At Oxyrhynchus

Mary Beard
TH E TIM ES LIT ERARY S UPPL EM E NT APR IL 27 2007 www.thc- tls.co .uk

3 PHILO SO PH Y Al anRyan In th e Beginning W as th e Deed - Edited by G eo ffrey H awthorn . Phi lo sophy as a Humani stic
Di scipline - Ed ited by A . W . Moor e. T h e Sense ofthe Past - E dited by Mil es Burnyeat Be rnard
W iIIiam s
John McDowell Wi lfrid Sellar s W iIIem A. deVries
S te p hen D arwall The Eth ics ofIdentity. C osm opo litanism - Eth ics in a wo rld ofstrangers K w a rne Ant hony
Ap piah
Uriah Kriegel I A m a Strang e Loop D ou gl as R . H o fstad ter

8 P OE M John Kinsell a Armou r

10 C LASSICS M aryBeard C ity o f th e Sh arp-Nosed Fish - Gre ek lives in Roman Egy pt Pet er Par so ns

12 S CI EN C E M atthew C o b b Primates and Phi losop her s - How morality evolved Frans de Waal. T he Evo lu tio n ofMoralit y
Richard J o yce . T h e Altruism E quatio n - Seven scien tists search for th e ori gin s o f goo dne ss Lee
Ala n D ugat k in

14 C O M M EN TA R Y P aul Bin d ing N o laughing matter - Angu s Wi lson reappraised

J . C. N B: T hejoy oftyp ewriter s, T he M an Booker Int ern ational Prize , T he TLS R eview er's H andbook
Hugo Williams Freelan ce

17 L ETTER S TO THE ED ITO R Shake spear e and th e First Folio , C arbon em issions , Fem inist harassment, ete

18 A RTS P atrick O'Connor N ote bo oks- Ed ited by M argaret Brad ham T h orn to n . T he G lass M en agerie (Apollo T he atre).
T h e Rose T attoo (O livier T h eatre) Tennessee W iIIiams
Michael Caines Behind th e Scen es- T he hidd en life ofG eorgian th eat re, 1737- 84 (D r j o hn so n 's House, G o ug h
Squ are)
M atthew J . Reisz An selm KieferfP aul C elan - M yth , mourning an d m emory A n d rea Lau ter w ein
Richard C o le s Beethoven - T he univer sal co m po ser E d m uri d M orris

21 FI CTI O N Thomas M eane y M att er s ofHonor Louis Begle y

LucyD allas La Di sparition de Ri chard T aylor Arnau d Cath rine
Sheila Hale Suffer th e Little C hildren D o nna Leo n
M .John H arrison T he U nk now n Te rror ist Richard Fla nagan
C hit ra le k ha Basu A G olden Age Tah m ima A nam
N a ta sh a Lehrer When W e W er e Bad C ha rlotte M en d el son

24 HIST ORY John D arwin En ds ofBritish Im perialism - T he scram ble for Em pire , Suez and decolonization W m . R oger
Louis. Suez 195 6 - T he insid e sto ry ofth e first o il war Ba rry Turne r
John K eep The Foe Within - Fan tasies of treason and th e end o fI m perial Ru ssia W iIIia m C . Fu lle r

26 P O ETRY C la ir Wills C ollected Poem s Louis M acN ei ce ; edited b y Pet e r M cD onald

28 BI O GR APH Y T im Blanning Na poleo n 's Ma ster - A Life ofPrin ce Ta lleyran d D avid La w day. T alleyrand Robin Harris
N icola Humble T h e Last Prin cess - T he devot ed life ofQueen Victoria' s yo unge st daughter M at thew Den n ison

29 G AR DEN H IST ORY AndreaWulf Infinitely Beautiful - T he Dessau - W a rlitz G ard en T homas Weiss

30 I N B RIE F Buri ed At Sea lain Sinc1air. Imp eria l Life in the Em erald C ity - Inside Baghd ad 's Gr een Z one
R aji v C ha ndraseka ra n . C u ltural C reativity in th e Early Eng lish R enai ssan ce - Popular culture in
to wn and co u n try E lizabeth Salter. M edi ated - How th e m edi a shape th e w orld arou n d yo u
Thomas D e Zengotita . R ed , White an d Drunk All O ver - A w ine-s oaked j ourney from grape to
glass Natalie M acLean . Self- Po rtrait ofPer cy Grainger M aIcol m G iIIies , David Pear , M ar k
Carroll, ed itors . Fem in inity in Fligh t Kat h leen M . Barry . H ybridity, Iden tity and Monstrosity
in M edi eval13ritain - On difficu lt mid dles Je ffrey J e ro m e Cohen . J ewi sh T raditio n and th e
C hallenge o f Darwinism Geoffrey Cantor and M arc Swetlitz , editors

32 P OLI TI C S M . E . Y app T he Eth n ic C leansing ofPalestin e Il an Pappe

36 C U LTURA L ST U D IES F rances Wilson Queen ofFashion - W hat M ari c Antoincttc w o re to th e R evolution Caroline Weber

35 T h is we ek 's co n tribu to rs 35 Author, Author 3 5 C ro sswo rd

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Unhappy thoughts
ernard Williams did as much as any-
B one to ruin my life. I first enco un-
tered him when I was a twenty-year-
old undergradu ate, convinced that a
prosperou s future as a tax lawyer lay before me.
The hours would be long, but the holidays
would be good, and the work intere sting. Wil -
liams arrive d to read his paper "The Idea of
Equality" to us; he had left the physical paper
behind , so he laid his hands on the table, stared
at his fingers , and delivered his paper as though
reading from his fingertip s. About halfway
through the paper , it dawned on me that I had
no intention of becom ing a tax lawyer. Wh at
lay ahead was, instea d, poverty and a lifetime of
wishing I were j ust that bit cleverer than I was
eve r going to be. Where the magic lay, it is hard
to say: partly in that dry, ironic and amused
voice that must sure ly have been the model for
Michael Caines in The lp cress File, partly in
the quic kness and sharp ness of his intellect ,
and, perhaps more than anything, in the implicit
prom ise that muddle and incoherence co uld be
dissolved, and one could come to kno w what
one believed and why.
One of the many pleasures of these volumes
of essays rescued from a variety of Fest-
schriften and other sources is that we can so
ofte n hear that familiar voice. In some ways
Williams remained to the very end the same
young man who describ ed the year he spent
flying Spitfires as part of his National Service
training as the happiest year of his life. The
drawback of preserving that youthfu l quickness
and capacity for amuseme nt, however, was that
he could also beco me bored and irrita ble; he
must rather ofte n have wondered how many
times he had to repea t himself before the less
quick-witted linally got the poin t. Oddl y
enough, the politica l essays co llected in In the
Beginning Was the Deed have less sparkle than
those in The Sense of the Past . Oddly, because
he was such a politica l animal. It was not j ust
that he served on gove rnment al com miss ions
into drugs, pornography, gambling and the
public schools - "all the major vices" as he
more than once remarked - but that he was very
deeply and passionately committed to the social
demo cratic vision of the 1945 Labour gove rn-
ment, and gave a great deal of time and energy
to it, both on his own behal f and in support of
Shirley Williams' s early caree r.
The explanation, perhaps, is that The Sense
ofthe Past is directed towa rds a task that deeply
engage d Williams, while In the Beginning Was
the Deed rather too ofte n reite rates Williams' s
perfectly sensi ble but philo soph ically not very
exci ting view that the extravaga nt development
of theories of rights in rece nt Ame rican polit-
ical theory did not pay enough attention to
local and temporary feature s of the politica l
land scape. Philosophy as a Human istic Disci -
plin e, on the other hand , is most interesting
when it raises the unsettling questions that
Williams first raised in his book Ethics and the
Limit s of Phil osophy (19 85) and which gradu-
ally induced him to see j ust how fertile
Nietzsches insights could be. Unsurprisingly,
PHILOSOPHY
How we see ourselves and how the world sees us
ALAN RYAN
B e rn a rd Will i am s
I N T H E B EGI N NI N G W A S TH E
D EE D
Realism and moralism in political arg ument
Edited by Geoffrey Hawthorn
I74pp. $29.95 ; distributed in the UK by Wiley.
£ 18.95.
978 069 1 12430 8
P HILOSOPH Y AS A H UM A NI STI C
D ISC I P L INE
Edited by A. W. Moore
227pp. $35 ; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £22.95 .
978 069 1 12426 1
T HE SE NSE OF TH E P A S T
Essay s in the history of phil osoph y
Edited by Miles Burnyeat
393pp. $39.5 0; distributed in the UK by Wiley.
£26 .95.
978 () 69 1 12477 3
Princet on University Press
Nietzsche also appears in an important place in
The Sense of the Past .
It is impossible to summarize essays that
span half a century in the writi ng, twe nty-five
Bernard WiIIiams, Oxford, 1991
centuries in their subject matter, and eve rything
from Tertullian ' s Paradox to the hankerin g after
the redu ction of philosophy to a branch of the
natural sciences. Three related themes may be
worth picking out. The lirs t is W illiams' s
account of the point of tacklin g philosophy
through its past. He draws the distinction on
which others have relied between the "history
of ideas", which is essentially a branch of his-
- 3-
tory, and the " history of philosophy", which is
essentially a branch of philosophy. The former
aims to provide a narrative to illumina te the
motivation of writers, the resources available to
them, the audience for whom they wrote, the
effec t they hoped to achie ve, and the effec t they
actually had, if any. The latter aims to extract
whateve r is of philoso phical interest in what is
being analysed . Of co urse, conceptions of what
is of interest will vary a good deal over time,
but in princip le the ambition is to study philos-
ophy in the past as philo soph y. This seemingly
straightfo rward distinction is somew hat cut
across by another that Williams employed very
illum inatingly when writing about Isaiah Ber-
lin; it was not true, he said, that Berli n had, as
he claimed, abandoned philosophy in favour
of the history of ideas. Berl in was still doing
philo sophy, but the kind of concepts that Berlin
was concerned with - freedom, j ustice, moral
integrity, progress - were esse ntially historical
concept s. Unlike the concepts of the physical
sciences, or mathematics or logic, they were
replete with social assumptions local to parti-
cular cultures and particular times.
In the essa y "Descartes and Historiogra phy" ,
W illiams fends off the familiar objection that
the attempt to distinguish at all sharply between
the history of ideas and the history of philos-
ophy is bound to fail because the identifica tion
of the philosophica l claim s themselves is a his-
torical matter. It may be true, he agrees, that in
the distant past some analytica l philosophers
were overincl ined to treat Descartes exac tly as
though he were the author of an article that had
appeared in the latest issue of M ind, but the
accusation that this is the inevitable result of
taking a philosophical interest in the work of
past philosop hers is ill-fo unded. It is anyway an
objection that Will iams takes in his stride; the
question is not "Are you sure you have the right
idea under your microscope?", but whether
one is primarily concerned to place the idea in a
conceptual and inferential land scape.
Nonetheless , the historical dimension of the
philosophical analysis is important. It is impo r-
tant in Will iams' s work because it is part of the
campaig n that he wage d agai nst moral philo s-
ophy as comm only under stood . That is made
particularl y explicit in an essay on Sophoclcs'
The Women of Trac his. It begins with the damn-
ing sentence, "Philosop hy, and particularly
moral philosoph y, is still deeply attached to giv-
ing good news". And after a subtle and illumi-
nating analysis of what the point of such "stark
fi ctions" is - tragedies built on unredeemed and
uncom pensated sufferi ng - Will iams ends with
the equally sharp observation that, although
there is no genera l account to be given of the
point of Greek tragedies of this kind, "one of
their more obvious achieve ments is to offer a
necessary supplement and a suitable limitation
to the tireless aim of moral philosophy to make
the world safe for well-disposed people".
Nietzsches thought that we engage with
tragedy so that we do not peri sh from the truth -
that is, so that we can come to term s with the
truth about unredeemable suffering - is essen-
tially what Williams sets in opposition to the
view implicit in mora l philosoph y, and espe-
cia lly in utilitaria nism, that all can be made well
if only we behave more sensi bly.
The historical distancing that is so ob vious in
an essay such as this is less visible in his discus-
sion of Descartess Meditations, however. And
that is dou btless becau se of what Will iams
observes in seve ral essays in both The Sense
ofthe Past and Philosophy as a Humanistic Dis-
cipline . Theories of knowledge are imperso nal;
if I and someone else hold the same theory of
the world and it is true, then the fact that it is I
or he who holds that view is imm aterial and
uninteresting. But ethical theories press on us
the question of what it might be like to live
according to them , and at that poin t the irreduci-
ble differe nces between one perso n and
another, let alone between one culture and
another, prod uce divergent rather than conver-
gent answers. Nonetheless , his discussion of
"Descartess Use of Scepticism" is a model of
how to get inside someone else's arg ument in a
histori call y se nsiti ve fashion.
He begins with a cheerful contrast between
Descartes' s ambitions and A. J. Ayers ap-
proach in The Prob lem of Knowledge (1956) - a
work in which the kno wer invites and then
rebuffs repeated assa ults by one sceptic after
another. Descartes' s use of scepticism is part of
a programm e whose terminus is not resc uing
common sense but show ing the possibility of
true scientia , i.e., a systematic and, at the limit,
irrefuta ble understandin g of the world. This is
why Descartes crank s up the sources of error,
from mere slips to the systematic misunder-
standings induced by our senses , and finally
TLS APR IL 27 2 0 07

