider variety of for ms. On e stimulus was
piled by Lord Che sterfie ld for sophisticated eighteenth century and the present da y. Thi s applies to nationa l characteristics (or charac- the apparent contrast bet ween Brit ish polit ical
"me n of the world". By strong implication, Dicken s wrote durin g the period when, accord- ter) too. Thu s, for instance, Mandl er quotes ex perie nce in the 1920s and 30s and that on the
Dick ens' s sympathies lie instead with "those ing to Mandl er, the notion of nationa l charact er Carlyle' s famous descript ion of the Ang lo- Con tinent. Lib ert y crumbled almos t every-
intensely vulgar sentiments" of "boors and peas- was being fashioned in respon se to the progres- Saxons as a "gluttonous race . . . lumbering where else , alon g with democracy; Brit ain
ants" which "are called the nation al character". sive extension in the curtil age of the political about in pot-belli ed equanimity", and sugges ts becam e their last and stronges t redoubt. " In
Although , curiou sly, Dickens never used the nation . "It is here, on the democratic fringes of that Stubb s shared this view. If so, it would these times o f dict ator ship abroad , we may
phrase again, in one sense his entire oeuvre (a respectable society in the turbu lent early Victo- hardly be surprising, becau se Carly le was para- thank God that we are not as oth er men are" ,
term to which he would probabl y take excep- rian decades, that we can locate the origins of phrasing a key passage in Willi am of Malmes- wrote the historian J. E. Neale (iro nically pre-
tion) might be interpret ed as an attempt to the idea of the ' English nationa l character'. " It bury' s Gesta RegumAnglorum, the most influen- figuring the logic of the wor k of the pupi l who
ex plore that chara cter , thus defin ed . According is doubt ful whether Dickens would have recog- tial of all the medie val historie s of the English. grew to loa the him , G. R. Elton) . Mandler does
to Fraser's Magazine (1850) , he di splayed an nized this as a description of what he was doin g; Th ose nineteenth-century scholars who had read not say so, but it was no co incid enc e that Ron-
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _, but he was, as Or well stressed, such an acute W illiam of Malmesbury, or Henry of Huntin g- aid Sym e' s cla ssic The Roman Revolution, con-
critic of cont emporary socia l and politic al de vel- don , or any of the other great twelfth-century cern ed with the di sintegrati on of the Roman
opm ent s, and his inllu enc e, in his own lifetim e historian s, wou ld have been bemu sed by Republic, and the erecti on of autoc racy on its
and subsequently , has been so colossal, that it is Mandl er' s assertion that in the l 850s and 60s ru ins, was publi shed in Sept emb er 1939 .
imposs ible to write a history of Eng lish national "the lack of [democracy] had previou sly inhib- The cont rast attracted a good deal of Conti -
character which ignores him . In the event, he ited the developm ent of thinkin g abo ut nationa l nent al as well as dom estic comm ent, some of it
inveig les his way from time to time into the character except amon g a minority of out-and- informed by the ex perie nce of fighting alon g-
pages of this book, despite Mand ler' s early out democrats". Their sources were full of such side the British in the First World War. The Brit-
statement that he will not probe very deeply thinkin g, and sought, incidentally, to cont rast the ish reception of, for instance , Andre Mauroi s' s
into literatur e. But the book would have been Engli sh with the barbarou s Celts. Les Silences du Colone l Bramble sugg ests a
much richer had Dick ens been allowe d to take Just as Mandl er pays no more than lip service characteristically understated national self-
his rightful place , somew here near centre stage. to the inllu enc e of medie val sources on tho se satisfaction, evident across the dom estic polit -
Barnohy Rud ge , one o f Di ckens' s two medi eval historians who are so ce ntral to his ical spectrum, from Baldwin to Orwell. For
attempts at historic al fiction , set in 1780, is a story , so the classical ed ucation from which Mandl er this coy national narcissism - though he
case in po int. Its subtitle is "A Tale of the Riot s all his intellectuals would have benefite d is does not describ e it thus - is epitomized in
of ' Eighty" - the Gordon Riot s. It coul d have scarcely ment ioned . When Richard Che venix Sidney Strube ' s 1930s cartoon s of the mode st
been used to revea l a lot, from the perspecti ve "concluded that climate and geography had a "little man" who decently mudd les through.
of 184 1, about another of Mandler' s centra l potenti at ing effect", might he have been influ- (His striking physical resemblance to Clem ent
them es: the tran sformation of the unru ly enced, directl y or indirectl y, by Aristotl e? Attl ee ex plains why Be vin often referred fond ly
eighteenth-century mob into a "solemn, When Samuel Laing linked the "energy, per se- to his Part y lead er as "th e Little Man".)
upright , self-reliant, ventures ome" peop le, a verance, self-reliance and independence of mind Wh y Mand ler deem s cartoons an acceptable
model of (and for) hum anit y. Dick ens' s other and action" of the Anglo-Saxon s to their seafar- source, but literatur e - and especially popular
attempt, A Tale of Two Cities , cou ld have under- ing origins, might the parallel with Athen s have literature - not, remains as much a puzzle as is
lined the point , by con trast with what obtained been at the back of his mind ? And if, as Man- his treatment of the nineteenth cen tury. J ames
If you can't find it here, across the Chann el. d ler tells us, Kemb le, like others, paid a good Hilton ' s Goodbye , Mr Chips (1934 ), for
Mand ler' s belief that a study of "more dea l of attention to Tacitus' Germania , what instance, set in a minor public school, is men-
it doesn't exist. detailed and coherent expre ssions of the idea" of did the y all make of the Agri cola, which is cen- tioned onl y in a qu otation from Peter Laslett .
national character req uires him largely to trally concerned with Britain and the Briti sh, Yet it could have provid ed M andl er with rich
eschew literatur e and other " imaginary . . . pre senting them , ironicall y, as embodying the material, with its survey, from a very Engli sh
material" leads him to focus on writing which he tradition al virtues whi ch the Roman s had lost? perspective, of world eve nts from 1870 to the
considers addresses nationa l char acter directl y Freeman was so steep ed in cla ssica l literatur e 1930s . Chip s' s resolut e adh erenc e to fair play,
and explicitly, whether for a learned or a popular that not only did he pick up on e very possible and to sentiment, is demonstrat ed when, as act-
~ audienc e. "As its purpo se has generally been to cla ssical allusion in his medie val sources, he ing headmaster durin g the First Wor ld Wa r, he
AbeBooks.co.uk assimilate elites and masses into one psycho logi- clearly saw him self as some latter-day Virgil reads ou t in chap el amon g the name s of the
cal type it has to be accessible to both. " Mand ler for the Engli sh, expounding their destin y, albeit school's fallen that of a former German master,
100 m illion new, se con d han d , discusses a panopl y of erudi te scholars, men of in prose (thou gh prose which he progre ssively who had died fight ing on the other side . (This
rare,and ou t-of-print books. letters, incipient social scientists, and unsavour y purifi ed , in later editions, substituting what he incid ent foreshadows the Archbi shop of Canter-
raci sts like Robert Knox, "a disgraced anatomist deemed to be pure Engli sh vocabulary for the bury' s insistence , to the reported anno yance of
Visit our Fantasy Book Room at
www.abe books.co.uk /famasy who made a precario us living in the I840s lectur- Latin ate adult eration s of the Normans). Mr s Th atcher , on praying for the Argent inian
ing on anatomy to popu lar audiences in the north A more ob viou s omi ssion than either earlier dead too , at the service of thank sgiving for Brit-
of England". The author seems most at home historian s of the English or classical writings ish victory in the Falklands War.) Tha t the film
with these ninet eenth-century writer s, particu - is Protestanti sm . Mand ler touche s on religion of the book was released in late 1939, ju st as
larly the historian s. Franci s Palgr ave (it is perti- from time to time in, for instance , his discu ssion hostili ties were renewed, serves to underlin e the

T LS JU N E 8 2007 - 8-
 HISTORY

point that mm , like literatur e, deserves more of an English national character - a term which self-mockery, destroys it. This is what Harold of the Opposition. How this recent development
attention than Mandler devotes to it. Churchill's was in any case progressively replaced by the Macmillan, that master of arch English under- is to be explained is a puzzle. If I were Mandler,
favourite film, That Hamilton Woman! (1941), is pseudo-psychological "identity" (bizarrely first statement, discovered in 1963. I'd look lirst at Scottish and Welsh devolution. It
not mentioned; but its adaptation of the Nelson coined in England by Thomas Arnold). Mandler But it is by no means clear that English is no longer simply a case of "Fog in the Chan-
myth in Britain' s linest (and darkest) hour is despairs at this disintegration, as well he might national character or identity is dead - hence the nel, Continent cut off ' - although this is once
germane to M andlers theme. Of the post-war when faced with John Major' s cackhanded number of recent books on the subject. Mandler again increasingly so - but fog on the Tees,
period, he comments in passing that many of attempt to resurrect national character by blend- does not attribute much significance to the Severn and Wye. No wonder the Prime Minis-
the Ealing comedies are concerned with commu- ing Baldwin with Orwell, in a sequence of current mania for llying llags of St George when- ter' s (Scottish) successor-presumptive has been
nities which were breaking up; but he makes no bucolic images which were already self-con- ever an English sports team is playing. Yet, even making speeches about Britishness (as opposed
attempt to reconcile this with the fact that the sciously out of date in the I930s. English a mere decade ago, only an eccentr ic would have to exclusive Englishness). Disraeli, who has a bit
Welfare State was being established at that very national character, or perhaps even national ident- llown a llag of St George. Now almost everyone part in this book, and Gladstone, who is unac-
time. ity, might be a fit subject for dry irony; indeed, does, right across the social spectrum, usually on countably almost ignored, might have approved.
Thereafter, what Mandler deems to be the frag- irony became an essential constituent of it. But if his or her car. During the football World Cup, But what would Dickens, with his low view of
mentation in British society made it more and irony is turned into a joke, then national charac- the Prime Minister was put under great pressure the political arts, have made of the attempt to
more difficult to sustain any convincing notion ter cannot survive. Mockery, especially national to conform with the precedent set by the Leader manufacture national character from above?

--------------------------~--------------------------

he Declaration of Independence illus- obscured , until now, a systematic evaluation of

T trated the Catch-22 in which would-be

state-makers from the Age of Revolution
to the present day have found themselves. If the
All men the Declaration as a charter for states' rights,
and as one of the formati ve documents of the
contempora ry world order. Even so, surely the
Continenta l Congress had been recognized exter- ADAM 1. P . SMIT H independence follow the form of the American endurin g influence of the Declaration in the
nally as a legitimate executive body, then the original, few include an abstract commitment to world at large as well as in the United States
Declaration which it ratified on July 4, 1776, David Arrnitage individual rights (a notab le exception being Ho lies in its conll ation of the rights of individuals
would have been accepted as a positive act in Chi Minh' s 1945 declaration of the independ- with the rights of states. Indeed, the Declaration
internationa l law. But if the United States of THE DE CLARATION OF ence of the Republic of Vietnam). Such selec- somehow manages to imply that these two sorts
America had already, by this date, been acknowl- I NDEPE NDE NCE tive copy ing, Arrnitage argues, confirms that the of rights reinforce each other, when, in reality,
edged as "separate and equal" to the other "Pow- A global history "main message" of the Declaration to the rest of it is far from clear how compatib le they are.
302pp. HarvardUniversity Press. £15.95(US $23.95). the world is as "an assertion of the rights of
ers of the Earth" as the Declaration claimed, then The relationship between the rights of states
9780674022 829
there would have been no need for the Declara- states among other states rather than an enumera- and the rights of individuals is one of the central
tion. The circularity of the logic infuriated, tion of the rights of individuals against their gov- concerns of our time, as of Jefferson' s. David
among others, Jeremy Bentham, who did not other Acts and Things which Indepen dent ernors", So by looking beyond the borders of the Armitage has shed new light on some of the
oppose American Independence per se, but States may of right do". The Declaration imag- USA, Arrnitage alters our perspective on the most important questions about the foundation s
lamented that "so rational a cause should be ined the world as a communit y of sovereign meaning of the Declaration. of the modern world by examinin g a document
rested on reasons so much fitter to beget objec- states, all of equa l status, communicating with That noble second paragraph, it seems, has that is both time-bound and timeless.
tions than to remove them". In other words, the each other throug h formal documents like the ~-----------------------------------­
central question posed by the American Declara- Declaration . As Armitag e puts it, "the Declara-
tion oflndependence and by the many others that tion of Independence was therefore a declara- NEW FROM
tion of interdependence". His primar y concern
have been issued since is: can Independence be
is with that remarkab le docum ent' s significance
ALDINETRANSACTION
effected merely by its announcement? How far
does the assertion create the reality? for a global history of the meaning and emer-
The basic premiss of the Declaration was gence of states over the past 230 years. He
that "the Laws of Nature and of Nature' s God" draws our attention to the Declaration ' s role in
entitled any "peopl e" (the problematic word inaugurating a whole new genre of declara tions
"nation" doe s not appear) to determin e their of independence , which in turn shaped the
own government, qualified only by a responsi- meaning of statehood and the practice of inter-
bility on the part of the people break ing away nationa l relations. The Declaration' s distinctive
from another that they should explain their form ula - asserting a "natural" right to se lf -g ov -
reasons for doin g so. And most of the Declara - ernment, and then justifying separation on the
tion is duly taken up with a litany of comp laints basis of a list of violations by an imperia l power First paperback edition First paperback edition
about the conduct of the British Government. In - provided a temp late that was of particular
old age, Thoma s Jefferson recalled that his aim value in eras where statehood was contr asted CULTURAL HISTORY NONVERBAL A HUNDRED YEARS
in draftin g the Declaration had been "to place with empire: in Latin America in the early nine- AFfER FOUCAULT COMMUNICATION OF GEOGRAPHY
before mankin d the common sense of the sub- teenth century, by anti-colonial resistance move- E dite d by Joh n N eu ba u er Albert Meh rabi a n T. W Freeman
ject, in terms so plain and firm as to command ments in the mid-twentieth centur y, and by the Thi s book discusses Foucault's In this ne w, multidimensional This new paperback edition
independence movements that sprang up in the achievements and the approach to the subject of of A Hu ndred Years of
their assent, and to justify ourselves in the suggestive power of his work, nonverbal communication Geography draws together
independ ent stand we are compe lled to take". In wake of the collapse of the USSR. as well as his methodological Mehrabian bring s together a the threads of a century
speaking like a state, the Declaration sought to If previous scholarship has focused on the weaknesses, historical great deal of original work of progre ss, from the first
bring the USA into being as a state. impact of the Declarat ion on the USA, undoubt- inaccuracies, and ambiguities. including descriptions of new scientific explorations and
Above all, it attempts to show experimental methods that mappings to present-day
David Arm itage' s concise and penetrating edly the most familiar lines appear in the second how one can use Foucault to suited to this field. detailed trends toward specialization
book, The Declaration of Indep enden ce, exem- paragraph, which begins with the famous state- open ne w approaches to findings of studie s scattered and generalization. It
plifies the potential strengths of a truly trans- ment that "all men" are "created equal" and cultural history. The essays throughout the literature , contains a synoptic view
broach the major and most importantl y, the of the development of the
national approach to the writing of history. In endowed with natural rights. In fact, although it
contro versial aspects of integration of these finding s various aspects of ge ography,
some respect s it is not surprising that the Decla- would be a slight exaggeration to say that this Foucauldian cultural history, within a compact framework. showing how the field has
ration of Independence ha s not pre viou sly been passage was a mere aside , it wa s logicall y subsid- all of which are explicitly been differentiated from
978-0-202-30966-8 Paperback
approached in this way. After all, by delinition, iary to the main argument that the United States analyzedwith respect to associated disciplines and
antiquity, the Renaissance ,
235pp $24.95/£16 .50 ho w it has differentiated and
it symbolized the moment when America broke of America were entitled to Independence. As and the nineteenth century. specialized within itself.
away from a sprawling decentrali zed transna- Abraham Lincoln later pointed out, the observa-
978-0-202-30585-1 Paperback 978-0-202-30920-0 Paperback
tiona l entity (the British Empire) and set off on tion that all men were created equal was "of no 259 pages $24.95/£16.50 $29.95/19.95
its own path. Yet although it has since become practical use in effecting our separation from
embedded in the American nationa l psyche as Great Britain" and it duly attracted relatively lit-
"American scripture", the audien ce to which it tle attention at the time, other than the passing
was implicitl y addre ssed was not a domestic scorn of positivists like Bentham who thought ALDINETRANSACTION
one, but the "Opinions of Mankind ". As "free that to ascribe laws to nature, and to derive natu- Rutgers - The State University of NewJersey, 35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway, :-.u 08854-8042
and independent states" , the American colo- ral rights from such laws, was "rhetorical non- Calltoll free (in U.S.) 1-888-999-6778 or fax 732-748-9801 www.transactionpub.com
nies, claimed the Declaration, now had the "full sense - nonsense upon stilts" . Interestingly, IN THE UKAND EUROPE- AldineTransactionUK, stocked and distributedby Eurospan,
Power to levy War, conclu de Peace, contract what Arrnitage' s global perspective shows is Tel: +44 (0)1767604972. Fax: +44 (0)1767601640.
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Alliances, establish Commerc e, and to do all that, while many of the world's declarations of

- 9- TLS J UNE 8 200 7

 P OLITI C S

A Culture of Improvement
Technology and the Western Millennium
ROBERT FRIEDEL
On red rugs
'This is a spiendidbook, recaliing Mumford's Technics and Civilization in
ere are two polemics on the Blair years MI C HA EL WHIT E
its scope and erudition. It challenges usto think carefully about the idea of
progress, the 'culture of improvement,' and the uneasy reiatlonship that
persists between freedom, power,and socialresponsibility in the modern tech-
nological world. "
- MerriltRoe Smith , CultenProfessor oftheHistoryofTechnology, MIT
H from clever and experie nced writers
who should never be left alone together
in the same room. Anthony Giddens' s habit is
A nt ho n y Gidd en s
to give mildly reproachful indica tions that some OVE R T O YOU , MR B R OW N
£24.95' cloth' 978·0·262·06262·6' 576 pp. (117 iIIus .) aspects of New Labour governa nce have been 188pp. Polity. Paperback, £9.99.
disappoin ting since Tony Blair was swept to 978 07456 42239
In Praise of the Whip power in Britain on May I, 1997. Geoff rey Geo ff rey W h e at cr oft
A Cultural History of Arousal Wheatcroft' s rage against the man he describes
NIKLAUS LARGIER as a "pious God-botherer" and charlatan, one Y O , BL A I R !
TRANSLATED BY GRAHAM HARMAN who has des troyed his country' s independence, 128pp. Politico' s. £9.99.
bursts dyspeptically from virtually every page . 978 I 842752067
Anewhistoryof voluntary flagellation in Europe, from its invention in medieval
religious devotionto its use in themodern pornographicimagination.Working Both authors establish their perspective with
witha wide range of religious, literary, and medical textsand images, Niklaus a scene-setting description of visits to Washing- be a test. His tone is respectful (twice as many
Largier explores the emotional and sensual, religious anderotic excitement of ton, DC. Wheatcroft applauds the refusal in July index refere nces to Gordon as to Tony) and he
the whip,a crucial instrumentofstimuiationin devotional and sexual practices. 2006 of Nouri al-Maliki, newly appointed Prime certainly shares much of what will now become
£22.95 • cloth' 978·1·890951·65·8 • 550 pp . (52 iIIus, ) • A Zone Book
Minister of democratized Iraq, to bow to Amer- the New Labour Squared agenda. Wealth
ican bullying and take Israel' s side in its short creation through a lightly but firmly regulated
Who Are You? war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. He contrasts free-market economy; a state in which power is
Identification, Deception, and Surveillance this stand with Blair' s subsequent refusal, in devolved but which ensures that its citize ns
in Early Modem Europe Washington en route to a Carribean family holi- have the necessary mean s - health and educa-
VALENTIN GROEBNER
day, to condemn the Israeli counter-att ack. It is tion, jo bs and money - to lead fulti lled lives;
TRANSLATED BY MARK KVBURZ AND JOHN PeCK
cited as further shameful evidence that Britain ' s personal security from crime, terrorism, Big
The prehistoryof modern passport and identiflcation technologies: the poodle Prime Minister has reduced a proud and Brother and clim ate change; a better work/life
documents, seals, and stampsthat could document and transformtheir
owner's identity in thecenturies before photography and fingerprinting- ancient nation to craven subservience. balance; a better EUfUS balance too; it is a
from thechancelleries, courts and streets of late medievaland Renaissance As much the intellectual-as-court ier as familiar list, one which New Labour has pro-
Europe, tothevagrants, merceneries and gypsies of early modern Europe. Wheatcroft is the armchair freedom fighter, moted while failing, Giddens concedes, to syn-
£18.95 ' cloth' 978-1-890951-72-6'340 pp . (22 iIIu•. )· AZone Book Lord Giddens' s anecdote is equally revea ling thesize as the "third way" between Thatcherism
about its author's perspective. He descri bes his and the lost semi-socia list world of 194 5- 79 .
Secrets of Women own first trip in the Blair entourage to the All this is to be achieved in a society where
Gender, Generation, and the Origins twentieth century's New Rome in 1998: by the overall tax burden remains roughly at the 40
of Human Dissection Concorde with New Labour' s VIPs, black per cent-plus of GNP where it now stands, but
KATHARINE PARK limos from the airport esco rted by police out- rewe ighted in a more ega litarian and greener
Katharine Parkexplores thehistoryofwomen on the dissectiontable through riders, high-level meeti ngs, the White House way. The rich should pay more, the poor less.
a series of case studies, explodingthemyth that medievalreligious prohibi- dinner where he stands in line to meet President The poor should also get their fair shares of
tions hindered thepracticeof human dissection in medievaland Renaissance Clinton between Harrison Ford and Barbra society's goodies, health care and Cambridge
Italy and arguing thatfemale bodies played a central role in thehistoryof Streisand . The reader half-expects to learn that bursaries for their kids, though they must be per-
anatomy atthat time. both stars offered to play Tony and Cherie Blair suaded to take more responsibility for their own
£23.95' cloth' 978-1-890951-67-2'304 pp . (60 iIIu•. )· A Zone Book in the film of The Third Way if only Giddens lives too. It is an important insight of Blairism
would knock his 1998 Blairite text into a script. that Attlee's welfare state model delivered
Evocative Objects
No such luck, but the visit was "a bit different more to the middle class and the clever than to
Things We Think With
from teaching sociology in Cambridge", the the poor, a repro ach to Labour critics who extol
EDITED BY SHERRY TURKLE
wide-eyed aut hor notes. the Golden Age.
Autobiographicai essays, framed by two interpretive essaysbythe editor, "Children First" should be Brown's guiding
Indeed. A prime ministerial cavalcade is a
describethepower of anobject to evoke emotionand provokethought.
seductive expe rience and Giddens appears principle. Yes, says Giddens. Excellent, but it
"Evocative Objects is a collection of great richness andcomplexify. Reading
seduced, albeit by red-carpet treatment that is already is. The real question is how to do all
these essays transforms one's sense of the mostcommonplace objects, and
promptsus to explorethe palimpsest of the past within us." distinctly at odds with the unflashy and egalitar- this. Giddens is right to say that New Labour' s
- JiII KerConway, President Emerita, Smith College, author of The Road ian values of social democracy he preaches in recor d in reshaping public services , red istribut-
from Coorain Over to You, Mr Brown. As Wheatcroft might ing money to the poorest and much else since
£15.95' cloth' 978·0·262·20168·1 • 352 pp . (70 lIIu•. )· Ju ly 2007 interject, "That's Blair for you, showbiz vulgar- 1997 is much better than genera lly acknow-
ity triumphs over substance every time". Yet ledged by left-wing Labo ur critics of the
The Inner Touch Giddens's book is by far the more useful of the Betrayal School, let alone by libertarian upper-
Archaeology of a Sensation two as Blair hands the key to 10 Downing Street middle-class conservatives like Wheatcro ft,
DANIEL HELLER-RoAZEN to his long-term collaborator, No 11 neighbour who ignores it. But, like New Labour, Giddens
Anoriginal, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiryinto the senseof and rival, Gordon Brown. It contains little that is also better at saying what "should" happen
beingsentient- what it means tofeel that one is alive - thatdraws on is likely to be unfamiliar to fellow toilers in than at doing the difficult bit and setting out
philosophical, literary, psychological, and medical accounts fromancient, academe (he generously cites the research exactly how a policy goal is to be achieved.
medieval, and modern cultures. of others), to policy-holies like Mr Brown or to Lloyd George knew what to do: break a few
£19.95' cloth' 978·1·890951·76·4' 300 pp.' A Zone Book co lonies of think tanks on the banks of the heads. But, on the home front at least, Blair has
Thames. But to the lay reader contemplating a usually been tim id and co nse nsua l. Hen ce the
The Prism of Grammar Brown future or to students, it will prove acces- pervasive sense of disappointment as he departs
How Child Language Illuminates Humanism sible and stimulating reading. Giddens knows that Young Lochinvar did not fullil his promise,
TOM ROEPER undergraduates well enough to bribe them with that presentational gloss - doubtful statist ics
"Thisengaging, perceptive, andwide-ranging study investigates individual a jo ke or three at the start of every chapter. about exam results, "spin" in the j argon of Fleet
ianguagesin terms of thechallenges theypose forfhe child as well as their There is more Grouc ho Marx here than Kar!. Street's counter-spinners - has too often been a
often surprising relations to other languagesand to the generalprinciples that So what does Giddens propose? And will substitute for delivery.
constitute thegenetically-determined languagefaCUlty. Lucid and engaging,
Prime Minister Brown , steeped in ten years of Giddens knows this and ruefully acknow-
The Prismof Grammar leadsthe reader from strikingobservations and
experiments with children that anyonecancarryout to subtle andintricate government experience as Britain' s finance min- ledges some of it, just as he admits that the activ-
issues that concerneveryparent - in fact, anyoneseekingto understand who ister as Blair was not in 1997- 8, take any notice ist, interven tionist foreign policy he sees as
we areand what we should be." of such an arch-Blairite scholar? Brown is essential to a globalized, inter-dependent world
- Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor, MIT famously wary of those who have not sworn a has led to half-cocked disas ter in Iraq. Giddens
£24.95' cloth' 978-0-262-18252-2'372 pp . (50 lllus) blood oath of loyalty, though he has promi sed does make some specific proposals, such as a
to be more open and inclusive. Giddens cou ld 1 per cent annual wealth tax on assets on a

TL S J UNE 8 2 0 07 - 10-
 POLITICS

Bush presidenc y would be, over Ne w Orlean s,

the budget proc ess and climate change policy,
as we ll as over its lurch from gut isolation
to the worldwide big stick after 9/11. Where
Wheatcroft, assorted Litt le Englanders, Big
Europe ans, Trot skyites and BBC executives go
wrong is in their unshake able belie f that Blair
acted in bad faith from the start. In say ing
durin g the milit ary build -up of 2002-03 that
Saddam Hussein could stay in po wer if he
disarmed he stands accused of contradicting
his post-bellum justilication, the rem oval of a
dict ator. Yet if Saddam had disarmed he would
have been overthro wn.
It is possible to have hon est disagreem ent
about the abo ve assert ion, but Wheatcro ft on
Blair is not a combination to ent ertain that possi-
bilit y. Wearil y often he asse rts as fact things he
cannot know. For instance, that publi c grief for
the Que en Mother was sincere, for Diana syn-
thetic, and compounds his own prejudices by
uncritic ally treating the media as a spar kling
stream, not a polluted river. In the 24/7 era of
rollin g news-as-ent ertainm ent, this is a cruci al
blind spot.
Tony Blair, Trimdon Labour Club, on tbe occasion ofbis resignation speech, May 10, 2007 Nor does he give thought to Blairs over-
arch ing calculation of Britain ' s national inter-
sharply rising scale. T his is easie r said than that the Con servatives under the reviving leader- personal and nation al humili ation rath er than est, that the global hegemon (ho wever tempo-
don e when the iiber-rich have their ow n ver- ship of David Cam eron could win it - unless the kind of boyish banter routin ely used by one rary its status) should not be left to act in total
sions of Islamic bankin g network s. The Swiss Bro wn makes a far more effective positi ve case pri vate school and Ivy League coll ege child of isolation from the international community,
appare ntly have such a tax, but it is prob ably than Blair has done for what he and Gidden s pri vilege to another. A nicknam e addict, Mr e ven from a UN whose own record had been as
a secret. Would it be wiser to concentrat e, as ca ll " the progressive consensus". Like Brown , Bush call s tall reporters "Stretch" and says erratic, self-serving and at time s murderous
Gidd en s also sugges ts, on changing the behav - G iddens tend s to shy away from what fail s to " Hey, Bolton " to his former colleague, John . I (usually by default) as any State Depar tmen t
iour of the rich by encouragi ng pbil antbrop y to interest him or makes him uncom fortable . He do not think he says " Yo, Putin ". Nor will his Unde r-Secretary for Latin Am eric a. Hug the
grow to US levels or solidarity to Germ an ones? seems unaware that the prim ary funct ion of recent embarrassi ng ly warm farewell tribut e to White House close: though their greater experi-
Wb at tbe Blairit e peer does not do is to chal- state power is not SureSt art, but protect ion from his "good" and "courageous" ally persuad e ence would almost certain ly have coun selled
lenge, as some con structi ve critics have, tbe ex ternal threat and intern al lawlessness. Th ere Blair ' s detractors otherwise. After all, Wheat- caution in Iraq, Churchill (who bombed it first)
long-term ef fective ness of Bro wn' s key poli- is not much here about defenc e or law and croft quot es approv ing ly Kend al Myers, the and Margar et Thatcher would have grasped that
cies for the allevi ation of povert y: the New order. Thou gh the right- win g UK Independence State Departm ent ana lyst who rashly called point - as Ant hon y Eden tragica lly did not.
Deal, whic h active ly prod s the long-term unem - Party is gently deplored, there is also a striking Churchill Wa shington' s first British poodl e. As All the same Yo, Blair! could have been fun.
ployed into the labour market, a local versio n of absenc e of any mention of the Briti sh Nat ional the old bulldo g him sel f might have put it, Evel yn Wa ugh , whose scornful, snobbish rage
tbe Clint on appro acb ; or tbe Treasury' s syste m Party (BNP) , its riva l for disaffected votes - in "s ome pood le, some leash". against the vulgarity of the passing parade
of tax credi ts, a form of negat ive inco me tax the BNP ' s case Labour ones - if Bro wn stum- Of cour se, Blair is open to sustained cri ticism Wheatcroft seeks to emulate, still makes us
de signed to bolster the net inco me of the work- bles. It hap pens. for the way in which he took Britain to war rock with laughter in his austere mock ery. If
ing poor, so compl ex that it seems to need bet- Geoffrey Whe atcroft has no such fastidious- again in 2003 and the way he failed to exert the Anthony Giddens is too mildl y reasonable,
ter accountants than are employed by the City' s ness. He revels in a fight. As a title, Yo. Blair! influence that decision should have given him Geoffrey Wheatcroft is disarmed by his own
de rivativ es traders. says it all. Th e a uthor is one of eag er million s in Washington to help shape the disastrou s occu- anger, a saloon bar ranter still goin g on when
Gidd ens is right in saying that the next gen- who beli eve tha t Presid ent Bu sh' s overh eard pation. He did no better than Colin Pow ell. But the bar is shut and the broken glass is being
eral election, due in 2009-10, is wide open, but gree ting at the G8 ' s St Peter sbur g summit was a few then reali zed how dysfunctional the second swept up.