invoke s the possibility of a " malicious demon "
who is dedicated to ensuring that we are system-
aticall y delu ded in all our beliefs. It is only this
last, "hyper bolic" doubt that is dispelled by the
certainty of the existenc e of a benevolent and
omn ipotent God . Th e occa sional error caused
by inattention or by some sensory malfunction
cannot be eliminated; but once we kno w that we
are not sys temat ica lly deluded we can con li-
dentl y apply the correction to common sense
that science provide s. None of this shows that
Descarte ss argume nts for the existence of God
are sound, and Will iam s is quit e cert ain they are
not; but this reading of Descartes makes sense
of the project in ways that other readin gs will
not , and Descarte s' s failure s are the failures of
his argum ent s, not the incoherence of the
proje ct.
Th e second them e worth extractin g, then, is
the dir ect assaul t on (mo st form s of) mora l
philo soph y. The dire ct assault is the bridge to a
third them e, which is the contrast betwe en the
human and the non-human perspecti ve in philos-
oph y, a contrast that is implicit in much of what
Willi ams has to say about the cha ract eristic
defects of moral philo soph y. Because Williams
is such a deft critic of particul ar writers, it is
occ asiona lly hard to spot the genera l point ,
but in the case of his doubt s about his great
predecessor as the Knightbridge Professor of
Phil osoph y, Henry Sid gwick (1838-1900), the
general po int is firml y in the foreground.
Sidgwick famously thou ght that ethics should
take "the point of view of the universe" ; it
should con sider things sub sp ecie aeternitatis -
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PHIL O S OPHY
from the standpoint of eternity. But that, says
William s, is a very bad standpoint from which
to con sider hum an life. There is some question
whether, and if so how, that objection links to
William s' s often repeated complaint against
Sidgwick, that Sidgwick' s ethics form a "govern-
ment house morali ty" , an ethics to which the
enlightened may subscribe but to which we
must devoutl y hope most peop le do not.
Sidgwick had com e to the concl usion that
following the rule s of moralit y and following
the dict ates of self-interest were equ ally
rational. That , however, is not something
we would like everyon e to belie ve, since we
certain ly hop e that other peop le will follo w
the ordinary rules of moralit y, even if we see
that they rest on a fragile basis. In any event,
even if we opt to pursue genera l utilit y rather
than our own, it is not obviou s that we want
other people to be utilitarian s. If utility is to be
promoted, most people had belle r go on thinking
that mora l principles are the word of God , or the
dictates of common sense, or laws of natur e,
indeed almost anything except social rules
whose purpo se is to promot e utility. We may tell
the truth , keep our promi ses, refrain from mur-
dering our irritating neighbour s for any number
of reasons, but probably not because we think
we ma ximize utility by doin g so.
Th e requireme nt that a morality must be able
to be publicly advocated is at the heart of, for
instanc e, John Rawls' s Theory of Justice; and it
see ms to be implicit in any attempt to show
that explaining morali ty is part of the wider
proje ct of ex plaining rationality in act ion. So
Sid gwick ' s admi ssion that he was dri ven to the
paradox ical view that if his mora l vision was
right then it had better not be publicly known is
deeply emb arrassing. Williams' s larger point is
one that was implicit in Ethics and the Limit s
of Philo soph y. This is that there is something
suspect about the very idea that an account of
rationality in ethics is a matt er of linding an
ethical theory. The thou ght is quit e elu sive.
Williams was not hostile to philo soph ical
inquir y and not anx ious to abandon the idea
that philo sophy is the search for the truth at
all costs. He makes some striking ly acerbic
comm ents on Richa rd Rort y' s not ion that
philosophy should in future proc eed as a
"conversation", ob serving that
the model is not encouraging. Unless a con ver-
sation is very relentless - for instance, one
between philosophers - it will not be held
together by "so" or "therefore" or "but", but
rather by "we ll then" and "that remind s me"
and "come to think of it" . . .
He also found Rort y' s readin ess to hand over
moralit y and political judgement to the poet s
and the noveli sts too light-hearted to be tolera -
ble. Willi ams' s own educ ation in the classics
certain ly meant that the poet s and the drama-
tists were from the beginn ing deepl y impli cated
in his thinkin g about ethics , but they were not
impli cated merely as the agenc y that gets us to
feel di fferentl y: serious art articul ates a vision
of the world tha t can be analysed; it is not an
altern ative to a psychotropic dru g.
Th e thou ght that we should not see k theoreti -
cal tidiness or completene ss in ethics is perh aps
best made in a familiar way. It is a proper
aim of scientilic inqui ry to seek an "ab solute"
concept ion of the wo rld - the "v iew from
nowhere" , in Thom as Nage!'s phrase. Physics
is not intere stingly reflecti ve of the cultures in
which it is practi sed ; it is not "perspectival" - it
is not about how the world look s from one place
or anoth er. Mor al con viction s, by contrast, are
- 4-
perspecti val from one end to the oth er; and this
view sugges ts, in its most radica l form, that
mora l philosoph y may be better condu cted
as a mixture of historica l, anthropological and
cultural analysis. Th is is a tho ught that wou ld
not at all have upset radical pragmati sts such as
William James or John Dewey (Dewey thoug ht
that phil osoph y should be superseded by "criti-
cism" or "the criticism of critici sm" ), but it lits
awkwardly into the postwar analytica l tradit ion .
Thi s leads to the third animating them e,
which underpin s the title essay of Philosophy
as a Hum ani stic Disciplin e. Tow ard s the end
of his life, Williams becam e deeply interested
in the contrast betwe en life conc eived of from
the inside as a con stantl y rewo ven narrati ve,
inev itably heavil y retro specti ve, always some-
what in arrears of the life narrat ed , and life
conce ived from the outside , a de-indi vidualized
instanc e of the ge nera l class of "huma n lives".
As innumerable writers have ob served in differ-
ent ways, we each of us live this one life of our
own from the ins ide and cannot, except perhap s
in cases of acute ment al illne ss, con sider our
own existence as merely one amon g all the vari-
ou s existences in the world. On the other hand ,
there have been philo sophers, Hegel amon g
them, who have tried to reconci le us to the inevi-
tabl e losses and miseri es of life by invitin g us
to see oursel ves, if not wholly ex ternally, at
least as participants in a larger narrat ive und er-
pinned by the actuali zation of reason in the
world. Som ethin g not dissimilar seems to ani-
mate Spino za' s Ethi cs. But those doctrines do
not threate n our own view of ourselves, because
they leave us at the centre of the me taph ysica l
scheme we are invited to embrace. The radi-
cally dec entrin g view that whatever does not
matt er in physical science doe s not matter at all
is a wholly different matter. Th e easy respon se
is simply to ob serve that it is old news that the
uni verse doe s not care what happens to us,
individually or as a species; we car e what hap-
pens to us, and that is as much carin g as is
need ed. We do not need the false heroic s of
Bertrand Russell ' s "The Free Man' s Worship "
nor the exaggerations implicit in Heidegger' s
cla im that life is a form of " Being toward s
Death".
Willi ams is not dismi ssive of the easy
respon se; he is clear enou gh that Russell ' s her-
oics are unnece ssar y, and that man y cultures
have survived happil y enough without bein g
con vinced tha t the universe was deepl y con-
cerned with their fate. But he was also intrigued
by what intrig ued Nietzsche, namel y the un-
sett ling effect of philo soph ical inqu iry itself.
There are man y rea sons why philo sophy is a
humani stic discipline and not a branch of natu-
ral science; but one is that it thro ws up the que s-
tion raised by Rou sseau ' s disconcerting cla im
that the capacity for rational thought make s
man an unhapp y and corrupted animal. If the
on ly sort of truth that we can search for is of
the same sort as that pursued in the natur al sci-
enc es, it appea rs that Rou sseau may be right -
at least to the extent that ther e will be a di scon -
nection between re ason and our confide nce in
our own goals, individual or collecti ve. Take
away a conc ern for truth , however , and philo s-
oph y degen erates into chit-chat. Bernard
Williamss answer to the puzzle is to emph asize
the role of the local and the histori cal, the need
for philosoph y to "sound right ". One ends Phi-
losoph y as a Hum ani stic Disciplin e wishing
that he had had anoth er deca de both to do the
sort of philo soph y that "s ounds right ", and to
tell us more about what made it sound so.
Real
colour
JO HN M cDOWELL
Willem A . d eVri es
W IL FRID SELLARS
338pp. Acumen. Paperback, £ 14.99.
978 I 84465 0392
hen the philosopher Wilfrid
W Sellars died in 1989, the Ne w
York Times carr ied a coupl e of
column-inches of obituary treat-
ing him as a pro vincia l journeyman . So one
may suspect wishful thinkin g when Will em A.
deVri es writes, in his line acco unt of Sellarss
work, that "Se llars exerci sed a profound inllu -
enc e on Am erican philosoph y in the latter half
of the twentieth century" . His students, their stu-
dent s, and so on engage seriously with him, but
in man y good philo soph y departments - not to
speak of wide r intellectual circle s, in which aca-
demic philo soph y is anyway not much noticed
- he is virtually unread . He is not widely placed
where he belon gs: alongsi de his rough cont em -
poraries, W . V. Quine and Dona ld Davidson , as
a maj or figur e in mainstream , or (in an increas-
ingly unhelpfu l term) " analytic", philo soph y in
the United States in the twenti eth century. Thi s
may be chan ging, ho wever; and perhaps
deVri es' s book wi ll make a difference .
Wh y is Sellar s not read mor e? One might
look for ex planations in academic sociology;
for instance, he never taught at Princ eton or
Harv ard . Less superfi cia lly, he is notoriously
di fficult. His writ ing sw ings between eloquence
and an ineptitu de that compares bad ly with
Quines lapidary pro se and David son ' s lucidity.
It is quit e characteristic of him to forget, in mid -
strea m, the cour se a sentence was intend ed (in
some sense) to take. And even when he keeps
his syntax under control, he does not make it
easy to understand him . Here is a striking
exampl e: his seminal ess ay "E mpiricis m and
the Philosophy of M ind" (which is more widely
read, or at least cited, than most of his work) is
framed as part of a campaign against " the Myth
of the Gi ven" , but he neglects to say what he
means by "the framew ork of Gi venn ess"; he
cont ent s him self with exam ples, leavin g his
reader to guess what misconception he mean s
to sugges t they have in common. DeVri es' s
patient and thorou gh guide will be helpful in
enablin g readers to lind their way in Sellar s' s
copious output.
W hat is distincti ve abo ut Sellarss work?
DeVrie s begins with the sugges tion that
twentieth -centu ry analytic philo sophy character-
istica lly went in for piecem eal probl em- solving,
wherea s Sellars, "almost alone ", was ana lytic in
his method s but systematic in his aim s. At this
level of ge nerality this is not very con vincin g.
The ideal of the philo sophical article as a
self-contained treat ment of an isolable issue
was already far from universal, among philos -
opher s who conce ived themselves as analytic,
when Sellar s was writing. On e could say of
Quine and Davidson what deVri es says of
Sellar s, that their work was "in the service of a
 PHILOSOPHY
unified vision of the world and our place in it" .
The all-encompass ing ch aracter of Se llar s ' s
work is ne vertheless di stinctive, even in com-
pari son with others for w ho m phil osoph y is not
piecemeal problem-sol ving . DeVries captures
thi s nicel y when he says (perhaps exag gerating
a bit ) that each of Sellarss essays "is a per spe c-
tival glim pse of a broader philosophical po si-
tion " . In readin g Sel lars, one can have the
impression that a sense of ho w ever ything
han gs together lies only ju st below the surfa ce
in w ha t is expli citl y a de scription of ju st one
part of the terr ain.
The di stinctive nature of Sellars' s sys tema tic-
ity is perhaps connected with one of the funda-
mental commitments deVries lists: "his Hege-
lian co nv iction that virtually ever y important
voice in the chorus of We stern phil osoph y ha s
something to teach us" . " Important" make s thi s
risk tri viality: w hat co uld be important abo ut a
philosopher w ho had nothing to teach us'! But
deVri es is right that Sellars is ju st about unique,
among his main stre am contemporaries, in hi s
cath olic responsivene ss to the philosophi cal
tradition, which is seamless ly inte gr ated into
hi s ow n phil osophical practice.
There are two di stin gui shable points here .
The fir st concerns the way in w hich Sel lars' s
thou ght is anchored in the hi stor y of philos-
ophy . Thi s is note worth y independently of
which part s of the phil osophical tradition were
important for him . It is not uncommon for
an al ytic phil osophers to tolerate the hi story of
philosophy, more or less grudg ing ly , as an are a
for spec ialists, in principle separa te from work-
ing on philosophi cal qu estion s. One wo uld not
have expected Quine or Davidson to publi sh, as
Sell ar s did in 1967, a book subtitled Yari atio ns
on Kantian themes. P . F. Str awson ' s The
Bounds of Sense (1966) is rou ghl y contempo-
rar y with Sellars' s Kant book, but Strawson ' s
idio syncratic reading of Kant is not to the same
extent as Sellars' s Scie nce and Metaphysics an
occ asion for " perspectival glimpses" of how , in
its autho r's view , "things, in the broadest sense
of the term, hang together, in the broadest
sense of the term " - as Sellars descr ibe s what
philosophy aims to understand .
The seco nd point is the bre adth of Sellars' s
respect for the tradition . Some pa st figure s used
to be, and so me times still are , reg arded as
un suitable sources of nutrition for analytic
philosophy. Sell ar s paid no attention to such
exclusion s. As deVries reminds us, Sell ars stud-
ied Hu sserl with Marvin Farber at Buffalo .
DeVries him self wrote a di sser tati on on He gel
under Sellars' s supervision. One reason wh y
the term "analytic" is, as I said at the beginning,
increasin gly unhelpful is that mu ch of the co n-
tent of the idea of anal ytic philosoph y used to
be determined by thi s kind of sepa ratio n of pa st
phi losophers into tho se w ho are to be read and
tho se who are not , and the separatio n is losing
its grip. The very idea of an ana lytic reading of,
say , He gel would once ha ve seemed so mething
like contradictory, and no w we are clo se to
takin g it in o ur stride . Sellars is an earl y figure
in thi s bre aking do wn of barriers.
But the prim ar y an swer to the que stion of
what is d istin cti ve about Sellars mu st lie in hi s
visio n of ho w thin gs hang together. In hi s 1963
collection of papers, Science , Percep tion and
Reali ty, he put " Philosophy and the Scientific
Ima ge of Man" fir st, where it sets the tone , and
in hi s fir st ch apter de Vrie s frame s an o verview
of Sellars' s thinking in term s of that essay.
Sell ar s ' s attitude to the sc ientific im age is
expressed in hi s notorious "scientia men sura"
- 5-
remark in "Empiric ism and the Philosophy of
M ind " : "in the dimension of de scribing and
exp laining the world, sc ience is the mea sure of
all thin gs: of what is that it is, and of wha t is not
that it is not " . The topic of " Philosophy and the
Scientific Imag e of Man " is ho w to combine
that view of sc ience with doing ju stice to what
he call s "the manifest ima ge of man in the
wo rld". Articulating the manifest ima ge is
Sell ar s ' s counterpart to what Str awson
described as de scriptive, rather than revi sion-
ary, met aph ysic s; the manifest ima ge is the
wo rld-v iew of reflecti ve common sense.
A central element in the manifest ima ge, as
Sell ar s reconstructs it, is the idea that human
bein gs are wh at the y are largely by virtue of
their parti cipation in norm-go verned social prac -
tice s. For Sellars, conceptual th inking includes
me aningful speech, w hich can be "thinking out
loud " . Ev en w hen thou ght is not expre ssed out
loud , he thinks we mu st understand it on the
model of meaningful speech. Norm-go verned
socia l practices, in particular natural lan guages,
form a context within which alone the very idea
of conceptual thinking, which is fundamental to
the manifest ima ge , so much as makes sense.
The attitude expressed in the scientia men -
sura remark mi ght ha ve led Sell ars to debunk
the manifest ima ge, g iven th at its central con -
cepts pre suppose a normati ve frame work. Ho w
thin gs o ught to be , we mi ght think, is one thin g;
how thin gs are is another. Quine, for one ,
wo uld have applauded the claim th at science
is the me asure of all thin gs. And th at attitude to
science led Quine to di sparage talk of me aning
as a second-class idiom, practically indi spen s-
ab le but no t int ellectuall y re spectable .
But Sellars is more re sponsive th an Quine to
a thou ght on the se line s: to make sense of the
very exi stenc e of the sc ientific image, we need
to acknowledge that the conception of being
human that centres o n participation in norm-
governed practices is not a mer e convenience,
but in so me important sense correct. Norm-go v-
erned practices include the practic e of science
itse lf. M ore o ver , the content of the evolving sc i-
entific image - not ju st its exi stence - cannot be
appreciated except as a cas e of human traffick-
ing in meaning, with its nece ssar y context of
responsivene ss to norm s.
The point is not ju st that an y view at all, what-
eve r its subject matter, mu st be me anin gful , and
hence need s to be seen in a norm ati ve frame -
wor k. More spec ifica lly, the scientific wor ld-
view is di stinctive in including the idea th at
thin gs conform to laws of nature. And in Sell -
ars ' s view, a conception of nature ' s law s is a
con ception of norm s for a certain kind of modal
thinking : thinking about w hat would ha ve been
the ca se on certain suppos itio ns. So the scien-
tific image, thou gh it deal s in matters of fact , is
deepl y implicated with normativity.
For Sellars, then , there is no que stion of
di sparaging the manifest image from the stand-
point of the scientific ima ge . He insists th at
there is more to the idea of truth than we can
make of it w hen we re strict our sel ves to the
dimension in which science is the me asure .
Truth is attainable in thought and talk about the
normati ve, and the normati vely conditioned,
too . How thin gs ou ght to be can, after all , be a
ca se of how thin gs are . (Thi s opens a space for
subs tantial reflections about ethics.) Our deal-
ings with me aning cannot be tidil y lined up
with the scientific ima ge , but for Sell ar s that is
not a ground for regarding them as second-
cla ss. Wh at he calls for is an integratio n of the
two im age s into one stereos co pic view. A s
TL S APRIL 27 2007
The Emergence of a Scientific Culture
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1210-1685
STEPHEN GAUKROGER
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GEOF FR EY LLOYD
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 PHILOSOPHY