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- 11- TLS J UNE 8 200 7

 POETRY

TLSlFoyles poetry competition 2007

Shortlisted poems: a poll of readers to decide the outcome

From more than 3,000 poems ente red/or this yea r 's compe tition, the edito rs ofthe TLS ha ve chose n a shortlist of eleven p ieces, pr inted in random sequ ence below, f rom which read ers are invit ed to
select the winning po ems. Tho se wishing to take port in the ju dg ing pro cess should fill out and return the votin g slip prin ted at the f oot ofpa ge J3. or e-ma il tlspoe trytsme wsint.co. uk . by Jun e 28.
Readers are entitled to one vote each, identifying your chosen po em by the letter affixed to its title; yo u may also offer a second choice, which will ga in halfmarks in the adjudication . Beneath these
letters, you ore asked to fill in your nam e and address. The resul ts of the poll will be collated and printed on July 13. The mo st popular po em will win £2,000; runn ers-up will receive a total of£/ ,500.

A) A cts C) T he Adder's Skin E) The Modified MercaIli Scale

of Earthq uake Inten sity
With reg ard to these act s: remo val of clothing, A desiccated trophy in its box
nudit y in front of fema les and before prayer, With sna pped clay pipes, I
the bell y a heap of whea t set about with lilies, Pink dentures and a dried -out fountain pen , Beep -beep : a zebra finch
The memory of its swa rthiness unlocks motoring betwe en perches,
a brood of men with bushy locks, black as rave n, The se sini ster, ophidian a peaceable age of ent wined fish.
the shaving of beard s 0 dau ght ers of Jeru salem, Black loze nges and stripes
expo sure to extreme temperature s, hot or cold , short Tha t slithered through a fossilizing world II
Its brin gin g out so vividly uncurled. Sen siti ve souls on upper floor s
shackling to an eye-bolt on the !loor, with seafood pliers,
spikenard and saffro n, calamu s and cinnamon, He'd stunned and slit it, lea ving ju st the !lesh, demolishin g crab claw s.
thre e hundred and fift y incidents of self-harm, The serpentine
Remains dumped in a coil the heat di spelled , III
a garden inclose d, a spring shut up, a fountain sea led, Then stretched its skin like patched-Up battledress A famil y spirit
hood s, goggles, lap dance s during inter rog ation, On crow ds of soldiers as the y swe lled, ratt les her own portr ait,
fear of dogs, the use of do gs; the act s in que st ion Assembling line by line scrawls mou stachioes on it.
Lon g trail s that in the twinkling of a ey e
were perp etr ated by known governme nt officials, Snaked a ll the way to Mon s and Pic ard y; IV
their teeth a !lock of sheep, e venl y shorn . Parked car s rockab ye with lovers.
Then went him self, sloughed off his fifteen year s With lamb ' s blood , the governor
To make his mark daub s his front door.
And jo in his brother dead some where in France
B) Beach Kites And whe re, somehow , a small god interferes V
To ga s him , give him one last chance As ever y pendulum fails
Is this a new wa y of bein g born ? To shovel through the dark the sleepers awak en . Church bells
To fee l some huge cre scent personality Then shut it in thi s box whe re no stray !lare peal them sel ves.
Bur geoning out o f your shoulders, Can pinpo int what the add er' s scales out stare.
Win ging you over the sand, the sluggish sea? VI
Mile upon mil e of contamin ated Wa sh is He 'd lift if gentl y, test its brittl e we ight , Citi zen s !lee the bullring .
Tucking a cold Mar ch sky into the hori zon . Then tell me why Radio s play " Beg in the Beguin e" ,
When takin g life you' re best to save its skin shopkeepers cave in.
You can dri ve no further. And so let toxic stillness fascinate
Look do wn at the thra shin g wa ter, Lon g after any norm al peri shin g, VII
The upfa lls of its reach Long after each clea r eye Architectural orn aments
Failin g, fail ing ag ain to take the cli ff - Co ld rain and clouds of chlorine turned opaque crumble; the ve il is rent.
Sandpipers hunch on the geomorp hic lodge - Had chi lled into the dead skin of thi s snake. A wild pitching of pres s tents.
Rock face and wave force, story without speech.
VIII
But it' s one thin g to pau se at the cutting ed ge , Branc hes crack, a tower falls.
Another to face the e volvin g beach, the gap Water levels
Where the road stops and the dune s heap D) The Fair Iss ue Sits the Eton rise like mercur y in dead well s.
And the wind blo ws fierc ely in the wrong direction . Entrance Ex arri
IX
One gaud y comma ascend s .. . ano ther .. . anothe r . . . Hop scotching or hoofing a ball along the lane s, Earth is open for busine ss.
The air is rock ing alert with pun ctua tion. or qua shing their whoops on strawberry chews - the boys Crumbs on broken dishe s
don 't notice you follow your father out of the ga tes mar auded by ze bra finche s.
Gr ey sickle cell s clu ster under a microscop e.
where swan s that web the bank s are queening throu gh X
A jumbo wasp, a pterodactyl, a peacock feather the time in hand, as boys in cano es are !leeting The gove rnor strugg les to adapt:
Jock ey for space aga inst moon-parings, rainbow ze ppe lins, upstream, you follo w your father on cobbled rout es A crab-claw hand ,
Prayer flag s - imagi natio n battling with imagination, the Whisperi ng toen ail s of a rat.
Spott ed species cha sing the plain - as out they !lo at, where men in black est go wns stamp the gro und,
Stron g men steering their wild umbilical toys !loa ting in weeping willow breeze till heat XI
that falls from gargoy le towers open s you ou t . .. Rail track s gro w serpentine,
A way from the girl friends in the ca r park , who cockroaches bide time.
Leathered from hee l to neck in stee l-s tudded black , Circling back to where you saw the boys, There is cake , there is wine.
Head scarfed again st the win d, see m coolly resigne d as dark as the dark est lobb y whe re you quietl y
To an old dispen sat ion , a ritual of matin g stand in a corner, where you follow your father ' s XII
That puts up again with the cliff-han ging habit s of boys. Tidal meadows, ghost town s.
Is this a new wa y of writing? cardoman Whisper tellin g you how your brot her Communications down,
The heroe s off !lyin g or light ing , the women waiting? will follow , one day, in the footst eps of maharajas! the ange ls e lec t their new thro nes.

TLS J UNE 8 200 7 - 12-

 POETRY

F) T h e M au v e Ta lTl-o ' -S han ter H ) At a provi ncial zoo J) R e f u s al S hoes

It was n ' t meant to start like that: Tw o owls con versing The man agem ent ha ve a quota to lil l.
my sister 's best frie nd in a hat as darkness comes to the zoo. So we have a fro ntline job to do,
pluck ed from her head on Elie beac h The ow l in the cage prote ct ing this country fro m alien s.
by strong Fi fe breeze I have walked the line of Regulation s
and me - in reck less hot pursuit - as ks What is f reed om? too often, fee ling like I' m auditioning
its rescu er. Th e de ed bore fru it The ow l on the outside as ks for the TV version of Men in Black .
beyond all ex pec tations, eac h What is confinement?
signed up to please This one claim s he is an An glic an vica r,
I as k What is it delegate to a conferenc e at Lam beth Palace.
the other for a lifetim e. Lur ch that brin gs llvo owls toge ther I' m sure they have prop er Churches
of bells in an An struther chur ch , to talk as night fall s ? in Nigeria, not j ust the happ y-clapp ys
rece ption at a festal hall , or the ones with tho se sonorous titles
a honeymoon The ZOO-kee per says that sound like a prop hecy in their own right.
in Norway : these grew from my act Lo ve and ph ilosophy shap e
of chiva lry. Last year , attacked the wisdom of owls. He obviously didn' t buy the do g-collar
by some thing terr ible thou gh sma ll, or his smart barathea blazer in Duty Free
you hummed our tune I ) T he Exurru n o r s at Lagos; his soft ly spoken Wo rld Ser vice
Where the house is co ld and empty and the gar de n's overgro wn , Eng lish is better than mine, or yours.
ex haustedly - then closed your eyes The y are there. No, it's the shoes, not your usual sandals
on thre e decades, our nupt ial prize. Where the letters lie unopened by a disconnected phone, or crocodile skin, or black Oxford loa fers.
Onco logists cou ld do more The y are there.
tha n shake their heads; Where your footste ps echo strange ly on each moonlit cobb leston e, Brothel creep ers . Blue bro the l creep ers.
and so a journey onc e begun Wh ere a shadow strea ms behind you but the shadow 's not your own , I nearl y sang him the Elvis, ex ce pt he looked
so fli ppantly red uced to one You ma y think the wo rld's yo ur oys ter but it' s bon e, bon e, bone: as if he ' d heard it before , had a homil y ready.
man gazing at a poli shed 1100r, They are there, they are there, they are there. I haven' t see n a pair in public since 1978 ,
the fatef ul bed ' s the old Ted s and Rockers are dyin g of f;
They can parse a Latin sentence; they ' re as learn ed as Plot inus, Rock 'n ' Roll ' s not dead , j ust in a coma.
occupant as still as stone. The y are there.
I held your hand. Th e ancient bon e They ' re as sharp as Ockham' s razor, they're as subtle as Aq uinas, Mind you, Litt le Richard found the Lord,
benea th the llesh had been there since The y are there. so did Al Green , & Elvis sang Go spel.
the dawn of time : They delin e us and refine us with their beta -q uery-minu s, If he says anything sensi ble about comfort
you were an imme mo rial fact The y're the wa ll-const ructing Emp eror s of undi sco vered Ch inas, or spide rs, or he ca n 't quote from the Goo d Book ,
whic h none cou ld cancel. Our staunch pact The y coniine us, then ma lign us, in the end they undermine us, he 'll need a miracle or a sign from Go d.
cou ld not be brok en . None cou ld rinse They are there, they are there, they are there. Tim e for my Nanc y Sinatra impress ion.
away the rhyme
They assume it as an impo st or they take it as a toll,
and reason of that Elie beach The y are there.
and everything within our reac h: The con tractor s gra nt them all that they incontinentl y stole K ) The Side Line
the home, the kids, the rich years spent, The y are there.
our maiden kiss, They will shrive l your ambition with their qu alit y control, The pile of spe nt pistach io she lls his linge rs
and a blown hat I de ftly caught. They will de sicc ate your passion , then eviscerate your soul, burro wed throu gh in sea rch of salty bu llet s,
Tho se numb ers don 't add up to nau ght. Wri ng your life out like a sponge and stuff your body down a hole, that urgent click of carapa ce upon carapa ce ,
and ye t I sense it was n't meant They are there, they are there, they are there.
to end like this. brou ght to mind the sound of Scrab ble ch ips
In the desert of your dreaming they are humped behind the dunes, in their white cott on bag, linge rtips
They are there. se arching eac h face for the ind ent of a letter:
On the undisco vered planet with its seve n circling moon s,
G) Inc ident They are there. the high numbers, the smoot h blank s.
They are tickin g all the boxes, mak ing sure yo u ea t your prun es, Som e pla yers insist on laying all the pieces
Like any oth er day, the ea rly sun slips They are sending secre t messages by heliu m balloon s, face do wn , takin g the ir pick on the basis of fate.
slantw ise thro ugh the cri ss-cross railway bridge. They are humming Bach cantatas , they are playing looney tunes,
The y are there, they are there, they are there. Ju st staring at the back of his head as he ' s getting them
The long-haired , hare-lipp ed port er co unts down in at the bar should tell you the nature of the man .
the creo soted tieba rs to Worc ester and to London; They are there, they are ther e like a whis per on the air, Som etim es it does, sometimes it doesn ' t.
The y are there.
the grav id schoolgirl in the bunched -up skir t They are slippery and soa py with our hope and our despair, His side line - so casually thro wn into our talk
loll s und er anniversary llags and lights a cigarette. The y are there. of what we do and whe re we ' re fro m: the spit-
So it' s idle if we bridle or pretend we ne ver ca re, sealed pledges, the celebrato ry all-night sessi ons.
Behind the private park ing sign a dog bark s If the questions are superll uous and the mark ing isn ' t fair,
in bursts of thre e and a plane starts For we know they ' re going to ge t us, we j ust don't kno w when This along with the curved leather ar mcha ir,
or whe re, the gold jamm ed on to his li nge rs, gave him
up fro m nowhere out of a pale blue sky, The y are there, they are there, they are there. the air of a don . T hat' s Don - as in Corl eon e.
di stant and staccato. It is still so ea rly
,,
,,
ant s skim fast as wa ter boa tme n along
cracks in the sun-c razed asphalt; the plat form Voting slip - TLS/Foyles Poetry Competition 2007 ,,
,,
C h oice of po em s in order of preference: Pl eas e r eturn thi s slip by JUNE 28 to :
thrums the onr ush of the Paddington ex press
whole minutes be fore it passes and before the news
First choic e:
Second choic e: .
. TLS Poetry Competition, Cu stom er Liaison, 1,,
I Virginia Street , London E98 I RL ,,
com es in, wire less and incr edib le. At ten the porter
Pl ea se fill in d etails: A lternati vely, vote online by visiting www.the-tls.co.uk :
hauls dow n the buntin g. The cluster ed passengers mutt er
Name (please print ): . :
J nFI
_
Address: Onlv one vote per person
and go hom e, past the do g barkin g on and on in threes.
It is very still. Smoke-dri ft scents the wind beh ind the trees.
~~~~~~e~~.~.~.~.~.~~~.~.~.~.~.~.~~~~.~.~~.~.~. ~ ~~~._ .~.~.~._.~~~~.~.~ ______________________ _~:~l!!~::~~=!~:~:~~: ~
__

- 13 - TLS J UNE 8 200 7

---I COMMENTARY
Institutes that created them and by the user com-

Senate House rules munit ies that ran the Institutes. The Director s of
the Institutes togeth er chose their Dean from
their own number and shared resources among
themselves. Thi s system has effectively pre-
served their autonom y and individualit y.
The University of London in search of a new role Together with their libraries they have been,
and still are, an important national and inter-
hose who look for book bargains in 1. A . NORTH condi tion defies simple analysis and is quite national asset, located in the University of Lon-

T the middle of London will have

noticed in recent months that the
University of London has been selling
off its book s. Not, of cour se, all its book s, but
100,000-odd volumes from a jo int University
ously with the launchin g of a research library in
the Humanit ies in Senate House. The two devel-
opment s typi fy both the University's shortage
of funding on the one hand and its search for a
incomprehensible to outsiders. You might say
that there are today two separate Univers ities of
London: there is the " broad University" and the
"residual University". The first is a flexible
grouping together of six powerful institutions,
don, but with activities stretching far beyond it.
To consider the history of the Warburg
Institute in particular: its collection s were
started in Hambur g as the personal library of
Aby Warbur g, of the family of bankers, whose
Library store at Egham . This was a reserve col- role on the other. Throu ghout its 170 years, the which could all be universities on their own research centred on the Art of the Renai ssance
lection that held some 300,000 volumes weeded University of London has almost always been (UCL, Imperial , LSE, Kings, Queen Mary and in its intellectu al and soci al conte xt. In 1nl ,
out over many years from the collections of the the scene of conflict and irresolution. Th is has Royal Holloway - the first three of which are this library was established as a research
Colleges and of the Senate House Librar y itself: not in the past prevented its having a remark- consistently ranked among the top twenty-five institute in the cultural and intellectual tradi-
that is, they were no longer needed for regular able record of achievement and an extraordi- Universities in the world) ; then, also part of the tions derived from Classical and pre-Classical
use, but were to be kept available (so it was nary influence on the whole developm ent of broad University are several other very impor- Antiquity. In 1933, it had to be moved to
promi sed) for research purposes when needed higher education both in this country and tant institution s, also largely runnin g their own London , in order to escape the Nazi regime, and
by staff, students, or other users of the libraries. abroad. But its relation ship with its own affairs, such as Birkbeck Colle ge, the School of it has been part of the University of London
Many of these books are old textbook s that will constituent members has never been resolved or Oriental and Afr ican Studies, the Courtauld ever since. It houses unique and world-famous
not be needed again, but others are research stable for very long, and all attempted solutions Institute , and Gold smiths. collection s. No case has been put forward to
tools, valuable in both monetary and research (even after Royal Commi ssions) have broken The residual University is based in the ju stify taking away its control of its own
terms. The resource s apparentl y were not avail- down sooner or later. The question today is whe- Senate House, has its own Vice Chancellor and library, its own staff and its own finances - a
able to determ ine which book s should be sold ther the existing compromi se is not doin g seri- an elaborate decision-mak ing structure, but, in development which is now threatened.
and which should be treasured, so a simple solu- ous harm to an important area of the intellectual the best tradition s of Gilbert and Sull ivan, no For, since 2004 , the residual Univers ity has
tion was devised - sell them off cheap . Some of life of the countr y: at stake is the future of a set undergraduates and not many postgraduates. been absolutely determined on a major reform
the treasures have now been bought back by of institutes in the Humani ties, which have for What it does have is a portfolio of Central Lon- of the SAS, which has had the consequenc e,
divi sions of the very Library to which they many years provided crucial coordin ating don propertie s and a base in the Senate House, intended or not, of underminin g the autonomy
belonged in the first place. services for scholarship, both nationall y and which is architecturally spectacular, looks good of all the member Institutes. The starting point
It may seem parado xical, but this bargain- internationally. when used for movies, but is very expensive to was the announcement in 2003 that the Council
hunters' bonanza has been happening simultane- One problem is that the University's present maintain . It also has two very important respon- of the University had decid ed to create a new
sibilities, left over from past ambitions: first, a superlibrary, merging its existing holdin gs, and
~ library (the Senate House Library) providing to appoint a senior librarian to whom the Insti-
III
vital support to the Colle ges at undergraduate tutes' librarian s would all repor t. This was the
The Univer~ity of Michigan Press I~I level and also some important research coll ec- beginnin g of a process of centrali zation of con-
IlI ~ tions; and, secondly, a number of Research Insti-
tutes, grouped under the title School of
trol over all the operation s of the Institutes
which has continu ed ever since. At every stage,
THE ILIAD 100 EDIBLE MUSHROOMS Advanced Stud y (or SAS), which serve, not ju st the propon ents of the plan have issued reassur-
Homer With tested recipes and full calor
the University in either sense, but the commu - ing statements about their intention s, perhap s to
Translated by R odney Merrill M ichael Kuo
nity of scholars in their various fields, at home keep resistance muted or confu sed; but they
Nov2007464 pages, 1 map Jun2007344pages, and abroad. Apart from these, the residual have inexorabl y pursued their cour se.
978·0·472·11617·1 269colour photographs
Hardback£19.95 978-0-472-03 126-9
Univers ity still provides some services to the In one case so far, this policy of centraliza-
Paperback £14.50 Colle ges, though none that would on its own tion has led to open confrontation. The Director
ju stify the res idual Unive rsity 's exis tence. of the Institute of Classical Studies, believing
Tellswhere andwhen to Notionally, of cour se, both broad and residual that the job he had been appoint ed to do no
Anewtranslationof find ediblemushrooms,
Homer's classic. are still a single entity, but their union is under longer existed, since control over the Institute' s
with reci pesfor each.
great strain; Imperial College has announced its budget and its library had been taken over by
THE FUTURE OF New in Paperback decision to leave the University, and some at central officers, resigned . As it happen s, in the
CLASS IN HISTORY HOW SONDHEIM FOUND least of the other Colle ges are known to be case of this particular library, many of the
Wh at 's Left of the Soc ial? HIS SOUND books are not the University's property, but
considering their options and taking the powers
Ge'!ffEley & SteveSwayne
necessary to be fully autonomous. belong to the member s of the learned societies
Kei'hNield May 2007336pages, In this strange situation, there is a danger that in the field (the Societies of Hellen ic and
musical scores andtables
Mar 2007 280pages the admini strators of the residual University, Roman studies), whose members believe that
978-0-472-03229-7
978-0-472-06964-4 Paperback £10.95
Paperback £14.50 lacking all the restraints of having a "real univer- their power to administer and de velop their own
978·0·472·09964·1
An in-depth look
sity" to run, may turn inwards on their own com- collection s is being stolen from them, in viola-
Hardback £37.50
atthe musical and ponent parts, restructur ing so as to create a tion of established agreements . This dispute
Analyses the effect ofthe dramaticinfluences
conflictthat followed the 'turn bur eaucratic rationale for their ow n surv ival. threatens to lead to the splitting of an important
in Sondheim's music.
~~~:JIiIilio1l!!i.:J toculture' in historica l work. Thi s seems to be exactly what has been happen- collection , if the two Societies were simply to
N.w in P.psrb.ck ing in the Senate House. remo ve their books - an intellectual disaster by
A CROOKED LINE CATEGORY 5 Mean while, the Institute s of the SAS have no any standards. But the discontent in this Insti-
From Cultural History to the History of Society The Story of Camille, Lessons Unlearned common pattern and have ne ver need ed one: tute is j ust the tip of an iceber g. The merging of
from America's Most Violent Hurricane
,~.". , Ge'!ffEley they have grown up at different times, for differ - the collecti ons, the dismemberment and reinte-
Ernest Zebrowski &
tI Crook00 Lin 2005320 pages Judith A , Howard ent purposes, to serve their communi ties of gration of the Institutes, the creation of a mana-
978-0-472-06904-0 users; they range from some that have professo- gerial group to run the new library and the
Paperback£12.95 May2007304pages, 5 maps,
978·0·472·09904·7 , 0 figures,24photosections rial staff and run large research projects to reformed School , all these are highly controver-
Hardback £34.50 978·0·472·03240·2 others that consist of no more than a Director sial steps that could destroy the capacity of the
Paperback £12.95
and a programm e of events; some, far from all, Institutes to carry out their very important func-
Tracks theevolution of
historical understanding. The epic story of the real admit MA and PhD students. They contain tion s.
victims ofa perfectstorm.
certa in vitally important libraries in subjects What is the justification for the policy? The
such as History, Law, Germanic Studies, propon ents do indeed claim to have a vision.
~
Eurospon Iuniversity presses
'" Classics and the Classical Tradition, History of They also have problems they wish to see
I~I Tel: +44 (0)1767 604972 Fax: + 44 (0)1767 601640
Email: eurospan@turpin-distribution.com
Art and of Religion , not least in the world- solved. The vision is of a great research library

III www.eurospangroup.com/bookstore
famous Warbur g Institute. In the past, these
libraries have been maintained and run by the
in the Senate House. The new librar y, which
already exists at least on paper, is called the

TLS J UNE 8 2007 - 14-

 COMMENTARY

University of London Researc h Library Ser-

vices (ULRLS) and consists of the old Senate
abroad. Th is ought to be a model for the
developm ent of Institutes in more subjects in
World Views
House Library and the libraries of those of the future decades. It is ironic that Oxford Univer-
Institutes of the School of Advanced Study that sity should be opening a Classics Faculty
have hitherto had their own co llections. The Centre precisely on the model that London
problems are mostly financial: the Senate simultaneously seems to be closing down. What
The Dream of the Poem
THE DREAM OF THE POEM
Hebrew Poerry from Muslim and
House Library has long had serious shortfalls in the resid ual University seems in effect to be Iluu.... PoIT'" .IOOM PoI U. LIIo' /I,"D
CH "UTI /lWS"" I'" ~l~tl Chrisrian Spain, 950-1492
its budget and a buildin g with high maintenance doing is inventing a bureaucrat ic construct,
costs. Also, some of the Institutes are housed with centralized control over budgets and Translated, edited, and
outside the Senate House. If the Senate House space, that will undermin e, not strengthen, introduced by Peter Cole
can be adap ted to house most of the Institutes research in the Humanities. There seems no
and their libraries, then it is hoped that the finan- reason (so oppon ents of the plan believe) why "Virtually stagnant since late Biblical times, Hebrew
poetry and the language itself would be transformed
cia l problems can be solved by the restructuring the Institutes should not keep their freedom,
by a succession of poets of genius and their imitators.
of budgets, the saving of space and the re-use of their diversity and their responsiveness to read- In Peter Ccle's rich new anthology, the extent of their
some parts of the building to generate new ers and students in their subjects, nationwide astonishing achievement is fully revealed for the first
income. and worldwide, while collabo rating fully across time in English. "
The fact is, however, that it will not be a all the Senate House co llections. -Eric Ormsby, New YOrk TimesBook Review
great new resea rch library at all: it will be a The whole project raises serio us issues for LockerrLibrary of PoetryIn Translation
strange mixture, with a few areas of the highest the review of SAS funding that is currently PETER COLE Richard Howard,serieseditor
exce llence, and many gaps, where the Institutes being undertaken by the Higher Education Paper $19.95 £11.95 978-0-691-12195-6
in question do not possess libraries or where Funding Council. Do the Colleges of the broad Cloth $50.00 £29.95 978-0-691-12 194-9

there has never been any Institute at all. There University in fact want to see research in these
are of course advantages in co llaboration: for areas concentrated in the Senate House? But the The Most Arrogant Man
instance, it is useful to be able, as is now possi- interests of the University of London are only
ble, to search a single library catalogue , but this one of the issues that need to be taken seriously in France
had been agreed long before the creation of the here. Gustave Courbet and the
ULRLS and in no sense depend s on its exis t- The Institutes of the SAS taken together Nineteenth-Century Media Culture
ence. No doub t, also, some economies in buy- make an essential contribution to the intellec- Petra ten-Doesschate Chu
ing policy can be worked out, though, in the tual life of this co untry, and also foster and
future ju st as in the past, this will best be done maintain international links by providing a con- "In this insightful book, Chu (who edited and
by gro ups of academics and specialist librarians text in which high-quality research work has translated Gusta ve Courbet's letters) examines how
the painter (18 19- 1877) used the ptess to market his
working together. But the real issue at stake, the been car ried on by scholars from many parts of
work. ... Chu's brilliant stud y of Courbet's paintings
case for the merger in intellectual and resea rch the world. It is a model that has immense value,
and marketing strategies sheds much light on his work
terms, has never been publicly debated: is there !irst developed in London in the 1920s by the and the artistic milieu of the 19th centu ry."
really a national need for creating a new Human- Institute of Historical Research, that should be -PublishersW<ekly
ities research library when we already have the extended to other subject-areas, not dim inished 248 pages. 49 color plates. 88 halfton es. 8 x 11.
British Library virtually round the corner? where it has already grown up. It is, of Cloth $45 .00 £26.95 978-0-691-12679-1
It is clear what will be lost: the best of the course, of great import ance also that the Senate
Institutes have provided a coherent space House Library should thrive and develop as a
within which the library, teach ing rooms, work- resource for all London ' s Universities; but it
ing spaces and commo n room s are all adminis- will be a tragedy if saving the Senate House What They Think of Us
tered by staff who specia lize in the area of work Library causes, as now seems all too likely, International Perceptions of the United States
and identify with the purposes of researchers irreparable damage to such a valuable asset as since 9/11
from London , the rest of the country and the Institutes.
Edited by David Farber
In this book, a remarkable group of writers from
Party the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and Latin America
describes the world's profoundly ambivalent attitudes
toward the United States-before and since 9/11.
The firewor k went off in the box
causing screams and laughter - "Each [essay] is thoughtful, and consciously and
and a knocked-over bottle of wine, unconsciously revealing"
-Greg Sherldan, TheAustralian
then someone put on The Doors
Cloth $24.95 £14.95 978-0-691-13025-5
up so loud the panes vibrated
while a tipsy blonde sang along.

That was when the cat freaked out -

Wallace had slipped her acid
stirred into chopped-up rabbit. A New York Times Editors' Choice

She spun round like a compass needle One of Amazon.coms BestNonfiction Books of 200S
at the Pole, then dropp ed dead. Winner of the 2005 Aword for Exceiience in
The identica l Finnish twins shrieked. The ET H ICS Professional/Scholarly Publishing in Philosophy,
Association of American Publishers

No one was guarding the telephone, ofIDENTITY The Ethics of Identity

so when the wah-wahs sounded,
and a head out the window reported
KwameAnthony Appiah
the cops were here, I assumed "Suave and discerning .... [T] he superb rhetorical
the Ilushing of the West Cork grass, performance of th is book offers the most persuasive
while Wallace hid the corpse. evidence for his case.... To read The Ethics of
Identi ty is to enter into the world it describes; it is
also to imagine what it might be like to live in so
What a waste, I thought, as the two
urbane and expansive a place."
cops - a man and a woman - made
-Jonathan Freedman , New YOrk Times Book Review
the most perfunctory search, he
New in pap erback $19.95 £11.95 978-0-69 1-13028-6
laughing, saying the grass smelt good,
she tight-lipped but elsewhere .
Wallace, I think, showed them out.