deVries insists, the att itude ex pressed in the in Wittgen stein ' s Tractatus Logico-Philos oph- it is qu esti onable whet he r his rejection of
scie nt ia men sur a re mar k does not lead Se llar s icu s. Picturing invol ves re latio ns be tween ele- a rela tional understanding of signili cance can
into a crude ly scie nt istic world-view. ment s in the co nfig uratio ns that do the pictu rin g command acce pta nce apa rt fro m its po sition in
It does, however , en courage him in di stin- and ele men ts in the con ligu rat ion s that are pic- the w hole.
g uishing sharply bet ween " matter-of-factual" tured - for instance, re latio ns in w hich "na tural- The scientilic image has no room for co lo urs
truth and any co nte nt int o which normat ivity lin gu istic objec ts" con sisting in utteran ces of as they appear in visual ex peri ence . (It ca n
ente rs. A nd that has far-reaching effe cts. the voca ble tra nsc ri ba ble as "P ari gi" sta nd to acco mmoda te refl ectan ce proper tie s of
As Sell ars see s thing s, truths to the effe ct that the city, Pari s. Bu t these relati on s are not re la- surfa ces.) T his ope ns into anot her the me in
o ne thin g sta nds in a cert ain rel ation to anothe r tions of signilic ance. In Sell ars' s view , the ve ry Sellarss reflect ions about the sci entific im age
wo uld be "ma tter- of-factua l". A nd he th ink s it ide a of relat ion s of sig nifica nce is a co nfus ion. and the m ani fest im age . It has been common
fo llow s that on e cannot specify the signilicance He thinks the supp osed ly rel at ion al sta teme nts to re spo nd to the ab senc e of colours fro m the
of, for instance, a nam e by say ing it stands in a of sig nilicance offered in orthodox se ma ntics scie ntific im age by treat ing man ifest-image
cert ain relati on, th at of being a nam e of, to an ca n be und er stood only as inept attempts to colours as mere ap pearances , proj ect ion s fro m
ex tra- ling uis tic object; for its signilicance is a cap ture thin gs th at ligure in his o wn view : the phenomenal charac te rist ics of visua l ex pe ri-
normative matter. On the face of it, if one relati on s that lig ure in an acco unt of pictu rin g, ence . But Sell ars urges tha t ou r concept s for
says " 'P ari g i' is what Itali an s call Paris" , one or the " matter-of-factual" regul arities in the cl assif ying col our se nsatio ns ca n, as th ings
captures the signilicance of the ex pressio n occurren ce of "na tura l-ling uis tic objects" that sta nd, be und erstood onl y on the model of the
"P arig i" , its rol e in the norm -go vern ed practic e und erl ie th ose relatio ns. colours that , in the manifest image, bel on g
of spea kers of Italian, and one do es so by rel at- DeV ries represe nts this rejection of the idea WiIfrid Se llars to things in the env iro nme nt. This ris ks leavin g
ing the ex pression to the city , Pari s. Su ch idea s tha t sig nilicance mi gh t be rel ation al as a con se- us witho ut a basis on which m anifest-im age
are ce ntra l to sema ntics on the ort hod ox co nce p- qu ence of the met alin gui stic ch aracter of state- ity. Th at is why Sell ars thinks the orth od ox colours can be und er stood , eve n as projected
tion . But Sell ar s thinks that this is a mistak e . A s men ts about bits of lan guage. But there is no rea - conception of sema ntic s is conf use d. appearances. But he suggests tha t there is a way
he sees th ings, there are indee d rela tiona l truth s son why a metal an gu age for , say, Itali an cannot But the restrictive view of the po ssibilit ies for o ut, if the sci entili c image ca n be tran sformed
in the neighbourhood . Sp eak er s con form their include ways of refer rin g to th ings on e ca n talk rel ation al truth is em ine ntly op en to qu estion . so as to embrace counterp art s to the distinctive
lin gu istic beh aviour, fo r the most part, to the abo ut in Italian, and hen ce a llow for rel ating So it is arguable that the failure to unde rstand is featu res of se nsory co nsci o usness. He re turns to
norms by virtue of w hich the ir speec h has its Itali an ex press ions to , for instanc e , ci tie s, as in o n Sell ars' s side. Rath er than showi ng that the thi s topi c aga in and again throughout hi s career ,
sig ni licance, and con sequ entl y they tend to the fac e va lue construal of ou r example. That rel ation al co ncep tio n of se ma ntic s is co nfu sed, and deVries ' s chapter on se nsory con sciou sness
utter arrange me nts o f vocables isomorph ic to is j ust ho w met al an g uages are und er stood in the the res tric tive view of rel at ion al tru th precl ude s gives a cl ear acco unt of a great deal of complex
arrange me nts in ex tra- ling uistic rea lity . Th eir orthodox con cept ion of se mantics . Sellarss Se llars from seei ng the poi nt of the re latio na l materi al in thi s area .
utter anc es, consi dered in abstrac tio n fro m the rejection of rel at ion s of signilicance ca nnot be co nce ptio n of semantics. If the res tric tive view Here, as with the picturing do ctrine, much
norms that con stitu te the ir signilicance (consi d- ex plai ned as a mere appli cat ion of an unc on ten - of re latio na l tru th is wro ng . the re latio nal co n- turn s on the scie nt ia me nsura thou ght. Withou t
ered as " natural-linguistic objects", as Sellars tiou s un derstanding of met alan gu age s. On the ce ption of se ma ntics is innoc uo us. A nd then that thou ght , the abse nce of ph enomen al co lo ur
pu ts it), sta nd in picturing rel at ion s to con figura - co ntrary, it rell ect s th at sha rp separation of Sellars' s acc o unt o f pic turi ng, w hic h is ho w he from the sci entilic image do es not po se the
tion s in extra-lin gui stic reali ty, in a sense of " matter-of-factual" trut h, includ ing rel at ion al acco mmodate s the intuitio n that there must be qu estions about the place of colour in reality to
"picturi ng" for whic h Sell ars linds inspirati on tru th, from an y co nte nt that invol ve s norm ati v- so me thi ng rel at ion al in the co mplete story about which Sell ar s devo tes all that ingenuity.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _---, lan gu age, ca n dro p o ut as superfl uous. Th e Sellarsian phil osophy I have tou ch ed on
It is a way of exp ressing the sa me th ou ght to is not ind isputab ly succes sful, and that may
suggest that the restrictive co nception of rel a- see m to thr eat en the ra nking I suggested at the
NEW FROM ACUMEN tio na l truth preclu des Sella rs fro m unde rsta nd- beginning. But ev en w he re on e resist s hi s doc -
ing the model for his acco unt of pict uring tha t trin es, Sellars is an unu su ally interes ting philos-
he lin ds in W ittgenstein ' s Tractatus . oph er , not least in the aspect of his thou ght I
Herbert Spencer and the In vention of Modern Life
.,""
F-" Mark Fran cis
In the Tractatus, the fac t that the eleme nts in
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ha ve conc entrated o n, his att empt to integ rate
wha t might otherwise ha ve been a crude ly scie n-

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Se lla rs, th at mu st be a mistake . Applying it to
that ex am ple, on e wou ld purport to capture the
sig nilicance of a stri ng of wor ds - wha t it ca n
be used to say - partl y in term s of rel ation s
between its elem ent s Ca" and "b ", whic h
are arra nge d by being put to the left and
the rig ht of "is to the left of') and e leme nts in
ex tra- ling uistic rea lity (a and b) .
Bu t for Sell ars, state me nts of sig ni lic ance
mu st be disting uished fro m state me nts abo ut
rel ation s bet ween bits of lan gu age (as " natura l-
lin gu istic objects" only) and eleme nts in extra-
lin gu istic realit y. So Sella rs insists that pict ures
and what they picture ca n only be co mplex
o bje cts , and not , as the Tractatus has it, facts.
But his only gro und for suppos ing the Tracta tus
misund erstand s the conce ption of pictu rin g it
requires is the restricti ve view of rela tional tr uth .
Perhap s that is the mistak e. And in that ca se, the
Tractatus conce ption of picturing, as something
o nly facts can do , ca n com e into its ow n.
Th e do ctrin e of pictu ring is often ignored as an
embarrassing enc umbrance to Sellars' s thinkin g.
(De Vrie s gives it due attention.) But even Sell ar-
sia ns who avert their gaze from Sellars
o n picturing tend to fo llow him in rejectin g a
rel ation al account of mean ing, the sort of
Even whe re o ne thinks he goes astray, it can be
unc ommonly helpful to think thro ugh exactly
ho w on e th ink s he goes as tray . And ofte n he
simply sees more cl earl y than mo st.
Thi s is ve ry mu ch the ca se in his es say
"Em piricis m and the Phil osophy of M ind " , a
demolition of "traditional empi ricis m" and a
ske tch of a philosoph y of mind that ca n pro vide
an approp riate context for the epistemo logy
of perc ep tion. T his enormo us ly rich essay
would place Sell ar s in the fro nt rank of
twen tieth -century philosophers eve n if he had
wri tten nothing else. I am incl ined to th ink
Sell ar s is at his mo st succes sful whe n he let s
the spiri t of Hegel break free fro m the fetter s of
Carn ap . (Q uestio ns lik e thi s are hotl y d isputed
bet ween " left" and "right" Sellarsian s.) But
wha tever on e' s final verd ict, his respon si ven ess
to tho se see m ing ly conl1ict ing tend encie s
mak es his work unu su ally re wa rding.
DeVries expr essly bypa sses Sellars' s histori -
cal writing in the det ail of hi s study, bu t an y
assessmen t of Sell ars sho uld not e that he is an
asto nishing ly perc ept ive read er of man y philos-
oph er s, and especiall y of Kan t. It wo uld have
been impossible for W illem deVries to leave
ev eryone w ho grapples wi th Sell ars happ y with

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ACUMEN thing Davidson puts fo rward with an appeal to
Alfred Tarski. A nd it is not clear that th is will
eve ry thing in his bo ok . But wi thin the limits of
what is offered o nly as an introduction, he ha s
coh ere wit h di scoun ting the do ctrin e of picturin g. don e an ex trao rdinar ily good j ob of ex plaining
Se lla rs 's philosoph y of lan gu age is a un ity, and thi s major thinker.

TLS AP RIL 27 2 0 07 - 6-
 PHILOSOPHY

Thi s, no do ubt, gives those who would arg ue

I do what I am that socia l, cultura l, or nation al ident ities make

basic cl aim s on us signifi cantly less than they
might like. It does, however, point to a liberal
position that, while valuing autonomy and indi-
he principal thou ght that runs throu gh ST EPHE N DAR WALL Stuart Mil l. He plausibl y regard s Mill as a viduality, resis ts the temptation to wea n indi vid-

T The Ethics of Identity and Cosm o-

polita nism , two very interesting new
books by Kwame Anthony Appiah, is that
much of what gives meaning and signific ance
to our lives depend s upon " ide ntities" we have
that are sig nifica ntly mor e "partial" than the
one that gro unds our moral obligations to one
another, namely, that of " moral age nt" or
"huma n bein g". From this co mmon thou ght
springs the probl em at ic of both boo ks, which
might be put as follows : if we start from the
idea that we owe obli gati ons to one another as
mora l persons, how are we to think of the
claims that are placed on us, and on one
another, by these more partia l iden tities? Wh at
are the "e thics of identity"? And given that we
meanin gfully pursue our lives from within
more restric ted ident ities - whether nat ional,
co mmunal, pro fessional, familial, or whatever -
how are we to think about our obligati ons to
one another as mor al person s or fellow
human s? If we understand "cosmopolitanism"
as a unive rsalist outl ook according to which, in
the Cynic s' coinage, we are all "ci tizens of
the cosmos", what shape can a defensible
cos mopo litanism take? After all, this "cosmic"
identity gives relative ly little sig nifica nt textu re
to our lives. And when we try to acco unt for
the claim s of more meanin gful, partial ide ntities
Kw am e Anthon y Appiah
TH E ETH IC S O F ID E NTI T Y
384 pp. Princeton U nivers ity Pre ss. Paperbac k,
£ t2.95 (US $19.95).
978 0 69 1 13028 6
C O S M O P O LI T AN I S M
Ethic s in a world of stranger s
224pp. Alien Lane. £ 16.99.
978 07 139994 19
US: Norton. Paperback, $ 15.95. 978 0 393 32933 9
socia l identitie s as in a sense metaph ysically
insub stanti al. This does not underm ine their
ethica l significance, in Ap piah' s view , but there
is a puzz le about why it doesn ' t. Ho w can our
regard ing some ide ntity as mean ingful by con -
struc ting a socia l ca tegory actually endow it
with ethica l significa nce , that is, give it a status
that makes a ge nuinely valid claim on us? O f
course , it isn' t up to any indiv idual to create any
ide ntity - although it is impo rtant to Appi ah
that it is up to individuals to crea te their ow n
life paths through accepting, reje cting, or
reshapin g the iden tities that the socio- cultural
context pro vides them (more on this presentl y).
But e ven though identities are constru cted col-
lecti vely, it is hard to see how they can thereb y
mod el of ho w it is possible adequately to app re-
cia te the values of a diverse society with widely
differing identit ies, while none theless res pect-
ing ind ividuals and the value o f what Mill , fol-
lowing va n Humboldt, called " individuality".
At first blu sh, Mill ' s idea of ind ividua lity
might seem an unpromising place to look for
help with an "ethics of identity" , for Millian
individuality is a matter of develop ing one' s
powers and spontaneity, of finding one' s own
way . One achi eves indiv iduality in this sense by
living one' s life as onesel f, not by instantiating
some social ide ntity. It is van Humboldt' s insist-
ence, which Mill quote s as the ep igraph to On
Lib erty, on "the abso lute and esse ntial import-
ance of human developm ent in its richest diver -
sity" (my emphasis), that give s the Mill / va n
Humboldt line on individu ality traction on the
"e thics of identity" . Th e idea is that a socio-
c ultural cont ext can be too insistentl y homo -
geneous to foster genuine indiv iduality, and
that by developin g individuality a socie ty is apt
to give rise to diverse ide ntities. Still , valuing
diversity of identities does not amount to valu-
ing the identit ies themsel ves or crediting thei r
cla ims. Moreover, Appi ah make s clear that
although he and Mill celebrate di versity, they
do so because it is " both a condit ion and a conse-
quen ce of indi viduali ty" .
uals from ide ntity- related values when these
con flic t with the de velopm ent of their indi-
viduality and autonomy . App iah rejects what
he call s "autonomism" , that is, elevat ing auto-
nom y and individuality to an ideal that a ju stifi-
able socia l orde r should seek to prom ote, per-
haps eve n coerci vely: if individuals belon ging
to a religiou s or cultural group wish not to
develop autonomy and individuali ty, Appi ah
think s they should be free , within certain limit s,
to pursue their non -ind ividualist path. His
Millian liberali sm see ks to walk a line between
giving group identitie s basic standing, as in
"mill et" mul ticultu ralism (the Ottom an Empire
prac tice of allow ing different religiou s groups
their own social space), on the one hand , and
privil eging a sing le liberal idea l of autonomous
indi viduality, on the other.
The question is ho w to do this. Appi ah is at
his best in mak ing the normative case that to
accord standing to groups and group identity
threaten s unaccept able impositions on individu-
als. For one thing, ide ntity ethic s and politic s
risk the "Medusa Syndrome" . Th ey not only
threa ten autonomy and our ability to rega rd, for
exa mple, "skin ca lor and the sex ual bod y as
personal dimen sion s of the se ll": they can also
turn gro up and culture life "to stone" , ossifying
what might otherwise be vigorous and creative