MATTHEW SW E E NEY
IT2> PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

- 15 - TLS J UNE 8 2007

 COMMENTA RY

f you haven ' t had much luck placin g your Newton, Beetho ven, Pushkin , Volt aire, Char - Israeli compan ies or collabor ate on research

I short stories in magazines recently, we

recomm end readin g an article in the Man-
chester-based literary magazine Transmission.
lotte Bront e and Ernest Hemingway. A letter
of 1948 from T. S. Elio t to Cli ve Bell come s
with a loisir de la po ste addressed to the post-
contracts with Israeli academics" .
There is no need to force a glib parallel
between the prohibitions; only imagine the out-
"Wri ter's Block" by the novelist Nicholas man on the enve lope. The lines were publi shed rage of the British academ ics if their gove rn-
Royle sets out some rules to help you get your in a 1948 sympos ium devoted to Eliot , but are ment, rather than their union , had instruct ed
work publi shed in the future. "Rule No I: you little enough kno wn to meri t reproduction them not to work with Israeli journ als or collab-
can 't win. The sooner you realize this the bet- here. Lewes, where Bell lived (pronounced orate on research with Israeli colleagues.
ter." Rule No 2: "resea rch your market" ; to put "Loo-i ss", overseas readers please note), is a
it anoth er way, "do not send your fictionali zed their work . The use of the word is not to my trick y word to rhyme but Eliot succeeded: *
Our new ly formed association , the Defenders
diary of a crack-whore to the Read er 's personal taste. 'Outlet' see ms a more accept- o stalwart Sussex postman, who is of One, ded icated to preser ving the prono un
Digest" . Rule No 3: "don 't put 'Fir st British able alternative, one that allows for the more Deli vering the post from Lewes, "one" against attacks by Muri el Spark and
Serial Rights Offered ' on the cover sheet. It' s a plausible version of events in which your story Cycle apace to Charleston Firle others, has drawn widespread support. The
dead giveaway and should in all cases lead to appears but you do not get paid." While knitting at your plain and purl request was for sentences in which "no other
immediate rejection ". Nos 4, 5, 6 and 7: don 't The Summ er issue o f Transmission is ava il- Deliver there to good Clive Bell pronoun cou ld do the job as well". Anthea
send your work to Granta. Mr Royle di fferenti- able for £4 from 8 Sydda l Clo se, Bramhall , (You know the man, you know him well Ingham of Leamin gton Spa draws attention
ates the respective rules thus: No 4, "You' ll be Stockport. It carries nine short stories by fortu- He plays the virginals and spinet) to several instances in Nancy Mitfor d' s novel
lucky to get much serious con sideration from nate writers, and a note: "No payment can be This note - there's almos t nothing in it. Love in a Cold Climate. The first - Cedric
Gran ta", No 5, "You 'r e not likely to get much offered for any submission". Hampton' s declaration, "In Paris I have an apart-
con siderat ion from Granta", No 6, "You' re *
Iranian academics have been warned to abstain ment of all beauty, one' s idea of Heaven" -
still not likely to get much serious con sidera- *
A grea t literar y discovery wouldn' t be great if from communicatin g with Western colleag ues, seems to us not to pass the test. The first-person
tion from Gran ta", No 7, "You' re unlikely to it didn 't turn up in a cob webb ed attic or a trunk on pain of being sacked, or accused of spying, possessive would be as effective, and would
get much etc etc etc". unop ened for cen turies. It was scarcely a sur- or worse. According to a report in the Guard- sound less " pompous" (Spark' s objection).
Having got that off his chest, Royle tries prise, then, to learn from the Dail y Telegraph ian (Ma y 3 1), an Iranian government official Ms Ingham' s second example of Cedri c' s
looking on the bright side: the British Council - (J une 4) that "one of the greatest co llection s of claimed that "our lecturers are exposed to intel- speech - "What one doe s so love about love, is
sponsored annual antholo gy Ne w Writin g is a letters ever amassed" - the collection of the ligence threat s. We are worried about aca- the time before they find out what One is like"
possible outlet for your work. Then again, "it late Au strian industriali st Albin Schram, demic conferences which foreigners attend [to] - hits the mark . Here, the first-person singular
is publi shed by Granta Book s" . Submi ssions which goes on sale at Christi es, London , on establi sh relation s with Iranian academic s". would damp en the comic touch , while " what
are welcome, "but an unspeci fied proportion Jul y 3 - "has been found in a laund ry room ". You doubtle ss find it hard to imagine any you are like" would risk offending Cedric' s
of cont ribut ions are commi ssioned from estab- As if that didn't give the story a sufficient thinking person approv ing of attempts to for- interlocutor.
lished writers", the likes of whom are favoured fairy-ta le element, we were introduced to Miss bid free intellectual exchange. The same news- Jo hn North pro vides an example from Jane
by . . . (fill in the blank). Morris of Chri stie' s who, on being led to the paper, on the same day, carried a report about Austen : "E verybody is always supposi ng that I
Mr Royle' s intention is to promo te the cabin et in the laundry room , "opened it and British academics, as repre sented by the Uni- am not a good walker; and yet they would
market for short stories. The word " market" could not believe her eyes" . As she flicked versity and Co llege Union, who have voted to not have been pleased, if we had refused to
suggests transaction, which sugges ts money, throu gh the contents, "Miss Morri s' s eyes recomm end a boycott of all Israeli academic jo in them . When people come in this manner
which hold s out the promi se of nouri shment grew wider ". institution s, in protest at the occ upation of on purpo se to ask us, how can one say no?"
and continuing life for the budd ing short story The Schram collection would widen any- Palestinian land. Accordin g to the paper ' s (Persuasion) . As Mr North says, " ' You' or
writer. Mr Royle isn't that da ft. "A lot of one' s eyes. The 1,000 items includ e letters education correspondent, this cou ld involve 'we ' or T would ruin this sentence".
would-be writers do talk about 'markets' for written by John Donne, Dan iel Defoe, Isaac "refusing to work with journals publi shed by Le.

t is hard to under stand how Segolenc for duplicity? A strange survivor is "un-

I Royal' s harm less invention of "br avitude"

(for "bravoure") , uttered while out walking
the Great Wa ll of China, cou ld have lost her
off Crimewatch , while a SINKSCUM is a
F REE LA NCE

single, independent no-kid s self-centred male.

"tortured", "enormity" for "hugeness", "simplis-
tic" for "simple" . "Well" has taken the place of
beknown st" ; its popu larit y suggests its bits and
pieces are adding something vital to
"unknown", but what?
votes in the recent presidential election : as The word "chav" sounds like an acron ym for " very" , and "good" the place of "well" , as in I was brought up to dislike most things; enthu-
neologisms go it isn 't bad. But then the French "co uncil house and vio lent", but it may derive ''I' m good, thank s", as if referring to something siasm, as I remember it , was reserved for round -
are more defensive about their language than from the gypsy "chav i", a child. ("Cheval" more than mere health, moral hea lth perhaps. I ing things up and driving them over a cliff as
we are, perhaps becau se it is shrinking. English mean s lad in Spanish.) Chavisms include always say, "Good at what?" , which annoys amu singly as possible. Today it is vaguely incor-
isn't, of course. Five new words arrive e very " bashin", "bangin ", " kickin", "blatant" and even me. I wouldn 't want to canute the sea of rect to dislike things, as if you might dislike cer-
day. I' ve ju st heard it announced on the News " buff' (nake d, but also well-ton ed). "Los ing it words, but it' s hard not to when something is tain peop le too. The height of persona l distaste
that the new edition of the Coliins Dictionar y big time" is more likely to be " big style" nowa - being lost. I note that "a curate' s egg" is now is voiced in phra ses like " I'm not overly fond
include s "season creep" and "carbon footprint" . days. I look to my beggar friend Mark outside widely used to mean "a mixed blessing" , of ' and " I' m not a massive fan", which go out
The lava no w allow s us the luxury of feeling Tesco for the current mode of addre ss. He used although one without any blessings presuma- of their way to respect the disliked thing. "I
either smug or irritated according to our mood. to ca ll me "G uv", then it was "Bruv", now he bly. "Iconic" and "s tate of the art" mean any- hear what you' re saying" is the closest to dis-
Sometimes the air seems to be full of vivid new ca lls me "Son" as I hand over my £1. The law thing slightly good and the usefu l "edgy" is sent. Maximum aggressi on is expressed with
slang - "Croydon facelift" for that pulled-b ack of dimin ishing return s. now short for the yuppy "cuttin g edge". Inten- "And your point is?" or "What?", spoken into a
hairstyle, "pram-faced" for the sulky express ion The meaning of " partner", "lover" and " boy- tional misuses include "d isappointed" for silence, as it is in a new translation of Gork y' s
of young mothers, "gone bitch cake s" for friend" are all up in the air, as far as I can see. "outraged", " unhelpful" for "damag ing" and Phili stin es at the National , along with "great",
mad. At other s it seems to be losing its grip One can only guess the nuances. And whereas "so-called", as in "the so-called British Empire ". "s ure" , "s tuff', "w eird" , "What' s with the . . ."
with comm ercia l doub le-talk and politica lly "He' s seeing a woman" is quite a discreet expres- I like to think that Mike Tyson ' s "I might j ust and "She' s a great-looking bird , it has to be
correct euph emi sms: "a lcohol issues", "walking sion, "He ' s seeing three women" isn't. In a fade into Bolivian" was actua lly a jok e. said" , all in spite of the 1920s vacuum cleaner
skills", " his head' s in a diflicult place". The restaurant a man might "go for" the vegetarian The Sopranos' "We ' re in a fucking stag- being pushed about the stage .
unforgivable " problem" problem was solved option. In the pub, once he has "got them in", he mire" join s a line of portmanteau words fun - Tracey, the "c rusty" or "hippy raver" in the
long ago with "issue" , but I haven't notic ed might "come up with" an idea, althoug h anyone ning from "smo g" and "s lithy" throug h "alco- new Big Broth er realit y television show, was
"No issue" supplanting the all-purpo se "No who has been creative ly inspired by a hangover holida y" to "chillax" (relax and chill) , "copy- being intervi ewed about her chance s of win-
problem". There are signs that even the word will disagree that "a Mond ay mornin g idea" is righteou s" , "trysexual" and "spindocracy". ning . "That' d be proper havin' it, proper
"issue" is becoming culpable, with "situation" unlikely to be any good . "Irregardless" seems to have "irrespective" hid- buzzin ' '' , she said, without pausing for thoug ht.
taking over , as in "He had a situation with drugs Mal apropi sms were around long befor e den inside it. A "ha sbian " or " wasbian" is a Phrases like "butt-hotties" , " toe-cleavage",
which became a situation with stealing". And if Sherid an ' s rather force d jok es in The Rivals . former lesbian now in a hetero sexua l situation. "arse-horns" (rear tattoo s) and " Bingo wings"
the verb to steal is too much for you there is Shake speare started it with lines like "Compari- Needle ss verbal accumulations include "station (nappy upper arms ) might make you want to
always the coy "TWOC" for " taking without sons are odorou s" in Mu ch Ado About Nothin g. stop" (either would do) and the use of " today" "hurl" (chuck, vomit) , but as soon as the
con sent" (" He twoc'd it"). You have to smile at The television Mafia series The Sopranos con- on the end s of sentences, as in "Will there be thought come s into your head you' ll hear a tired
"Noble cause corrupt ion" for the fabrication of tinue s the tradition with suitably Freudi an self- anything else for you today?", which natters voice asking "Do you want a bag with that?"
ev idence in a worthwhile cau se. betra yals such as "Vito' s passing and all that with its suggestion that you are a regul ar Enjoy.
An upda te of the old "N ice legs, shame about that entr ails" and "I was prostate with grie f '. In cu stomer. Equally, the contin ual use of your
the face" is BOBFOC, body off Baywatch face modern parlanc e, " tortuous" is often used for Chri stian name in conversation is surely a "tell" H U G O WILLIAMS

T LS JU N E 8 2007 - 16-
 uni ver se here wh er e the ability to read the origi-
nal lan gu age in qu estion see ms to be regard ed
The importance of camouflage as a mere irrel evance - or ev en a di sad vantage.
Of a vid, Wilmer suggests that a " lim itatio n
Sir, - Aft er gi ving a succi nct d efinition o f suggests , but an esse nt ial adjunct of the strate- submari ne, was kill ed after it had been torp e- in Hu ghe s' s art and outlook" helped him to
camouflage in her revi ew of the cur rent exhibi- gic plan fo r the Battle o f El Alamein. Th e con- doed by a U- boa t in the Atlantic. imi ta te the Metam orpho ses, "e lid ing the prin -
tion at the Imperial War Mu seum and the structi o n o f a dummy railh ead and the siting o f Camoullage continu es to be an ong o ing cipl e o f order that uni fies the poem and its
accompan yin g book by Tim New ar k (Arts, dummy ta nks and g uns co nfuse d the ene my as requirement in warfare, but both the ex hibitio n vision" . It mi ght be ar gu ed th at "eliding" her e
Jun e I) co m pa ring them with the fa sh ion fo r to whe re the o ffens ive wo uld be launched. and Tim Newark, in hi s splend id ly illu strat ed mean s some thing more lik e " igno ring " or e ven
camouflage design s, Cl are Grifliths tends to The concealme nt o f shi ps at sea was far more book, co nce ntrate on un iform s w hile ne gl ect ing "v anda lizi ng" - be that as it ma y, we are left
underestim ate the importanc e o f camoullage in d ifficult than hid ing tar get s on land . The da zzle the countermeasure s against sys te ms of detect- wonde ri ng if the all eged lim itation is a vice or a
both wor ld wa rs and a fter. paint design s of the Fi rst World W ar mad e ion such as radar, in frar ed and so und alread y virtue in Hu gh es as a " translator" of a vid .
Perhaps this is not surprisi ng afte r viewi ng ships more conspicuous, and had to be replaced being introduced in the latt er stages o f the Th ere are vers io ns in thi s book fro m fo ur teen
the bel at ed but rather inconclusive ex hibition by shades o f w hite and grey accor d ing to the Second World W ar. lan gua ges. It wo uld be int er estin g to kno w ho w
at the IWM wi th its limi ted di spl ay of artefacts . theatre of war. Sci enti sts began to repl ace art- man y o f them Hu gh es read directl y. Th e wor d
Camoullage was by no mean s an "abs urd ity" ists in devi sin g de sign s. On e o f them , A . E. GUY HARTCUP "t ran sla tion s" in the titl e is a red herrin g. Wh y
in the We stern De sert in 1942 , as Gri ffith s Schuill, while making ob ser vat ion s from a 16 Temple Sheen, East Sheen, London SW 14. no t call these text s " poe ms in spired by other
poem s" ? Th en we could tak e them or lea ve
--------------------~-------------------- them and eve n ad mire them witho ut imag ini ng

Communist collapse wo ma n on her back who mu st rel y pur el y on

the forc e o f mu scular contract ion. Yet gi ving
Dustwrapped we have ga ine d access, mysteriously or oth er -
wise , to the wo rlds o f the ori g inal authors.
Sir, - Chri s Patten rightl y not es, in his review of birth in thi s po sture is the chief raison d ' etre Si r, - Jam es Ferg usso n as ks : "W he n is a lirst
Eli zab eth Rob erts' s histor y of Montenegro (Jun e for man y o f the dub iou s pro cedures - Ca esa r- edition not a fir st ed ition?" (Jun e I). He mi gh t ROBIN FULTON
I), that the area o f the forme rly Communist ea n sectio ns, episioto mies, indu ction - that also have asked : whe n is a du stwra pper not the Mjughaug terrasse 8, N 4048 Hafrsfjord,
world that suffe red the greatest vio lence in the Pridmore-Brown ag rees with Wagn er are rif e du stwrapp er ? In R. A . Gekoski' s cur rent cat a- Norway.
break -up of Communism was the fornner Yugo- with unnecessary and unpl easan t complications. logu e, w hich Fer gu sson go es on to describe, are
Is there any goo d reason why a woma n sho uld ------~,------
slav ia, the part "that had mo st di stanc ed itse lf two items (not mentioned by Fergu sson) w hich
politically fro m M osco w" . But it was not, as he give birth lyin g on her back ? Non e wha tsoever,
unl ess on e beli eves tha t a wo man should have
cause me un ease . A copy o f Sols tice and Other Foucault and madness
says, the onl y part to do so . He mi gh t have men - Poem s (19 35 ) by Rob inson Je ffer s, inscribed by
tioned Roman ia, which und er its meg alomania- sex lyin g on her back. T he very term " mission- the author to Edga r Lee M asters, is described as Sir , - In hi s repl y to critical int er ventions,
cal nationalist lead er N ico lae Ceau sescu also, in ary po sition" - a long with the rallyin g cry o f "a good cop y, spine fade d, in a ve ry good du st- Andrew Scull (Le tters, Ap ril 20) quotes in
the I960 s, brok e wi th Mo sco w - and, con se- 1970 s femi nis ts, "Off Our Back s!" - should wra ppe r which has been supplie d". And a copy French and En gli sh Mi ch el Fo uca ult on the
qu entl y, wa s the onl y oth er part of the Commu- indicate that so me times a culturally med iated of D. H. La wr enc e' s The Rainbow (1915 ), Land graf Philipp o f Hainau havin g set up on e
nist world to ex perie nce any real degree o f practice can go be yond the merel y faddi sh. signe d on the title pa ge and bearin g Lawrenc e' s of the fir st ho spi tal s for the mad in a Lu theran
vio lence in the di ssolution of its Communi st Surel y thi s is the burden o f W agn er' s ad vic e Phoenix bookplate (and so pu tati vel y hi s own country.
reg ime. Th ere was nothing, o f cour se, like the for pregn ant women to " tru st their bodies" : co py), is offered " in a du stwrapper su pplied Scull , quite naturally, tak es the fact as give n.
bloodshed that convulsed Yu goslavia in the w hen wo men admit that it is po ssibl e to ha ve fro m another co py" (d ustw ra ppered co pies However, there was no Landg rafschaft of
1990s, but hundred s, perh ap s - the fig ures are sex ua l ple asure (perhaps ev en more sex ua l bein g appa rently ve ry rar e) . Ha inau in the em pire and, henc e, no Land gra f
still not preci sely kno wn - died in the stree t vio- pleasur e) wi tho ut bein g on the ir back s, the y Th is swa pping abo ut of du stwr app er s, I fee l, Philipp of Hainau . M ost probably it is Land gra f
lence of Timisoara and Buchare st in 1989. It was might al so have the conlidence to giv e birth erodes the authe ntici ty of historical obj ect s. Philipp o f Hesse w ho is bein g referred to , on e o f
ind eed a wide ly ob ser ved feature o f the revolu - in a way that scie nce, common sense, and W ould the Je ffer s book, for instance, have a the fir st Gernnan princ es to embrace Prot estant -
tion s o f 1989- 91 that a mo re or less peac eful tradi tion al mid wifer y wo uld all rec o m mend. faded spine if the wr apper had al wa ys been ism and conse que ntly to sec ularize monasteries,
tran sit ion occurred wh erever Soviet influ enc e present ? Ho w d o we kno w that Lawr ence didn 't usin g their incom e to fund new ed ucationa l and
was stro ng - inc luding, o f course, in the Soviet PETER MORRIS junk the (rather lurid) Rainbo w wra pper because soci al institution s. Thi s he did to the Ci sterci an
Union itse lf. Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania 19081. he hat ed it? At these pric es (£ 500 and £25 ,000 abbey of Haina (not Ha ina u), which was secular-
W e do not I think still appreciate sufficie ntly respect ivel y), one mi gh t ex pect a greater respec t ized in 1527 and then tran sfornned into a ho sp ital
------~------ for inli rm old men and the mentally ill.
the extr aordinary cha racter of the break -up of for the int egrit y of the goods o ffered.
"th e So viet empire" , and o f its inform al ex te n- 'Pelleas et Melisande' HANS-JORGEN WAGENER
sio n in Central and Eastern Europe. What GRAHAM CHAINEY
oth er em pire has ende d its life so peac eabl y? Sir , - Andrew Port er ' s re view o f the Ro yal 25 The Albemarle, Marine Parade, Brighton . Diedcrsdorfer Strasse 2, D-I 5306 Fricdcrsdorf,
Cer tainl y not the O ttoman, or the Ha bs burg, o r Op era Hou se production o f Debu ssy' s Pelleas Ge rmany.
et Melisande , ju stly characterize d as a "c he ap -----~,-----
the Frenc h, or the Briti sh . What was it about the
-----~,-----
So vie t empire that m ad e it so di fferent ? mod ish spectacle" (Art s, Jun e I) , brin gs to mind
Hughes the translator
w hat in its way is perhaps an e ven mo re bizarre
ex amp le of the same deplorable tenden cy. Thi s
The ideal economist
KRISHAN KUMAR Sir, - Cli ve Wilmer ' s review o f Ted Hu gh ess
Departm ent of Sociology, University of was provided by Rob ert Wil son , in whose pro - Selected Translations (Jun e I) is perc ep tive o n Sir , - In his ex ce lle nt rev iew of The Chance l-
Virgini a, Charlottesv ille, Virginia 22904. duc tion of the wor k at the Pari s Op er a in 1997 , man y po int s but prompts larger que stion s about lors' Tales, ed ited by H oward Da vies, Pet er
with Da wn U pshaw as a tou ch ing M eli sand e, ho w we use the wo rd "tra ns latio n". Of Pound Hennessy (A pril 6) ci tes Keyn es twic e , once on
-----'~,----- imag inative stag ing was mat ch ed to the mu sic the qualities o f an ide al econo mis t, and seco nd
he tell s us that " In wri ting Cathay - at a tim e
Off our backs w hile res pecting the indications of Debu ssy ' s
libretto . Three yea rs later, in what was d isingenu -
whe n, incidentally, he kne w no Chinese -
Pound di sco ver ed a mysterious pro cess .. .".
the we ll- known state ment o f practic al men
being the slaves of so me defun ct eco nom ist.
Sir, - Michele Pridmore-Brown ' s re view of ou sly bill ed as a "revival", this had mutated into People who tran slat e from lan gu ag es they can't Ho wever, given the chancellors ' views
sev era l recent American studies on child birth an exa mple o f Japanese Noh theatre (Wil son ' s read cert ainl y mo ve in mysterious ways, ye t (rec ounted by Hennessy) on the shortc om ings of
(Jun e I) goes too far in the d irection of sce pti- latest fad) in which the same ca st no w had to "i nci denta lly" is an odd word to use here : sure ly economic theo ry as a guide to their poli cy-
cis m. In particular, she cas ts d oub t on Ma rsden strike sty lize d attitudes and mo ve stiff-lim bed it wa s o f the esse nce of Pound' s text tha t at that mak ing, perh ap s the mo re appropriate qu otation
Wagn er ' s advi ce that pregnant wo me n sho uld acro ss the stag e lik e automa ta, seem ing ly time he was unable to convey an yth ing at all fro m Keynes wo uld be from his introduction to
"tru st their bodi es" since , in Pridmore-Brown' s una ware of ea ch other' s presence. Thi s was dou - fro m a lirs t-hand kno wledge of Chine se? the Cambridge Econ omic Handboo ks. Keyn es
words, " interpreting bodily sig ns is itself a cul - bly iro nic, since the composer him self, at a tim e Of a poem by Fer en c Juhasz, Wilmer tell s us wrote that "T he Th eo ry o f Economics do es not
turall y med iat ed, ind eed oft en faddis h, affa ir". w he n he despair ed o f eve r seei ng his op era per - that Hugh es ' s " thrilling" ver sion d rives oth er furnis h a bod y o f settled conclusion s immedi-
I wonder if Pridmore-Brown wo uld g o so far forme d in France, had rem arked jokingly that vers io ns "o ff the map", thou gh Hu ghe s de vised ately applicable to a polic y. It is a method rath er
as to sugges t tha t New to n's law o f gra vitat ion is perhaps it wo uld be more welcome in Japan - a it "w itho ut an y kno wl ed ge of the ori ginal lan - than a do ctrine , an apparatus o f the mind, a tech -
either culturally medi at ed or faddi sh ? Th e place whose thea trica l aest he tic he we ll knew to gua ge and no Hun gari an spea ke r to advise nique o f thinking, which help s its po ssessor to
tradi tional mid wifer y promoted by Wa gn er be the opposi te of hi s own, a point c lea rly not him " . O f a po em by Jrino s Pilinszk y, W ilm er dr aw correct conclusion s" . No wh ere d id Keyn es
ve ry often invol ves a birthing stoo l, or so me tak en by Wil son. tell s us tha t Hu gh es "s uccee ds in putting hi s li n- say that economics was a sci ence offerin g read y-
oth er mean s by which a pre gnant wo ma n may ger on the quali ty o f Pilinszk y' s visi o n". Ju st mad e fornnulae for cha nce llors to apply.
g ive birth in a po sture other than the supine . DENYSPOTTS how can suc h th ings be achi eved and e ven co m-
T he we ight o f the in fant itsel f then become s an 12a Bushcomb e Close , Woodman cote, ment ed on wi tho ut refer enc e to the Hun garian KHALID IKRAM
aid to deli ver y - not an impedim ent, as with a Cheltenham. texts ? W e are in an Ali ce-in-Wonderl and 8703 Victory Lane, Potomac, Maryland 20854.

-17- TLS J UNE 8 200 7

 ARTS
The past and the future ofBollywood

Look back in bhangra

BHAR AT T A NDO N Shekhar Kapur are some of the most illumina t-
ing in the book ; as this account stands, how-
Mihi r Ba s e ever, the more intriguing and awkward stories
are fated to ho ver as ominous pressur es aro und
HO L LYW O O D the edges of the main frame.
A history Raft a, Rafta . . . , for its part, makes much
352pp. Tempus. £20. both of the long shadow of Bollywood classics,
978 0752428352 and of repressed back stories, as they bear on
the immediate unfold ing of the drama. Folk-
A yub Kh an-Din romance narrati ves so often end with weddin gs,
RAF TA, R A F TA as a rewa rd to character s and readers; but this
Lyttelton Theatre play opens with the immedi ate aftermath of the
marriage, with what would be the untold "ever
after" in such a story, swiftly alerting an audi-
n his 1992 essay on The Wizar d of Oz , ence to the thought that all might not be quite

I Salman Rushdie recalls that film's influ-

ence on his own earliest attempts at fic-
tion: "I have forgo tten almost every thing
about his adventures, exce pt for an encounter
with a talk ing pianola whose personality is an
well here, and so it proves to be. Naughton' s
original play drew on the anxiety of the newly
wed coupl e' s having to live back under the
parental roof, at a time when the power of trans-
lating eco nomic freedom into "a place of one' s
improb able hybrid of Judy Garland, Elvis Pres- own" was far from guaranteed (Keith Water-
ley and the ' playback singers ' of the Hindi mov- house' s late 1950s anti -hero Billy Liar, for
ies, many of which made The Wizard of O: look example, desires an "e lsewhere" at least as
like kitchen-sink realism". It is a measure of much as he lusts after women); Khan-Din trans-
how far Bollywood has raised its profile in the lates this central conceit convincingly into one
West over the past fifteen years, that the cul- of the few modern contexts where it might still
tural shock absorbers of quo tation that Rushdie ring true. The young groom , Atul (Ronny
places around '''playback singers" now look Jhutti), working as a projection ist at his local
quaintl y redund ant (as if he were explaining to Indian picture-house in Bolton, breaks step with
us the mysteries of the "digital watch"); never- social habit by refusing to j oin in the bhangra
theless, the pertinence of his memory remain s. dancin g after his own wedding to Vina
Instinctively reinvent ive, Indian mainstream Ronny Jhutti as AtuI Dutt and Arsher AIi as Etash Tailor in Raf ta, Raft a . . . (Rokh saneh Ghawam-Shahidi) - a prefiguring
cinema has long been a space in which Jud y of what turns out to be a much more serious
Garland , Elvis Presley and singers such as Lata centres, with their largely white audiences, to Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons live on disappointment of collective expectation s, as a
Mangeshkar could meet metaphorically, an art become an art form that, on account of its visual somewhere in Mumb ai), and to concentrate on variety of pressures contri ve to postpone the
which flaunted its hybrid form and cultu ral priorities and mass reproducibility, had the the internal and external factors which contrib - consummation of their marriage, to the point
intertextuality decades before such actions were potential to reach a truly popular audience. uted to the films' status as milestones; his where the whole neighbou rhood starts erupting
given the stamp of legitimacy by European and Tracing the cour se of this expansion via the cho ice of the Amitabh Bachch an Western in ill-informed gossip. Against the background
A me rica n acad emi a ; as so m an y time s before, efforts o f num erous visiona ries and journey- Sh o!ay (1975) and the anti-Imperialist cric ket- of th is crisis, Atu l' s parent s Lop a and Eesh war
the issue of who is runnin g to catch up with men, Bose offers a cinematic history whose ing drama Lagaan (200 I) as his later test cases (Meera Syal and Harish Patel) find themselves
whom is not as clear as it might seem. The best tirneline, from the early decades of the twentieth may lend the more recent history of Bollywood questionin g their ow n ideas of what is and isn't
parts of Mihir Boses oddly shaped but often century, runs in parallel to the more familiar a triumphali st air, but within the frame of his usual, as some problematic memories of the his-
absorbing history of Bollywood explore such American one, rather than passively echo ing it. chosen narrative, the selections are j ustified. It tory and preh istory of their marriage hove into
modes of reworkin g, and in particular how the For example, his account of the Madan family, is especia lly heartening to read an acco unt of view, until the characters' pent-up energy spills
reconfig uring of old stories has served "to re- pioneers of the Indian studio system, shows how Sh o!ay that pays some attention to its cinematic over into violence, only to expend itself, rapidly
create an old nation emerg ing after centuri es of the coming of the talkies offered distinct oppor- techniqu es, rather than simply reading it in and merci fully, in reconciliation.
bondage, help it to rediscove r its roots, while tunities to Indian cinema, not least a chance to terms of its cultural resonances; it is a pity that Given his work with Alan Bennelt in the past
linking it to a present, very different world" . adapt the works of indigenous literary giants Bose does not go into the same kind of analyti- two decades, it is not surprising that Nicholas
Similarl y, at the National Theatre, Ayub Khan- such as Rabindranath Tagore. Indeed, there cal depth with a tilm like M other India , which, Hytner' s direction should be at home with the
Din' s Raf ta, Raj ia .. . not only dramatizes the were clearly times when the wider access which with all its visual symbolism (not to mention pitch of Khan-Din' s writing: here, as in Eas t Is
influence of old stories (from Bollywood clas- films offered to less oflicially sanctioned views its complex and often uncom fortable politics), East (1996), the script displays a facility with
sics to skeletons in familial closets), but appears of Westerner s became a cause for concern: enshrines a particu lar cinematic image of post- habit and its sudden disturbances, and an ear for
itself as a cross-cultural updating of Bill Naugh- Anything that undermined the supposed superi- Independence India. those turns of phrase which work as capaciou s
ton' s 1963 domestic comedy A ll in Good Tim e. ority of the white races in the eyes of their Bollywood: A history aim s to be a managea- social connot ations rather than as stereotypes.
Negotiating awkward generation gaps thus brown subjects was co nsidered very dangerou s bly compreh ensive introduction to the topic ; (Bennett can suggest whole, unnarrated short
becomes bo th a su bject and a dramatic method. .. . . In 1922, H. L. Stc phc nso n, the chief secre- how ever , the desire for coverage mean s that storie s beh ind character s sayi ng " finger buffet"
As Bose rightly notes, the term "Bollywood" tary to the Government of Bengal, discussing some of the most noteworth y parado xes to or "Highly Commended at Harrogate" .) In
carries its own contentious freight, some the need to tighten ce nsor ship of Am erican which Bose alludes in passing are Raf ta, Raf ta . . ., Atul reminisces about bondin g
commentators rejecting it for perpetuating in its films, wrote about scenes in which "w hite men frustratingly allowed to drop ; such as the long with Vina over their mutual admiration for the
very etymology the idea of modern Indian and women [are] shown in a state of extreme history of contributions to the industry from canonical Bollywood melodrama Pa keezah
culture as something intrinsically "belated" or drunk enness in order to portray the degradation markedly left-of-centre figures, and Bolly- (1971), a female-led story in which a lush
second-hand, and one of the most rewardin g caused by drink . Such scenes do not convey the wood's abilit y to rise, in its artis tic and roman- visual style marries Indian classicism to the
emphases in his history is on how the new moral idea of Western mann ers and ideal s." tic collaborations, abo ve the divisions of com- late- 1940s palette of Powell and Pressburger.
medium - thank s in part to the Lumier e broth- Once he move s on to the first "Go lden Age" munali sm ("In the India of Bollywood, Hindus Once some of the characters begin to speculate
ers' evangelical and entrepreneurial zeal for it - of Bollywood itself, typifie d by the defining fell in love with Mu slims and even married on the reasons for Atul's non-performance in
made its first appearance in India only a few classics Moth er Ind ia (1957 ) and Mu gh al -e them, as it was quite common for Mu slim bed, a kno wing audience might be tempted to
month s after those epochal screenings in France A zam (1960) , Bose does well to steer clear of actors and actresses to play Hindu characte rs"). make retrospective leaps of innuendo, only to
at the end of 1895, and was, within a few years, the speculative gossip which that era brought It is no coincidenc e that Bose' s discussions of be caught out by the play' s comic resistance
spreading outwards from the metrop olitan into the cult of cinematic celebr ity (the spirits of pricklier director s such as Shyam Benegal and to stock wisdom, or at least to stock wisdom's

TLS J UNE 8 20 07 - 18-

 ARTS

claims to know everything. If the beginning of

the first Act deliberately calls on conventional
associations (whisky, bhangra, Artex ceilings),
Glorious cranks and wrestling parsons
the second Act serves conscio usly to pull both
characters and plot into three uncomfo rtable n the eighteenth cen tury, the terms amateur GILLI A N D ARL EY shire, who by "Contriving & Drawing all his
dimensions, so as to reco il from such expecta-
tions. In this, Khan-Din and Hytner are aided by
some spirited ensemble playing: Syal manages
I and professional had not yet been strictly
defined. But Georgian architectu re was well
served by a veritable Territorial Army of gentle-
A P ASS ION FO R B UIL DI NG
The amateur architect in England 1650-1 850
Planns without an Architect" left results
described as coming from the "lunatic fringe
of the Baroque". Byron's daughter, Ada, Lady
to lend long-suffering restraint a saving feisti- men enthusiasts of means, dwindling cof fers Sir John Soanes M useum, then tourin g Lovelace built herself a Plinean villa overlook-
ness, and Harish Patel is this production's often replenished by advantageous marriages, ing Porlock Weir, and Sarah Losh, romantic
dramatic centre, slipping almost impercepti bly well placed to design their new country houses pantheist, designed a bevy of buildings on her
from Falstaffia n comic bluster to crumpled and estate buildings. They were all beneficia r- he had returned from a lengthy study tour in island home, Wreay, on Lake Windermere.
defeat and bewilderment. It is perhaps unfortu- ies of the Gra nd To ur, and, once home, con- Greece , personally took on the entire design Sadly, a small exhibition cannot include any of
nate that, in a co medy about parental pressure, tinued to hone their skills, bent over the classi- and building process, working drawings and the practica l philanthropists, such as Lord Har-
the parents' performances should so outweigh cal treatises, builders' manuals and architec- stonewor k included, at Belsay Castle, his radi- co urt of Nuneham Courtenay, who drew up his
the childrens'; nevertheless Ghawam-Shahidi tural prints that they had brought back from cal Greek Reviva l house and estate buildings. own model village, or Ada's widower , Lord
pulls off the diflicult task of playing a characte r Paris, Venice and Rome, and which now The task took him more than thirty years . Lovelace, who let rip with handmade bricks and
who is sexua lly inexperie nced without being weighed down their library shelves and filled Others call for attention from the shadows. patterned llints on his Surrey estate, nor those
sexua lly naive, another recoil from safe expecta- their folio cupboards. From these they taught Ambrose Phillips built a functionally pointless (usually Irish) dreamers who wanted to emulate
tion s. them sel ve s to draw and eve n measure , since but full-throttle Triumphal Arch on his estate, aspects of Vienna or Versa illes within the
For all the assurance of the production, how- they had to convey at least a minimum of infor- Garendon Park in Leicestershire, added a brace compass of a village .
ever, Raf ta, Rafta ... is never as emotio nally mation to the crafts men and artificers who of classical garden buildings, but sadly died, Paradoxically, even the first President of the
invol ving an experience as it wants to be - per- would build their schemes. aged thirty, in 1739, before he had finished the Royal Institute of British Architec ts, Earl de
haps because it wears its dramatic emotio ns so A Passion for Building starts with the Rest- house. A little later, the "Wizard of Durham" Grey, was an amateur. Had we, as the French
barefacedly. East Is Eas t was able to move oratio n, apart from one very early example of Thomas Wright, not content with discovering did from the 1670s onwards, depended on state
between comedy and pathos more quickly and an amateur's grasp of pure Vitruvian classical the Milky Way, just one of many intellectual training and educatio n for architects, there
less predictably, and despite the finely acted architecture: a newly discovered drawing for achievements, also designed over thirty garden would have been little of this startling individu-
unfolding of Lopa and Eeshwar' s buried trauma a "porticus" fronting the river at the bottom buildings ranging from cottages ornes to toy alism and the built landscape would be much
- the fact that Eeshwar's long-lost best friend of Lord Salisbury' S garde n off the Strand, forts. He lived as a kind of perpetual guest whose the poorer. A Pa ssion fo r Building is a memo-
remains the silent, invisible third party in their designed (we do not, frustratingly, know either house gifts were unusually concrete offerings. rial to ardent autodidacts, who took for granted
marriage - the new play still works primarily as why or how) by Sir John Osborne well before Finally, there is space in A Passion fo r Bu ild - their own hard-won visual literacy and practical
a sparkling piece of comic entertainment, one Inigo Jones had hit his stride. It was the late, ing for a glorio us raft of cranks and ecce ntrics, competence, and richly dese rve to be celebrated
that revivifies Naughton's origi nal while feel- much missed Giles Worsley who initiated the none more splendid than the wrestling parson, for abilities long since undermined by the
ing at times confined by its "we ll-made" stand- exhibition, and it sprang from a very personal Sir Thomas Parkyns of Bunny in Notti ngham- unrelenting rise of the absolute professional.
ards. In Tim Hatley' s design, the standa rd mid- interest: Worsley' s own ancestors made up a
terrace hou sefront is merel y a trompe l'oeil cur- spider 's web of interco nnected Yorkshire ,---- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
tain, from beh ind which the interior opens out gentry families that included more than its fair
into a two-storey set; but this visual coup also share of amateur architects . Rokeby Hall and
highlights the play' s priorities, and the scales Hovingham Hall are their most notable works,
on which it chooses to work. For example, fine examples of the English Palladianism
though it is a smart reversa l for Khan-Din to promoted so zealously by Richard Boyle, 3rd
cast the British Natio nal Party in the role of the Earl of Burlington, another Yorkshirem an.
unseen owners of the corner shop where Lord Burlington had departed on his European
Eeshwar buys his whisky, that is about as close travels an enthusiastic amate ur but returned
as they get - of all the dangers that might from his second visit to Italy in 1719 a complete
threaten the periphery of the domestic drama, professional with a mission. He established an
these ones are oddly unthreatening, as seem-
ingly distant and avoidable as Kenneth
office, with assista nts and draughtsmen, and
became a "professional", charging clien ts for cityguest
Grahame's Wild-Wooders, whereas their real-
life co unterparts might do more unpleasant
things with bottles than sell them. Then again,
his work. There lies the disti nction.
As well as the landowners who returned in
droves from their three or four years traversi ng
of honour :
for all its surface trappings of naturalism, the the classical sites of Europe to recreate the
Lo~~~n
Dutts' home might best be seen as an Artex-
ceilinged version of pastoral - all the more so
since Atul and Vina need to llee it for a while in
order to keep their wits and sex life about them.
Veneto in Scotland , Yorkshire, or Ireland as the
case might be, there were men (and a handful of
women) who broke the mould, for, as amateurs,
their own clients, they could afford to stray, Will Self
..
Both Bollywoo d and Hollywood are cur- experiment and simply indulge themselves. • ••
.. .
•
rently in the process of self-conscio usly remak- Some were seria l meddlers, whose effo rts
ing their own classic back catalogues. While the rarely left the page but add to the gaiety of his-
Martin Crimp
Indian remakes have, for the most part, been tory; others were more successf ul in their
less pointless than their America n counterparts, endeavo urs. And here the fun begins. James Flint
it rem ains to be seen whether they will continue There are tlamboyant early Gothicists such
the tradition of creative reinventio n that made as John Chute, who worked away on paper,
Bollywoo d so fascinating, or succumb to the assembling a fantastic array of elaborate
imitation-by-numbers currently afflicti ng so studies for a new staircase at his family ho use ,
much of America n film. In its own way, Rafta, the Vyne, while also advis ing that prince of ohnson...
Rafta ... makes over Bill Naughton in ways virtuosi (another indefinable category), Horace
that the terribl e Jude Law version of Alfie Walpole, at Strawberry Hill. Among the early
(2004) couldn' t begin to understa nd, but it nineteenth-century figures included in this
remains overs hadowe d by some other old exhibition, Thomas Hope app lied great means,
stories . Before East Is Eas t, Khan-Din was and taste, to his intl uential houses in London
probably best known for playing the lead in the at Duchess Street and at Deepdene in Surrey
bracingly ill-mannered Hanif KureishilStephen (demolished by British Rail in 1969 - the year it
Frears collaboratio n Sammy and Ros ie Get Laid threw off its fusty old British Railways image).
(1987) ; if Raf ta, Raf ta . . . had allowed itself a Sir John Soane, an arch-professional and him-
few more of that film's two-fi ngered j ungli self a victim of the taste police in the House of
salutes, even lurking around its edges, how Commons, looked admiringly at Hope' s work.
much more gripping it might have been. In Northumberland, Sir Charles Monck, once

- 19- TLS JUNE 8 2 007

 ARTS

F
irst staged in 1938 by the Negro Unit on his m ulatto mot her-in-law for her " idiotic
of the Chicago Fe deral Theater Project,
Big White Fog , T heodore Ward's am bi- Invisible men pride" in her "rapi ng [wh ite] ancestors" .
Ward is eq ually forthrig ht in showing ho w the
tio us theatrical deb ut, exp lores the obsta cles princi pled man can bring terrible sufferings on
enco untered by a black fami ly as it tries to ROB ER T SH OR E com mon gro und", or a new socialist dawn for his ow n fam ily. Les is refused a unive rsity scho l-
battle its way out of the enveloping mias ma of black and whi te alike based on the Ru ssian arsh ip on the grounds of his co lour - " I happen
co lour preju dice. In a note written many years T h e od o r e W a rd mod el - beg ins to suggest itse lf more force- to be a little too black, I guess" - but it is Vie ' s
later, Ward remembered how, as a yo ung man fully. As the fam ily face eviction from their stub born fait h in Garvey, who, in a sp lendi dly
trave lling across the Unite d States, he had been B IG WH ITE FOG hom e, Vic is persuaded by his son Les to stan d decora tive ceremony, has him hon ou red wit h
overwhe lme d by the su blime magnificence of A lmeida Th eatre and fight rat her than plan a future in Africa, and the airy title of "Lord of Agric ulture of the Provi-
the American landscape. " But suddenly I fo und in the rousing, rather operatic fina le a chan ting siona l Rep ublic of Africa", that ultimately endan-
myse lf sickened as I realized the trut h: 'I'm a mixed-race mob of "reds" appear at the doo r to gers his son 's chances of obtaining a co llege ed u-
Negro and all this beauty and majesty does not try to chase away the bailiffs. (As is often catio n. The radica lism of Big White Fog's polit-
belong to me ' .... In my bewilderment that late note d, W ard' s career was bligh ted in the 1950s ica l conte nt is hardl y matched by its distinctl y
afternoon, it sudden ly occurred to me that we as under McCarthy and the Hou se Un-American old-fas hione d three-act form: the curtain lines in
a peop le were eng ulfed by a pac k of lie s, sur- Activities Co mmi ttee . It is no less ironic, how- partic ular tend towards the me lodramatic, and
ro unded, in fact, by one big white fog thro ugh ever, that his paean to socialist brotherhood, the revelation s are often cl unkily sprung. How-
whic h we cou ld see no ligh t anyw here ." whic h look s to the Soviet Union to provi de a ever, the most end uring pleas ure of Ward's play
Big White Fog was inten ded to pose an urgent ne w design for living, was written in 1937, at lies in its portrait of fami ly life and in its ability
qu estion: how can black Americans ac hieve a the heigh t of the Great Terror.) to perso nalize the politica l (especially in the vari-
se nse of "belonging"? Stra dd ling the 192 0s and If the writing is perhaps overly schematic, it is ous inter-generationa l conflicts), aspects of the
30s , the action follows the shifti ng fort unes of a wea kness that is more than compensated by the writi ng that are brill iantly rea lized in Mic hae l
Vie Maso n and his exte nded fam ily who live vigour and to ugh-mindedness of Ward' s argu- Atten boro ugh's fluidly evocative production.
cheek by jowl on the So uth Side of Chicago. mentation, a qua lity that is we ll serve d by the Atte nboro ugh has also assem bled a wo nderfu l
Opening in 192 2, the play initia lly seems to author's knack for prod ucing cris ply epigram- cast: at its heart is Danny Sapani, who beautifully
offer its protagonists a star k choice between matic turns of phrase ("T he on ly fair thing about conveys the mora l blindness as well as the charis-
co mp lete segregation from, and tota l imitative the white man is the colour of his skin", for matic passio n of Vie as he wilfu lly invites ruin
integration into, mainstream white cu lture . Vie, insta nce) . In fac t, Wa rd's target here is not so on his family. Atte nboroug h's produc tion is espe-
an ed ucated man who can only lin d emp loyment Danny Sa pa ni a s Victor Mason m uch the "big white fog" itse lf but the prej udices cia lly welcome for draggi ng the forg otte n Theo-
as a hod -carrier on a building site, has joi ned within the black community that hinder it as it dore Ward out of the fog of theatrical neg lect and
M arcus Garvey's se paratist Back to Africa has squeezed out of his black neighb our s. tries to find its way through that fog . Internal restoring him to his rightf ul place alongsi de more
movement; his brother-in-law Dan, meanwhil e , The action then leaps forward a decade, into tensions are revealed as the Cari bbean Garvey is ce lebrated stage chro niclers of black American
has chosen to "use the white ma n's met hod " to the mid st of the Depression and a seve re down- repeatedly described as a "mo nkey-c haser" by life such as Lorraine Hansberr y and Aug ust Wil-
get ahead, build ing cheap low-grade acco mmo- turn in the M asons' fina ncia l circ umstances, Dan, while Vie, who praises Garvey as "t he star son. Asto nishing ly, this Almeida stagi ng is also
dation and buying a Ca dillac with the pro lits he when a Third Way - " unity wi th the majority on of his peo ple's destiny" , makes a vicious attack Big White Fog's European premiere.

uring the 1980s, Steve Bell drew the

PARALLAX: RE·VISIONS
OF CULTURE AND
SOCIETY
Literature D Guardia n's daily strip, "If .. .", se t in
a looking-glass versio n of Thatc her 's
Britain populated by politicia ns and talking
STEVE B ELL
Norw ich Arts Ce ntre

man-ligure who wears his Y-fro nts outsi de his

Stephen G. Nicbols, peng uins from the Fa lkland Islands. Wh en trouse rs, afte r Alastair Campbell's allegation
GeraldPrince, and Margaret Thatc her rece ived a "bou nce" after that M ajor tucke d his shirt into his underpants.
Styles of Haunted English defen ding that territory in 1982, so did Bell. Be ll allows suc h one-joke libels their own life.
Wendy Steiner. SeriesEditors
Enligh tenment The Celtic Fringe, the British As he exp lains in the notes to this retrospective Wh en he makes a monkey out of George W .
Taste, Politics, Empire, and De-Anglicization of his work, the l1edgling strip - named after Bush, it is initia lly as the m issing link in the
and Authorship in Laura O'Connor the nation's favourite Rudyar d Kipling poe m- US Presidency: the December 200 0 cartoon
Eighteenth-Century "Valuable and original work found its voice with the Falklands. "After the "Bigtime for Bonzo" refe rs to Ronald
France that par ticipates in some of the Vie tnam War" , he writes, "w hich I well Reagan ' s film Bedtime/or Bonzo, abo ut a man
Elena Russe most exciting and forward- reme mber in full grap hic detail from the TV trying to educate a Chimpanzee . Bush, as heir
look ing trends in curre nt Irish news coverage .... the Fa lklands War re-esta b- to Reagan ' s "Star W ars" defence policies ,
"After reading Russo ,
and literary stu dies.' lished the pri nciple of com plete gove rnment then becom es Bush-as-ch imp-as-Darth-Vader,
it is impossible not
-Marjorie Ho wes, contro l over what was shown and what was wielding a laser banana . Be ll's visua l carica-
to see the French
Boston College, aurhor of seen." In a Boy' s Own adven ture of gun boats ture is nice ly matched by his phonetic speech
Enlightenment
YeatssNations: Gender, Class,
through her reveal- defen ding a guano industry, the left-wing bubbles (B ush speaks of his frustration with
and Irishnas
ingprism." " If .. ." restored that detail with a scato logy "Yurp" and the "Nine Asians") and literalizing
£33 .50 hardcover
-DavidBell, that developed a dunghea p wo rld of its own. of political langu age: before the Iraq war, Jack
The Third Citizen John' Hopkins University The expans ion into the leader pages ca me Straw and Tony Blair emerge thro ugh the seat
Shake,peare', Theater and £36 .50 hardcover Body and Story j ust as Be ll was losing his first muse to the of Bush's starred-and-striped cow boy pants
the Early Modern Houseof The Ethic, and Practiceof mach ination s of her Ca binet. Three high -con- cryi ng "T here's clearly been a material
Commons Framing Attention Theoretical ConAict ce pt pieces tell the story: "T he Golden Sce- breach !"
Oliver Arnold Windows on Modern Richard Terdiman nario", alluding to James Frazer's theory of Wh en wor ds fail, so does wi t, as in Be ll's
"In addition to startlingly German Culture "A welcome reflection on the the ritua l sacrifice of kings in The Golde n me morials to the W orld Trade Center attacks
fresh and persuasi ve inter- Lutz Koepn ick condition of theory in the Bough, shows Thatc her felled by a tree, sur- (two bu rning, flag- draped towers) and the
pretations of familia r plays, crepuscule of its idols." rounded by kneeling Tory bac kbe nchers; Lon don Underground bomb ings (gravestone
"It's a different Germany we
Arnold offer' a whole new -Tom Conley, "T he Sca pegoat", afte r the pai nting by Hol - crosses repl aced by T ube logos). But at ot her
feel we know after reading
way of understanding the Harvard University man Hunt, has Thatcher be ing taken fro m times he achieves a savagery eq ual to the clas-
the particular synthesis and
politics of rhe Elizaberhan £ 16 .50 paperback
getting to know the historical behin d by a Tarzan-like M ichael Heselt ine , sics of Gi llray. The topos of bestial co ngress
and Jacobean cheater." characters Koepnick bring' using a sheepish Geoffrey Howe as a prop hy- returned in 2005 , wit h Bush in Iraq dec laring
-Stephen Greenblan , together." lactic; and "The Adoration of the M ajor" "I will on ly pull out when the ca me l is fully
Harvard Un iversity -Irene Kacandes, reveals - with apologies to Brueghe l - the able to screw itse lf'. And Bell has draw n
£36 .50 hardcover
Darrmourh College next inc um bent of 10 Downing Street. Blair for so long that the vis ua l short han d
£33 .50 hardcover Bell is not as habitually literary as his whic h initia lly linked him to Thatc her - a sta r-
Guardian colleag ue, M artin Rowson , nor as ing left eye - now makes any thing
rancorous in his caricature. Instead, he runs a Blair- like : a prison door, a pylon, a cras hing
circus of sig ht gags. W ith the unpromisi ngly heli co pter.
The Johns Hopkins University Press
m ild Major, he hit on the conceit of a Super- J ER EMY N OEL-T O D
Distributed by John Wiley • Tel: 1243 843291 • www.press.jhu.edu

TLS JUNE 8 2007 - 2 0-

 FICTION

Whaddya mean?
Haruki Murakami' s exi stential musings

S O P H IE RAT CLl F F E

W
e meet the heroine of Af ter Dar k in a of our person al ity to some greater System or guide to the novel' s ce ntre. T his is a no vel
late-nigh t diner, somew here in a Ord er ? And if so, has not tha t Sys tem, at so me about the sys tems of which we form a part,
large Japanese city. The din er is stage, demand ed of us so me kind of ' insanity' ? about socie tal guilt. Ta kahas hi's account of the
H arttk i Murak ami
describe d first. Th e " unre markable but Is the narrative you now possess rea lly and trul y face less ness of society chimes , all too neatl y,
adequ ate lightin g" , the "expressionless decor A F TE R D ARK your ow n?" There ha ve alway s been elements with the fig ure that wa tches the sleeping Eri
and tablewa re", the "i nnoc uous back ground Translated by Jay Rubin of Mu rakam i' s liction that refe r to pro blems from insi de the Son y televisi on, a fig ure whose
music at low volume" : 208pp. HarvillSecker. £ 15.99. and questions in co nte mpo rary Jap an. Refe r- "mas k fits the face like a seco nd skin". "We
Every thing about the restaurant is anonymous 978 I 846550478 ences to pop cu lture ha ve always jos tled with sha ll call him " , the narrator notes, "t he Man
and interchangeable. And almost every seat is reportage and ec hoes of film noir. However, up with No Face ." And Ta kahas hi spe lls thin gs out
filled. buds. Her sleep is deep. She is probably not to now, one of the strengt hs of his writi ng ha s a little too c learly. He is give n to raisi ng his
After a quick survey of the interior, our eyes eve n drea ming. . Her slender white neck been that one is never exac tly sure what his index finger in orde r to emp hasize his po int - a
co me to rest on a girl sitting by the front preserves the dense tranquillity of a hand- message has been . In Kaj ka on the Shore, for habit tha t see ms excessive, co nsidering that his
window. Wh y her? Wh y not someone else? crafted product. Her small chin traces a clea n exa mp le, we ca n try to wor k out the relation remar ks are fairly straig htforward. (He co mes
Hard to say. But, for some reaso n, she attracts angle like a well-shaped headland. Even in the bet ween a tee nage boy, a villai n ca lled Colonel out with sentences like "you ju st have to live
our atte ntion - very naturall y. She sits at a profo undest somnolence, people do not tread Sa nde rs, some large fis h falling fro m the sky one day at a time" , " people are all differen t.
four-perso n table, reading a book. Hooded so deeply into the realm of sleep. They do not and a gro up of soldiers - but we will onl y fai l. Even siblings" , and " if yo u reall y wa nt to kno w
gray parka, blue jeans, yellow sneakers faded attain such a total surrender of conscio usness There , as wit h the labyrinth ine workings of The so mething, you have to be willing to pay the
from repea ted was hing . . . . Little makeup, no .. . . This is all we ca n concl ude for no w. Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , one may co nclu de price"). Wh en it co mes to one- liners, Kaoru
jewellery, small, slender face .. . . Every now Soo n, eve n more abnorma l things happen. The along wit h Mu rak am i' s hero that the answer isn't much better, lean ing towa rds Ma ri to ask
and then , an earnes t wrinkle forms between her te levision in the corner of Eri' s bedroom start s may be "so me thing intangi ble" . Tho se novels "w hat's a gi rl like you do ing hangin g ou t all
brows. to behave bizarrely. Th e set is unplugge d, but it are not so much me tap horical mapp ings or night in a place like this?".)
Gradua lly, mo re details abo ut the gir l's late- begi ns to I1icker. A picture appea rs on its ex plora tions of any one tru th, as exp lorati ons of In the handling of his characte rs, as with the
nigh t vig il are revealed. Her name is Mari , she nove l as a whole, Mur ak ami see ms to have lost
is in her first yea r at co llege specializing in hold of iro ny. Admitted ly, his teenage
C hinese , and there is tro uble at hom e. W ith no characte rs do display it on a sma ll sca le.
warn ing , her elder sister ha s dropp ed out of Ta kahas hi makes a joke abou t why Mari
norm al existence . Two month s ear lier, the beau - both ers to avo id bat tery-fed chicke n while
tiful Eri decl ared that she was " going to go to chai n-smo king her way through a packet of
sleep for a while" , and has not wo ken up. Ca me l Filters. Mari finds hersel f defining the
Mari read s her mysterious book wit h co nce pt of iro ny to Kaoru , whe n she explains
co nce ntratio n, but keep s being interrupted . Her the fact that the Love Hotel takes its name from
first visi tor is an old friend of her siste r's . Jean -Lu c Go dar d's 1965 film : "Cause in
Tetsuya Ta kahashi, a law stude nt and A lphavi lle, you 're not allowe d to have deep
trombon ist, is tak ing a break fro m an all-nig ht feelings. So there' s nothing like love. No cont ra-
ja mming sess io n to gra b a chic ken salad. The dictions, no irony. They do eve rything accord -
seco nd is Kaoru , a former fema le pro -wrestlin g ing to num erical formul as" . Kaoru listen s, but
cha mp, who run s "A lphavi lle", the local Love she claims tha t she does n't "rea lly ge t it" . Nei-
Hotel. It tran spires that a man ha s brut all y ther, in truth, do we. The phil osophi cal discu s-
attac ked a C hinese wo man in one of the hotel sio ns in Af ter Dark are deadp an exc ha nges .
roo ms, an d nobody ca n und er stand what has T he re is a se nse that we are listening to so me-
happened. Having heard that Mari speaks thing , as the narr ator put s it, "of great signifi-
C hinese , Kaoru ca lls on her as tra nslato r. ca nce ". This is not a no vel tha t wears itse lf
Meanwhil e, Haruk i Murakam i' s imperious lightl y.
narra tive voice mo ves bet ween areas of the city , M urak am i' s vision o f ad olescent co nscious-
zoo mi ng in on Mari' s wo rld, on that of her An image from Mamoru Oshii's Anime-inspired film Ghost ill the She1l2 : Innocence (2004) ness has always been an acquired taste, but
siste r, and, linall y, on the office of a co mputer some of the awkwardness here co mes from Jay
pro gramm er nam ed Sh irakawa. scree n, of a masked man. Thi s "new intrud er" wha t it migh t mean to inhabit more than one Rubin' s mid-Atl antic translat ion , which see ms
Mu ch of this is familiar Mu rak ami territory. in the telev isio n is " ne ither qu iet nor tra nspar- wo rld at a time. vario usly inco ngruo us or over-egged in its hand-
From the detail s give n in the nove l, it appea rs en t. No r is it neutral. It is" , the narra tor tell s us, Aft er Dark, in co ntrast , see ms to offer the ling of dialogue, as if so meo ne 's fat her had
that Shirakawa is the per petrator of the cri me in " undoubtedly trying to inter vene" . reade r a clea r moral imperat ive, throu gh the found him sel f at an afte r- party , and was tryin g
A lphav ille. As for the connections between the The fig ure in the telev ision is not the only figur e of Ta kahas hi. The law stude nt see ms to to fit in. Tee nage rs "grab some shut-eye",
other narrative strands, they are left loose. Vari - piece of interference. Throughou t the novel , the have an opinio n on eve rything, fro m the differ- talk of their "buddies " and ask eac h oth er
ous reaso ns co uld be moo ted for Eris exte nded reader notices so met hing both intr usive , and ent sor ts of bath ing suits girls wea r to the crisp- "W haddya mean ?" .
nap. A model, she was living a highl y press ured newly " interventionist" about the narrat ive ne ss of the toast in the diner. His main gri pe, it Mur akam i is often co mpa red to J. D.
teenage existence , "i nsa nely busy, taking a voice itse lf. On a forma l level , by using the seems, is with co ntem porary Japan ese society, Salin ger, but his cult-stat us novel Norwegia n
million lessons" . One co uld see her so mno lent third person plural , Mur akami ca ptures the which he ca n onl y describ e as "a creature" : Wood relies on the kind of ex iste ntial mu sing
sta te as a ca se of h ikokomo ri - a so rt of slee ping reader and d raws them into a "sing le po int of It takes on all kind s of different shapes - some- and soft-foc us nostalgia that Hold en Ca ulfield
sic kness currently co mmon among de presse d view ". But the re is also the suspici on of a sus- times it's "the nation" , and sometimes it' s "the would have seen as " phoney" . In Aft er Dark,
Jap anese teenagers. However, like so man y of tained social criti que. Nea rly ten years ago, law" , and someti mes it takes on shapes that are Mu rakam i never seems fully to countenance the
Mur akami' s sleepers, there see ms be so met hing Murakam i wrote a book about the po isonous more difficul t and dangerous than that. You potential co medy of his characte rs, or the fac t
more uncann y tha n physio logic al going on. As sarin gas attack on the To kyo Unde rgro und, per- can try cutting off its legs but they just keep on that their discu ssions fall into a familiar sys tem
the narrative voice puts it, "we gradually co me petra ted by the memb ers of a religiou s cu lt. In growing back. Nobody can kill it. It' s too of their own. Th is tona l difference must be seen
to sense tha t there is so me thing abou t her slee p the book he argued that while the followers of strong, and it lives too far down in the ocea n. as part of the sensibility of twentieth-century Jap-
that is not normal. It is too pure, too perfect" : "Aum" had a distorted view of the world, the Nobody knows where its heart is .. .. And this anese art, which, from Ta nizaki to Anime ca r-
We allow ourselves to becom e a single point of phil osophy offered by mainstrea m society was crea ture, this thing doesn' t give a damn that toons, relies on the dead pan and the absurd. But,
view, and we observe her for a time. Perhaps it no better. The attac k, he arg ued, showe d up I' m me or you ' re you. In its presence, all in the end, nothing abou t Afte r Dark, and its
should be said that we are peepi ng in on her. " the co ntrad ictions and weak nesse s deep within human beings lose their names and their faces . wide-eyed philo sophizing, seems surprising. Per-
Our viewpoi nt takes the form of a midair our social system . ... Wh at was made clear We all turn into signs, into numbers. hap s this is because its message is far too clear
camera that can move freely about the room was the struct ura l routing of 'o ur' system". His speec h about the "creature" is addressed to to be truly bewild ering. One wishes Haruki
. . Her eye lids are closed like hard winter " Haven' t we entrus ted", he asked , "so me part Mari , but the diatrib e also see ms intended as a M urakam i had left a little more in the shade.