in universalist terms, and reduce them to
those term s, the "attempts at reduction fail
to have a grip on us co mparable to what they
seek to red uce" . They "see m remo te from the
attitude and emotion - the eva luative affec t"
involved in the partia l ide ntities them selves. As
Pro fessor Appiah mem orabl y put s it, "y ou
always fee l as you would if someone gave yo u
a twen ty-doll ar bill as change for a five: the
ge nerosi ty is touch ing but you wo nder abo ut
the accountin g" .
Iden tities in Ap piah's sense are things we
live our lives as. Th ey are, primarily, ways of
rega rding ourse lves and one another that are
co llective or socia l: first, in that they involve
"terms in publ ic discou rse that are used to pick
out the bearer s of the ident ity" ; seco nd, in that
people act of ten enough toward s others as such
bearers (i.e., treat them as such); and third, in
that at least some such bearers intern alize the
label and so view them sel ves as well. App iah
discu sses Mr Stevens, the butler in Kazuo Ishig-
uro' s novel The Remains of the Day (1989) , for
whom it is cent ral to his life' s meaning that he
is a servant in a "g reat house". Mr Stevens lives
his life as such a serva nt, and he sees this self-
conception reflected in the way others treat him
(or at least seem to from his point of view) .
App iah starts from the idea that " ide ntities
make ethica l cl aims", but he nonethel ess agrees
with lan Hackin g' s "dy namic nom inali sm" , in
whic h identiti es "come into being hand in hand
with our invention of the categories labelin g
them". App iah discusses impressiv e evide nce
for " identity nom inali sm" in the famous
"R obb ers Ca ve Experime nt", ori ginally pub-
lished in 1961 , in which eac h of two groups of
eleven-yea r-old boys sponta neo usly ass umed a
we/t hey mentality on simply being infor med of
the existe nce of the oth er gro up, and subse-
quentl y develop ed elaborate comp etin g ide nti-
ties and norms after onl y a few days of inter-
action. Ident ity nomin ali sm invol ves treating
liiiir" ~ijijir.~~iii~i~~~'i~i~~jI'jiiiiiiii
be jure.
de made Itvaluable or otherwise
is, of cour give n troversial
se, quite uncon authori ty
that socia l construction ca n crea te something
that has value. Th e question is how it is possible
to socia lly construct the value itself.
On the whole, Appiah takes the ethic al signi-
ficance of identit y for gra nted and doe s not seek
to ex plain it further. Th is see ms fair enough
give n his purp oses, although it also seems
important to distinguish any cla ims that ide nti-
ties make as such from other things that are
often in the neighbourhood. Fam ilial identities
loom large for App iah, for exa mple. On e of the
most wonde rful things about his books is the
window they open onto his marvell ously tex-
tured relations with his father, the Ghanaian
patrio t Joseph App iah, his English moth er, his
Engli sh and Ghanaian uncles and aunts, and
far-fl ung family of his own ge neration. It is
clear that Appiah pro foundl y appreciates the
special values and responsibilities these relat ion-
ships involve. But to what ex tent do these come
from an ide ntity Appia h happil y em braces as
his father and mother' s son, and so on , as
oppo sed to com ing directl y from the relat ion-
ships and related indiv iduals them sel ves (say)?
Do the reason s to be loyal to someone (or eve n
to some group or nation) to whom (or which)
one is devoted co me from one' s self-conception
as someo ne who is thus devoted ? That migh t
seem "one thought too many", in Bernard
Williams' s famous phrase.
The challenge that Appiah primarily takes on
in these book s is to see whether it is possible
to give part ial identiti es their due while also
keep ing them in their place . A properl y "partia l
cosmopolitanism", as he ca lls it, should seek to
" take seriously" both the values of "human life"
in ge neral as well as of "the lives people have
made for themsel ves, within the communities
that help lend them significa nce" . " In a sloga n",
he says, "uni versality plu s differenc e." To help
him meet the chall enge, Appiah enlists John
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- 7- T LS A PRIL 2 7 2 0 0 7

cultures . Second, eve n a prima facie case for
giving certain grou ps standing within a liberal
framewor k is plausible only so long as a "right
of exit" is guara nteed, and it is hard to see how
LECTURES ON to do that adequately without compro mising
THE HISTORY OF gro up standing itself. Third, the best liberal
arguments for gro up standing (those of Will
POLITICAL Kymlicka and Joseph Raz), which rely on the
PHILOSOPHY idea that rootedness in cu ltural groups is neces-
John Rawls sary for individua lity and autonomy (culture as
Edited by Samuel Freeman reso urce), founder on the inapt ness of the meta-
The last book by the late John Rawls, phor. Someone without any culture at all is
derived from written lectures and unimaginable, and it is also unclear how to
assess both the resource value of different cul-
notes for his long-running course on tural groups to their indivi dual memb ers and
modern political philosophy. how political and ethica l recogn ition might
March 200 71 Belknap Press 1978-0-674-02492-2 1£22 .95
affect that value. Appiah imagi nes a cu ltural
gro up, "the Dyspeptics" , who thrive on social
WHAT IS GOOD
rejectio n. How, he asks, might recogni zing their
AND WHY gro up identity improve whatever suppo rt indi-
The Ethics of Well-Being viduals get from the group? Ultima tely, he sensi-
Richard Kraut bly remarks, one must decide " whether it is cu l-
One of our most ture or people who are owed respect: and this is
respected analytical one difference that cannot be split". Respect is
philosophers, reorients the something we owe to people.
questions around the notion of what But what dee per j ustificat ion underlies these
normative assessments? In Appiah's view , it is
causes human beings to flourish
a thesis about the relationship between a
- that is, what is good for us? person' s good or welfare, and autonomy, one
April 2007 1978-0-6 74·02441-0 1£22 .95
that is very differe nt from anything to be found
MIND IN LIFE in Mill. This is Ronald D work ins "endorse-
Biology, Phenomenology, and ment constra int", according to which, as Appiah
the Sciences of Mind interprets it, "you cannot make someo ne better
Evan Thompson off by forcing her to do something she does not
herself endorse as valuable". In my view, how-
Draws on a diverse eve r, this mislocates autonomy' s value and
range of sources to proper role in moral and political theor y.
illuminate how life is related Mill' s idea was that individua ls ca n legiti-
to the mind, and to argue that the mately object to paternali stic d irection on their
two are more continuous than has behalf, because autonomy and individuality are
previously been accepted. important "e lements of well-being" . In other
April 200 7 I Belknap Pres s 1978-0-6 74-02511-0 I £29.95 words, Mill sought to grou nd our authority
as ind ividuals (autonomy as authority) in the
IN THE SPACE thought that we are likelier to achieve the indi-
OF REASONS viduality and autonomy that are so impo rtant
Selected Essays of to our welfare (autonomy as benefit) if we are
Wilfrid Sellars recognize d as having this authority . As I see it,
Wilfrid Sellars Mill ' s approach was misguided. The desirabil-
Edited by Kevin Scharp ity of seeing ou rselves as having authority to
& RobertB. Brandom lead our own lives is a reaso n of the wro ng kind
Presents Sellars's essays in a to think that we have this authority de jure , j ust
as the beneficial consequences of believing
sequence that illuminates what
something is a reason of the wrong kind for
Robert Brandom calls the thinking that it is actually true. Mill at least
"inferentialist" conception of appreciated that autonomy as authority and auto-
meaning at the heart of his work. nomy as benefit are different things. His mis-
Apri12007 I 978-0-674-02498-41 £29 .95 take was to think that the former could be based
on the latter. Dworkin' s endorse ment con-
NEW IN PAPERBACK straint, on the other hand , confla tes the two
things. It confuses the plausible idea that indi-
FRONTIERS viduals have standing to object to attempts to
OF JUSTICE benefit them, contrary to their wishes , with the
Disability, Nationality, implausible idea that no such attempt could suc-
Species Membership ceed. But surely the problem with paternalism
Martha C. Nussbaum is tha t it usurp s the ben efited pe rso n's authori ty
"Well-argued and to lead her own life and to resist direction from
beautifully written, Frontiers of others (indiv iduals, groups, or the State) for her
own good, eve n when these others are correct
Justice is an important, provocative
about the benefits of their direction. The prob-
and thoroughly admirable book, and lem is not that "successful" paternalism in this
will be essential reading for anyone sense is simply impossi ble.
interested in the concepts ofjustice This confla tion of autonom y as an authority
and moral entitlement." - Mark individuals have over their own lives that
Rowlands , Times Literary Supplement is part and parcel of the dignity of free and
May 20071 Belknap Press 1978·0·674·02410·6 1£12 .95 independent moral persons (part of our being
"se lf-orig inating sources of valid claims",
as John Rawls put it) with autonomy as a con-
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS dition of our welfare or well-being, infec ts the
www.hup.harvard.edu
UK: +44 (0) 20 7306 0603
US: 8004051619
TLS AP RIL 27 20 07
PHILOSOPHY
founda tions of Appiah's argument. It j ust seems Wh en it comes to intercu lturallinternatio nal
false that the idea that a person ' s welfare moral discussion, he arg ues, we would do well
depend s decisively on her own endorse ment of to adapt the notion of "incompletely theorized
its constituents is "one source of Kant' s notion agreements" which Cass Sunstein has proposed
that we are each entitled to a form of self-gov- in the context of America n constitutional law.
erna nce, which he ca lled 'a utonomy' ''. Auto- Here, practice rather than theory has primacy.
nomy as authority is consistent with eve n the It is "commerce" with one another, in David
most perfectionist accounts of human welfare, Hume' s broad sense, that leads strangers with
which hold that we flourish most when we real- conl1icting identities to ethical agreeme nt. As
ize forms of human excellence. And Appiah mis- indi viduals atte mpt to make themse lves mutu-
locates the proper objec tion to perfectionist lib- ally intelligible, they are likelier to come to
eralisms - those that wou ld support intervention eva luative agreement , as David Velleman has
to impro ve indi viduals' autonomous pursuit of so effec tively shown.
individua lity. The problem, again, is not that phi- Appiah also has a fascinating discussion of
losophers, includ ing Mill, cannot possibly be the difference between taboos and moral norm s
correc t when they think that people would flo ur- and their respect ive connections to emotions
ish more as creative individuals eve n if they like disg ust, on the one hand, and guilt and indig-
don't want that. It is that we have no authority to nation ("rea cti ve attitudes" as P. F. Strawson
direct people to live their lives in this way if termed them), on the other. Appia points out
they choose not to. Any such atte mpt would vio- that ordinary Americans are no less suscepti ble
late their authority as autonomo us individuals. to taboos (for instance, rega rding eating cats)
I have concentrated on The Ethics of Identity than anyone else. Finall y, there is a wise and
because it is the more philosophi cally devel- insightful discussion of the lively debate about
oped and systematic of the two book s, but repatriation of national cultural treasures.
Cosmopo litanism is also chock-full of insights Kwame Anthony Appiah takes the sensible posi-
and suggestions that will be interest ing to tion that preservation of cultural treasures is not
philosophers as well as to the lay publ ic, Appia simply a right that a people or nation can have,
argues with some persuasiveness that eva lua- it is an obligation that we owe one another j ust
tive agreement across identity lines is likelier to as human beings. There may, it seems, be an
emerge from empathetica lly informed conversa- obligation to preserve the memory and apprecia-
tion and response to specific cases, as part of tion of cultural groups even when there is not to
a shared life or narrat ive experience, than it is preserve the gro ups themselves (if for exa mple
to deri ve from agree ment on first principl es. group memb ers choose not to do so).
Armour
(poems without po litics)
From sabaton to visor, greave to rerebrace
(He kno ws but one directi on!) :
His family call him cyborg , but lack imagination;
He' s all metal until an enemy punctures
His underco ating. Chain mail is satisfying
(It breathes . . . is coldly swea ty) ,
It imprints on skin or aketon a cartog raphy
Of craftsmanship: he goe s to his maker
Well unmade, having dri ven an economy.
(Muse ums mai ntain down- paymen ts.s
In an idle moment he marvels over rivets:
The movement of the poleyns: vital as his kneecap s.
As mirror s of his joi nery, steel plate makes faith
(Go d's hand iwo rk: give n a good work-over):
Detailed, custom -lined , in his own image - moreover,
Performance enhancing, produ ct placement:
Ch ivalry! He' s the complete package.
(He 's thrown dow n the gaun tlet.)
He removes his cuisses and faulds,
And enamours us with his tenderness:
Cheerleaders, weekend warriors
(Paintballers outside office hours) ,
Paraglid ers, scrappe rs, war gamers,
Dealers fighting turf wars. Sold iers.
(Imp act of mac e on plate sha tters peace.)
JOH N KINSELLA
- 8-

e often take it for granted that much
W of our world has been exposed and
explained by science. The best rem-
edy for such complacency is to take a closer look
at those few remaining mysteries that present the
deepest challenges to our understanding of the
world. Three in particular come to mind: Why is
there something rather than nothing? Why is
some of what there is alive? And why is some of
what is alive conscious, or self-aware?
We are somewhat in the dark with respect to
the lirst question , though some scientists will
tell you that, ultimately, some combination
of Big Bang and String Theory will be the
answer. We are considera bly better off when
it comes to the second question , where it is
wide ly believed that the so-ca lled modern
synthesis of evolutionary biology and Mend-
elian genetics exp lains not only the origi n of
species but also the origi n of life. Oddly,
perhaps, it is the third question that presents the
graves t challenge to our attempt at an intellec-
tual domesticati on of the world. It is the one
area of science where our understand ing is still
in what posterity will surely refer to as the pre-
historical stage of inquiry. The problem is that
we lack any compelling paradigm to guide our
research on conscio usness and se lf-awareness .
Many take these phenomena to represent
science' s final frontier.
I say "oddly" because our own seIf-
awareness is, in one way, the phenomenon
closest to us of all. And yet it has proven extra-
ordinarily elusive. There are probably many
reasons for this, but it is someti mes thought that
the deep problem is a fundamen tal incompatibil-
ity between the aspired objectivity of scientific
inquiry and the essential subjectivi ty of seIf-
awa reness. The modus operandi of modern
science is to abstract away from our subjec tive
perspective on the world in order to home in on
the objective way it is in itself. This might work
for most phenomena, but not so much for phe-
nomena that are inextricably tied up with subjec-
tivity , such as self-awareness and conscious-
ness. How is the objective study of subjectivity
supposed to proceed? Nobody knows.
It is into this unwelcom ing fray that Douglas
R. Hofstad ter steps with his new and cutely
titled book, I Am a Strange Loop . Almost thirty
years after the publication of his well-loved
Giidel, Esche r, Bach, Hofstadter revisits some
of the same themes. The purpose of the new
book is to make inroads into the nexus of self,
self-aw areness and co nscio usness by ex amin-
ing self-referential structures in areas as diverse
as art and mathematics.
Hofstadte r is the man for the jo b. His treat-
ment of the issues is approachable and personal,
you might even say subjective. His discussion
is never over technica l and his prose never o ver-
bearing. He stays close to the surface of real life
at all times, even as he discusses matters of
the highest level of abstraction, and his book is
full of fresh and rich real-life examples that
give texture and authenticity to the discussion.
In these ways and others, he is what philoso-
phers would call "a good phenomenologist",
meaning a good student of lived conscious
experience. If we hope to unravel the mysterie s
of self-awareness, the combination of good
phenomenology and a focus on self-referential
phenomena is a prom ising starting point.
Hofstadter's principa l thesis is that we our-
selves, qua conscious beings, are "emergent
self-refere ntial structures". I Am a Strange
Loop thus revolves arou nd two main ideas: the
idea of an emergent phenomenon and the idea
PHILOSOPHY
point: how can we reconcile our lived, experi-
Back to back enced conception of ourselves with the concep-
tion of ourselves portrayed by modern science?
Hofstadter tells a wonderful story about the
emerge nce of symbolic thought from neural
U R I A H KRIEG EL drawer, and could swear he felt a marble nes- activity. Imagine a pool table with a million
tled among them. It turned out that the uncanny small interacting magnetic marbles ("si mms")
D ou gla s R . H of st adt er appearance of a marble was produce d by the on it. These simms careen about the space of
extra layers around the envelopes' V. This mar- the pool table, which he calls the "careenium".
I AM A ST RANGE LOOP ble appearance is for Hofstadter a paradigmat ic In some circumstances, the simms get magnet-
348 pp. Basic Boo ks. £ 14.99 (US $26.95). emergent phenomenon , arising as it does from ized to eac h other, and may form ball-shaped
978 046503 078 1 wholly unrelated underlying elements. In this clusters - "sirnmballs". The behaviour of single
case , we are inclined to dismiss the marble simms is random, but that of simmballs is not.
of self-reference, or of a "strange loop" to use appearance as illusory, because of how acciden- The simmballs move around inside the
Hofstadter' s technical term. tal and idiosyncratic it is. But according to Hofs- careenium depending on what kind of external
A strange loop is a phenomenon that involves tadter, when an appearance is produced reliably forces impinge on the careenium's external
reference to itself. An artwork, a thought, or a and persistentl y, under many different condi - walls. Thus the behaviour of simmballs inside
sentence may twist back on to itself and self- tions and for many different observers, we start the careenium comes to reflect conditions
refer. Thus, the sentence "this very sentence is taking it more seriously. It becomes "more real" outside it.
written in English" is self-referential, because it to us. Ultimate ly, he proposes, our self is an Our minds, says Hofstadter, work in just this
refers not to any old sentence, but to itself. A emergent appeara nce of this sort. In fact, it is way. Inside the cranium (careenium) are millions
more surprising example explored by Hofstadter the most real emergent object in our inner of nervous cells whose behaviour is more or less
(which does not employ the demonstrative world. meaningless. But sometimes large clusters of
expression "this very") is the sentence ''' pre- The issue of emerge nce arises with special cells coordinate their behaviour in response to
ceded by itself in quote marks yields a full sen- acuity for self-aware ness, but it applies already the way the external world impinges on parts of
tence' preceded by itself in quote marks yields a to awareness of things other than oneself. At the cranium, such as the retina or the eardrums.
full sentence" . (Think about that for a moment.) some level, we know that all that is really going When they do, these clusters come to constitute
Many other self-referential phenomena are on in our head is the propagation of electrical symbols (simmballs), symbols that represent
discussed throughout the book, including self- impulses among nervous cells. But, of course, external conditions in a sustained manner that
videotaping videos, self-proving mathematical this is not how we experience our mental life. effectively constitutes a rudimentary awareness
proofs, Eschers self-referential paintings, etc. We experie nce it as involving the continuous of the external world. The moral is that although
Different systems may exhibit different representation of the world. Our ideas, hopes we cannot lind anything like symbolic thought
degrees of self-refere ntial sophistication, and and desires all employ symbols that represent or awareness when we look at individual brain
for Hofstadter, the more sophistica ted a sys- how the world is and how it could be. The cells, if we widen our view and consider slightly
tem' s self-referential capabilities, the more soul- question of emergence arises already at this more abstract and more spread-out structures
ful it is - the more robust its selth ood, its exis t-
ence as an "I" . A snail probably has no concep-
tion of itself whatever, and to that extent is soul-
less. A dog has some conception: it knows that
its paw is its own. But the dog' s self-co nception
is very limited. For example, studies show that
dogs do not recognize themselves in the mirror.
In these studies, a mark is painted on the
animal' s forehead , and when a mirror is
brought in, it is observed whether the animal
makes any attempt to wipe the mark off. The
number of animals who pass the "mark test", as
psychologists call it, is surprisingly small: the
Chimpanzee, the orang-utan, the bottlenose
dolphin , and the Asian elephant are the only
ones on record. Even gorillas, baboons and Afri-
can elephants fail, as do humans younger than
eighteen months. The five self-recognizers
(including ourselves) would thus constitute, by
Hofstadter' s lights, a soulful elite within the
animal kingdo m. At the same time, it is clear
that there is a kind of self-awareness that is
more sophisticated and more elusive than the
recognition of one's embodied self in a mirror,
and there is probably a kind of self-awareness
that only adu lt humans exhibit, and which
represents the pinnacl e of soulfulness.
One of the deepest questions in this area is
how any soulfulness can exist in a world of sub-
atomic particles buzzing about in mostly empty
space. The ancients believed that the self
emerged from the activity of the heart. It is
clear today that the seat of selth ood and self-
awareness is rather in the brain. A pressing ques-
tion arises, however: how can something as
majestic as self-aware ness emerge from the
thoughtless activ ity of millions of nervous cells
vibrating inside the darkness of the skull? Some
of the most fascinating insights in Hofstadter' s
book pertain to this issue.
As an example of an emerge nt phenomenon ,
Hofstadter tells of the time he tried to take out a
wodge of old envelopes from a box in his
- 9- TLS A PRIL 2 7 20 0 7
 PHILOSOPHY & CLASSICS

and patterns within the brain, we j ust might.
What is true for awareness of things other
than oneself is true also for self-awareness. One
specia l symbol which takes more time to form
is the "I" symbol. If the caree nium developed a
simmball with which to represent its own opera-
tions, it would come to be a self-refe rentia l sys-
tem and have an "I". Our cranium does have a
symbol that represents itself, and it is therefore
self-aware . Importantl y, however , our symbolic
representations have a somewhat "coarse
grain", as philo sophers say. When we represent
an ice cube, for exa mple, we are aware of
it simply as a single, homo genous, clear-
pinkish cube. We are not aware of the millions
of hydrogen and oxygen atoms makin g it up.
Likewise, when we represent ourselves, we are
not aware of the mill ions of neurons inside our
brain, but rather of the vario us symbols that
clu sters of them make up. That is to say, the cra-
nium is aware of itself precisely as a theatre of
ideas, desires and hopes, not as a cont ainer of
cere bral molecules buzzing about mean ing-
lessly. And that is why we experience our men-
tallife in those terms, eve n though ultimately it
all rests on the purpo seless activities of so many
individuall y insentient nervous cells.
The thesis that con sciou s selves are emergent
self-refe rential structures strikes me as sending
us in exactly the right direction . Nonetheless I
find two important problems with it. First, it is
disconcert ing to di sco ver that, like the marble
in the envelope box, I am a mere appearance,
albeit a stubborn one. Hofstadter insists that such
stubborn appearances are very real "to us" . But
--;'; '; '; '; '; '; '; '; ';;::==============================::;l
•
'The missing link that reveals the underlying
unity of Foucault's later thought.'
- Kevin Thompson, Continental Philosophy Review
New from the Lecturesat the College de France series
'Security, Territory, Population' by Michel Foucault
that does not make them real (period). When I
hallucinate a lion, but am unaware that I am hallu-
cinating, the lion is real "to me". Yet, for all that,
it is entirely unreal. And if we had a whole group
of people hallucinating a lion in concert, the lion
would not miraculously assume flesh and blood
as a result. Second ly, self-reference can take
place in any numbe r of compl etely unconscious
systems, as Hofstadter' s varied examples show.
Many inanim ate objects, includin g your office
desktop, often perform self-monitoring func-
tions. So self-refe rence by itself canno t suffice
for con sciou sness and self-awareness. Perhap s
what is needed is that not onl y the system, but
also specific states of the system, be self-referen-
tial. This proposal, however, requires separate
consider ation , which Hofstadter does not offer.
That problems should arise with any attempt
to tackle science's last frontier is par for the
cour se. The important thing at this pre-hist-
orical stage of inquiry is that this book points
in the righ t dire ction: the phenomena logically
respon sible explora tion of emerge nt self-
refer entia l phenom ena. Althou gh this is cer-
tainly contro versial, my own view is that if a
viable parad igm to guide research into self and
consciou sness is to arise, it would have to be
from the neighbou rhood of ideas explored in I
Am a Strange Loop - and explored so entertain-
ingly, no less. Douglas Hofstadter' s engaging
style, his feather-light prose and his determ ina-
tion to establish genuine communication with
the reader add up to high intellectual adventur e
- and not only for those who, like myself , are
already sympathetic to his ideas.
Stone on paper
n AD 19, the Roman prince Germanicu s
I paid a royal visit to Alexandria in Egypt.
According to a surviving papyru s record, he
was given a rapturous recepti on by the crowds.
He had hardly got throu gh the first sentence of
his speech ("I was sent by my father, gentlemen
of Alexandri a . . .") when they broke into
appl ause. And cries of "Bravo" and "Good
luck" continu ed to punctuate his address - as
he begged for a chan ce to be heard in peace,
explained how difficu lt his journey had been,
and how much he was missing his famil y in
Rome (incl uding his adopted father, the
Emperor Tiberius, and his "granny", as he affec-
tionately called the austere - and possibly
murd erou s - Empress Li via), and compli-
mented his listeners on their lovely historic
town. The Alexandrian s probably overdid their
enthusiasm. Anoth er papyru s preser ves part of
the text of an edict issued by Germ anicus on
this same visit. The gist of it is that if they con-
tinue to treat him like a god, then he will show
his displea sure by staying away and makin g
rather fewer epiphanies in the future.
It is hard to know how we should read the
tone of Germ anicu s' speec h to the cro wds. Is it
an adept piece of semi-improv isation (to jud ge
from the repeated "to begin with"), flatterin g
his audienc e by sharing his anxieties for his
famil y - showing his carin g side, as we might
say? Or is it an ill-prepared public perform ance ,
in which this pamper ed aristocrat tactlessly
whinges on about the inconvenience of foreign
travel and his own homesickne ss? But, which-
eve r view we take, the speech makes a nice
counterpoint to the cynical narrati ve of the histo-
rian Tacitu s, who asserts that affairs of state
were onl y a pretext for Germanicus' arri val in
Egy pt: he was reall y on a sightseei ng trip. And
before long, accord ing to Tacitu s, the emperor
had given him a gentle reprim and for going
nati ve and wearing Greek cloth es; and a rather
sterner one for enterin g Egypt without permi s-
sion - for all Senators required a specia l " visa"
from the emp eror to visit that particular prov-
ince. At the very least, it is a nice reminder for
MARY BEARD
P et er Par son s
C I T Y O F TH E S H A R P- N O S E D F ISH
Greek lives in Rom an Egypt
320pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £25.
978029764 588 7
from fragment s of Christian apocrypha to pri-
vate letters bewailin g illness, arranging wed-
dings, or soliciting a loan. As Peter Parsons puts
it in his marvellou sly evocative City of the
Sharp -Nosed Fish (which is the English transla-
tion of Oxyrhynchu s, and refers to the town ' s
sacred animal), this amounts to "the paper-trail
of a whole cu lture". Unlike Pompeii, which
preser ves the build ings and the bodies of an
ancient cit y, Oxyrhynchu s has now no visible
remains on site beyond a single column . So far
as I can see, for most of us it would hard ly be
worth the visit. But it exists "as a waste-paper
cit y, a virtual landscape which we can repopu-
late with living and speaking people" .
History has been kind to Grenfell and Hunt -
rather kinder, in some respects, than life itself
(his third breakdown ended Gren fell' s aca-
demic career in 1920, and he spent his last years
in a mental hospital; a few years later, Hunt
appears to have been shattered by the death of
his only son). Tony Harrison's play The Track-
ers of Oxyrh ynchus reflect s their generally
friendly recept ion. Harrison weaves the plot
of Sophocle s' lchn eutae, or "Trackers" , which
was one of Grenfell and Hunt' s major redisco v-
erie s, into the story of their own tracking down
of papyri. In Harrison ' s arresting doggerel, the
pair com e acro ss as an engaging, if dotty, team
of boffin s, with Gren fell (who is also the
Apollo of the ancient dram a) bein g notic eably
"highly-strung": "Grenfell gets so anxiou s to
find dramatic scraps / it almost brought the poor
chap clo se to a co llapse". In fact, their archaeo-
logica l method s were not much less of a treas-
ure hunt than those of Sch liemann . "Good luck
with the grave digging ", wrote Grenfell ' s

MICHEL us of how different viewpoints offer a dram-

atically different perspec tive on the power
polit ics and internecine squabbles of the Roman
broth er, aptly, on one occa sion to wish them
success. With their eyes trained on the holy
grail of the lost literary masterpiece s of Antiq-

FOUCAULT imperia l family.

The papyru s fragment which preser ves
a sizeable part of Germanicus' speech is all that
uity, they took little interest in the other
materi al rema ins of the ancient city, which were
still sufficiently well preserved for Flinders
now remains of what was probably a pamphl et Petrie to survey and record in the 1920s: the
comm emor ating important occasions in the remains of a large theatre for some I 1,000
relation s betwe en Alexandria and Rome. The spectators, as well as a coup le of colonn aded
other side of the document seems to be an streets.
account of an embassy sent from Alexandri a to "Most of that stone has since disappeared",
S ECU R I T Y. T ERR IT O R Y. the elderly Emperor Augustus in AD 13, writ- Parsons observes, euphemistically, of the
ten in the same care less hand . It was found not depr edations of modern building work that
P O I' U L ATI O N
in Alexa nd ria itsel f, but in on e of the ancient have taken pla ce over the past nin et y years. It is
LECll r R[~ .H T il l COL L E G E D E F R .... x c t
rubbi sh dumps at the Graeco-Roman town of hard not to suspect that the favourab le reput a-
1~)77 - 197~
Oxyrhynchu s, about 200 mile s to the south. tion of Grenfe ll and Hunt rests on the fact that
'0111.1' 111"!11l'll'U '\ '1
'_[" ltll ~ 1..,.. ' .."", ... El I A I' • U.,'h"l .... Here, no fewer than half a mill ion papyrus they were not ransacking a site for hoards of pre-
"" .. . ,,, It I • ",, ~ .... l Il .. ,..., "

11 .. ~'l.A" 1' 111 I •• , tt\'I ~. I' lit L.

fragment s, some large, some very small, were
excavated by the British Classicists Bernard P.
Available now' Hardback- £19 99 Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt over the decade
between 1897 and 1907, and shipped to Oxford.
These papyri preserved writing in almo st
'These Lectures offer the wonderfuL opportunity of eve ry genre, mostly in Greek, and mostly writ-
ten in the Roman period: from texts of "lost"
witnessing a great mind at work'
plays of Sophocles and Menand er to school-
- Jeremy Jennings, University of London room writin g exe rcises, from scraps of ancient
porno graph y to contrac ts and tax documents,
ciou s gold and silver , but for these academ i-
call y priceless pieces of paper. Thi s material
came to Oxford in dozens of tin boxes, and was
in due cour se placed for safe keepin g between
the leaves of back numb ers of the University
Gaze tte (which serendipitously was ju st the
right size for the tins). It has been the focus of a
thriving scholarly indu stry eve r since.
The first volum e of papyri was publi shed by
Gren fell and Hunt in 1898 under the aegis of