- 2 1- TLS J UNE 8 2 0 07
 FICTION

nacy hasn't prevented him from having a

Fugitive lover passionate affair, and the picture he clings to

during his dreadful linal days is of himself
as the fugitive lover of the virtuous Jewish
Death of
n May 1940, on the day of Nazi Germa ny's PA UL BI NDI N G
Marianne, though it is too late for this image to
be isolated, in some idea l album or gallery Hobbes
I attack on the Netherlands, Osewo udt, a
young man running a family tobacconist in
Voorschoten, has a visitor. A young Dutcharmy
W . F. H erm an s
away from other less wholesome pictures.
W. F. Hermans (1921- 95) devoted severa l
novels to the traumatic German occupation of
OLIV ER HARRIS

lieutenant, calling himself Dorbeck, asks him to THE DAR KROO M OF D AMO CL ES the Netherlands of his own youth. Yet it would G erard Dono van
develop a roll of film, a service the shop adver- Translated by Ina Rilke be a mistake to read The Darkroom of
tises. Two things immediately strike 391pp.Harvill Seeker. £ 16.99. Damocl es, which was first published in 1958, J UL IUS WI NSOM E
Osewou dt: first, the customer is as tiny as he is 978 1 843432 067 as a historical account. Rather, the Occupat ion, 224pp. Faber. Paperback, £10.99.
- and he himself has been rejected for military with its moral reversals, its laws and shibbo- 978057 1235360
service because of his lack of height; and any given time - haunt The Darkroom of leths, its imposed need for disguises, untruths
second, the other man' s surprised, grey-g reen Damocl es, as other photographs do W. F. and assumptions of alien ident ity, provides the UliUS Winsome lives in a wood cabin with
eyes match his own. Osewoud ts wife, Ria, nine
years his senior, remarks on the likeness: "He
looked exac tly like you, the way a photo
Herrnans' s fine novel, Beyond Sleep (1966). perfect setting for Hermans to exercise his dis-
They stand for our desire to make sense of the illusioned view of human nature, his refusal of
world, even a Nazi-co ntrolled society; we strive befogging idealisms. An academic geologist,
J 3,282 book s left to him by his father,
shelved alphab etically around the walls.
He does some men ial work in summer and sits
negative looks like the positive. You look as to impose order on our experience by compress- Hermans views people as far less secure in their out the winters alone. This is how he has lived
much like him as a pudding that hasn't set ing a representative scene into the limits of a physical circ umstances than they suppose, and for fifty-one years. There was a dog, but he has
properly looks like a . . . let' s see, a pudding frame. Yet life won' t stand still for us. Hence far too easily content with inaccurate measure- been shot.
that has set properly". the photographs' own erratic history. ment and false readings. What control had The dog' s death opens Gerard Dono van' s
There is a cruel truth in her words. While Photography enables the unkind Ria to Osewoudt over biology' s allocat ion to him of third novel, and provides a convincing, low-key
Osewou dt is small, beardless and has a make another important point: Dorbeck is bad parents? Or of his personal deficiencies? At pretext for its exploration of grief, violence and
woman' s high voice, Dorbeck is patently virile. Osewoud t' s "negative" ; he reverses the other 's the book ' s close, when the war is over but he is solitude in the co ld spaces of Northern Maine.
But Ria' s comment has another significance, black-and-white. And after his first meetings in mortal trouble, he bursts out: "The reason As Julius responds to the loss of his comp anion,
for it is the only evidence we have of Dorbeck' s with Dorbeck - their subsequent meetings are they' ve put me in prison is not that Dorbeck we are fed glimpses of his past: a brief love
objective existence over the six anarchic years few - and his decision to comply with any can' t be found, the reason is that I have a high affair, education at the hands of his father, and
the novel covers. Alone with him two days directives from him, Osewoudt abandons all the voice like a castrato, a face like a girl and no the mental breakdo wn of his grandfather, a
later, Osewoud t listens as Dorbeck explains conventions that have governed his life so far. beard. I've been imprisoned in this body all my First World War veteran, whose Lee-Enlield
his situation. In the early hours of the Nazi To serve Dorbeck' s cause, he enters strange life; my appearance has made me what I am" . rille is now dusted off, as the murder mystery
invasion, he ordered the men in his command to houses and kills defenceless individuals, with Th is is not wholly true, but it is not untrue turns into a revenge tragedy.
shoot two newly released Ger man prisoners. He barely a sign of emotion. His self has slipped either. Beneath the complicated, often co ld The rille, given to his grandfather by a
is unrepentant; he may be in danger but he is into its negative form. Yet, by the novel' s close manipulations of their plots, Herm anss fine British soldier moments after the Armistice,
wholeheartedly committed to resisting the - when even he comes to see the misapprehen- novels - long withheld from translation by his jo ins the violence of twent ieth-centur y Europe
enemy. Develop ing the roll of film would be sions, the acceptance of unchecked statements, own proscription - burn with passionate feeling to that of present-day America - themes
Osewo udt's contribution to the strugg le. of the last years - we feel that the positive may for humanity. To read this novel in Ina Rilke' s explored in Donovan' s previous novels,
Those photographs - their mysterious subject have returned, that the old black-and-white has sensitive, supple English is a literary expe rience Schope nhauer 's Telescope (2003) and Doctor
matter, their provenance, their whereabouts at been reinstated. Osewoud ts physica l effemi- of the rarest kind. Sa lt (2005). We are told that the grandfather
"never lired a rille after he came back from that
-----------------~,----------------- war .. . gave his medals to my father and told
Dolboy' s nature, on the other hand, is "to him to keep them or to throw them away, he

Interesting times speed through life". Running through his care-

free childhood, he never becomes ensnared, and
didn' t care which" . But if this renuncia tion has
haunted Juliu s, its lessons are ones he appears
willing to forget, and he embarks on a cam-
finds his selfhood in moments of solitary, spirit-
he Soviet Union seems now like another MICHA LAZAR US paign of haphazard executions. The relation of

T
ual reverie. In this coming-of-age story,
world, far older and more distant than Dolb oy keeps exa mining his ow n motives, acts o f revenge to acts of random vio lence pro-
the decade and a half since its dissolu- Karl Mand ers despite his success. At no point does the novel vides a fruitful border to explore, but it lead s
tion. To exhume this time, before freedom and accuse its protagonists of weakness - Mander s the reader from familiar emotions into the
choice took on the semblance of inevitability, is MOTHS understands the pressures of suffering too well realms of psychopath ology.
to run the risk of seeming fantastical. Karl 224pp. Chatto and Windus. £12.99. for that. But it is in Dolboy' s preservation of his Julius Wins ome is told in the first person, but
M anderss scintillating novel Moths opens ju st 978 07 0 1 18106 2 private motivation that the difference between two voices seem, at times, to compete: the hard,
before the Second World War and ends some- the stories consists; the boy has a sage dignity self-consciously isolated man of the woods and
where in the late 1950s. For all the intimate, serve a ten-year sentence of hard labour. which is rellected in Manders' s prose. His style the gentler, more innocent student of nature.
earthy realism of its detail, it is written - and The novel is constructed from two beauti- recalls a formal era, glimpsed through Mirjam' s Julius' s home education among his father 's
read - from the higher towers of European fully intert wined different stories. The grim family or at Dolboy' s private school, with its books complicates matters further. We see him
history, and its action is seen throughout with Kalkaesque morb idity of Cornelius' s journ ey crisp, exquisitely turned sentences, avoiding reading Chekhov and Pope but, by his own
vertiginous clarity. through the labyrinth of Soviet bureaucracy any stiffness. Th is writing, with extraordinary admission, the classics do not intrude on his
The son of a wealthy merchant family based and the privations and violence of life in the visual power, is a pleasure to read. narrative style. What are we to make of some-
in the Netherlands, Cornelius van Baerle has Gulag, form a dystopian tale of Europe gone Karl Manders, a former journ alist, is one who has compiled lists of Shakespearean
often travelled on business to Czechoslovakia, wrong, the individual tossed in the ogre hands described as having lived "in many places and coinages but only uses them when speaking to
where a brief passion results in a son. This of the state. The transformat ion of his own through interesting times", and his descriptive his victims: "You are blood-boltered, I said.
son, Dolboy, rescued by Corne lius from his hands, once the supple instrument of the pian- verve is informed by a wealth of real experience. You are besmoiled"?
damaged mother, grows up in the Netherlands ist, now "thic k, like burnished horn", charts his The novel is full of richly imagined detail, from The iron ic distance necessary to read Julius
with his aunt; he develops a passion for running regress ion in civi lization. Estrangement from the colours in the paint factory staining the skin as self-deluded only gradually opens up, and
and for Mirjam , the daughter of a noble family. his home starts a slow estrangement from him- of the Gulag' s workers to the blindly I1itting never entirely. That his tone remain s reaso nable
At school Dolboy' s athletic ability brings him self, as, broken down by the camps, he retires moths of the title. Here, all the powers of the throughout, is central to the novel's effect: "I
fame and later he becomes one of the leading after serving his sentence to a neighbouring state are insufficient to account for even one had no logic, no excuse. He was my friend, and
athletes of his generation, urged to compete on colony of ex-convicts. 'T his is our life", says a individual' s full nature, and socialism is a I loved him. That is all of it". But the reader
the international stage - though competition has fellow prisoner, as freedom is gradually sub- failure of the belief that people exist in more cannot rest there. The dead dog, Hobbes, has a
ne ver been his motivation. sumed into survival. Regardless of guilt or inno- dimensions than those the state imagines. If the name rich with implications in this wild setting,
Cornelius, meanwhile, on another foreign cence, the individual only has one history, and characters in this stately ode to individualism yet we are told that it was chosen at random
tour, falls innocently into the clutches of Soviet ten years as a convict makes Cornelius into a become entangled in the web of European from the book shelves. There is a half-nod , a
bureaucracy. His musical talent grants him a convict. Facing the malignancy of the state, and history, it is not from blind chance or mere wink, from somewhere between the autho r and
brief reprieve in Eddie Rozner' s band of con- devoid of other choices, he ceases to hope; he brutality: like the mating of the moths, its "me- his creation, too vague to suggest how this
victs, but as jazz falls out of favour, so does he; relinquishes the desire for self-determination andering, like all our blindness, concealed a fate- detail might contribut e towards our overall
and he is taken off to the Siberian Gulag to even as that capacity is stripped from him. ful purpose". understanding.

TLS J UNE 8 20 07 - 22-

 F IC TION

f the many literary reference s in a character named Jerr y Shteynfarb, the author

O Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart' s second

novel, none is more apt than a brief
mention of Joseph Helier, who approached the
Golly Burton of a book called The Rus sian Arriviste 's Hand
Job . (Shteyngart 's first novel was The Ru ssian
Debutante's Handbook.)
gravely serious matter of Air Force troops fight- The pizza resistance of Absurdistan may be
ing in the Second World War with relentle ss MARK KAMINE which recent history is creatively skewed. the grant proposal Misha writes for the Absurdi
mocking humour, deplo ying repetition as one When war breaks out, "tank s guard the strategi- government, proposing the construction of a
of his key comic weapons. "Golly Burton, Gary Shteyngart cally importan t Benetton store" and Americ an Holocau st Museum . In a chapter titled "A
Goll y Burton", the ringing greeting with which Expre ss nag s attached to a car assure a safe pas- Modest Proposal," under bold-faced topic head-
Absurdi stan' s prostitutes attempt to seduce the ABS URD ISTAN sage throug h checkpoints. Even Misha' s post- ings such as "Project Name" and "Methodol-
corporate executi ves staying at the local Hyatt 352pp. Granta. Paperback, £10.99. sex talk with the daughter of the Absurdi rebel ogy", Shteyngart turns the bland ly syrupy
Hotel, does not share the civilized detachment 978 I 86207 972 4 leader has a commercial slant, as he tenderl y language of academic fundraisin g against itself.
of Helier' s catchphras e "Where are the Snow- US: Random House. $13.95. recites the entrie s he has memori zed from Eve n among the most thorough ly secular and
dens of yesteryear?". But it accumulate s a 97808129 71675
Zagat' s guide to restaurants in New York . unaffiliated young Jew s, the Holocau st enjo ys
freighted meaning neverth eless, for "Go lly References to evildoers, oil pipeline s, Dick great name reco gnition . When asked to ident-
Burton" is a mispronunciation of "Ha lliburton" , wise, [his] two-scoop breasts slapping against Cheney, Halliburton, and the politically engi- ify the following eight components central to
one of many American corpor ation s setting each other". Stranded in St Petersburg because neered initiation of the bombing of the Absurdi Jewish identity - Torah, Mishnah, Talmud,
their sights on Absurdistan, the lictional , oil- his gangster father has killed an American ghetto , drive home the point : Absurdistan is us. Holocaust, Mikvah, Whitefish, Israel, Kabba-
rich former Soviet republic where a good "biznesman", Misha wants only to be granted a Shteyngart takes full comic advantage of his lah - only Whitefish scored higher than the
part of this novel 's action unfolds. Shteyngart visa so he can get back to New York, where his multicultural cast, to show how niceties of Ho locau st in a survey of thirty drunk Jews at a
targets corporat e greed and polit ical complicity belo ved "Bronx mixed-race girl" Rouenna diction can disguise important question s. "Tell nightclub in suburban Maryland (cf Greenblatt,
as surely as Helier did inane military bureau- lives. Rouenna has a disarming straightforward- me, friend, who are you by nationalit y?" is Roger, "Oy! What a Feeling, I'm Jewish",
cracy. He has a similarly rebellious comic ness, offensive but refre shing, a manner not code, in Absurdistan, for, "You' re a Jew, aren 't Annals of Mod ern Jew ry. Indiana Unive rsity
vision. Nothing is off limits. The easily unlike the author ' s. ("If you lost some weight , you?". And undereduc ated Rouenna , having Press).
offended are not welcome in Absurdistan. you cou ld be one of those fat movie stars", she gone back to college in New York, writes Having taken on religion, class, race, sexual
Misha Vainberg is - for a time. Misha, tells Misha on meeting him.) Misha travels to Misha a letter crammed with malapropi sms and global politic s, the oil industry and the
Shteyngart' s gargantuan Russian-born Absurdistan to bribe an official as the first step including the information that she has "self as- Holocau st in Absurdi stan, it is hard to imagine
narrator, is "a deeply secular Jew who finds no on his path back to New York . steam issues" and is working on a story that will where Gary Shteyngart will turn for his
comfort in either nationalism or religion ". He The Absurdi civil war he becom es caught up be the "pizza resistanc e" of a book to be edited next fearle ss romp. That this one ends on
embodies the excesses of the Shteyngartian in, fought between the local Svanis and Sevos, by her professor. There is even a wink at post- September 10,200 I, may be some indication of
world, his "heroic gut spinning counterclock- provides materia l for some gleeful satire, in modernism. Ruenna ' s profes sor turns out to be the direction of his thoughts.

-----------------------~,-----------------------
aspect of the book is weaken ed by the earl y rev- beauty of its soaring skyscraper s, and its setting
City of the plains elation that Helenow ski is on the loose. The
nove l is told from a sometime s bewildering
number of points of view, and although
on the sandy shores of Lake Michigan, where
the sun rises, "looking at first flat and razor-thin
and then like a bloody organ taken from a
ANDREW ROSENHEIM loose, and that the killer is Helenowski, though Magnu son is the protagoni st he is an elusive body" . The city' s inhabitants have a "friendly
the madman has switched identitie s with a character, alternately obsessive and despairing. lour about their faces that stemmed from . . . the
Mark Smith vagrant he murders at the beginning of the book. What become clear s is that the real hero of the arroganc e of their own awareness of themselves
Magnu son is alwa ys one step behind his book is Chicago itself. as Chicagoan s" . Smith' s cameos are idiosyncrat-
THE DEATH OF THE DETECTIVE quarry, as he travels across the city, from its Writer s from Theodore Dreiser to Nelson ically preci se - of a feeble bartender posturing
600pp . Northwestern U nive rsity Press . Paperback , wealthy northern fringe, through its flat lifeless Algren have tried to stake out that city as their as a tough guy, he writes: "Even his numerou s
$18.95. suburbs on the West Side , to Skid Row and own, but only Saul Bellow 's The Adventures tattoos did not suggest military service, manli-
9780 81012387 8 even into the no-go zone , the black ghetto of of Au gie Mar ch and William Brashler' s under- ness or evil so much as his having been held
the South Side. A subplot concerns the discov- valued City Do gs can rival Mark Smith for down forcibly by sadistic friends and muti-
he Death of the Detective was first ery by Farquarson' s "nephew" of his real parent-

T
visceral engagement with the place. His descrip- lated". Describing the teenage sons of wealth y
published in the United States in 1974, age ; ano ther invo lves a small-time hoodlum tions of the city are relentlessly inventive, tilled men, he notes they "wou ld not have to hone
and although it was well received and who kills a cop and is ruthlessly hunted down. with mixed emotion s for "the vast, dirty, dilapi - themselves like knives to move up . .. . They
shortlisted for the Nationa l Book Award , it The Death of the Detective is a long, sprawl- dated city that . .. stretched out in either direc- were already there, waxing fat". There are
soon disappeared, through a mixture of bad ing novel, less a mystery than an odyssey. Not tion like a Russian city built upon the plains". shortcomings to the plot, which often verges on
luck and publisher' s neglect. Its re-emergence all of its characters come alive - especia lly Always counterpoised against Chicago 's indus- the prepo sterous, but the novel's stylistic rich-
has been equally capriciou s: an editor at since so many are murdered - and the whodunit trial drearine ss is its irrepre ssible vitality, the ness is extraordinary.
Northw estern University Press did an internet
search for a lawyer called Mark Smith, and
found an entry for the author of this remarkab le rime novelists are contin ually pushing La ura Lippman officers do not belie ve her. Kay, the social
novel.
Arnold Magnu son, a retired world-weary
widower living in Chica go, is an uncorrup ted
C against the limits of the genre. High
stylists create fantastic baroque per-
formanc es around the investigation of murder ;
WHAT THE DEAD KNOW
345pp. Orion. Paperback, £9.99.
978 07 528 88514
worker, is drawn to her client in sympat hy but
also repelled by her childlik e self-absorption
and her inability to empat hize with anyone
police detective who left the force and set up a blood-and-psychopathy devotee s invent ever US: William Morrow. $24.95. else. The woman ' s own thoughts are designed
securit y agency which is called in for every- nastier ways for villains to torment their vic- 978 0 06 112 885 I to give awa y only so much, leaving as much in
thing from weddings to professional baseba ll tims; and more restrained writers use the occa - doubt for the reader as for the officer in charge
games. Magn uson lives in a Miesian tower of sion of violenc e for delicate explorations of news stories. For the Bethany s, the stress built of the investigation .
"charcoal steel and glass" , cut off from his the contradictions of life and society. up until it ripped their marriage apart . Now, a The smoothly written narrative switche s
neighbour hoo d root s and his children, who li ve Laura Lippman' s new novel, Wha t the woman who has illega lly left the scene of a betwe en many points of view and se veral
abroad. A summons from a former client, an Dead Know, shows her to be one of the most minor car accident in Baltimore, in which she different periods, raising ever more complex
ageing millionaire named Farquarson, brings effective member s of the restrained school. was injured, claim s to be Heather, the younger questions. The picture of the girls' lives before
Magnuson out of his disengagement , but before She has a way of dep icting peculiar families of the two missing girls. The police, the the disaster become s as vivid as their parent s'
he learns what Farquarson wants, the old man is with such clarity and sympat hy that she hospital social worker and the lawyer who has unhappine ss and the strugg les of the police
murdered. throws light on the pains and pleasures of far been found to represen t her, all have to decide to work out what really happened . Laura
Other murders follow, and it transpires that more con ventiona l relationships. This time, whether to believe her. She tantali zes them, Lippman heightens the tension without any
all the victims are linked to a past conspiracy in her focus is on the battles between sisters. and the reader, with snippets of information savagery or melodrama, while at the same
which Farquarson ' s wife was forcibly incarcer- Thirty years ago, the two Bethany sisters, about the day the sisters disappeared and time exploring the nature of family relation-
ated in a lunatic asylum, where she became preg- aged lifteen and eleven, disappeared, leaving about what was subsequently done to them . ships in all their misery and necessity. What
nant by a fellow patient named Helenow ski. their parents to suffer all the agonies of fear, Although much of the information is cor- the Dead Know is an impressive and engaging
The child of their union has been raised by false hope, malicio us hoaxe s and well-mean - rect - and unlike ly to be known by someon e novel.
Farquarson as his nephew. It soon become s ing but erron eous sightings familiar from who was not involved in the case - the police NATASHA COO PER
clear to Magnuson that a seria l killer is on the

- 23 - TL S J UNE 8 2007
 LIT ERATURE

A new tongue
" R ather drinke at the wel-head , than sip THOM AS H EAL Y
at pudled streames; rather buy at the
lirst hand , than goe on trust at the Mi ch a el W yatt
bucksters." John Florios enco urageme nt to
his readers at the start of his second Italian T H E IT ALI A N ENC OUNTER WITH
language learning manual, Second Frutes T UDO R ENG LA N D
(159 1), cha racteri zes how the impetus for A cultura l po litics o f translation
language acquisition in sixtee nth- and early 371pp. Cambridge University Press. £50 (US $90).
seventeenth-ce ntury Eng land rested on gaining 9780 52184896 I
reading proficiency. A desire to engage with J a s on L a wr enc e
the literature, history, political philoso phy, and
other writings that had emerge d from Italy' s ce l- " W HO T HE D E VIL TAU G HT T HE E
ebrated, if at times suspect, culture prompted S O M UC H IT ALI A N ?"
Itali an lan gu age learn ing and literar y imi tatio n in
English endeavours with Italian. In the latter
early modern Eng land
sixtee nth century , English printers issued Ital-
224pp. Manchester University Press. £47.50.
ian books directed at a native public keen to 978 0 7 19069 147
drink at the Italian "we l-head", prompt ing a cul-
tural engage ment far greate r than mig ht be
acco unted for by the few hundred Italians living a sense of civi lity that was ofte n perceived as
in England at any one time after the Reform a- lack ing in England. As Frances A. Yates noted,
tion - mostly merchants and Protestant refu- Florio's language manu als have something of
gees, such as Joh n Florio's father the courtesy- book about them, and Florio - and
Michelangelo, who in 1550 became the first to an exte nt his readers - may have felt that
Pastor of the Italian "s tranger" congregation in acquiring Italian encourage d a refor matio n in
London. For every Roger Asc ham castigati ng manners, the absence of which, eve n among
the poisonous Circe- like Italians for making "of " the gentle classes" , was much remar ked on by
a plaine Englishman" a debased figure who Italian visitors.
abandons honesty, while acquiring pride and an Michael Wyatt' s extensive consideration of Count Baldassare CastigIione (1630) by R embrandt
arrogant contempt for others, there were far T udor England ' s enco unters with Italy divides
more dra wn to Italy as a cu lture that man ifested into two parts. In the first, he outlines the varied writing, not least because Florio was happ y to Thee So Much Italian ?" linds much common
;::::================::::;-l clerics
responses of Italian visitors, diploma ts and
to Britain. Baldassare Castig lione, for
include slang and dialect amo ng his 44,000
entries. His linguistic endeavo urs also impacted
ground with Wyatt ' s but, importantly, it
explores the impact of Florio on English
instance, arrived in 1506 as the Duke of on English. The Oxf ord English Dictionary literary writing, es pecia lly Samu el Daniel, with
Urbino' s envoy and was delighted by the hon- has him as the ear liest citation for 1,164 words, whom Florio was we ll acquainted, and Shake-
ours accorded him. Surp risingly from a modern mak ing Florio one of the most significant con- speare , whom he likely knew as well. As
perspective, most visitors were favourably tributors to the language (Chaucer is first with Lawrence demonstrates, English interest in
Contemporary German Prose in Britain and impressed with the food: its variety, abundance, 2,004 words). Italian was notably directed at its literature and,
France (1980-1999): A Case Study of the eve n its preparation. But many others tend ed The most interesting part of Wyatts survey like Michael Wyatt, he shows that langua ge-
Significance of Otherness in Translation towar ds condesce nsion and alarm over aspects of Florio, though, is his considera tion of Firs te learners were less concerned with the spoken
Wiebke Sievers of English life, such as the freedo ms enjoyed Fruites and Second Frutes, the language- language than with its written form. In exten-
"...an excellen t study which raises some very important
questions about contemporary trans lation practice in the by women, includin g the shock of witnessi ng learnin g manuals he publi shed in 1578 and sive analysis of work by William Drumm ond,
global market ..." Or Georgina Paul, St Hilda' s College, public kissing between the sexes. Alessandro 1591. Presented in Italian and English in two Daniel and Shakespeare, Lawrence shows how
University of Oxford the parallel-text appro ach used in language
Magno disapprovingly noted that "if a foreig ner co lumns , these co nsist o f phra ses, di alo gu es,
April 2007 / 312pp / 978-0-7734-53 60-9 / HB / £74.95
enters a house and does not first of all kiss the prove rbs and borrowe d prose extracts. As learn ing impacte d not only on translation and
mistress on the lips, they think him badly Wyatt demonstrates, Florio offered his readers imitation during the period but on more original
Eavan Boland's Evolution as an Irish
brought up". Yet, though often dismayed by the possibility of constructing themse lves in an literary writing, too . Unlike modern dispo si-
Woman Poet: An Outsider within an
Outsider's Culture encounters with English xenophobia , Italians imaginat ive world, one where theatricality - the tions to reproduce as accurately as possible the
Pilar Vlllar-Argalz frequentl y found England appearing in a new adopting of varying roles - was enco urage d for language of a text's original state, where the
.....This full-length book on a contemporary Irish woman desirabl e light if they ventured to Scotland or moral and civ il refinement. Florio was awa re translated version is witnessed as a type of
writer is something of a rarity in Irish studies and most Ireland. Enea Silvio Piccolom ini, the future of both opportunities and dangers in this, as his client to the original, Early Modern writers per-
welcome ..." Or Eibhear Walshe, University College Cork
April 2007 / 442pp / 978-0-7734-53 83-8 / lIB / £79.95
Pope Pius 11, retu rned to England from Scotland English versio n of an Italian prove rb illustrates: ceive d original and translation existi ng in a con-
as one who "see med that I was seeing, as if for "with art and with deceit, halfe the yeere we current symbiotic relation. Parallel texts enco ur-
the lirst time, a civilized world inhabited by live: with deceit and with art, we live the other age d comparison and observa tion of different
Brian Moore and the Meaning of the Past:
hum an beings", finding the North, "horrifying, part" . Further, he was not ave rse to employing effects between languages, and the differences
An Irish Novelist Re-Imagines History
primitive and in the winter never touched by the his language exe rcises to enter into poli tical of mean ing these could genera te. The printer
Patrick Hicks
.....it is an important and authoritative contribution to the warming rays of the sun" . Similarly, Francesco critique, suggest ing that the instability which John Wool fe' s 1588 trilingual edition of Cas-
growing body of Mo ore criticis m..." Professor Norm an Chiericati , a papal nuncio to England from unchecked socia l disg uise generated ultim ately tig lione' s II Co rtegiano, for exa mple, prints the
Van ce, University of Sussex
1515, undertook a pilgrimage to Lough Derg in resulted from the Queen. In Firste Fruites, Italian in para llel with Sir Thomas Hoby' s Eng-
April 2007 / 228pp / 978-0-7734-5403-3 / lIB / £69.95
Donegal - the reputed portal into Purgatory - he observes that "a handycrafts man wil be a lish version and Gabriel Chappuys' s French
The Problem of Translating and was clearly shaken by the rigou rs and priva- merch ant , a merch an t wit be a ge nt leman, a one , a for ma t designe d to encourage thi s ty pe of
"Jabberwocky": The Nonsense Literature of tions encountered. gentleman a Lord e, a Lorde a Duke, A Duke comparative readin g. Jason Lawrence' s study
Lewis CarrolI and Edward Lear and Their The Refor mation inev itably restricted Italian a King, so that everyone seekes to overcome adds significa ntly to our understandin g of how
Spanish Translators wanderings in England, and also coloured the another in pride". The source of this is English authors approac hed fo reign language
Pilar Orero accou nts of those who did visit, unless Protes- Elizabeth, who "is so pitiful, that she letteth material s.
..The principal finding of the book may perhaps be the tant themselves. The seco nd part of Wyatt' s everyone to doe what he pleaseth most; lust These two books complement one anoth er
simple recognition or affirmation that the translations of
nonsense calls upo n all available techniques of translation ..." study exp lores the Engli sh acquisition of the and covetousness are practised very much" . and contri bute impor tantly to our knowledge
Or Alberto Mira, Oxford Brookes Univers ity Italian language, focusing on the inlluential Florin' s position bears similarities to arg uments of how the Early Mod em English engage d with
April 2007 / 382pp / 978-0-7734-5358-6 / lIB / £74.95 John Florio. As well as a translator of that Spenser was later to use in The Fae rie Italian and, to a lesser extent, with Italians.
Montaigne, Florio is best known for A Woride Queene. Where Spenser employed allegory , They both present compe lling arguments for
The Edwin Mellen Press of Worde s, published in 1598, which set a new Florin' s students might use Italian to engage the importance of Florin' s impact on English
www.mellenpress.co.uk benchm ark for bilingual dictionaries and with ideas that might be risky to voice in their culture. His standard biography remains
Tel:++44(0) 1570423356 became an important resource for Engli sh own tongue. Fran ces Yates' s 1934 acco unt. The time is
email: cs@mellen.demon.co.uk
engage ments with a whole range of Italian Jason Lawrence' s " Who the Devil Taught surely ripe for another.