TLS APRIL 27 200 7 - 10-


the Egypt Exp lorati on Society, and they con-
tinued working together on the decipher ment
of their discoveries unt il Grenfell's fina l break-
down - when younger members, base d in
Oxford and Uni versity Co llege London, were
gradually introduced to the team . Vo lume
LXXII is about to ap pear (bringing the tota l of
individual new texts and documents published
to around 5,000), and forty or so more volumes
are in prospect, as we ll as a co llection of essays,
Oxyrhynchus: A city and its texts , edited by
Alan Bowman and ot hers.
Parsons, who recen tly retired from the
Regius Chair of Greek at Oxford, has been
invo lved with the Oxyr hynch us project for
almost ha lf a century. His aim in City of the
Sha rp-Nosed Fish is to use the surviving scraps
of papyrus to provi de a gui de to the life and
letters of this ancient city for the non-specialist
as much as for the professional Classicist. (The
original germ of the book came from a "Co m-
mentary" in the TLS in 1998.) He writes with
tremendous verve and wit , and wit h memorable
turns of phrase . I liked , for example, the idea of
Egypt being the "Californ ia of opportunity" to
the Ancient Greeks. The sheer elegance of his
sty le tends to make the reconstruction and syn-
thesis he has attempted look effort less . In fact, it
depends on tru ly phenomenal learn ing and
expertise. It is hard enough to decipher the hand-
writing of these documents, let alone to work
out how any particular fragme nt mig ht fit into a
bigge r picture, and then to explain it to a general
audience, as he does, wit hout dumbi ng down.
Parsons evokes a wide range of human
experience in this multicu ltura l town (a Greek-
speaking community, in the ancient land of the
Pharaohs, now under the Roman Empire): from
the co mplaints of its schoo lteac hers about their
pay to the tro ublesome co ugh of its reluctant
mayor. Several of the stories he tells show viv-
idly how the provincials of the Ro man Empire
adjusted to interventions from the top, or to
deve lopments in Rome itse lf. A visit of
emperor or prince ling was one thing . Another
prob lem was the realignments that might have
to be made when a new ru ler came to the throne
or disposed of his riva l. This was especially
acute when the memory of a previous emperor
was "damned" (so-called damna tio memoriae)
and his name and images were supposed to be
exp unge d from sight. There was, as Parsons
points out, " no easy way of air-brus hing the
fallen out of history" ; it wou ld require treme n-
do us orga nization to erase all traces of "the late
great " from everywhere. W hat he shows instead
are some sporadic attempts by the locals to
reflect the new order, as well as a few cases
of practical inge nuity. One extract from the
journal of the local town co uncil shows that the
recor d of compliments paid to a trio of imperial
relatives, who later fell from favo ur, has been
emp hatically inked out. In ot her doc uments
some offending names have been erased, but
others apparently not noticed in what must have
been a cursory searc h thro ugh the archive . But
sea ls presented difficul ties of a different order
and might pro mpt particularly ingenious solu-
tions. At the customs post of Karanis, nort h of
Oxyr hync hus, an official sea l had been in use
showing the image of the Emperor Septimius
Severus, Ilanke d by his two so ns, Caracalla and
Geta. W hen Severus died in 2 11, Caracalla
soon had Geta murde red and dam ned. The
response at Karanis was to fill in the image
of Geta on the sea l with the ancient equivalent
of putty , so that it no longer left a mark. Sea l
stones were presumably pricey, and it wo uld
CLAS S ICS
A blu e glas s fish of E gy p tia n d esign c950 BC, found at Ox yrhynchus
have taken a while to commission a rep lace-
ment. This was the instant and cheap solution .
Most of the documents at Oxyrhynchus, how-
ever, are more concerned with specifically local
issues, even if the Roman authorities are
present in the background. There are contracts,
apprenticeship agree ments, acco unts, magical
spe lls, legal denu nciations, han dwriting exe r-
cises and thank-you letters. Occasionally the
history of an individual fam ily, its trials and trib-
ulations, can be traced thro ugh surviving papyri
ove r many years . That is memorab ly the case for
the horr ibly dysfu nctional fami ly of Tryp hon, a
weaver born in AD 8 or 9. W hen he was about
twenty-five, Tryp hon had married a woman,
Demetrous, who soon walked out on him :
according to his surviving den unciation, "s he
too k a hostile attitude to our marriage and in
the en d went off, and they took away our
property . . ." . In the absence of De metro us,
Tryphon started to Ii ve wit h a woman ca lled
Saraeus and signed a forma l civ il partnership
with her in AD 37 . But Demetro us was not
entire ly off the scene ; she returned and beat up
Saraeus, who was pregnant and miscarried.
Another forma l denunciation followed. We do
not know how Demetrous was fina lly disposed
of, but Saraeus went on to have three children -
and then to get into more trou ble.
Wh en she was nursing the youngest baby,
Apio n, she also agreed to wet-nurse a foundling,
given to her by a man called Pesouris, who pre-
sumably paid for the service. One of the babies
died : she claimed that it was the foundling who
had died , Pesouris claimed that it was Apion.
This tricky judgment of Solomon went before
the local governor, who decided against Pesouris
"since the child seems from his looks to be
Saraeus 's". Pesouris may well have recognized
this for a weak and desperate argument, so he
continued to harass Tryp hon - who then too k his
case to the Roman Prefect (that is, provincial
governor) himself. Even though Tryp hon seems
to have won this roun d, too, Saraeus, pregnant
again, found herse lf beaten up once more by a
gro up of fema le allies of Pesouris.
All this prompts two awkward questions.
First, how typical was life in Oxyrhynchus of
life in the Roman wor ld more generally? Can
we generalize from Tryp hon to the ordinary citi-
zen in Rome itse lf, or even in Ga ul or Britain?
T he stan dard scho larly answer used to be " no".
Egypt, so this argument went, was sui generis .
Wit h its mixture of native Egyptian, Greek and
Roman traditions, it was muc h more aggres-
-1 1-
Egypt's uniq ueness. Thoug h the conditions of
their survival are certainly much less favour-
able elsewhere, ep hemeral written docu ments
are now bei ng discovered in greater quantities
a ll over the Empire (especially in Britain),
and their themes and concerns are not so very
different from the Egyptian material.
The second question is about interpretation.
How far is it legiti mate to read into these docu-
ments a day-to-day life in Antiquity that is
broadly like our own , give or take a few quirky
or quaint customs? Or how far do we detect in
them a radically alien world, pressing at the
very limits of our comprehension? Parsons
refers to the series of events in Tryphon 's
family as a " soap-opera". If so, it was a partic u-
larly nasty one, invo lving the deat h of a ba by,
assa ult, harassmen t and miscarriage by vio-
len ce. But thro ugho ut City of the Sharp-Nosed
Fish, he tend s to paint life in Oxyrhync hus as
recognizable and relative ly familiar to us . Of
course, they did things differently there, but not
so very differently. So for example, as Parsons
sive ly multicu ltura l than most parts of the exp lains , " the gymnasium is cu ltura l centre and
Roman Empire. And thanks in part to the linger- country club in one" ; bakers made their bread in
ing inIluence of pharaonic bureaucracy, it was a kind of ter racotta she ll or klibanos, such as
also a much more literate cu lture . It was not sim- " are still sold to am bitious home-bakers under
ply a question of the Egy ptian sands providing the name ' baking-c loche :": some crafts traine d
the optima l conditions for preserving papyrus; the next generation with appren tices hips "as we
most Ro mans wo uld never have left beh ind the did until quite recently" .
kind of paper trail that we find at Oxyrhynchus, Even those aspects of Oxyrhynch us life that
or lived in a world so dominated by writing. It is move further up the sca le of unfamiliarity still
perhaps a pity that Parsons does not vent ure a come over as indivi dua l oddities, rather than
view on this . But there is an increasingly stro ng glim pses of an entire ly different way of being.
case for tempering somewhat the old view of Suc h, for example, were the conventions of
r-r- _
Now available in a new English translation. . . I
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MORALS
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POLITICS
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Translated by Steven Rendall
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TL S APR IL 27 2007
 CLAS S rcs & S crENCE

writing. There were, apparently, no such things gery , but thank God!" It is the word "s urgery",
as desks. When you wro te, you rested the papy- or "operation" in another modern version, that
rus roll on your knee: "t he pen wrote me, the gives this accou nt a particularly familiar ring,
right hand and the knee" as one copy of part of with all its connotations of hospitals, anaes-
Moral mammals
the Iliad signs off. Likewise the genera l lack of thetic, antiseptic and so forth. In the original
sanitation. Parsons probably correctly con- Greek, the word in question is "to me" . This any criteria have been put forward to MATTH EW COBB
clud es that the absence of written reference to means "cutting" - of anything from wood to
lavatories is more likely to be due to the fact flesh. "Surgery" is a perfectly legitimate trans-
that there were none, than to modes ty about lation, though a rather nice way of putting it. " It
M provide a definition of what makes
us specifically hum an, such as
language, tool use, or conscio usness. Most of
F ra ns d e Wa al
mentionin g them . The town, he hints, would nearly came to the knife" or "it nearly came these have crumbl ed, or at least become less PR I M A TE S AN D P H IL OS OPH E RS
have smelled stro ngly of human and animal to chopping me up" might be a better rell ection exclusive, under the impact of scie ntilic discov- How moralit y evo lved
waste, and he quotes an extraordinary letter to of ancient med ical proced ures - as well as a ery. Chimp anzees can learn simple forms of 230pp. Princeton University Press. $22.95;
illustrate the ubiquity of excre ment. Missing stronger prompt for us to go beyond the comfort- language; a variety of animals, from apes to vul- distributed in the UK by Wiley. £ 14.95.
978 069 1 124476
her absent friend, one Kalli rhoe wrote in these able modern analogies. tures and sea otters, ca n use tools; inasmuch as
affecti onate terms: "I make obeisance on your "Same or different" is a d ilemm a for any hist- it is possible to be certain that other individuals Rich ard Jo yc e
behalf every day before the Lord God Serapi s. oria n who tries to recapture the structures and are conscious, we now strongly suspect that this
From the day you left we miss your turds, wish- concerns of eve ryday life at whatever period of is the case for apes, dolph ins and , most T HE EV O LU TI ON O F MOR ALI T Y
ing to see you". This was too much for the mod- the past. On the one hand is the obvious fact recently, Asia n elephants. Faced with this ero- 288pp. Bradford Books / MIT Press. $32.
978 0262 101127
esty of Grenfe ll and Hunt, who in the first edi- that some things do not change, or only very sion of our specilicity, one of the few rema ining
tion of this papyrus wrote merely, without trans- slightly. Peopl e in Oxyrhynchu s would have exclusive ly hum an charac ters would appear to L e e Al an Dugatkin
lating, "A very singular sympto m of reg ret for had coughs and co lds, sore feet and blistered be our moral sense.
an absent friend is specifie d in 11.6- 7" . But all hand s jus t as we do; and they may well have Frans de Waal' s exce llent and tho ught- TH E A LT RU I S M EQ U A TIO N
you have to do is omit the title "Serapis" and baked their bread in ways that are still instantly provoking new book , Primates and Philos- Seven sc ientists search for the origins of goo dness
replace " turds" with "laughter", and it could recognizable to us. On the other is the unner v- 224pp. Princeton University Press. $24.95;
ophers, exa mines how morality might have
distributed in the UK by Wiley. £ 15.95.
have been written yesterday . ing thought that these people lived in a world so evo lved by looking for moral behaviour in our
978 069 1 125909
In some cases it is actually Peter Parsons' s different from ou rs as to ca ll into question that closest animal relatives. De Waal is a US-based
elega nt and ju dicio us translation that serves to superficial familiarity and to challenge our abil- Dutch scientist whose work has revolu tionized
domesticate the strange. In one papyrus letter, ity to understa nd, let alone empathize with it. our understanding of primate behaviour. His Nearly thirty years ago, de Waal lirst showed
Tit iano s, probably a Christia n, writes to his My only qualm with this otherwise brilliant findings have been distilled in his highly success- that, after a light between two chimpanzees,
siste r about a lucky recovery. "I was gripped for book is the slightly too cosy image it offers of ful popular science books, including Our Inner another, uninvolved individual will come to put
a long while by an illness", run s the translation, ancient Oxyrhynchu s and its people. Much Ap e (reviewed in the TU ;;, March 3, 2006) and an arm round the defeated individual, in an appar-
"so that I couldn' t even stagger. Wh en my ill- more stands between us and mak ing sense of The Ape and the Sushi Master (TLS , July 13, ent gesture of consolation. This phenotype is
ness eased, my eye suppurated and I had tacho- their world than the deciph erment of Grenfell 200 I). In 2004, de Waal gave a series of lectures limited to the great apes, though many primate
mas and I suffered terribly and in other parts of and Hunt ' s tins of papyri - fascinating and at Princeton University on the subject of species show "reconciliation", when the two
my body as well so that it nearly came to sur- formidable a task as that is. "primate socia l instincts" and their relation to combatants will subsequently groom each other.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _---, human morality. These lectures, summarized in De Waal convincingly argues that consola-
an eighty-page essay , form the heart of Primates tion in great apes is yet another indicator that
and Philosophers. they possess a degree of con sciousness, and

Independent thinking from polity De Waal' s aim is twofo ld. First, he wants to
convince us that primates, and in particular the
something like a theory of mind. And by equat-
ing aspects of human behaviour with that of
great apes (gorillas, chimpanzees , orang-utans other great apes, de Waal also reinterprets ou r
and ourselves), show behaviour that ca n be own behaviour, arguing that rationality plays
Disrespect Century interpreted as a produ ct of morality. Second , he little role in hum an snap decisions to act altru is-
AXEL HONNETH ALAIN BADIDU seeks to use these data to undermin e what he tica lly. Instead , he claims, raw, unprocessed
'The Century is not "the best" :/
ca lls " veneer theory". T his is the idea, which he emoti on intervenes, making us more like our
In this important
book of the last decade, it is traces back to T. H. Huxley, that human moral- animal cousins than philo sophers and psycholo-
new volume, simply the book of the last
Honneth pursues ity is a thin "ve neer" laid on top of a brutish and gists have hitherto supposed. In principle, this
decade! Read it with the
his pathbreaking proper tremor, aware that selfish core, a view that implies a fundamental hypothesis should be testable, in particular
work on recognition you are reading a classic, that discontinuit y between humans and our clo sest through the use of virtual enviro nments.
by exploring the a figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among animal relatives. In other words, this is not only Indeed , all aro und the world video gamers may
us! 'Slavoj ~ii.ek
moral experiences of disrespect that a d iscussion of how we became moral, but also be testing it at this very minute.
underpin the conduct of social and 229x 152 mmI 248 pages I February 2007 of what we rea lly are. The key question The second half of Primates and Philosophers
political critique. 978-07456-3631-3 hb £55.00 addressed by de Waal is whether non-human contains four commentaries, from the science
978·07456-3632-0 pb £15.99
229 x 152mm/ 288 pages / March 2007 animals "po ssess capaci ties for reci procity and writer Robert Wright and the philosophers
978-07456-2905-6 hb £55.00 revenge, for the enforcement of socia l rules, for Robert Kitcher, Christine M. Korsgaard and
978-07456-2906-3pb £18.99 Original Accident the settlement of disputes, and for sympathy Peter Singer, followed by de Waal ' s reply to
and empathy". All of these characteristics, he them. In general, the commentaries dismiss
PAULVIRILlO argues, are required for the exis tence of moral- " veneer theory" as "silly" and de Waal' s critique
Cool Memories V This book defines the ways in ity, but the one he di scu sses in most detail in its as llogging a dead horse. De Waal, however,
2000·2004 which post-industrial science
animal context is empathy. Highlighting the rel- shows that there is life in the horse yet, and that
has merged with out-and-out
JEAN BAUDRILLARD hyper terrorism to threaten ative dearth of investigations into empathetic the idea still lurks in many corners of the life and
the foundations of Greco- responses in animals, comp ared to, say , studies social sciences . "We urgently need to move from
In this new, eagerly Roman, Judeo-Christian
awaited volume in his civilization. and the future of of tool use, de Waal pro vides a series of exa m- a science that stresses narrowly sellish motives
series of fragments and reflections, the planet with them, through innovation of ples of empathy in chimpanzees , ranging from to one that considers the self as embedded in and
mass catastrophes that are part and parcel of defined by its social envi ro nme nt" , he concl udes .
Baudrillard takes in his sweep such its panoply of inventions.
the anec dota l to the experi me nta l.
disparate subjects as death and Probably the most striking example is that of In The Evolut ion of Morality , the philosopher
television, Silicon thought and film, 216x 138mm/128 pagesI November 2006 Kuni, a female bonobo chimp, who found a Richard Joyce covers some of the ground dealt
sex and the philosophical significance 978-07456-3613-9 hb £45.00
978-07456-3614-6 pb £12.99 stunned starling. She picked it up, climbed to the with in Primates and Philosophers, but with a
of zero.
top of the highest tree, and "then carefully far greater degree of philosophical rigour. After
198 x 198 mm / 120 pages / June 2006 unfolded its wings and spread them wide open, explaining that he thinks the appearance of "help-
978-07456-3659-7hb £45.00 one wing in each hand, before throwing the bird ing behaviour" lies at the heart of the issue, he
978-07456-3660-3pb £13.99 as hard as she could towards the barrier of the provides some strict delinitions, teasing apart
enclosure". It is hard to interpret this beha viour the nuances that separate helping, "fi tness sacri-
Toorder: phone MarstonBookServices: + 44 (0) 123S465500 in any other way than by saying that Kuni was licing" and altruism. The key chapter outlines
For more information : email breffnLo·connor@oxon.blackwelipublishing.com empathizing with a member of another species. his critique of the kind of position advanced by
Empathy implies having "a theory of mind" - an de Waal , where Joyce argues that other animals
'1J www.polity.co.uk animal needs to be able to recognize that other
individuals also possess attitudes and emotions.
do not show any understanding of transgres-
sions, prohibi tions, or deserved punishments, all

TLS A PRtL 27 2 007 - 12-

 SCIENCE

of which he argues are essential part s of moral- [or Everythin g: Nat ural select ion and the Eng- return for a token that only had the value of a
ity. Joyce ' s vision of the evolution of moralit y lish imagination (reviewed in the TLS, December piece of cucumber. The result was striking: the
emph asizes instead the role of language in shap- 3, 2004) , and Matt Ridley' s The Origins of Vir- monke ys who were on lower "pay" began to stop
ing and transmittin g that set of attitudes. No lan- tue (TLS , No vember 29, 1996), but Dugatkin' s playing the ga me, refusing to make the
guage, no moralit y. In reply, de Waal would no results are less impressive, mainl y becau se each exchange , or rejectin g low-value food in
doubt point both to the very real ex istence of chapter is so short and because too much pre- exchange for a low-value token . Thi s rejection
punishm ent and policin g in many anim al socie- ciou s space is devoted to the contrasting attitudes grew in amplitude if the oth er monke y was sim-
ties, of which chimp s at least seem to be very and experie nce of Kropotkin and Huxley. How- ply handed food without having to make any
aware, and repea t his argum ent that langua ge ever, brevity is also a virtue, and interested read- kind of exchange. The monk eys apparentl y
itself was a product of moralit y, and not the other ers (particularly stude nts) will learn a great deal knew what was expected of them , and would not
way round. For the mom ent , it is diflicult to see from The Altru ism Equation , despite its irritat - part icipat e if someone else was doing better out
how we could devise experiments - real one s, ing, unnec essary and repeated use of "blood of the syste m. The y wanted e veryone to play by
not thou ght ones - that could separate these com- kin" , which gives some pages a whiff of The Da the same rules.
peting hypothe ses. And experimentation, not vinci Code's "blood line" hokum. Both Fran s de Waal and Phil ip Kitcher argue
argumentation, will ultimatel y determin e wh ich One point largely missing from all three book s that this striking finding did not reveal a fully
view - or neith er - is correct. de velop ed sense of " fairness ", becau se onl y the
Joyces approach is refreshin g, and he wears depri ved monkeys prote sted again st unequ al
his learnin g lightl y: unde rpinning his philo soph - treatment. Pri vileged monk eys seemed to be
ical arguments is a thorough kno wledge not quit e con tent with the situation. Thi s misses the
onl y of the phil osophical issue s, but also of the poin t. Firstly, almos t all rea l hum an prot ests
empirical and theor etical literature on various against unfairness invol ve the exploi ted and
form s of natur al se lection and on the ex istence, depri ved, rath er than the privileged and the
or oth er wise, of mor alit y in an imal s. In general, wea lthy (for some reason the latter do not let
any such sentiments - if they have them - dri ve
Joyce does an ex cellent job of brin ging philo s- Dialectics of the Self
oph y to the ordin ary reader, usin g striking and them to action). Mor e importantl y, the respon se
lan Fraser (May 2007)
quirky examples of differ ent moral jud gements of the monk eys strikes a chord in any parent
A critical evaluation of Charles Taylor's
("cleaning the toil et with the national na g who has had to deal with two young children ,
recent and most explicitly religious work .
is wron g" ). His bold , jargon- free appro ach one of whom will inevitably wail that a parti- 215 pp. £17.95/$34.90, 9781845400453 (pbk)
mean s that this work of serious philo soph y cul ar deci sion is "not fair" if they do not rece ive
can noneth eless be understood by the non - the same treatment as their broth er or siste r. Consciousness and its
philo soph ically trained layper son. Onl y rarely do favoured children take up the
The way thinkers developed the theor etical ca se of their depri ved siblings; like capuchin
Place in Nature
framework for under standin g the evolution of monkeys, they are, however, extrem ely sensi- Galen Strawson (ed. A. Freeman)
social beha viour is the subject of Lee Alan Dugat- tive to a declin e in their own circumstanc es Strawson's fullest defence of his view that
kin' s The Altruism Equation. In this slim book , rel ative to other individuals. Thi s is not surpris- physicalism entails panpsychism.
Dugatkin describes the work and ideas of the key ing - we are, after all, prim ates. 'Bold and provocative.' Barry Dainton , TLS
294 pp. £17.95/$34.90, 9781845400590 (pbk.)
figure s in our understand ing of the genetic bases A related point , which is touched upon by
of altrui sm - Charl es Darwin , T. H. Huxley, Petr Rich ard Joyce, and which could produ ce a great
Kropotkin, W. C. AlIee, J. B. S. Haldane , George deal of fruitful research , is how moralit y is tran s-
Radical Externalism
Ted Honderich (ed . A. Freeman)
Price and, abo ve all, the late Bill Hamilton. The Japanese macaques, grooming mitted in humans or , potentiall y, in other great
Honderich's theory of consciousness
result of their work was our mod ern understand - apes. There is no " morality gene ": that much is
outlined, discussed and defended .
ing of the pow er of "kin selection", whereby is the de velopment of empathy, moralit y, or certain. But morality might be " in" the genome,
'The spirit of the book is one of amicable
individuals who share certain genes experi ence altrui sm. As point ed out by the great Dutch in that it emerges fro m the act ivity of a parti -
combat.' Steven Poole, Guardian
the same (po sitive or negat ive) selection pressure ethologis t, Niko Tinbergen , to understand a cular set of neuron s, which in turn are created by
220 pp. £17.95/$34.90, 9781845400682 (pbk.)
and, ultim ately, may favour each other , in given behaviour , we need to address its proxim al a complex series of ge netic and developmental
particular throu gh "altruistic" beh aviour. causes, its adapti ve impact, how it evolved and interaction s (including those with the environ- NEW IN PAPERBACK:
In each case, Dugatkin tries to provide back- how it changes with the development of the indi- ment ), much as language is "in " our genes . Or it Lectures in the History
ground material which explains some of the sci- vidual. In the case of human moralit y, this is par- may simply be part of the socia l structure, like a
entifi c choi ces made by his subjects. In the case ticularl y important as children show a highly particular hum an language , and be passivel y of Political Thought
of the anarchist Kropotkin and the socia list develop ed moral sense , especia lly their version assimilated throu gh the mere fact of growing up Michael Oakeshott
pacifist AlIee, their emphasis on mutualistic inter- of " fairness". Thi s deepl y rooted attitude may in that environment. The fact that all hum an soci- Oakeshott's legendary LSE lectures
action s was intimat ely linked with their polit ics. help us to under stand the evolution of mor ality. eties share ce rtain feature s, such as moralit y, available in print for the first time.
But this biographi cal approach furnishes onl y Thi s is not becau se there is a functional link would then be explained by the fact that all 'A tour de force .' Kenneth Minogue , TLS
limited insights, and finally fails: there is little in between the developm ental stages throu gh human societies, like all human bein gs, can 516 pp. £19.95/$39.90, 9781845400934 (pbk.)
the outlook of the nai ve Stalini st Haldane , nor wh ich hum an children pass and the shaping of trace a direct lineag e back to the original small St. Andrews Studies in Philosoph y & Public Affa irs
of the brilliant indi viduali st Hamilton - far more beh aviour and moralit y which occurred durin g band of early Afric ans, some 100,000 years ago. (series editor : John Haldane)
interested in insects than in politic s - that can eas- human evolution - Haeck el' s dictum "ontogeny Wh ate ver they did - spea k, paint, be mo ral - we
ily account for the particul ar appro ach they took. recapitul ates phylogeny" is not true for anatomi- still do , too, thro ugh cultural transmission.
Life, Liberty and the
Hamilton, who was one of the greatest evolu- cal developm ent, so it seems unlikely to appl y to A final facet of this problem, which anchors Pursuit of Utility
tionary biolo gists of the twentieth centu ry, moral faculti es. But there may be a relation in the the real dif ference s that ex ist between our selves Anthony Kenny & Charles Kenny
deri ved what has been called "the e = me' of other direction: the beha viour of hum an children and other animals, is that mor alit y is also con- The nature , ingredients, causes and
evolutionary biology". Hamilton ' s rule, as it is may give us some insight into the behaviour of sciously, delib erat ely taught by humans, abo ve consequences of human happiness.
known , states that altrui sm will evol ve where the non-hum an organi sms. all to children . Thi s is one particular aspect of 'A new study of an altogether superior
co st (c) of performing the altrui stic act is less For exa mple, in 2003, de Waal and Sarah our uniqu e teaching beha viour: unlike every kind .' Samuel Brittan , Financial Times
than the bene fit (b ) accrued to the other individ- Brosnan published an article in which they stud- o the r animal, as far as we kno w, hum an s teach. 275 pp. £17.95/$34.90, 9781845400521 (pbk.)
ual, multiplied by the degree of relatedness (r) of ied the respon ses of ca puchin monke ys to what Teach ing doe s not appear to be nece ssary for NEW IN PAPERBACK:
the two individual s. In other words, if a particular the authors termed "un equal pay". The monkeys tool use (chimps manage very well by cop ying) ,
species has an ecology that leads closely related were trained to give the experimenter a plastic nor for langu age (babi es ju st listen and babbl e), The Institution of
individual s to spend a great deal of time with token, and in return they receiv ed a piece of food but it may be essential for tran smitting va lues. Intellectual Values
each other , then altrui sm is very likely to evol ve. wh ich varied from "lo w value" (a piece of For a true definition of what it is to be human, Gordon Graham
Thi s hypoth esis is given powerful support by the cucumber) up to "high value" (a grape), depend- perhaps our species nam e should be ch anged to The history and purpose of the university.
exampl e of social insects. The conditions under ing on the form of the token. The monk eys were Homo didacticus. Testin g these hypoth eses and 'An elegant and extraordinarily refreshing
which genetically based altruism can evolve can then tested in pairs, and were able to observe de veloping new theoretical ex planations will be book .' Gordon Johnson , THES
be writt en as rb - e >0, a formul a so simple and the outcome of the exchanges (or "w ork" ) part of the challenge of twent y- first-cen tury 290 pp. £14.95/$29.90, 9781845401009 (pbk.)
elegant that even the mathematically challenged carried out by their partner. The situation was studies of hum an and primate behaviour. In
Reviews , TOGs and sample chapters :
can grasp the underl ying biolo gy. Dugatkin' s then man ipulated , so that one monke y received their dif ferent ways, all of these books pro vide
book covers similar scie ntific and biographical food at the establi shed exchange rate, while the in valuabl e pointers and guid es as to how that i mprint-academ ic.com
ground to Marek Kohn ' s brilliant work A Reason other recei ved a better "deal", such as a grape in work could be fruitfully pur sued. Gatalogue requests & order enquiries:
Imprint Academic, PO Box 200 , Exeter
EX5 5HY UK. Tel: +44 (0)1392851550
Fax: 851178 . E: sandra@lmpnnl.co,uk
- 13 - TLS A PR IL 2 7 2007
----I
. AS he walked throu gh the hall , he
cau ght sight of his hand some ,
flu shed features, his tall erect
figure in the lon g gilt mirror and
wa s di sgu sted . ' Good God !' he thou ght , ' what a
bloody, shameful was te !' " Thi s is Gerald
Middleton, a Profe ssor Emeritus of medie val
history in his earl y sixties , the central ch ara cter
in An gu s Wil son ' s seco nd no vel, Anglo-Saxon
Attitudes (1956). The "waste" he cont emplates
extend s to his pri vate and profe ssional life
alike, th ank s to his gentlema nly recoil from the
di sagree abl e and the confrontational. Rather
than commit him self to a woma n he loved , he
has maint ained a marria ge (in nam e only) with
a woma n he does not , even parti cip ating in
seas ona l di splays of familial so lidarity ; fraught
but hollow charades . His professional evas ions
have been if anythin g more serious still. He
kno ws a fraud wa s committe d in that sem inal
Suffolk dig of 191 2, that the pagan ima ge found
in the Sa xon bishop ' s tomb was planted ther e
by his sick, maverick friend . But a whole tangle
of loyalti es has, ov er the yea rs, pre vented him
from voicing his sus picions - even, in any
app ropriatel y serious form , to him self. Now, in
the 1950s, a see ming ly analogo us archaeo log i-
cal di sco ver y has be en made from which schol-
ars w ill dr aw concl usions, and only Gera ld ca n
block en suin g di storti on s of the truth by
show ing th at the earlier find was inde ed a fak e.
Collec ting the evidence will be not onl y diffi -
cult but possibl y destru cti ve, and on a personal
level too.
Th e metaphori cal significance of Gera ld 's
task was clear at the tim e of the novel ' s first
appea ra nce, and rem ain s so. Post-war Eng land
(" Britain" is inappropriate here ) mu st be purge d
of its self-deceptions, its falsified histor ies, how-
ever pain ful the pro ce ss. If the country lives
more hon estl y, it will be mor e dee ply at peace
with itself , perh aps more so th an ever be fore.
Gerald's very surname, Middleton , sugg ests a
man firml y of the Establishment, prot ected
rath er too thorou ghl y from the turm oil of else-
where. Gera ld is we ll-off, dra win g di vidends
from the flouri shin g famil y firm , livin g not ju st
co mfortab ly but elega ntly, in a Kni ght sbrid ge
square, with Aug ustus John drawin gs on his
walls, and has regul ar recourse to a lazy-sound-
ing upp er-cl ass drawl which at onc e impresses,
charms , wards off and ant agoni ze s. Yet for all
his past selfishness and his pre sent sy baritism
we not only like him , we feel him to be - that
traditi onal English term of praise - an ess en-
tiall y decent man . Th e novel will show us ho w
thi s decen cy wins throu gh , against diver se oppo-
sition. Thou gh we know it wi ll claim victims,
we approv e from the start his co urse of ac tion,
and feel by the end th at he has both red eemed
him self and ass isted in the purificati on of the
culture of which he is a respected but not
blam eless part.
The reson ance of Gerald's story for co nte m-
porary readers was borne o ut by its enormou s
success. It vindicated the ac cla im given earlier
to Wil son ' s two volumes of brilliant sho rt
stor ies, The Wrong Set (194 9) and Such Darling
Dodos (1950 ), and to his first no vel, Hemlock
TLS AP RIL 27 2 0 07
No laughing matter
PA UL BI NDI NG
Angu s Wil son reappraised
and After ( 1952). Yet it also showed a de velop-
ment that indi cated the unu sual sco pe of its
autho r's mind and his clairvoyant relation to the
tim es. The sho rt stor ies had "placed" , with an
acc uracy of eye and ear and an ac id hum our ,
indi vidu als and soc ial phenomena which other
wr iters apparently had not yet noticed - the
ambitious scholarship boy perpl exed and irri-
tated by his soc ial but not intellec tua l superiors,
the Thirties progressives no w deem ed o ut-
mod ed by a younge r, sha rp-w ined. illib eral gen-
erati on , the mar gin ali zed effe minate bo y who
will co me to ad ulthoo d burd ened with palp able
resentm ent s but also dream s. Thi s sha rpness
cha rac terizes Heml ock and After, a novel o ut-
sta nding for the breadth of its ca nvas, the vig-
our of its plot , which unit es different compo -
nent s of soc iety and depends ove rtly on co inci-
Angus Wilson, the British Museum Reading Room, 1952
dences, confront ation s and explo sion s of vio-
lence - and, not least, for its autho rial voice,
om nisc ient, mon da in , ironic. At the book ' s
centre is Bernard Sand s, a writer fam ou s for his
enli ghtened views, who com es to que stion their
va lidity and thu s his per son al moral probity.
Th e diffi cult y of his conse quent predi cam ent -
which mean s the failure of his utopi an scheme
for a wr iters ' ce ntre - is compounded by the
hom osexu al life he ha s onl y latel y been leadin g
(this at a tim e when Britain was not ju st main-
tainin g its crue l laws crimina lizing hom osexu al
ac ts, but ever more stringently applying them ).
The frankn ess, the det ail with which Wil son
present s Bern ard ' s essentially jo yful , physi-
ca lly expr essed relationship with a yo ung man ,
Er ic Craddock, and the tribal more s of the gay
circles they frequ ent , gave the novel an ecl at
which probably obsc ured its other as pec ts -
its troubled reali zation of a new , det erminedl y
- 14 -
1---
eliti st sec tion of the affl uent middl e class, its
apprec iatio n (lighter here than in later Wil son )
that hum ani sm , to be adequate, mu st tak e in the
non-human , the life of anima ls and plant s.
With Anglo-Saxon Att itud es it became cle ar
that Wil son ' s ficti on al meth od s refl ected his
proud ado ption of th e grea t nin eteenth- century
noveli sts, and es pec ially Dicken s, as mentors.
The y had wa nted their work to encompass a
soc iety whose sha pe, compo nents and prioriti es
we re in such a state of flu x that it appear ed a
literar y terr a incognit a, and had had to find
the form s appropriate for the task. So splen-
didl y had the y succe eded that it was to these
that Wil son turned as he surveye d a fra ctured
co untry, one uncert ain of its futur e, ec ono mi-
ca lly burdened , redu ced both in world stature
and in self-co nfidence , even after its victory
in the sti ll recent war, and yet not lackin g in
vitality or hop e.
In The Times of June 15, 1961 , Wil son pub-
lished an account of his reading habit s which,
given the novel s he had produ ced , did not sur-
pri se eve n while it inspir ed aw e. "W ithin an
approx ima te peri od of two yea rs I still read
aga in all the no vels of Cha rles Di cken s, Jane
Austen, Geo rge Eliot and A La Recherch e du
temps perdu", Th ere were also "annuals" ,
which included Wuthering Heights, Lewi s
Ca rro ll's two A lices (the very title Ang lo-Saxon
Attitudes is a quot ation from Through the
Looking- Glass) and all Ev elyn Wau gh . Such
statements - and Wil son was to become incre as-
ingl y articulate with time, in the medi a and on
ca mpus - amounted to a virtual anno unce ment
of unb eatable qualificati on s for the position of
contemp orary English no veli st nearest to the
Pas t Master s. Thi s was a de sider atum at a tim e
when Leaviss Grea t Tr adition held sway in
mo st edu cational establishme nts (Wilso n
admired Leavis, if with so me qu alific ation s;
Lea vis did not recip rocate) and when ine xpen-
sive new critical editions of old classics were
appea ring. Wil son ' s co urageo us defiance of
"M rs Grundy", es pec ially in sex ual matters,
rightly did his standing more good than harm ,
and he ca me to enjoy a mor al authority th at was
exer ci sed in many dom ain s of our nati on al
cultura l life , and which he always referred ba ck
to the hum ane art of the no vel as he him self
pra cti sed it. His reput ation wo uld, one ass umed,
palp abl y and inspiritingl y surv ive him .
It has not. Angus Wil son died, aged
seventy-seve n, after a long, physically and
mentall y debilitating illness, in 1991 , since when
- despit e publi shers' attempts to relaun ch
him , despite a full and deepl y felt bio graph y by
Margaret Drabbl e (1995) and a mo st percipient
critica l mon ograph by Peter Conradi (1997),
despite encomia from fell ow writers such as
Pa ul Baile y, lan McEwan and Rose Tremain -
he has virtually di sappe ared from view ; his
book s are una vail able, teachin g syllabuses do
not include him . Thi s is a matter for deepest
regret. But why has it happened? It is simply not
enou gh to take refu ge in the clich e that even
major authors suffer slumps after their death s.
Ou rs is a soc iety ca tho lic in its reading tastes;
most of Wil son ' s literar y contempora ries have
fared bett er, whatev er their current critica l
stock: Anthony Powell , Iris Murdoch, Willi am
Golding, Kingsley Amis all have reader s. Cer-
tainl y, the time has come for him to be reread
and re-appre ciated ; but we sho uld be aware of
some of the reason s for his langui shin g in limbo .
Th at excitement at the application of Dick en-
sian methods to the contemporary world, felt by
both writer and readers, co uld not , of its natur e,
survive the era of the book s' appea rance , and
not mer ely becau se that wor ld, obv io usly,
has cha nged so co nsidera bly. While both of
Wil son ' s fine fir st two novel s are unfl aggin gly
narr ated , acut ely ob ser vant and courageou s in
where the y venture, their homa ge to the Vict o-
rian master has by the end becom e pastiche too
gleeful and attention-draw ing not to be vitiating
to the whole. There are tho se cast lists at the
front of the book s, the iron y of which the text
will later reveal: "Mrs C urry : a lad y of many
inter ests" (of a pitil ess procuress); "Larrie
Rourk e: an Irish boy" (of a young psychopathic
cr iminal) - but which in fact onl y emphas ize
the one-dimen sional natur e of the ac tual por-
trait s; there are tho se high- spirited di stribution s
of sugar-plums or brickbats at the end which
und ermine the book s' serious ness and show a
gulf bet we en the keenl y observed first-h and
and the liter ary voulu, Ev en more dam agin g is
its effe ct on Wil son ' s treatment of a subject that
haunted him throu ghout his life: gratuitous ev il.
Returning in spirit to the period before M ar x
and Freud (W ilso n was co nfess edly influenced
by both ) might perhap s enable the mod ern
writer to crea te free- standing charac ters whose
" wanton malic e" fright enin gl y threaten s all
hum ani st edifi ce s. But by a sor t of liter ary sod's
law, exactl y the opp osite occur s. Mr s Curry and
Larri e exhibit more th an anythin g else the deep
fear felt by the edu cated for educa tion-less