TLS J UNE 8 20 07 - 2 4-
 LITERARY CRITICISM

the follo wer s of Joa chim of Fiore (the twelfth-

Uncharitable remarks cen tury Italian abbo t and visionary) made

claims for unm edi ated access to the Holy Sp irit.
Thi s, by definit ion, posed a threat to the Church
hierarch y. Much of the fi rst section of Boo ks
nfuriated by the misogyn istic teach ings of lAM ES C A R LE Y manu script context, ow nership or early pro ve- under Susp icion is de voted to a study of

I the book with which her yo ung hu sband

metaph orically beat her about the ears,
Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath reacted with
K athr yn Kerb y-Fulton
nance - as well as of quotation and imitation, and Joach imism in Eng land, and Kerb y-Fulton is
dealing prima rily with theolo gical texts in Eng- deeply indebted, as she ackno wled ges, to the
lish, she linds patterns suggesting that constraint pione erin g labou rs of Marjorie Reeves. On the
the most se vere form of censorship: she tore BOOKS UN D E R S U SPI CIO N rather than censorship may be the approp riate basis of (perh aps rather thin) manu script
three leaves out of the offend ing manu script in Censorship and tolerance ofreve latory writing term to describe co ntrols over the transmissio n evide nce - I am uncon vinc ed, for exa mple, by
orde r to thro w them into the fire . Her hu sband in late medieval England and reception of medieval writings. her conclusions abou t missing or putati vely cut
then turned fro m metapho ric to physical abu se 488pp. University of Notre Dame Press. $50; With re velat ion and with proph ecy - ge nres away leaves - she associ ates the English Bene-
distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £33.50.
and hit her so hard on the side of the head that favoured by wo men - truth depend ed, as the dic tine s with collecting and read ing, not always
978 02 68 033 t 2 5
she became dea f: future censorship was presum- authorities insisted, on the source, and this, negatively, suspect materials from a varie ty of
ably unnecessary since the Wife co uld no D ebor a Shu g er involving discretio sp irituum, was what needed sources. Th is in turn sugges ts to her that we
longer clearl y hear any text that might be rea d to be tested, constra ined or repr essed. It was for need not look onl y to John Wycli f and his fol-
to her. CENS O RS H I P AN D CU LTU RA L this rea son that Jean Gerson' s De pro batione lowers to explain Reformi st eleme nts in Middle
SE N S[BILI T Y
In the world before the inve ntion of the print - sp irituum, De distinction e uerarum uisionum a Engli sh writings: these have a longer histor y
The regul ation of langu age in Tud or-Stuart England
ing press, censorship in genera l wor ked on a fa lsis and De exa minat ione doctri narum deri ving from the radical Franciscan trad ition
346pp. Phi ladelphi a: University of Pennsylvania
local le vel, but it was not norm ally as ext reme becam e such pivotal texts in the Iifteent h ce n- on the Continent.
Press. $59.95; distributed in the UK by NBN. £39.
as in Chaucer' s fictional exa mple: vellum was 978 08 [2239 17 I tury. As Marger y Kemp e well knew, it was As Felici ty Riddy has don e so success fully in
too valuable a commodity to co nsign indiscrim i- incumb ent on her to conv ince the Archbishop her studies of Arthurian rom anc e, Kerby-Fulton
nately to the lire. Sometimes margin al notes by of York, or even the Archb ishop of Can terbury, uses manu script conte xt to unco ver the sources
later readers querie d mistaken or eve n heretical both authors make use of (somet imes grating, Thom as Arundel - whose perh aps "d raconian" of the " buried" Joa chimite overtones in Piers
as pects of an author 's arg uments. Trul y offen- some times dub ious) mod ern analogies and col- Cons titutions of 1407-09 proh ibited the tran sla- Plowman . Cambridge University Library MS
sive passages co uld be blacked out or scrape d loquial phrasing. tion of the Bibl e into Engli sh - of the divine Od.1.l 7 is highl y pertinent to her argumen ts,
off the page, and in Eng lish manu scri pts this In Books und er Suspicion: Censo rship and source for her spiri tual "dal iaun ce" , Pertin a- not only because of its cont ent s - especia lly an
occurred mo st systematica lly in the l5 30s, tolerance of reve!atory writing in late medieval cious she may have been , but her trial con- "unknow n" proph ecy, "R egnum spiritus sancti"
when it becam e illegal to use the term "Pope" to England, Kathr yn Kerb y-Fulton conce ntra tes firmed her orthodoxy. Lik ewise, by Kerby- - but becau se of its ow nership by the Augustin-
descr ibe the "Bishop of Rome". In a lavishl y on the reign of Rich ard II - a golde n age Fulto ns rec koning, Julian of Norw ich incl uded ian friars in York , who were, by Kerb y-Fulton' s
produ ced Book of Hour s owned by a lady in the that saw the "publicati on" of the Lollard passages in the Short Text of her Revelations of rec koning, "on e of the largest pur veyors of
Co urt of Henry VIII , not only has " papa" been Bible, Chau cer ' s Canterbury Tales and Will iam Divine Love, such as tho se on wo men's right to Joachimite prophecies in England". Uniquely
ef face d, so too are the King' s wife and daughter Langland ' s Piers Plowman - and contends that teach , which she would later suppress in the found in this manu script , the "R egnum" proph -
purged of their respec tive titles: "the most total censorship was a more subtle process Lon g Text in order to avoid accusation s of ecy is attributed to Johann es de Lignano - it is
exce lent Prynses [deleted] Mary, dou ghter to before the uniformity imposed by the printed heterod oxy. She was prepared to co mpromise describ ed in a headnot e as "Prophecia lohannis
the moste hygh and myght y Prynce and Prynces book. As Kerby-Fulton observes (and so, too, on ge nder issues because she "had bigger fi sh de Lignunbio so lempnissimi docto ris decre-
Kyng Henry the viii and Quene Kateryne hys did Chaucer with his curse on the careless scribe to fry" . In a sense, too, one could also see foru m uniuersitatis Bononi e" - and Kerb y-
wyf e [deleted]" . This was a proto-Stalini st Ada m Scriveyn), it was hard enough in the Mid- Chauc er' s Retrac tion to the Cante rbury Tales Fulton believes that this was deliberat e obfu sca-
rewritin g of histor y which the Qu een resisted dle Ages for authors to control the acc uracy of as an act of self-censorship or, as Kerb y-Fulton tion on the part of the scribelcompiler; that is, he
heroically, eve n though it mean t perm anen t their texts, let alone for the ecclesiastical or polit- put s it, "cav [ing] in to j ust the kind of anti-hu- attributed a "dangerous" piece of writing to a
ex ile to the English equiva lent of Siberia, that ical authoriti es to censor them effective ly. Never- mani st agend a the Opus [Arduum] author [possi- "safe" author in order to mislead possible cen-
is, the East An glian fenl ands. theless, using the evidence of official interven- bly Nicholas Hereford] sets out". sors. She gives no hard evidence, however, and
W ith printed book s, unlike hand -produ ced tion, of audience response - that is, annotation, As well as advoca ting apostolic po vert y, does not establish precedent s for this practice.
manu scrip ts or personal dedications, it was not (There is a later parallel in the De expunge ndis
as easy to unwrite inconve nient informa tion - haer etico rum proprii s nominibus [1576] of Juan
since there were inevitably multiple copi es of Bautista Cardona, who, as Oebora Shuger point s
the iden tical offendi ng mat erial - bu t this was a ou t in Censo rsh ip and Cultura l Sensibil ity ,
probl e m tackled as early as 1521 when Card inal arg ued that the name s of heretical writers should
Thomas Wolsey staged a large-scale publi c be remov ed from title pages of printed book s,
burnin g of Martin Luth ers book s at St Paul' s whether or not the book itself was heretical.)
Ca thedra l in Lond on . Possessors of heretical Mo re to the point: is there really any indica-
book s were as vulnerable to persecut ion as the tion that these sorts of comp endi a, stored as
book s themse lves, eve n if the delinition of her- they were in virtually inacce ssible mon astic
esy became a moving target in the latter part of librarie s, were checked by outsiders for their
Henry VIII ' s reign , something that the aged orthodoxy, or that wily monk s or friars
Abbot of Glastonbury discovered in 1539 routin ely "cleverly hid " or "laundered " suspec t
thank s to the cop y of a "co unterfe it life of materials by makin g false author attribu tion s?
Thomas Bequ et in print" which was found in Is this not to confu se the wo rld of The Na me of
his possession . A few yea rs later, when Mar y the Rose with reality? And who were the read -
was Queen, Thom as Cra nmer, forme r Arch- ers of this particu lar compendium or recueil (a
bishop o f Ca nterbury, thru st his right hand into term , by the way, eo-opt ed by Will iam Ca xton
the flames that were about to consume him in his first print ed book )? Pace Kerb y-Fu lton,
because with it he had signed, under dur ess, there is not any consensus about the pro venan ce
bills re pud iat ing the wri tings to whic h he had
de voted his life and thus had , in a sense, subm it-
ted to censors hip. Afte r Chri stopher Marlowe' s
FOUR COURTS PRESS
Or Faustus offered to burn his book s, he quickl y
reali zed that it was too late to repent. He had Transmission and transformation in
already ingested the knowledge and it co uld not the M iddle Ages: texts and co ntexts
be voided: ce nsorship is effective , as it were,
K. CA WSEY &] . HARR IS EDITO RS
onl y avant rather than apres la lettre.
Two rece ntly publi shed book s exa mine Nin e original case studies of cultural or textual
tran sfor mation in th e medieval p eriod over eight centurie s
censorship in England, one before the print re vo- in m edieval England and Ireland.
lution and one afte r. Although both are written

-•
ISBN 978 -1 -8518 2-990-3 256 pages £50 Published: 8 June
by membe rs of Eng lish faculties, both concern e
"La strada sempre que lla" (1955) by Mimmo Rotella; from Mimmo Rotella
them sel ves with other disciplines, theology and by Germano Ce la nt (575pp. Milan: Skira. 020; d istrib u ted in tbe UK by 7 Malpas Street, D ublin 8, Ireland
law, and neither is an easy read, eve n thou gh Thames & Hudson. £80. 978 88 8491359 3) TeL (Dublin) 453 4668 www.fourcourtspress.ie

- 25 - TLS J UNE 8 200 7

 LITERARY CRITICISM

of Dd . 1.17, whic h is best know n for the copy of decided to remove the offending verses simp ly been ce lebrati ng a Free Spirit Ma ss mu st be against individuals (fic tio nal wri ting was usu-
Gildass De excidio Brita nnie it contains . It was becau se they were hostile to the King, In any ca lled into q uest ion , especially since Ramsbu ry ally unt ou ched because it dea lt wit h types) wa s
lon g associated with Glastonb ury Abbey, on the ca se Fa ustina wa s, like Bodley , a co nventual incl uded the elevation e ven if he may have needed, since, as Bishop John Jewel poi nte d
basis of statements by the sixteenth-ce ntury anti- produ ct: it too was written in the "safety" of St neglected the wor ds of consecration (whic h he out , thro ug h slander peo ple co uld be " killed not
quary Jo hn Joscel yn ; but there are prob lems A lbans Abbey . T he re was , in othe r word s, no m ay not have known and whic h wo uld in any for what they believed but for what men we re
wit h the attributio n, and in A. G. Watso n's Sup- nee d for censorship as suc h in eit her version. case have norm all y been recited sotto voce by fa lse ly led to be lie ve about them". The "paper
plement (1987) to N. R. Kers Medieval Librar- Kerby-Fulto n takes the ca nce llation of two an ti- the ce lebrant), bullets of the press" , as Ric hard Baxter
ies ofGreat Bri tain it is inc luded in the G las ton- men dicant poems in BL MS Cotton Cleopatra Like the mys tics she studies, Kerby-Fult on de scribed them, were no less dangero us for
bury list wi th a q uery . In her comprehensive B_I1 as a blin d . As a res ult of crossing o ut, they considers her work revo lutio nary and reve la- being metaphorical bullets. By English law,
Summary Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the ap pear to be ce nso red , bu t in fac t are still reada- tory - in a variety of places she observes that therefore, ver bal assau lt wa s as cu lpab le as
Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Mon- ble, and thus co nst itute a "pe rfect form of func- she is the first to have noticed one pattern or physical attack, Ver bal iniuria inl1icted infamia
mouth (1989) (no . 40), Juli a C. Crick has laid tio nal am big uity or self-protection " . (T his pre- anot her - and she hopes her book wi ll ins pire o n its vic tims . T he pun ishment for slan der or
o ut the evidence wit ho ut comi ng to any co ncl u- suma bly stan ds in contrast to the "benign" cen- others. After reading it, I had ma ny qua lms, malicious acc usation cou ld be severe, as in the
sio n, althoug h she has noted sim ilarities with sor ship used by the Carthusians to "rein in ma v- large and sma ll, and major difli culties de proba- case of a quack physician ca lled Woode, who in
Lond o n, BL, MS Royal 13 D .I, itse lf deriving erick enth usia sms" of individuals like M argery tione. Are the so urces she examines rea lly 1595 "lost both his ea rs upon the pillory, was
from St Pe ter- upon-Comhi ll in Lo ndo n. Ulti- Kempe thro ug h the use of minor de letions.) largel y understudied? Sho uld modern scho lar- slit in the nose, sealed in the fore head, &
mate ly, Ra lph Han na ' s statement that " the his- Cancellatio n thro ugh cro ssing o ut is a common ship take her lead on how to interpret silence ce nsured to perpet ua l imprisonment".
torical text s . . . suggest origin among regu lar phenomenon in medieval manuscripts, but I concerning the Thir d Status Joach im ism (ie, the Defamation, as Shuger observes, also vio-
clergy" takes us abou t as far as we can go - and have ne ver come across anot her example of this eme rgence of a spiri tua l Churc h to rep lace the lated divine law becau se it stoo d in op position
from th is to the York Aug ustinians is a grea t sort of functional ambiguity - it seems more corrupt cleri ca l Churc h) in medieval Eng lish to chari ty. It wa s a two-edged sword, and
leap, even allowing fo r Hanna' s specu lation like over-ingenuity on Ker by-Fu lton's part - text s? In what sense are the Benedictines a con- wou nded the perpetrator as we ll as the victim ,
that the historical materials m ig ht possibly be and [ wou ld need m uch more docum entation to templative order? Does He nry Cos sey not turn Pre ss cen sors hip wa s thus an enforcement of
linked to the City of York . be co nvinced. up more regularly in English booklists than sac red norm s. C ulpability lay in intent rather
Mo nastic pryvetee is something mu ch A lthoug h wide-ranging in her use of so urces, Joach im o r O livi preci se ly because he wa s Eng- than meani ng: so unds in them selves ma y be
evoked by Kerby-Ful ton in her discussio ns of Kerby-F ulton makes no mention of Rich ard lish? We re the prop hecies of the "obscure" Rob- harmless, but signs are not necessarily so. In
the circulation of for bidden material, as are Rex' s revisionist account in The Lollards ert of Uzes almost unknown in Eng land? Never- me dieval and ear ly mo dem Eng lan d, motives
tricks to confuse pos sib le censors. Like (2002) of Wi lliam Ramsb ury' s ap parent ly theles s, I am sure that Kathryn Kerby-Fu lton' s we re judged o n an et hica l rat her than a psyc ho-
Dd . 1.17, so we are to ld, the unpu rge d versio n of heterod ox version of the Mass, wit h its "si lent book wi ll spark co ntroversy, making many of logical basi s. T he social aspec t of be ha viour
the poem on the execution of Rich ard Scrope, co ntempt of the e levation". Un like Kerby- us re-examine old assumptions . (verbal an d physical) also meant that every citi-
Archbis hop of Yor k - in Oxford, Bodleian Fu lton, Rex maintains that Ramsbury was a cyn- De bora Sh uge r's Censorship and Cultural zen entrusted his ide ntity to the word s others
Lib ra ry, MS Bod ley 85 1 (anot her Piers Plow- ica l m isc reant and sceptic purposel y paraded by Sensibility: The regulation of language in spoke abo ut him or, as a theo logian in
man manuscript) - was " prod uced in the safety his j udge s as a Loll ard. If Rex is correct (and Tudor -Stuart England has an entirely different Elizabeth' s re ign put it, each individual wa s "a
of a co nve nt". As A. G. Rigg has pointed out , mo st Loll ard scho lars , I sho uld add , wou ld dis- l1avour. T his is an extremely difficult , but in the per son [o nly] in respect of another". Honour
however, the scribe of the later cop y, in BL MS agree wi th his interpretation), Kerby-Fulto n' s end high ly rewarding, piece of scho larship. linke d self to society, identity to reputation, and
Cotton Fa us tina B.IX , may have himsel f assumption that Ramsbury mig ht we ll ha ve Like Kerby-F ulton, Shuger distinguishe s ultimately it mattered more than liberty. It is for

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this reason that, in Richard 11, M o wbray cou ld
printed book s and manuscri pts, and
points o ut that for her perio d, whic h carries up assert that "Mine ho no ur is my life" . T his is
the co llap se of the T udor lice nsing system in also how we should read Ric ha rd Lovelace ' s
1641 , manu script ci rc ulation wa s virtually "cavalier" appeal to Lucasta that " I cou ld not
uncon tro lled . She also ob serves that because so love thee , dear, so muc h, Loved I not ho nou r
mu ch has been lost there may not be any lina l more".
MAKING ISLAM DEMOCRATIC THE PARADOX OF A GLOBAL USA answers to many of the qu estions she pose s Charit y, by these models, a llowe d for a dis-
Social Movements and thePost-IslamistTurn Edited by BmceMaz lish, abo ut the reg ulation of langu age . Shuge r is, continuous self thro ugh radical transforma-
AsifBayat Nayan Chanda, &
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moreover, very specific in her definition of ce n- tions , and it is this discont inu ity that makes
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ological (the Index ce nsored books containing see n as libell o us. Shuge r, ho wever , sees a shift
Offers a new app roachto Describes thestrained relationship
Islam and democracy. between the US andglobalisation. heretical ideas), and insular regul ation , which to a Tacitean mod el towards the end of the six-
co nce rne d iniuria - that is, attacks on the "dig- teenth century: this postu late d a lixe d and irrev-
nity and integrity of the self'. Not surpris ingly, oca ble sense of character. In this case, censor-
THE BOUNDARIES OF THE REPUBLIC AGAINST FREUD
MigrantRightsand the li mits of Universalism therefore, there we re no laws pro hibiting the ship cou ld become a means of suppressing
CriticsTalk Back
in France, 1918-1940 possession of Catho lic books in Eng land - it know ledge of injustice. Historic para lle ls wit h
Todd Dufresne
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Uncoversthe French Republic's
.nJ_ _ ---" hiddenhistoryof inequality. critics ofFreud. "incestuo us ba sta rd" of " an infamous courte- of utter control in the case of Christian doctrine
san" who used Leiceste r "only to serve her filty as James I interprete d it) rather than protection.
lust". T his was typical of the sexual insu lts Rewarding critical studies ultima tely lead
TERRORISM FINANCING REFLECTIONS ON LITERATURE
directed against Protestants from the Continent, you back to the pri mar y texts they elucidate and
AND STATE RESPONSES AND CULTURE
A Comparative Perspective Edited by HannahA rendt and in his Life of Ca lvin the Carmelite Jerom e- allow you to view them in new ways. In Henry
Edited byjeanneK. Giraldo Hermes Bo lsec describ ed the undou bte dly VIII, Cat heri ne of Aragon responds to the false
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dom, In James I's reign, after the failure of the also to its theo logical dimension as a vio latio n
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www.eurospangroup.com/bookstore Reg ulatio n of in l1ammatory texts directed who mi sled the King or them se lve s.

TL S J UNE 8 2007 - 2 6-
 LI T ER ARY CRITI CI SM

in acade mic disco urse by "autochthonous" .

We're in charge In a stu dy whic h takes imperial soci al experi-

ence as its subject, eve n when inte r-
racial encounte rs are not its pri mary foc us,
Kuc ich ' s racial voca bu lary is worrying ly

J
ohn Kucich explains that his new book , P A T RI CK DENMAN F LANERY while he notes the initial periodica l publica- uncon sidered .
Imperial Masochism , seek s to demonstrate tion of Conrad' s, Stevenson ' s and Kipling ' s The author 's treatment and selec tion of his
the "continued relevance of psychoanalysis J o hn Ku c i c h works, there is very litt le investigation of the so urces are also occasionally naive. For
to historicism" as well as to "e lucidate the effects of this kin d of pub lis hing, an d on the example, he add uces as evi dence Sam ue l Cron
ro le masochistic fantasy" plays in forming [MPERIAL MASOCH ISM very speci fic class implication s of pu blishing Cro nwrig ht-Sc hrei ners description of O live
identity. Kucic h combines these two critical British fictio n, fa ntasy, and socia l clas s in periodica ls like Blackwood's Maga zine Sc hrei ner banging her head on a table, but fa ils
preoccupations to reveal "the socia l function" 258pp . Prince to n U niversity Press. £22.95 and The Cornhill Maga zine , whic h had, as he to draw atte ntio n to the fact that Crons
(US $35).
of masochis tic fantasy in nineteenth-century fleeting ly ack now ledges , "a pre domi nant ly accou nts of hi s wife as suffering, weak and
978069 1 [ 271 2 3
Britis h imperial culture, paying specific middl e-class readership ". me nta lly unsta ble have long been seen as less
attention to its class implications. Rather than Given the project's co lonia l focus , Kucich's tha n entire ly cre dible. Odd ly, too, nowh ere
adhering to the conventional sense of potence". His theory of the se is so broad ly racia l and national categories are lacking in does Kucich note Sc hrei ner' s use of the
masochism as a sexual impulse, however, defined that it encompasses a range of disparate nua nce . Samoans, black Sout h Africans, pse udo nym "R alph Iron" , sure ly relevant to
Kucic h exp lains that his usage derives from experiences, from Sc hreine r' s evangelica l self- Indians, Afg hans and Malays are referred to, any discussion of her feminism an d se lf-
relational psyc hoanalysis, emphasizing the lessness, to schoo lboy bullying in Kipling ' s fic- unironically, as " natives" , and Stevenson is effacement. He cites ear ly American pirated
ro le played by "narcissistic fanta sies of tion, all gathered too tidil y under a sing le criti- described as " having gone native" in Polynesia. edi tion s of so me of Sc hreiner's works, an d
omnipotence". ca l umbrella . Kucic h regar ds this as a positive The closest Kucich co mes to ethnic specificity e lsew here in Imperial Masochism he relies on
The works - and to some extent the Ii ves - of and even necessary effect, since " masochistic in the Sc hreiner chap ter is a sing le re ference to a patch work of recen t paperback, crit ica l, an d
Robe rt Louis Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, fantasy is ... more a part of dail y psychosocial Zu lus and the Sa n peop le. In his discu ssion of first editio ns.
Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad are experience than many of us have yet realized". Co nra d, he switc hes between "Malays" and In his fina l paragraph, Kuch ich co nce des,
Kucic h's central focus; and while his approach But over the co urse of the book the repetitive "natives" , wit h no apparent ratio nale for using so mew ha t de fen sively, that he may appear to
produces some intrig uing rea dings , and should deployment of catc hphrases suc h as "omni- the latter except as binary oppo site for occu py the pos ition of critic who "becomes
perhaps be admired for attempting to expand potent fanta sy", "narcissistic excess" and " whites" ; in his discussion of Nina , in Conrad's master of all he ... surveys" , bu t asks us to
the fie ld of masochism studies, his critical inter- " magical groups" becomes a kin d of litany, Almayer's Folly, he descri bes her, witho ut quo- ju dge the book on the basis of the "pro ductiv-
ventions often feel arbitrary. He organizes his obscuring rather than illuminating the social tatio n, as "ha lf-caste". ity and .. . interp retive yie ld" of his scholar-
study aro und four imbricated type s of "maso- phenomena disc ussed . T he sy m bo lica lly loaded " native" is in- ship . This is an unco nvi ncing apo logy for a
chistic fanta sy" : "fantasies of tota l control over There is vir tua lly no consideration of how appropriate in this co ntext; the QED, in mu lti- meth odological approach whic h m igh t have
others, fantasies about the annihilation of the masoch istic elements Kucich finds in ple defi nitio ns, notes that it is now "considered be ne fited fro m greater critical se lf-awareness,
others, fanta sies that maintain the omnipotence these fo ur writers' works mig ht ha ve been read offe nsive" . Even the more po litically correct rat he r tha n the "st ringent critical askesis" Joh n
of ot hers, and fantasies of solitary omni- by a udiences at the time. For example, " indigenous" has recen tly bee n supersede d Kuci ch claims.

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- 27 - TLS J UNE 8 2007
 SC IENCE

of writers, including himse lf, and sma ller frag-

Words within wheels ments of persona l testimony . What the reader

gains in the immediacy of persona l reminis-
cence - Alan Turing scratching a dinner invita-
tion on a rhododendron leaf for want of pen
n unprecedented assault on an R IC HA RD LEA the hundreds of messages received at Bletchley and paper while out running - is often lost in

A "unbreakable" Nazi code, a string of

successes by a small team working flat
out against the clock, and an unfortunate reluc-
B . Jack Cope land , edi tor
Park every day, Max Newman, a theoretica l
mathematician who was familiar with Turing's
1936 paper on computability and had worked
needless repetition . To explain the workings of
the Enigma machine three times in the opening
three chapters is surely misp laced.
tance on the part of the British authorities to COLOSSUS on issues surrounding Godel's incomp leteness But Colossus does evoke the intense atmos-
allow the cloak of secrecy that surro unded these The secrets of Bletc hley Park's theorem, suggested that the attack on Tunny phere at Bletchley, the informality and excite-
extraordinary events to be lifted - the tale codcbreakingcomputers should follow the examp le of the attack on ment fired by the vital nature of the work, and
B. Jack Copeland has assemb led in Colossus 478pp.OxfordUniversityPress.£18.99. Enigma and bring in machines . the paralysing effect of the secrecy that sur-
9780 19 284055 4 The first of these machines, whose ram-
has a familiar ring. But this is not the story of rounded the project both during and after the
the British attack on the Enigma cipher , made Nei l Barret! shack le appearance rapidly earned it the name war. Those involved were prevented by the Offi-
famous in Robert Harris's 1996 thriller of that Heath Robinson, generate d Tutte 's statistical cial Secrets Act from discussing the work they
name; it is an account of British successes THE BINARY REVOLUTION data by comparing two loops of teleprinter tape had done until the publica tion of a report on
against a later and more advance d German The history and deve lopment of the computer strung on a metal frame and run at high speed . Tunny in 2000 - too late for Flowers, who died
320pp.Weidenfeldand Nicolson. £18.99.
cipher, which the British called Tunny. The paper tapes were diffic ult to synchronize in 1998, after writing a contrib ution which
9780 297 847380
Cope land takes us back to Bletchley Park, the and sometimes tore, flying off at high speed includes a bitter attack on the shortsig hted
scene of Alan Turing's triumphs against into fragments which festoone d the room. obsession with security that blighted both his
Enigma, providing a detailed account of how two enciphered messages to each other, the plain Tommy Flowers, a Post Office engineer, then career and the development of the British
Tunny was cracked and how the codebreakers text of the messages could be deduced, enabling suggested that a faster and more reliab le computing industry in genera l.
designed and built the world's first digita l one of the codebreakers, John Tiltman, to machine cou ld be constructed to perform calcu- Neil Barrett' s workmanlike history of the
computer to help them do it. Buried among a recover an extended series of the obscuring let- lations on encrypte d messages stored electroni- computer, The Binary Revolution, demonstrates
mass of often overlapping technica l informa- ters produced by the Tunny machine. From this cally using electronic valves. He built the first clear ly how American firms have dominated
tion is the dramatic story of a project that sequence, a young Cambridge graduate, Colossus in the face of scepticism from Bletch- the industry since the Second World War. After
changed the course of the Second World War. William Tutte, was able to deduce the machine's ley Park, comp leting it in under a year and a brief discussion of the machines construc ted
Tunny was one of a family of codes used internal workings: how many wheels it had, how doubling the codebreakers ' output at a stroke . It by Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century,
by the German high comman d to communicate they turned and how they were connected was fully functioning almost six mont hs before and a rapid account both of Colossus and experi-
with units stationed across Europe. An operator together. A year after the lirst messages were the operation of even the first components of mental machines designed by a German engi-
typed a message into a Tunny machine at one intercepted, the cryptana lysts at Bletchley Park the American ENIAC machine, often consid- neer, Konrad Zuse, the focus shifts to the
end and the machine encrypted it via twelve were able to read virtually every message picked ered to be the world 's first electronic computer. United States, where we see the development of
whee ls which moved as the operator typed, up without ever having seen a Tunny machine . Nine more Colossi of increasing flexibility and the transistor , programming languages, operat-
masking the text by combining each letter In October 1942, just as the Germans had comp lexity were built before the end of the war, ing systems and the networks that led to the
with a quasi-random obscuring character. This tightened up their system for indicating the ini- providing vital intelligence and event ually internet.
encrypted stream of code was then transmitte d tial settings of the twelve wheels, Tutte realized requiring a team of twenty-six cryptographers, Barrett has chosen to divide his subject themat-
to another Tunny machine, which stripped that adding a copy of a message to itself, but twenty-eig ht engineers and 273 operators . On ly ically as well as historically, militating against
away the obscuring characters and printed out shifted over by one place, would yield valuable two of the Colossi survived when British code- the sort of clarity that might be expected from a
the message as origina lly typed. statistica l information . The staggere d rotation breaking was moved from Bletch ley Park in single-author treatment. The book suffers from
The lirst Tunny messages were captured system that the Tunny machine used to drive 1946, continuing service as part of the new ly needless repetitions and small errors, which sap
by the British in the middle of 1941. Within a live of its wheels combined with patterns com- constituted GCHQ until about 1960. Security the reader's confidence . It is surprising to lind an
coup le of months, a stroke of luck allowed the mon to every message , such as repeated letters, concerns meant that the rest of the machines account of the internet revolution that makes no
codebreakers to decrypt their first transmission - diphthongs and other features of the German were broken up following orders from Church- mention of recent shifts towards user-generated
a German operator had transmitted the same mes- language to allow Tutte to strip out the contribu- ill that no part larger than a man's fist should content, peer-to-peer networks, Wikipedia or
sage twice using the same settings. If the mes- tion of five of the machine 's twelve wheels - remain. even Google. Neil Barrett fails to convey the
sage had been exactly the same, this would not enough to allow skilled codebreakers to crack Cope land has brought together detailed drama and excitement of changes that have seen
have mattered, but on this occasion the what remaine d. Thoug h the comp licated statisti- accounts from some of the major figures in the computers transform from noisy, hulking beasts
message had been hand-typed, giving tiny differ- cal calcu lations involved made this method drama (including Flowers, Newman and Tutte) , like Colossus into the omnipresent engines of
ences in spelling and punctuation. By adding the impractical for the codebreakers to perform on and supplemented them with essays, by a range Western society that they are today.

--------------------------~--------------------------
ccording to its author, Mar tin Kemp, images. It could be argued that such work is too

A Seen/Unseen is a contribution to a
"history of the visual" that attempts to
go beyond the divisions between the arts and
Picture that theoretical for a book intended for general con-
sumption; but Seen/Unseen is too idiosyncratic
in its choice of subject matter to be comfortab ly
the sciences . It is a study of how the style of C HARLIE GERE practice diminishes, especially once Kemp regarded as such.
images, whether from science of art, conveys moves away from the Renaissance. The small I suspect that Martin Kemp is simply not
complex cultural values. In particu lar, it seeks Martin Kemp section on Andy Goldsworthy at the end seems intereste d in such approac hes. What he clearly
to show that scientific images are just as to be there in order to justify the use of the word is fascinated by is the way in which representa-
much redolent of their period as artistic images . SEEN/UNSEEN "art" in the book's title, rather than add to the tions and visual styles help us to order and
It ranges wide ly, taking in early modern Art, science and intuition from Leonardo to the argument. understand our apprehension of the world,
astronomy; the representation of space in Hubble Telescope This, then, may be the academic equivalent of rather than how they might be used as a means ,
368pp.Oxford UniversityPress.£25 (US $45). the dog that did not bark in the night, the absence for examp le, of self-expression. Art itself is
Renaissance architecture; the representation
9780 19 9295722 that is a symptom of something interesting that is thorough ly subordinated to science in this
of nature in Leonardo da Vinci 's microcosmic
studies and in the pottery of Bernard Palissy: not being properly acknowledged. A more particular attempt at a cross-disciplinary visual
the relation between the early theories of accepts the absence of the kind of theoretica l theoretical approach might have produced an history. Furthermore, Seen/Unseen reads as if
Erasmus Darwin and other eighteenth-century approac h that is more usual to art history. Partic- analysis of the differences between the styles of written by someone with a scientific-realist
scientists and Romantic artists such as Robert ularly enjoyab le is the materia l about Bernard representation to be found in art and in science; view of the purposes of representation, and a
Thornton; the downgrading of the visual in the Palissy and D' Arcy Thompson, though Kemp tellingly, such approaches are not even men- comparative lack of interest in other factors,
representation of ideas about evo lution from has missed a trick in not mentioning the strong tioned. Thus, in a book that includes a section contexts and drives. This is not necessarily a
Charles Darwin through Mende l to Dawkins; influence the latter had on the Independent about the emergence of perspective, there is no fault, but those looking for a critica l ana lysis
the application of the geometrical theories of Group (the loose collection of artists , designers, mention of the work of Martin Jay, for examp le, of the different regimes of power that order
D' Arcy Thompson to both art and science; and architects and theorists that coalesced around who has written about the different "scopic the visual field will be disappointe d. Those,
the various forms of recording made possib le London' s Institute for Contemporary Arts in regimes of modernity", or, in a section about pho- however, looking for a handsome and beguiling
by photography and other representational the 1950s). But as the narrative proceeds , the tography, that of Jonathan Crary and his work on study of the different ways, scientific or artistic,
techno logies. attention paid to scientific representation perception, or in one about scientific images, no in which we can mirror nature, will find much
There is much to treasure here, once one increases and that to more artistic kinds of reference to James Elkin's work on non-artistic to enjoy.

T LS JUNE 8 2007 - 28-

 CLAS S ICS

wo thousa nd years ago , Caesar Augus- ge t away with an esse ntially mean ingless title,

T tus was in his late sixties and facing

the ange r of the gods. The Rom e to
whic h he had bro ught peace and pro speri ty, a
Days at a time as man y authors do, if you r subti tle ex plains
what the book is about. But Kin g never makes it
cle ar what " male subjec tivity " means; his read -
city adorn ed with his bron ze and marble mon u- ers are expec ted to be fami lia r with the conce pt
ment s, had been struc k in qu ick succession by T . P. WI S EMAN alread y, j ust as they have to understand
earthquakes, floods and a de vastating lire . His " homoerotic spec ter" , " libidina l exc ha nge",
son and heir had died , aged twent y-two . The " the symbolic scree n", and "q uilting point"
R. J o y Littl e w o od
Ba lkan prov inces he had added to Rom e ' s (this last an obsessively recurring co nce pt bor-
Em pire were in revol t fro m the Danube to the A C O M MEN TA R Y O N O V ID 'S rowe d fro m Jacqu es Lacan ). He help s his read-
Adriatic; rese rvists had to be ca lled up, ex- "FA ST ] " ers only by poin ting to other boo ks, as whe n he
slaves enlisted, new and unp opul ar taxes Book 6 cites "w hat Lacan ca lled anamor phosis ", "w hat
impo sed . Wo rst of all, successi ve har vests 352pp. Oxford University Press. £60 (US $ 115). Pierre Bo urd ieu called ' a sy noptic illusion"',
9780 19927 1344
fa iled. There was fami ne in Rom e. "w hat Victor Tu rner called comm unitas ", "w ha t
The poet Ovidiu s Naso (or "O vid", as the Ri ch a rd J. Kin g Marcel Chio n ca lls 'acousmatic' '', " what
Engli sh have called him since Cha uce r's time) Majorie Ga rber ca lled 'ca tegory crisis'''.
was in his late forties. W itty, sop his ticate d, end- D E SI RI N G R O ME Throughout, the language is relentl essly
Ma le subje ctivity and readin g Ovid' s "Fasti"
lessly inventi ve, for thirty yea rs he had ce le- abstrac t and metaphorical. Here is the pro-
328pp. Ohio State University Press. $69 .95.
brated the life of love and pleasure, chro nicli ng gramme sta teme nt: "This book acc ounts for
97808 142 10208
his tempestuous relatio nship wit h "Co rinna" in the inco mpletio n and discont inu ity of the Fasti
the Amores, imagi ning the desires and jealou s- differentl y [from previ ous scho lars ' work]; it
ies of mythological lad ies in the H eroides, and this month ha s been and is most fort unate for embraces lack of co mpletio n and discon tinu ity
finally co m piling a three-volume manu al of our empi re, the Sen ate resol ves that this month as tro ubli ng ' blots ' (of Ovids unm ana geable
seductio n in the A rs Amat oria, followe d by a be called Augustus" . The reference was to the ' real' life), obsc uring direc t views of the poem
fourth on how to reverse the pro cess. As one of day in 30 BC when the yo ung Caesar, as he then and prov oking the reader's desire of who leness
his co nte mpo raries put it, "he has li lled this was, had entered Cleopatra' s A lexa ndria as the and (narra tive) co nti nuity". And here is Kin g' s
age (ho c saeculumi wit h ero tic handb ooks and victor in the last of the civ il wa rs. It was the first ex planation of O vid' s choice of subjec t:
erotic epigra ms". However, Ovid' s age was a day of A ugust, when sacrifice was made each The ca lendar, as syno ptic illu sion. provides a
saec ulum of a very part icul ar kind, a new era year at the temp le of Hope (Spes); now it rationa lized sce nario of ritual repetition - an
announced by August us wit h elabora te reli- becam e a public holid ay, to celebra te "the liber- ideo logica l fanta sy - that person s ca n use to
gious cere mo nia l in 17 BC to mark the end of ation of the republic from most grievo us peril " . scree n the Real of co nflicti ng force s that other -
the bad old days of civ il war and moral wic ked- Wh en A ugustus ina ugurate d his new age , the wise threa ten to split the subj ect's imagi nary
ness. The hymn to the gods on that occas ion, choir 's hymn had ended wit h Hope, an emotio n HercuIes driving away Pan from the bed and symbo lic identification s. Spec tral return of
Horace 's Carmen Saec ulare, hailed the return that was also a goddess. Bu t now the templ e of of Omphale (1590), by Tintoretto; an the Rea l adumbrates the dark, repressed under-
of "ancient Chast ity and neglected Virtue " . Ho pe was in ruins, destroyed probabl y in the illustration of an episode from Ovid ' s Fa sti side of ideologies (fantasies) bolstering the
That was n't ho w O vid and his rea ders saw it. grea t lire of AD 5. August us was terrified by symbolic order.
"It's useful that gods sho uld exist " , he wro te the loss of the gods ' favo ur, and is said to have the wrong track , and he ran into imp edim ents" . T he arg ume nt rests on the unexamin ed
in the A rs Amatoria , "so let' s suppose they do ." conte mplated suici de. He was afra id that the Part of that was special plead ing to prepare the premiss that Ovi d 's reader s we re "elite Rom an
A ugus tus , on the other hand , was a belie ver ; he sta rvi ng peo ple might rise up against him , and reader for Syme ' s redatin g of the poe m to males" , sometimes further specilied as
knew that the gods had mad e his ac hieve me nt he suspec ted treason within his ow n fami ly. before AD 4 , a pro posal whic h has fo und little " upwardly mobil e elite males" , su bject to "e lite
possible, and that if they we re offe nded they Wh en he was told that Ovid had see n somet hing favo ur. But there are a lso some grat uitous male anxieties" and behavin g with "e lite male
co uld take it all away again . The moral rearm a- suspici ous and failed to report it, his long resent- assumption s at wor k. Th e poem is not a versi- wari ness". From the start, O vid' s poetry had
ment program me reall y mattered to him. ment at the immora lity of the A rs Am atoria fied ca lendar, eve n though tra ditiona lly editors been addre ssed ex plici tly to men and wome n
Ovid had already change d tack by the time of turn ed to fury. In AD 8 Ovid was bani shed to try to make it look like one by inser ting dates alik e; in the Fasti, his varied subject matter
the disaster s of A D 5- 7 , and was now working a fron tier town on the Bla ck Sea, ju st sout h of and various ca lendrica l formul ae into Ovid ' s leads him to add ress all sorts of imagi ned rea d-
on two big new projects. The first was the great the Danub e delt a. text. Nor is there the slightest reason to think ers , such as schoo lchildren (March 19) , married
epic narrat ive ca lled Metamorphoses, a huge In one of his poe ms fro m exi le (there are ten that O vid' s imm en sely fert ile storytelling talent wo me n (Ap ril I , Jun e 11), pro stitut es (April
"sea of sto ries ", eac h mergin g into the next, vo lumes of them) O vid cla imed to ha ve co m- was un sympathetic to mat er ial fro m obsc ure 23), farmers (Ja nuary 24, April 12) , shep her ds
fro m the whole range of Gree k mythology; pleted all twe lve books of the Fast i. If that' s sources, or unint erested in the gods and ho w (Ap ril 21), artisa ns (March 19) , and the Ro ma n
among its cast of thousa nds are Apollo and true, though it may we ll not be, it is easy to see mortals wo rshi p them . Ce rtainly the subject People as a whole (April 4, Ma y 12, Jun e 23) .
Daph ne, Pyramu s and This be, Mid as of the why he suppresse d at least the Jul y and August was a cha lle nge, but this is a poet who thrive s But King has chose n to operate with "E ve
go lden touch , and the encha ntress he ca lls Tita- vo lumes , which would inevi tably have been full on cha llenges. Sed gwick ' s model of male 'ho mos ocia l
nia. Th e ot her poem was the Fast i, similarly of upbeat materi al abou t the rule of the Caesars. More recentl y the poem has at last found desire" ' , so all tha t evi de nce has to be ignore d .
kaleidoscopic but this tim e struc ture d on the As it was, he abando ned the poem for nine long prop er appreciatio n, wit h va lua ble monograph s For him , the Fasti is "a ' locus of media tion ' ,
calendar of rites and festivals that mad e up the years. Augustus died in A D 14. His successor by John M iller tO vid 's Eleg iac Fes tivals, where the poet plays with scree ning his own
Roman yea r; planned as twe lve volumes for the T iberiu s was not dispo sed to revoke the bani sh- 1991) , Geraldine Herber t-Bro wn (Ovid and the desire of knowing wha t the com plex Oth er
twel ve month s, it includes the rape of Lucrece men t ord er, but Tiberius was alrea dy in his mid- "Fasti", 1994 ) and Carol e New lands (Play ing wo uld want" ; the ex iled Ovid is submissive,
and the sto ry Botticell i painted as "P rimave ra" , fift ies when he ca me to po wer, and no one with Time, 1995), and a brilli ant one by A lessan- fem inized and, of co urse , sym bolica lly
O vid li nished the Metamorphoses, but the Fas ti knew how long he wo uld last. His heir appare nt dro Barchiesi (The Poet and the Prince, 1997). cast rated .
as we have it break s off at the end of Jun e. was Germ an icu s, yo ung, cha rismatic and a Up-to-da te co mme ntaries ha ve appeared for If psycho anal ysis has a value, it is sure ly
He dedica ted the Fasti to August us, and very poet. Would he want the glory of Ro man litera- Boo k 4 (Elai ne Fantha m, 1998) and Book I therape utic. Th ere see ms little po int in atte mpt-
pro perl y incorporate d in it all the significant ture to go on ro tting in ex ile? In AD 17 , amid (Steven Gree n, 2004), and we ca n now we l- ing it on a man who ha s been dead for nearl y
A ugus tan ann iversaries. " I' m no soldier, Cae- sce nes of grea t pop ular enthusiasm, the glamor- co me a vade mecum for Book 6 as we ll. R. Joy two millenni a. Besides, the diag nosis depen ds
sar", he wro te, "but in yo ur service I bear wha t ous yo ung prince held his long-awai ted tri- Littlewood ' s lirst study of the poem was pub- not on the sto ries Ovi d ac tua lly tell s, but on
a rms I ca n." Usi ng the Rom an yea r was itse lf umph , and dedi cated the re built tem ple of lished in 1981 , and the co mme ntary shows all "a ngu lar views" and "s kewed vantage po ints"
a tactful artili ce . The crea tion of an astronomi- Hope. O vid meanwhil e had embarked on a the bene li t of her long familiar ity with it. There which enable the analys t to ext ract the required
ca lly acc urate ca lendar was one of the most re writt en versio n of the Fasti, dedi cated , of are a few slips (An cu s Marciu s as a son of mean ings fro m texts tha t say somet hing quit e
lasting ac hieve me nts of Augustu s' father Juliu s co urse , to Ge rmanic us him self. He had fin ished Numa , a self-sac rilice by Mettu s Curtius), and differen t. The book offe rs plen tiful evi de nce for
Caesar, and Augustus himsel f had been respon- Book I , and mad e some adj ustme nts to Boo ks not eve ryo ne will be persu aded that there is a King' s close rea ding of the poe m and wide read-
sible for the final necessary adju stm ent to it. In 2-6, when death too k him in the same yea r. running the me of war in Book 6 corresponding ing of the scholarly literatu re, but in the end it
hon our of the res pec tive refo rmers , the month The rece ption of the Fast i in rece nt times has to one of peace in Boo k I. But what matters has nothing to of fer to read ers interested in liter-
Qu inctilis was renamed "July" in 45 BC, and in been very uneven . Sir Ron ald Sym e believed about co mme ntaries is that they shou ld help the ature or history. They may prefe r to reme mber
8 BC the mon th Sex tilis became " August" . Part that the poet had found "the vers ified calenda r reader to understand a dem and ing text, and in the O vid who never gave up hope, and ended
of the Senate ' s dec ree on the latter occ asion of the sta te religion" an uncon genial them e. In that Littl ewood ' s work is exe m plary, an impor- his Metamorphoses with an ep ilog ue that de lied
happen s to survive: " Since in this month Egypt History in Ovid (1978) he wro te: "A ma n need s tant add ition to O vid ian scholars hi p. August us ' power. As A. D. Mel ville translates
was brou gh t into the dom inion of the Rom an to have the passion for antiquaria n erud ition as W ith Rich ard J. Kin g' s Desiring Rome: Male it, "Now sta nds my task acco mplished, such a
Peopl e, and in this mon th an end was imposed we ll as a ce rtain sy mpat hy wit h superstition or subjectiv ity and readi ng Ovid 's "Fas ti", we are wo rk / As not the wra th of Jove, nor lire nor
on the civi l wa rs, and since for these reason s entra nce ment with myster y .. .. O vid was on in qu ite differen t scho larly terri tory. You ca n sword / Nor the devou rin g ages ca n de stroy".

- 2 9- TLS J UNE 8 2 0 07
 RELIGION

revolution has swept America n Christ- their faith in free enterprise, and marched to

A ianity durin g the past thirty years. With

the old mainline Protestant denomina-
tions and the Roman Catholic Chu rch facing
Gods of TV the heartbeat of American popular culture. Pro-
voked into action by the pro-abortion , femini st
and secularist lobbies of the 1960s and 70s,
serio us problems, the third great force in Amer- Evangelicals came out swinging in the late
ican religion, populi st Evangelicalism, has DAVID H E M P T O N spheres such as abort ion and homo sexua lity. 1970s and 80s . They are now a force to be reck-
surged to the forefront, numerically, culturall y Evangelicals may therefore be protesting oned with, as anyone who follows the careful
and politically. President Bush not only identi- Rich ard K y l e against the nation' s moral breakdown , but they cultivation of Evangelicals by the 2008 presi-
fies with this tradition, but would not be in the are not compl aining much about its materialism dential hopefuls will know. More generally,
Wh ite House without its formidable electoral EV A NGELI CA LI S M and consumerism. Evangelicals may claim to Kyle' s account of how this American version of
support. American Evangelical Protestantism, An Am ericanized Christianity uphold the Bible, but their biblical illiteracy has global fundamentalism constructed its founda-
though still not well understood, is now, through 327pp. Transaction. £26.50 (US $34.95). reached unprecedent ed levels. In the elucid a- tions before its increased visibility in the 1970s
its political clout, one of the most important 978 07 6580324 5 tion of paradox, however, Kyle' s main aim is makes for an interesting compari son with other
ideological shapers of the modern world. But not to expose hypocri sy or promote cynicism, forms of religious fundamentalism elsewhere.
how is it to be interpreted? What are its historical the South and from California , the new media- but rather to issue a warning to Americ an Evan- Thi s book is under-edited, too sermonic and
roots, and what are its contemporary cultural savvy Evangelic alism has little time for the gelicals that shrewd cultural adaptation is one too repetitive to be the definitive text on the
characteristics? These are the themes of Richard liberal agendas of the old East Coast Protestant thing: wholesale cultural accommodation is American Evangelical tradition , but it is prob-
Kyle' s authoritative and readable book. Kyle elites or their power bases in the Ivy League uni- quite another. ably the best general account of the historical
writes as both an insider and an outsider. As an versities, and the legal and scientilic worlds. Perhap s the most important part of Kyle' s roots and contemporary characteri stics of this
Anabaptist-Mennonite he is from one of the Indeed, one of Kyle' s main points is that just argument is his explanation of how Evangelical- compl ex phenomenon. Very little of the Evan-
lesser known and least powerful of the groups as the Christianit y of mainline Protestants has ism emerged from its relatively marginal posi- gelical past and present has esca ped Richard
that make up the variegated Evangelical family, caved in to elite cultur e, the Christiani ty of the tion in the aftermath of the Second World War Kyle' s gaze, which is genera lly straight and
and as a professor of history he is at an elite dis- Evangelicals has capi tulated to popular culture. to its promin ent position today. Borro wing penetrat ing. His exposition of how American
tance from the populi st style of contempor ary The centr al paradox of Kyle' s book, namely from other s, Kyle reiterates the point that after Evangelicalism has at once condemned, appro-
Evangelicalism about which he writes. that count ercu ltural Evangelicals have ridden the ignom iny of the Scopes Trial in the 1920s priated and consumed popular culture is not
The main theme of the book , as the title to power on the back of relentless cultura l adap- and their loss of influence in most Protestant only an appropriate way of viewing that tradi-
suggests, is that instead of creating a Christian tation, gives rise to lots of secondary paradoxes. denominations in the interwar years, Evangeli- tion, but helps explain the paradox that has
America, as was their initial intention, Evangeli- For example, most Americ an Evangelicals cals and fundamentalists patientl y built up their befudd led secularization theori sts for years
cals have effectively Americanized Christian- plead for less government in economic matters, institutions (Bible institutes, Christian colleges of how modern America has become more
ity. Although Kyle supplies a useful historical but more government regulation in moral and ubiquitou s grassroots organization s), kept religious and more secular at the same time.
account of how and why this happened , the
real punch of the book lies in its characteriza- -----------------~-----------------
tion of what has taken place in the past thirty hat does it say about historians of Christian cosmology, and devils were them-
years, particul arly through the rise of the mega
and electronic church es. Just as striking are the
huge numbers who listen to Christian radio, or
W early modern supernaturalism that
they have been so much more inter-
ested in witches, ghosts and de vils than in
Come, selves routinely identilied as fallen angels.
Robin Briggs' s contribution, appropriatel y
titled "Dubious Messengers", stresses how

circle
watch televangelists, or read the acres of print angels? The editors of An gels in the Early angels and demon s were "inextricably bound
produced by popul ist Evangelicals such as Hal Modem World, Peter Marshall and Alexandra together, seen as formed of the same mysteriou s
Lindsey, Rick Warren and Tim LaHa ye, who Walsham, ask whether post-medievalists have immaterial substance and subject to similar limi-
are amon g the bestselling author s of all time. been put off the topic because it has been tations" . Thi s metaphysical similarity between
All of this has been produced by a movement associated too exclusively with early Christian ALISON S HELL good and bad spirits helps to suggest why
which has traditionally regarded itself as dis- and medieval thought. Certainly, historians' visions of angels were often treated with suspi-
tinctly countercultural or even marginalized by often scornful treatment of angelology has clear cion: they might be a satanic deception in them-
culture . How can this be explained? Protestant antecedent s. The question of how P et er Marsha ll and selves, or accompany evil spirits, or imply that
Kyle' s method is to show how Evangelical- many angels cou ld dance on the head of a pin, A lexandra W a lsh am , e d i t o r s the visionary was tamperin g with forbidden
ism' s longstanding embrace of a market eco - long used to parody over-relined academic ANGELS I N THE EARL Y MODER N matter s.
nomy in a nation with no Established Church inquiry in general, has been wrongly attribut ed WORLD Some individua ls at this date experienced
has shaped its cultural style. Throughout its to Thom as Aquinas, but see ms to have first 326pp. Cambridge University Press. £55 (US$99). angel s or demon s as an advisory presence at
history, Evangelicali sm has peddled a conserva- appeared in print in 1638, in The Reli gion of 9780 521843324 their side; others saw the supernatural battle
tive, sometimes fundamentalist, message Prot estants by William Chillin gworth . between good and evil played out before them
through modern and inno vative method s. From A reconsideration of angels is, then, an sex, and if so, how ? Thanks to Pa radise Lost, in positively cinematic terms. Amon g them was
George Whitefield, the eighteenth-century excellent and very timely project, and the scholars of early modern literatur e have paid the Commonwealth minister John Pordage,
reviva list, to Bill Hybels, the pastor of the collection's intercontinental breadth lives up to more attention to angels than have their oppo- who had strong links to the underground mysti-
Willow Creek mega church in Chica go, Evan- the promi se of its title. The main focus is inevi- site number s in history departm ents; Joad cal tradition associated with Hendrik Niclae s
gelicals have been both trend-setters and trend- tably on Reformation and Counter-Reform ation Raymond ' s essay, focusing on the logistics of and Jacob Boehme . Ejected from his rectory in
follo wers in adapting their message to popular theology and its reception and development in Milton ' s poem, conclude s that Milton' s angels 1654, Pordage published a vindication of his
culture . Althou gh this feature of Evangelical- England , but Raymond Gillespie, Elizabeth are conceived in exceptiona lly bodily terms. conduct in which he described his visions of
ism has a long historical pedigree, its signili - Reis and Fernando Cervantes contribute strong As this suggests, while the collection ' s over- both evil and good angels: the former had "ears
cance has increased since the 1960s for a essays on - respectively - Ireland, Puritan New all focus is more historical than literary, it con- like those of Cats, cloven feet, ugly legs and
variety of reasons. The democratization of the England and Spani sh America . In the early tains many leads for literary critics. Among bodies" ; the latter were "spirits, in ligurati ve
airwaves, the easing of immigration control s, stages of evangelizing South America , Euro- these is the possibility of gaining a sharper focus bodies, which were clear as the morning-star,
the decline of denom inationalism, and the den i- pean missionaries practised the kind of cultural on the language of flattery. All angels were by and transparent as Christal".
gration of elite cultur e have all contribut ed to syncretism analysed by Peter Davidson in delinition subservient to God, while the notion Angels, in other words, can have a dangerou s
a baby boomer religiosity which is seeker- his forthcomin g monograph The Universa l of angelic hierarchies was given its most delini- imaginati ve polyvalency: which may be why,
friendl y, conve nient, non-liturgical and thor- Baro que. Bernardino de Sahaguns Psatmodia live formulation by Dion ysius the Pseudo- comp ared to the early modern wo rld, not much
oughly Americ an. Bubblin g up primaril y from Christiana, originall y compo sed in Nahuatl , Areopagite in the lifth or sixth centuries. Thus , is heard about them in today' s Church . But as
compares angels to native bird life: "You divine to call someone an angel is sometimes a straight- a glance at the "Mind, Body and Spirit" section
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --, orioles, you grosbeaks, you mockin gbirds, you forward hyperbo le, sometimes a term of scrupu- of most bookshops will conlirm, belief in
hummingbirds, all you sons of God, you angels: lously limited praise. Thi s helps to contextualize angels forms a large part of popular occultism:
NEW AUIHORS
PUBLISH YOUR BOOK
come, circle round the court yard of our
church". More common, though, was the con-
the famously abstruse ending of Donne' s poem
"Air and Angels" , often interpreted as implying
in particular , the notion of the guardian angel
provides comfort at a remarkable distance from
ALL SUBJECTS INVITED ceptualization of angels as superhuman. Even if that women's affections are less spiritual and its Catholic origins. As the editors of this vol-
FICTION, BIOGRAPHY, HISTORICAL, POETRY, FANTASY & SCI-FI, the question of angels' pin-dancin g capaciti es more bodily than men' s: "Just such disparity I ume put it, "Modern popular culture in North
RELIGIOUS, SPIRITUAUSELF·HELP, ACADEMIC &REFERENCE
WRITE OR SENDYOUR MANUSCRIPTTO: was never seriously posed, both medie val and As is ' twixt air and angels' purity I 'T wixt America and (particu larly) Western Europe

:~
7 '\J '!!!!!!2~~Y~!~
early modern thinkers were fascinated by the women's love, and men' s will ever be". At their may have discarded much of its foundational
question of how these higher being s best, angels were only ever transmitter s of Christian heritage, but it retain s an almost
TWICKENHAM TW1 4EG , ENGLAND differed from humans: How do angels talk to God' s goodness; at their worst, they could sub- visceral understanding of the potency of images
www .athe napress.com
e-mail: info@athenapress.com each other? How do they digest? Do they have vert creation . Angels mirrored devils in the of angelic care and protection ".

TLS JU N E 8 2007 - 30 -
 RELIGION

ebb Keane' s Christian Modem s between persons and things, good spirits and

W discloses a beautifully simple idea.

Religious faith in the transce ndent
can not help but be expresse d through material
Mission statements bad ones, to distinctions among objects and
what they imply for the persons who possess ,
exchange or use them.
forms and represe ntations, in what Keane calls Webb Keane provides subtle and sympa-
a "semiotic ideology". All worship, even the B ER NI C E M ARTIN argument is that human beings are chronically thetic analyses of the two-way adj ustments and
worship "in spirit and in truth" of a God so tran- prone to displace their own agency on to objects mutual incorporations that can occur where the
scende nt he cannot be named or represented in - images, natural phenom ena, animals, and so Calvinist "representational economy" encoun-
W ebb K e an e
images, has to be materialized through human, on, understood as the vehicles of invisi ble ters that of the indigenous Sumbanese. Early
and therefore social, media of expre ssion, even C H RIS TIAN MOD E R NS forces - in what is commonly known as "fetish- in the colonial enterprise Dutch administrators
where the med ium is language (creed s, sacred Freedom and fe tish in the mission encounter ism". "Purifica tion" is essentially a classifica- and anthropologists, as well as missionaries,
texts) rather than material objects. This means it 336pp. University of Califo rnia Press. Paperback , tion exercise, sorting out persons (with agency) found it necessary to make an (inevitably)
can never attain a condition sufficie ntly abstract $21.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £ 13.95. from things (without agency). The idea l of arbitrary distinction between what constituted
or "spirit ual" to preclude corruption, nor can it 9780 520 24652 2 human agency, "freedom", "emancipation", at "religion" and "c ulture" respectively, in order
be wholly spontaneous and sincere beca use the heart of the moral project of modernity, is to protect local custom and define the legiti-
even inner contemplation involves socia lly Christian Modem s is not an ethnography, itself derived, via the secularization of the mate field of mission activity. Its long-term
constructed conscio usness. Consequently, most though it deploys illustrations from historical Enlightenment, from ju st this purification drive consequences run through all the concrete
faiths, particularly those that emphasize divine and contemporary ethnograp hic work. Rather, in Protestantism, from which it passed into instances of the mission enco unter discussed in
transcendence, are prone to recurrent bouts of it is a theoretical exploration of the way the European politics and science alike. the book. The powerfully perform ative mode of
"p urification". paradox of transce ndence works itself out The problem Webb Keane addresses is none ritual language spills over from the ancestor
This is an idea that has found its time. There in a missionary enco unter between the most other than the classic sociological conundrum: cult into the newly minted ritual of a conver t
has been a recent spate of publications in abstract and morally rigoro us form of European if humans are the product of interaction with announcing his imminent Christian baptism.
the sociology of religion and religious studies " puritan" Christianity, and indigenous practices other humans, in the context of cultural forms Conceptions of bride-wealth mutate from the
dealing with religious dress, liturgical language, in which the materialization involved in they themselves did not create, how can they ritual and material goods that connect the
the choreography of ritual, religious architecture, ancestor cults, marapu , is elaborate, taken for have pure agency without stripping themselves families in a marriage exchange into a Christian-
and a new jo urnal, Materializing Religion, granted and wove n into the moral construction (an impossibility in any case) of all the things inflected valuation where they are dematerial-
in which something close to Webb Keanes of the Sumb anese. Keane seeks to show that that went into making them human ? Keane ized as symbols of the inherent value of an indi-
idea provides the underlying rationale. What is the drive to deva lue the material, which the attributes this perception to Marx, but it goes vidual bride. Keane' s final discussions of how
distinctive about Keane's approach is the theoret- missionaries introduced, has had consequences back at least as far as the Enlightenment origins the traditional description of the house is turned
ical thoroughness with which he pursues the beyond the immediate practice of relig ion, and of the social scientific enterprise : it underlies from a powerful ritual of communication with
implications of the paradox of transcendence, ultimately alters the constitution of Sumbanese Montesquieu ' s dilemma over ass igning moral ancestors into an inert poetic text, and how the
which takes a particularly striking form in the "subjects". responsibili ty for the "climatically determined " introdu ction of state-backed money articulates
Calvinist mission field of Indonesia where his He draws on structuralist and post-structural- institutions of slavery and polygamy, and with the Sumbanese ritual exchange system,
own field work took place. He worked on the ist theories of language and of representation, Locke' s attempt to devise a purely "objective" are rich demonstrations of the explanatory and
island of Sumba , where Dutch missionaries of but remains flexible and eclectic, particularly in language as the vehicle for unbia sed empirica l interpretive purchase his theoretical tools have
the re-Reformed Calvinist Church have been avoiding overdetermined models of symbolic observation. At all events it is, as Keane in co ncrete instances of modernization. He
meticulous in keeping the faith uncorrupted by actio n or language use. He takes his basic cues, stresses, built deep into the project of moder- concludes we should never assume that, jus t
syncretistic influences from the indigenous however, from Bruno Latour, particularly nity, and finds apparently secular or "c ultural" because we use the same words, we fully know
ancestor cult. Latours use of the term "purificat ion". The express ion in the drive to extend the distinction what eve n the modern Other means.

-----------------------~-----------------------
mmet Larkin established his pre- Christmas and Easter the parish clergy became

E eminence as an interpreter of nineteenth-

century Irish Catholicism in 1972, with a
seminal article in which he argued that the years
To your Stations itinerants, travelling round their parishes to say
Mass and hear the confessions of an entire dis-
trict, basing themselves in the houses of the
after 1850 had witnessed a "devotional revolu- E A M ON DU F FY and these very unevenly distributed. wealthier farmers, at the same time collecting
tion" in Ireland, during which the disorderly peas- Since there we re no se minaries in eig ht- their "dues", the levy on property and income
ant relig ion of the poorest co untry in Western E m me t L arki n eent h-century Ireland, the clergy were trained which form ed their main inco me, and conso lidat-
Europe was gradually brought under the control abroad, mostly in France. The sons of farmers, ing links with the better-off laity by receiving
of a disciplined, educated and increasingly asser- TH E P ASTORAL RO LE OF TH E shopkeepers and tradesmen, their expensive hospitality from them. These Stations were
tive clergy. That revolution, to which the death ROM A N C ATH O LIC C HU RC H IN studies were funded by the bizarre expe dient of always intensely problematic - because of the
or emigration of the poorest third of the popula- PR E -F AMI N E IR E LA ND , 1750 -1 8 50 ordaining candidates at once, often belo w the drunkenness which attended the station dinners,
308pp. Washington, DC: Catholic University of canonical age, so that they cou ld pay their way
tion during the famine years was the single most the financial strains and resentments the practice
America Press. $69.95.
significant contributory factor, turned the Irish through co llege from the income of Mass created, the moral ambiguities and scandals sur-
978 0 8132 1457 3
peasantry into the most docile Catholics in the stipends. Rome fretted about this blatant irregu- rounding the hearing of women's confessions in
world, and, in the process, helped determine the larity, but the Irish bishops simply could not a domestic setting, and in general the blatant lack
character of the modem Irish state. The Irish Church in 1750 was recovering afford to reform it. Larkin' s book, however, of conformity between the turbulent "Stations"
Over the past thirty years Larkin has fleshed from the dracon ian anti-Catholic legislation of sympathetically traces the heroic if not ulti- and the decoro us church-based pastoral norms
out that manifesto in a series of book s offe ring a the Willi amite period, when hundr eds of clergy mately successful efforts of three remarkable established by the Council of Trent. In Larkin' s
decade-by-decade analysis of the activities and had been forced to flee Ireland. Bishops and generations of bishops to cope with a mountin g j udgement, however, the "Stations" with all their
attitudes of the bishops and higher clergy , religio us superiors recruited frantica lly once series of pastoral crises: the destruction of the drawbacks averted the breakdown of pre-famine
closely based on manuscript sources , though by persecution eased, and many unworthy entire Irish seminary syste m durin g the French Irish Catholicism, maintaining pastoral contact
and large stronger on the political dimensions candidates were ordai ned in early Hanoverian Revolution, an extraordinary population explo- with a population which could not be reached in
of the story than the devotional. In The Pastoral Ireland , persuading not only a hostile British sion (a 270 percent increase in the century any other way, and for whom the Tridentine
Role of the Roman Ca tholic Church in Pre- Gover nment, but also a scandalize d Vatican, before 1847), and the strident factionalism rife ideal of weekly Mass attendance in the parish
Famine Ireland, 1750-1 850 he turns away from that there were too many priests in Ireland. In among the clergy in the ear ly nineteenth cen- church was a simple impossibility. The alliance
the fraught episcopal politics of the later nine- the 1740 s, Pope Benedict XIV issued a series of tury. Increasingly united in commitment to which Stations promoted between the clergy and
teenth century to explore in fascinating deta il wellintentioned but counter-productive re- reform, the bishops created new co lleges in Ire- the farming class would survive the cataclysm of
the charac ter and pastoral dilemm as of the pre- scripts designed to improve Irish clerical stand- land, most famously Maynooth in 1795, slow ly the famine, he argues, and would provide the
famine Irish Church, the background from ards : the worst of these limited the bishops to a improved clerical standards, and in the seventy basis on which a new Catholicism would
which the devotional revo lution emerged . maximum of twelve priestly ordinations durin g years after 1770 increased clergy provision by emerge. The famine itself would redefine the con-
There have been a number of excellent mono- their lifetime, and requ ired all novices for the 50 per cent. But none of this could keep pace ditions under which the Irish Church operated,
grap hs on pre-famine Catholicism by historians religio us life to study (at crippling expense) on with the galloping growth in population, and the wiping out the poorest stratum of Irish society
such as Sean Conn olly and the late Donal Kerr. the Continent. The resulting chronic shortage of ratio of priests to people was dramatically which was least amenable to ecclesiastical disci-
In its detailed statistical and archival underp in- priests and religious was made worse by the worse in 1840 than it had been in 1750. pline, reducing the ratio of people to priest which
ning, however, in the brio and clarity of its argu- lack of permanent places for Catholic worship, Wha t prevented pastoral catastrophe was had frustrated earlier reform, and clearing the
ment, and in the century-long sweep of its narra- fewer than 700 chapels for Ireland' s thousand the unique Irish phenomenon of "Stations", the ground for the devotional revolution. This is
tive, Larkin' s new book stands alone. or so parishes in the early eighteenth century, practice by which for several weeks around Emmet Larkin' s best and most persuasive book.

- 31 - TLS J UNE 8 2007

 IN BRI E F

often misunderstood and misrepresented as

mawki sh self-pity.
PA ULA BYR N E

Geoffrey Ashe
THE OFFBEAT RADICALS
The British tradition of alternative dissent
274pp . Methuen. £17.99.
978041377 460 6

W ith The Ojjbeat Radi cals, Geoffrey Ashe

marks fifty years of antiqua rian inquiry,
in which he has produced more than twenty pop-
ular and academic works on the condit ion of
mythical England . Much of his work is on
Gardening Arthuri an legend and its putative basis in fact. It
Christopher Lloyd is not surprising therefore that in this book Ashe
CU TTIN GS traces the roots of a peculiarly British type of
A year in the garden with Christopher L10yd radicali sm to Geoffre y of Monm outh' s prophe-
288pp. Chatto and Windu s. £ 18.99. cies of Merlin in the twelfth centur y, a pro-
9780 7011 8 134 5 phetic tradition that was explored and given a
theoreti cal framework by Joachim of Fiore.
The twin notion s of prediction and the crea-
A number of Christopher L1oyd' s books -
most notably The Well- Temp ered Garden
- have been hailed as modern classics; but it
tion of a utopia on earth inform the visionaries
that Ashe examine s, from Blake and the Shel-
was his weekly column for the Gua rdia n that leys to G. K. Chesterton . Such visionaries
made him an unlikely national celebrity. Over a looked towards a revolution theorized in proph-
hundred of these pieces - dispatches from his ecy and based on the transfig uring leap, a trans-
garden at Grea t Dixter in Sussex - have been formation into another world; they all stood in
collected in Cuttin gs. They are, in the main, sea- oppo sition to the Anglic an church. Seeking "a
sonal bulletins on topics which exercise all seri- transformation in attitu des, in thinkin g, in life-
ous gardeners - plant ing, pruning, plant asso- styles, leading to a fundamenta lly different
ciations, etc - interspersed with vignettes of society", Ashe' s radicals were not without
individual genera . The pieces have been well achievement: Robert Owen , for example,
chosen to illustrate L1oyd ' s determinat ion that created a welfare state in miniature with reason-
something exciting could and should be happen- able wages, lower working hours, fair prices,
ing in the garden every day of the year. Th e cent ra l axis of the garden at Villa Allegri Arvedi in Cuzza no, nea r Verona; decent housing, proper draina ge, refuse dis-
As a formidable virtuoso plantsman and tak en from Italian Gardens: A cultural h istory , by Helena Att lee posal and schooling incorporatin g physical edu-
skilled horticulturali st, L10yd was well quali- (240p p. Frances Lin coln. £30. 978 0 7112 2647 0). cation and music lessons. These practical appli-
fied to advise; but his popu larity deri ved in cation s of the "utopian" society are now so
equal measure from his perceived eccentri city. paralleled authority and enthusiasm that it is cer- witty book. Amon g many small items, it notes assimilated into modern life, that it is difficu lt
He spent almost all his life tendin g the grand tain to endure. that the University of Liverpoo l was built in a to comprehend how revolutionary Owen was.
Edward ian garden laid out for his father by AL EXA N D E R URQ UHART disused lunatic asylum . Ashe makes a good case for including
Edwin Lutyens around the Tudor manor house The exodus south by many of the leading Liv- Chesterton , with his back-to-th e-Iand Dis-
erpool families had a lasting impact on the city tributist League , claimin g that this was the last
at Great Dixter. It was the inspiration for almost Socia l Studies which had previou sly benefited from the philan- flowerin g of a kind of English radicalism
everything he did and the breeding ground for
the apparent contradict ion s in his charact er. He John Belch em , edi tor thropy and ci vie valu es of the Ro sco es and the before the Russian Revolution rather dimin-
was fiercely protective of the place and relished LIVERPOOL 800 Rathbon es (the role of John Moor es is rather ished the appeal of a utopia on earth. On the
the sybaritic possibilitie s of house and garden. Culture, character and history unfairly dim inished). Jane Longmore' s excel- way he nods to Richard Brother s, who pro-
He changed nothing about its design ("The orig- 416pp. Liverpool University Press. £35. lent essay shows how eighteenth-century Liver- moted the belief (not entirel y dead today) that
inal bones were so sound and satisfyi ng"), yet 978 I 8463 1034 8 pool did not subscribe to the same notions of the English were the true inheritor s of Israel;
embarked on a programme of uproot ing the polite sociability as leisure towns such as Bath. and to Edward Carpenter, who popularized the
wearing of sandals (he made his own) and a diet
roses and replacing them with subtropical bed-
ding plants in violent colours - "a sense of exoti- W hen Diana Mosley was incarcerated in
Holloway Prison during the Second
World War she was haunted by the words of her
Rather, Liverpool' s cultural pursuits were
shaped by its mercantile sensibility, with an
empha sis on outdoor acti vities. The masculine
of fruit and nuts. Ashe has not exhausted the list
and I was sorry not to lind the honey-lovin g
cism and lush flamboyance. It has been and con-
tinues to be exciting - and it isn't fashionab le". cousin Win ston Churchill on visiting the slums ethos of a port town was reflected in drinkin g philanthropic landlord William Thomp son,
He espoused many traditional values and was of Liverpool: "Imagine how terrible it would club s such as The Ugly Club. Insufficient atten- who creat ed the theoret ical underpinnin g for
relentlessly professional with an almost Presby- be, never to see anything beautiful , never to eat tion is accord ed to the importance of Liver- the Co-operati ve Movement; or the goddess-
terian de votion to back-breaking work; but he anything savoury, never to say anything pool' s Theatre Royal. Stars of the London domin ated utopias such as that promi sed by
abhorr ed "the asphyxiating boredom of the clever". Had Churchill lived to see this new stage, such as Sarah Siddon s, Dora Jordan and Elizabeth Carlile, aka Isis, who appeared at
good taste gardener who hasn't a fresh idea in history of Liverpoo l, he may have revised his Edmund Kean , toured during the long summer meetings in the Blackfriars Road with the floor
his/her head" . opinion. seasons; Georg e Frederick Cooke famously before her strewn with whitethorn and laurel,
Lloyds willingness to experiment with all Liverpool 800: Culture. character and berated the asse mbled gentry at the theatre for offering the promise of a mystical feminist reli-
type s of ga rdeni ng led to a rar e intima cy with h istory pro vid es a lon g o verdue reappraisal of their in vol vem ent wit h the slave trade. gion to co me .
his readers, though he himself rema ined an Liverpool' s chequer ed history from its glory Nor has enough been made of the fact that Ashe is in a tradit ion of reading primary
intriguin gly inscrutable ligure who hardly ever days as the second city of empire and gateway Liverpoo l has always been a matriarcha l city, sources directl y, which makes a refreshing
wrote about himself. His style has been to the New World in the eighteenth and nine- which is a key to its character and its strong change from academic texts that give the
described as "Edwardian", and it is indeed teenth centuries, to its rapid decline in the post- family values. Nevertheless, prominence is impression of being refracted throug h the lenses
schoolmasterly, but leavened with conspirato- industrial, Thatcherite era and its regenera tion given to many of Liverpool' s notable female of many other thinker s, but this does mean his
rial colloquialism: "Speaking personally, I in the twenty-li rst centur y as European Capital figures, including Kitty Wilkin son (founder of notions appear unchallenged, or unique to him.
don't really enj oy beds carved out of a lawn and of Culture for 2008. Liverpool ' s uneasy connec- public wash-houses), Margaret Beavan (first More engagement with other thinker s (and bet-
looking thoroughl y self-conscious. Open jam tion with the slave trade, on which the city first female Lord Mayor), Agnes Jones (who started ter references) would have made this a richer
tarts my mother used to call them. But if that is flourished, is fully addre ssed, its rich maritime a training school for nurses in the Liverpoo l book. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating ramble
what you like, then you' ll be aiming for a blaze history explored, and its contribution to music, Work house Hospital) and "Battling Bessie through the lives of visionary eccentrics for a
of colour". Christopher Lloyds was a maverick art, theatre , fashion, popu lar culture, comedy, Braddock". This volume gives a clear-eyed radicalism that long predated Marxism and has
voice in the panoply of twentieth-century architecture, poetry and literature made clear. and unsentimental overview of a city steeped survived it in New Age thinking.
gardeners, but one which spoke with such un- Lavishly illustrated, this is a vibrant, stylish and in pride and a deep emotional comp lexity so JADADAMS

TLS JUNE 8 2007 - 32-

 IN BRI E F

of sympathy and lucidity, directn ess of address, was used for the deception. It was no coinci- dom esticit y. Most were midd le-class graduate s,
Art History human warmth , and cosmopolitan example. dence that the body was that of a man with no frustrated, in the 1930s, by having to give up
Sheri KIein Berger is difficult to classify. Ever since Ways close family and few friends and whose body emplo yment through the marriag e bar, but "Cot-
A RT AN D LA UGHTER of Seeing (1972 ) he has been a significant cul- would not be undul y missed. The poignant ton Good s" was a working-class member who
168pp. 978 I 8504 3 931 8 tural presence. He describ es himself here as a point of Duff Cooper' s story is that his hero had here writes proudl y about her Lanca shire mill
Kerstein Mev story teller, which may be as apt an appellation always wanted to go into action again st the backgro und. When a hint of anti-Semitism
ART AN D OBSC E N#ITY as any. The strength of his writing is his reading enemy and had only achieved his ambi tion after tinged some entries in 1938, "Ad Astra" asked
I92pp . 978 I 845 11 235 6 - his ability to evok e the work of other writers, death. Duff Cooper, who had doubtl ess learnt "E lektra" , who was Jewish, to join.
Laura Brandon poets especia lly. He has the gift of friendship about the operation in his ministeria l capacity, Members follo wed each other s' activities
ART AND W AR and correspond ence , and has encouraged and was di scoura ged by the government from close ly and sympathetically, so that strong
I92pp . 978 I 845 11 237 0 inspired all manner of creati ve artists. revealin g what had been a wartime top secret; friends hips were soon forged. They all rejoiced
Tauris. Paperback , £14 .99 each. This collection of short essays and reflec - but he persisted, because - as his son John at the success of "Angharad"' s television plays
tions from the past five years or so is a miscel- J ulius Norw ich explains in his preface - he did and wept for the few who se marriage s failed or
lany on art and politic s, like The Shap e of a not see an y circumstances in which the ruse whose children or grandchil dren were handi-
T hese adro it little book s aren't reall y about
art per se, but about the role of art in gener-
ating or modi fying various discour ses on what
Pocket (200 I). Each piece is dated, but no pro v-
enance is given, for the most part ; some frag-
could be used again and therefore had to be kept
under wrap s. It is an engaging novel in its own
capped or morta lly sick. The entries are some-
time s candid about private matters like orga sms
the publisher call s "the real stuff of life" . They ment s look familiar from publi shed article s and right, whic h gives a nostalgica lly sepia-tinted and birth contro l. In a poignant series of confes-
aren't quite as accessible as they are made out exhibition catalogues . The watchwords are sur- picture of life in Britain between the wars. sional letters, "Isis" recount s her unreq uited pas-
to be, but, in genera l, theory is related to prac- vival in the face of displacement , disempo wer- The Man Who Ne ver Was was written by sion for her doctor, subsequent mental collapse
tice with a light touch . ment and despair, and resistance to the depreda- Ewen Montagu (the naval offic er who con- and quest for peace within Catholi cism. The
The troubl e with the real stuff of life is that it tions of "the economic and mi litary global ceived and executed the decept ion) over a details of life durin g the Second Wor ld War are
tend s to bridle at neat taxonomi es. Jake and tyrann y of today" , that is, globa l capit alism. single weekend at the request of the security ser- especia lly vivid, but the book ' s main impact is
Dino s Chapman ' s work, to cite one example, is "Yes, I'm still amongst other things a mar xist." vices as an immediate attempt to tell the story as a human rather than sociological document.
"about" war, laughter and obscenity, and so fea- There are nuggets of pure Berger. On first as it really was - and possibly to take the wind SARAH C URTIS
tures in all three of these book s; it' s also about disco vering the poems of Nazim Hikmet, for out of Duff Cooper' s book . The meticu lous
sex and death , two even more ambitiou s titles example, he writes, detail of the plannin g is totally absorbing, and it Comics
slated for future publica tion , and so may be They didn't describe space; they came through was serialized in the Dail y Expre ss in 1953 and
expected to crop up there too. One might add it, they cro ssed mountains. subsequently made into a popu lar lilm . The Will Eis ner
that it' s also abou t technolo gy and con sum er- They were also about action. They related deception had paid off, and Mont agu was decor - A CONTRACT WITH GOD
ism, and eve n assert that if it's any good it doubts, solitude, berea vem ent , sadness , but ated for his part in its success - though he found 192pp. 978 0 39332 804 2
ought to be about plent y more besides. these feelin gs follo wed actions rather than it difficult to explain to King Geor ge VI ju st A LIFE FORCE
Mean while , Robert Mapplethorp e, to cite bein g a substitute for action . Space and action s what he had done when the king inquired at the 160pp. 978 0 39332 803 5
another, was more than just a paper tiger go together. Their antith esis is prison , and it investit ure . D ROPS lE AV EN UE
dreamed up to displease the American Right: he was in Turki sh prisons that Hikm et, as a polit - Both book s - in their contr asting ways - are 192pp. 978 0 39332 811 0
was also an acutely original craft sman and styl- ical prisoner, wrote half his life' s work. well worth rereadin g, and they benelit from a Norton . Paperback , £10 .99 each.
ist, a strange sort of abstractionist and an intrigu- Or again , on the forest photograph s of Jitka j uxtapo sition that has more than a mere "t wo
ing criti c of the classical tradi tion . Slottin g indi-
vidual artists into wide thematic overviews like
Hanzlo va:
It is as if they have been taken between times,
where there is none . .. . Yet in a forest there
for on e" to commend it.
JOH N UR E W ill Eisner was one of the patriarch s of
comic s, but where most of the other
grand old men were content for others to further
this risks makin g them seem like one-trick
ponies, passive instruments of discour ses are "events" which have not found their place
Journ alism de velop the grammar of pictur e, dia logue and
which, in realit y, they transcend or disregard. in any of the forest' s numbe rless timesca les, grid that they had creat ed, he struck off in pro-
Neverthe less, each of these book s gives a and which ex ist between those scales. What J enna Bail ey duc tive and largely new directions. His long-
rich sense of the vitality of art in public life over events, you ask. Some are in Jitka' s photo- CAN ANY MOTHER HELP ME ? running strips and book s abo ut the Spirit , a
recent years: its problematic relation ship with graphs. They are what remain s unnam eab le in Fifty years of friend ship throug h crime -li ghter dra wn and written with a lighter
the State and with established moralities, its the photographs after we have made an inven - a secret mag azine touch than the Shadow or Dick Tracy, had
power to get peop le talking and thinking about tory of eve rything that is recogni zab le. 330pp. Faber. £ 16.99. always tended to concentrate as much on ordi-
important things. The cedin g of visual art ' s old Hold Everything Dear is a meditation, an 978057 123 3 137 nary peop le as on vampy villainesses and cow-
function s - ornamental, doc umen tary, commcm - injunction, and, in Bergers own word, a contes - licked polic emen. Among all the murd ers and
orati ve - to other media is taken for grant ed,
and presum ed to have little impact on its ability
tation.
ALEX DANCH EV T he Mass Observation Archive at the Univer-
sity of Sussex is a treasure trove of quirky
national remini scence. Jenna Bailey, a Cana-
gang wars, ordin ary people had good and bad
luck, committed small sins and occasionally
paid terrib le prices.
to bear mean ing, or rather its right to have mean-
ing imputed to it. One coro llary is that the role History dian researc h student looking for a subject for In the works of his middle age and later, he
of photojournalism, say, or cinem a, to do thing s her Master ' s thesis, was told about a collection ditched everything but this sense of ordin ary
that art used to do, is somew hat overlooked; Ewe n Mo ntagu, THE MAN WHO of home -made magazines circu lated between life and its small melodram as. A Contra ct with
there ' s no Don McC ullin in Art and War , for NEVER WAS; Duff Cooper, 1935 and 1990 by a group of women, born God is perhap s the most cruci al of the three vol-
exa mple. In fact, none of the three troubl es OPERAnON HEARTBR EAK between 1894 and 1927, who called themsel ves umes, made up as it is of four short stories in
itself with con vertin g the sceptic. Nobod y who 224pp . Spellmount. Paperback, £14 .99. the Coope rative Corre spondence Club (CCC) . which he demon strated once and for all that the
wants to know why Anni e Sprink le' s cervix or 978 I 86227 364 I She obtained permi ssion from those still living, skills he had used for commercial ente rtainment
a can of Piero Manzoni ' s shit must be thought and from the familie s of the decea sed, to pub- cou ld tell deeper and darker stories . A piou s
"art" at all will find the answer here. The empha-
sis laid on the cont emporary also mean s the T he idea of publi shin g these two quite sepa-
rate and distinct book s in one volume is an
appe aling one . Both tell the story of the decep -
lish extract s, which she has intelligently organ -
ized into topic s co vering different aspect s of
their lives and annotat ed with short biograp hies
man loses his faith and becom es somet hing of a
mon ster; an unpleasant jan itor is destroyed by
malice and goss ip; a vain young woman
book s will date quick ly. A notable absence
from Art and War , for instance , is Ste ve tion oper ation in 1943, in which a British sub- of the twenty main contributors. recei ves an edu cation in lo ve.
McQueen' s recent set of stamps depic ting Brit- marine launched the body of a dead officer into The Club began with a cri de coeur letter in A Life Force is a more transition al collection
ish se rvi ce me n killed in Iraq . the sea off the coa st of Spain in the confid ent the Nurs ery World, signed " Ubique". asking for - here the stories are less about indi vid uals and
KEITH MILLER expectation that it would be washed ashore and ideas to alle viate the writer 's loneliness. One of more about the South Bronx and how it
that the briefcase attached to the body would be those who replied suggested an exchange of changed . Th is theme gets picked up rather more
opened and cop ies of its contents passed on to letters between like-minde d women . Under systematically in Dropsie Av enue, whic h takes
J ohn Berger German intelligence . The documents in que s- pseudon yms the memb ers contributed a fort- a neighbo urhood from Dutch farmland to smart
HOLD EV ER YT HIN G DEAR tion, whic h included a letter from Lord Mount - nightl y article to the editor, "U bique" at lirst, townho uses to decaying tenemen ts to burnt-out
Dispatches on surv ival and resistanc e batten to the C-in-C Medite rranean Fleet , were who stitched the entri es together into a book shells and to new housing estates. The ethnic
142pp. Verso. £ 12.99. devised to reveal an Allied plan to recapture with a decorative lin en cov er , which wa s circu- charact er of Dropsie Avenue chan ges as often
978 84467 1380 Southern Europe throug h Greece - rather than lated by post. The first memb ers were recruited as hemlin es - Eisner is mord ant about the way
(as was in fact the case) thro ugh Sicil y and from Nurse ry World respond ents and later one s there are always nati ves and newcomers. All of
Italy. by persona l recommendation, the last in the these are pat, tight narrative s whose ironies are
A ny book by John Berger is an event. This
one is more fragmentary than some of its
predecessors, but his is an art of fragment s, and
Operation Heartbreak is a novel by Duff
Coop er, first published in 1950, about the imagi-
early 1950s. They all had to be mothers but
mothers who coul d write engagingly about all
nothing new ; Eisner ' s drawing style gives them
universality and a poignant darkness.
admirer s will recognize the charact eri stic blend nary career and love life of the man whose body their experiences and intere sts, not ju st about Ro z KAVENEY

- 33- TL S J UNE 8 2007

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 THI S W E EK 'S CO NTRIB UT O R S IN N E X T W E EK' S
J ad Adams 's recent books incl ude publis he d last year. Her Villa ges of most rece nt book is Methodism : Rob ert Sh ore is wr iting a book o n th e

TLS
Pankhurst, 2003, and Kipling , 2005. Vision is to be pub lished in a revised Empire ofthe sp irit, 2005 . seventee nth-ce ntury dram atist
P aul Bindin g ' s With Vine-leaves in ed itio n later this year. Mark Kamine is As sistan t Willi am Davenant.
His Hair : l bsen and the artist was Richard Davenport-H ines is the Produ cti on M anager o n The Adam I. P . Smi th is a lect urer in
publis hed last year. author of The Pursuit ofObliv ion: Sopranos . He rece nt ly lin e-produ ced A me rica n Hi story at University
K ale Bro wn is an Ass ista nt Professor A global history ofnarcotics, Interview, a movie starring Steve Co llege Lo ndo n. He is the author of
at UMBC in Maryland. Herbook,A 1500-2000,200 1, and A Nigh t at the Busce m i and Sienna M iller. No Party Now: Polit ics ill the Civil
Biography ofNo Place: From ethnic Maj estic, pub lished last yea r. He is Ro z K a veney ' s book Teen Dreams: War North , pub lis he d last year.
borderland to Soviet heartland, won co mp let ing a biogr aphy of Lady Reading teen film and television from Matthew Sween ey ' s Selected Poems
the America n Historica l Association's Desborou gh. Hea thers to Veronica Mars was was p ublished in 2002. He edi ted The Ferdinand Mount
George Lou is Beer Prize for 2004. Patrick Denman F la ner y rece ntly publis he d last year. New Faber Book ofChildren 's Verse,
P aula Byrne is the au thor of Jane fini shed a doctor at e in Engl ish at St Richard Lea works at Guardian 200 1. The ration-book
Austen and the Theatre, 2002, and Cross Co llege, Ox ford . He is a Unlimited Books. Bharat T andon tea ch es at St A nne ' s
Perdita: The Life ofMary Robinson, teac hing associate in the Universi ty o f Bernice M artin is Emer itus Reader in Co llege , Ox for d . Hi s book Jane w orld
2004. Sheffield ' s Sc hoo l of Eng lish. Soc io logy at the Unive rsity of Lo ndo n. Au stell and the Morality of
J ames Car ley's mos t rece nt book is Ea m on Duffy is Pro fes sor of the She is co mp leting a boo k, with David Conversation wa s published in 200 3.
The Books of King Henry VUI and His Hi stor y of C hr istia nity at the M artin , on Pentecostali sm. John Ur e's rece nt books inclu de
Wives, 2005, and he is completi ng an Unive rsity of Ca mb ridge, and a Keith Miller' s book abo ut St Peter 's Pilgrimage: The great adv enture of William Fitzgerald
ed itio n and tran slatio n of John Fe llow of Magdale ne Co llege. He is Bas ilica wa s pub lis he d ea rlierthis the Middle A ges, published last yea r,
Lelan d ' s De uiris illustribu s for the author of The Stripp ing ofthe year. and IIISea rch ofNomads , 200 3. Sex in a
Ox ford Medieval T exts. He is based at Altars: Traditional religion in Jerem y No el-Tod is writing a Ph D Alexander Ur q u ha r t is a ga rde n
York Un iversity in Toront o. England 1400-/580 ,1 992 . o n T . S. E liot at Trini ty Co llege, designer.
Roman mirror
Na tasha C ooper 's new no vel, A George Garnett is a Fe llow and T utor Ca mbri dge. Michael White is an assis ta nt ed itor
Greater Evil, was pub lis hed earl ier in Modern H istory at St Hu gh ' s J . A. No r th is Eme ritus Prof essor of at the Guardian , w hose po litica l
this year. Co llege , Oxford . Hi s most rece nt
book is Conquered England:
Hi stor y at University Co llege Lon don. ed itor he wa s from 1990 to 2006. David Papineau
Sa ra h Curtis' s most recent book was He is the co -author of Religions of Hugo Williams ' s most rece nt
Children Who Break the La w, 1999. Kingship, succession , and tenure Rome, 1998. co llec tion of poe m s is Dear Room , Principles
She edi ted the three vo lumes of 1066 - 1166, pub lis he d thi s yea r. Sop hie Ratcliffe is Brit ish Acade my publis he d last year.
W ood ro w Wyatt's Journals, Charlie G ere is a Reader in New Post Doctor al Research Fe llow, Bee Wilson is writing a history of for poker
1998-2000. M edi a Research at th e In stitu te for worki ng o n ideas of sympath y an d food adulterat ion. She is the author of
Alex Danchev is Pro fessor of C ultural Research , La ncas ter se ntime ntality . She is working o n The Hi ve: The story ofthe hon eyb ee
Int ern ati onal Rel ati on s at the Unive rsity . a se lec ted ed ition of the lett er s of and us, 2004 .
Unive rsity of Nottingha m . H is most Oli ver Ha r r is is studyi ng the P. G . Wodeh ou se. T . P . Wiseman is Professor E me ritus Michael Saler
recent book s are the co llect ion of Shakespeare in H istory MA at Andrew Rosenheim ' s no vel Keeping of Clas sics at th e Uni versity of Exe te r.
essays The Iraq War and Democratic Unive rsity Co llege Lo ndo n. Secre ts was pub lishe d in 2005 . Hi s book The Myths ofRome appeared Yiddish in
Politics, 2004, and Georges Braque: Thomas H eal y is Professor of Alison Sh ell is a lecturer in E ng lish at in 2004.
A biography, recentl y published in Renai ssan ce Stud ies at Birkbeck Du rham Univers ity . She is the author C o r r ect io n: O live r Rey no ld s' s poe m
Michael C habon
pa per back. Co llege , Lon don . o f Catholicism, Controversy and the "Dear Angclo" (J une 1) begi ns "We
G ill ia n Darley is th e author of David H empton is a Pro fes sor of English Literary Ima gination, are lo okin g at the past . . ." , not , as
John Evel yn: Living f or ingenuity, Hi stor y at Harvard University. Hi s 1558- 1660, 1999. printed, "the po st".

A UTHOR, A UTHOR 1,351 TLS CROS SWORD 698

Readers are invi ted to ide ntify the three someone to whom ideas were friendly - T he se nd er ofthe first correct so lutio n o pened on Ju ne 29
quotations which follow, and to send the they came and ate out of his hand - who wi ll receive a cas h prize of £40.
answe rs so that they reac h this office no would always have an interest in the En trie s sho uld be addressed to TLS Crossword 698 ,
later than Jun e 15, when the winner will wor ld and alway s have something to say. T ime s Ho use , 1 Pen ni ng ton St reet , Lon d o n E98 1BS.
be notified. The winner of Cmssword 694 is C. V. Clark, London.
The first correc t entry opened on that 2 He walked very fast on flat feet, with
date will win a pair of ticke ts to the striding ang ular movements of his arms
SO LUTION TO CROSSW O R D 694
Oxford Literary Festiva l Aud en and legs and jerkings up of his head.
Ce ntenary Celebra tion at Christ Once he had been told by a doctor that A N 0 R o M A C H E R A

he must wa lk as little as possible, so he E A 0 0 L Y C E U M

Church, Oxfor d, on June 23-24, includ - N E W M 0 0 E L A L P
ing talks, din ner and acco mmoda tion. immedia tely began goi ng for thirty-mile 0 P I L A N G U I S H
For prac tical reasons the prize is wa lks. He had a theory that the body is L A G E G I

restricted to those reside nt in the UK. controlled by the mind . 0 E A R L A G E R K V I S T

0 T I E A 0 R
The solution will appear on July 6. C R A S H A W A S H A N T I
This is the final Author, Aut hor com - 3 Wa lking the moor s one day , we
U N N S S S T
peition of this series. approac hed one of those dark stone walls o 0 N 0 U I X 0 T E H 0 P E
which wind over the conto urs like strips R E L N K U
1 Sitti ng in a room all day with the blinds of liquorice. A hundred yard s from the A R P E G G I 0 0 E R
M A A I U Y L L I S I
down, reading very fast and very wide ly wall, as if on a commo n imp ulse, we both
A N G L C R S L 0 E
psyc hology, ethnology, Arabia began to walk faster ; at fifty or sixty S E P E T U L E N G R 0
Deserta. He did not seem to look at any- yards , we broke into a trot, and we were
ACROSS DOWN
thing, admi tted he hated flowers and was sprinting all out over the last thirty yards 1 Big type, apparen tly of supreme exce llence (7) 1 Macaulay' s contribution to gamesmanship? (9)
very free with quasi-scientific jargon, or so. Arri ving simultaneously at the 5 OneofWi lliams' s signs ofloss (7) 2 Give Draremarkabl y holy book (7)
but you came away from his presence wa ll, we gave eac h other an am used but 9 Arcadian city, for exa mple, found in shrub (5) 3 " It's a small world" for this man' s priest (9)
always encouraged; here at least was also sheepish look. 10 Esse ntial ingred ient of Sturm und Dra ng? (9) 4 Free wheeling American poet (4)
ANSWERS C O M PETITIO N NO 1,347 11 Harr y the ki ng, Bed ford all ll - (6) 5 Fruitful upl and scene o f'Walpol e' xGothic revi vali sm (10 )
WI N NER: AMY HVI. YER 12Galsworthy' s final work (4,4 ) 6 Historical novelist in secret society? (5)
14 Is a current form ofScott' s usurer (5) 7 "With their - hats they look ed very much like Knaves of
1 Lifting through the brok en clo uds bosomy 15 Tyndale was concerned with that of a "Chri sten man" (9 ) Spades (M . J. Higgins, Essays on Social Subje cts) (7)
there shot Tree s indiffere ntly droo p above him. 18 Dramatist heard a ca ntor at service (9) 8 Go back to little review for big man (5)
A searc hing beam of go lden sunset- Louis MacNeice, "The Lake in the 20 Siren s indicate five current units (5) 13 Yearn over senior student know n as narrative poet ( 10)
shine. Park" . 22 "Bear up the helm - ! Rodmond cries" (William 16 Vain Eliot possibly sacrosanct .. . (9)
It swept the town allotments, plot by Falconer)( I-7) 17 ... using charac ters from Tom Bro wn and The Horse 's Mo uth
plot, 3 Not a bad place to be. 24 Go to doctor in charge to find recl usive hym nodist (6) in Somerse t village quartet (4, 5)
And all the digging clerks became Yet it doesn' t suit me, 26 Possibly staple Gay drama (5, 4) 19 Co mpo ser encountered in co rpore sana (7)
divine - 27 Scene of Ahabs victory in an ingenio us trap he knew of (5) 21 Mi litary music with measure of folk stories (7)
Richard Church, "Allotments". Being one of the men 28 She fell forSmith(7) 22 King Deat h has these ears, thought Tho mas Lovell
You mee t of an afternoon: 29 He received the Pulitzer Prize from a restful position (7) Beddoes (5)
2 On an em pty morning a sma ll cler k Palsied old step-takers, 23 Part of the Irish literary traditio n belo ngs to them (5)
Who thinks no one will ever love him Hare-eyed clerk s with the jitters . 25 Night's many seers, accor ding to Woo lrich (4)
Sc ulls on the lake in the park while Philip Larkin, "Toads Revisited".

- 35- TLS JUNE R 200 7

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