sections of (respectivel y) the lower-middle
class and the proletari at, and, with it, a Freudian
horror of sexuality without accomp anying intel-
lectual awareness. What does come across in
both novels, often depicted with great verbal
power, is the disturbing impact of such morally
anarchic persons on disciplined minds disposed
to kindness, tolerance and reason; indeed this
is a major reason why Heml ock and After
and Anglo -Saxon Attitudes are both still so
rewardin g.
In his fascinatin g study of his own creative
processes, The Wild Garden (1963), Wilson
says that "the impulse to write a novel comes
from a momentary unified vision of life .. ..
The novels, in fact, are those moment s of
vision". He conclude s: "Everyone says as a
commonplace that a novel is an extended meta-
phor, but too few, perhap s, insist that the meta-
phor is everything, the extension only the
means of express ion" . In saying this Wilson
has, to my mind, put his finger on the weakness
common to his two allegori cal novels, The Old
Men at the Zoo (1961 ) and Settin g the World on
Fire (1980). The dialectic in both illustrates seri-
ous rifts in the mid-twentieth centur y' s cultural
inheritan ce: in the first the binary attitude
towards wildlife that opts either for Victori an-
style zoos or for the "limited liberty" of the
National Park, in the second the contra st
between the classical sobriety of the architec-
ture of Roger Pratt (1620- 84) and the darin g
tlambo yance of Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-
1726) as evidenced in an imaginary surviving
London mansion which exercises its influence
on assorted Ii ves. In both cases the metaphor
comes near to eclipsing the human drama s it
supposedly illum inates, in the earlier novel
more gravely than in the later, where there is a
redeeming warmth in the portrait of the two
brother s at its centre .
Wilson' s own favourit e among his novels
was No Laughin g Matter (1967), a preference
endorsed by Drabble and Conradi in their
shrewd discussions of it. By the time he began
on this enormou sly ambitious work Wilson' s
literary allegiances had expanded to include
Ulysses and Virginia Wool f, who, he declared ,
was the single most important intluenc e on his
later writing. It takes the lives of the six talented
Matthews siblings, offspring of a feckless snob-
bish bohemian coupl e, from pre-First World
War Kensington to scattered destination s -
includin g the stockbroker belt, a perfume fac-
tory in North Africa and expatriates' Portugal -
in the year of publication itself. Wilson origi-
nally intended the novel to be called "Laughing
Mirro rs" and in the opening sequence the
young Matthewses see in distorting mirror s
retl ection s of themselves that suggest the indi-
vidual "humours" that will take them through
life, serving some better than others. If the first
task of each of them is to discover how best
to achieve freedom from the stranglehold of
family and class, largely achieved through The
Game , in which they in turn mim ic and reject
their elders, the great test of their humour s' rela-
tive merits will come in the Devil' s Decade, the
1930s, when each has to respond to the evil of
Fascism. Good sport Gladys proves unequal to
this challenge, while camp Marcus of the bitchy
wit lind s the courage, strengthened through his
own long-beleaguered sexuality, to face Mos-
leys thugs in Bermond sey. If Wilson' s first
two novels went to school to Dicken s, No
Laughin g Matter ' s modernist debts are lavishly
oftloaded on to the reader, its movement
through time being owed to The Waves and
COMMENTARY
The Year s, and its infiltration of streams-of-
con sciou sness by success ive cultural idiom s, its
presentation of key emotional scenes as literary
parodie s (in this case of reigning writers from
Shaw to Beckett) being borrowed from Joyce.
And here is the problem with this novel. What
for Joyce and Wool f were bold, self-imposed
quests are for Wilson exa minations in style, set
by himself, for him to pass with tlying colou rs -
a very different matter.
There are indeed riches here one can imagine
no other writer bestowing: the Rose Macaulay-
inspired novelist, Margar et Matthews, whose
habitual irony serves her maybe too well ; her
twin sister Sukey, whose determin ed retreat
from shabby-ge nteel bohem ia engulfs her in the
false pastoral s of an English prep school; their
elder brother "Q.J.", who exchanges Left poli-
tics for the exhibitionistic soul-searching of a
media pundit. But the three novels of Wilson' s
yet to be mention ed are more deeply satisfying
creation s. In all of them his literary art is sophis-
ticated and adventurous, but does not draw
attention to itself; the pressure of their theme s,
both personal and cultur al, makes this imposs-
ible. Con sideration of the author's mentor s
becomes of minor importance - all three are
astonishingl y compl ete novels, though with its
judicious analyses and solid evocation s of rec-
ognizable milieux, The Mid dle Age ofMrs Eliot
(1958), the most orthodo x of the three, was inev-
itably compared to the George Eliot whom its
surname-sharing heroine reads devotedly .
his, Wilson' s third novel and his first
T unallo yed, time-transcending success,
strips his eponymous heroine of
almost every prop her hitherto unques-
tioned identity has required . Meg Eliot loses, in
a terrorist attack on an airport in Indochina, not
ju st her lawyer husband, but the lifestyle and
concom itant illusions he had provided. She is
forced after his death to confront what she had
scarcely even noticed when he was alive - his
unhappine ss at having (for her sake) given up
crim inal law for more lucrative compan y cases
and his disappointment at not having children ,
resulting in a state of mind which had led him
frenetically to gamble his money away. Meg,
mistress of a Westmin ster house, party-giver,
porcelain collector and tireless charit y patron, is
left with little money to live on, and is forced to
accept that both her concept of herself and her
dealings with others had depend ed on the pro-
tective colouring of aftluence. What a sham her
bright interest in other people , her reliance for
wise com fort on English classical writers, her
determina tion to dispense wherever she can the
aper9us of common sense cumulati vely appear
- and yet, and it is one of the most extraordin ary
feats of this novel to persuade us of this, they
are not all sham by any means, and can, with
patience and perspecti ve, be built on to take her
on into further middle age with less attention to
the satisfactions o f ego .
For Meg' s existential crisis, though it
involves a breakdown and almost equally stress-
ful period of convalescence, will eventuall y
relate her more realistically and wholly to
other people , though her individuation is not
achie ved without pain. Her friends of many
years, Viola, Poll and JilI, are three husbandle ss
women who have been denied the kind of life
that she had assumed would be hers by the for-
ward movement of history itself, a movement
that has refused to preserve England and its
social order in aspic. When one by one these
reconnections fracture, Meg must turn to her
- 15 -
younger brother, David, whose situation has
strong similarities to her own : he too has ju st
lost a loved partner , Gordon , with whom he has
been runn ing a nursery garden in Sussex and
collabor ating on coffee-table books on tlora.
David (a con scientiou s objector in the war) has
opted for quietism as his tutelary spirit, and his
belief in it has only been confirmed by his
bereavement. It is a seductive attitude, espe-
cially for Meg in her present plight, includ ing
among its tenets as it does a kindly tolerance
extended in David ' s case to a tlock of "lame
duck s" con verging on his house. But Meg
comes to see that David' s outlook , for all his
kernel of goodn ess, masks a lack of proper
engagement beyond himself. Always he will
yield rather than defy, and Meg, grateful though
she is for her healin g stay with him in Sussex,
must put his attractive but false values, and his
retreatist (or defeatist) philosophy of life,
behind her.
The entire novel is distinguished by a blend
of acidity and charity which characteri zes
Wilson' s work at its best. Th is also informs
Lat e Call (1964), once again featuring a
woman , Sylvia Calvert - in late middle age now
- who feels marginali zed by the bewilderingl y
unfamiliar society in which she lind s herself,
but who appreciates she has no alternative than
to turn outwards, not with passive acceptanc e
but with a reinforced regard for human comple x-
ity. One senses in Wilson' s identification s fir st
with Meg Eliot and then with Sylvia a tremen-
dous psychic release, enabling a greater ampli-
tude of sympathy than before and a correspond-
ing stylistic tlexibilit y. No longer needing to
sustain the appar atus of the success ful careers
he gave to Bernard Sands, Gerald Middleton
and the narrator of The Old Men at the Zoo, he
was free to pay closer attention to intimacie s of
feeling and movement.
Sylvia Calvert retires from managing a pri-
vate hotel on the south coast and, with her idle,
scrounging husband Arthur ("Capt ain" Calvert
- in conversation and fantasy he is a hero of
the Great War), goes to live with her recentl y
widowed son, Harold, and his three children in
Carshall, a New To wn, where he is headma ster
of the secondar y modern school. His lately
acquired ranch- style home, 'T he Sycamores",
built by a firm praised in the Guardian, might
not seem consonant with all his propound ed
blueprint s for a radicall y new society. But then
as he explains in his letter of welcome:
To a degree Beth and I we re unwillin g to move
. . . . But the world can't ex ist on pioneer senti-
mentality. Especially the England of Mac the
Knife (don't breathe these re volution ary senti-
ments to Dad); the whole country seems to be
dying of a surfeit of nostalgia. But you' ll hear
H. C. on that theme when you come to live
here: the children blow a whistle now for what
they call TFFTST (Time for Father to Stop
Talking!) So - you have been warned!
Indeed Sylvia has been, though at this stage
proper understandin g of that warnin g is not
available. Carshall, though its communitarian-
ism is sincere and strong, is also a viper's nest
of personal antagonisms masqueradin g as ideo-
logical objection s, of hopes and beliefs eaten
into by private tensions or disappointments.
Harold Calvert himself constitutes a battle-
ground for many of these. His purcha se of 'T he
Sycamore s" , about which he still seems uneasy,
is parallelled by his awkward combination of
bluff good humour and pompou s autocrac y
where his children are concerned. He professes
himself pleased that his second son, sober
mop-topped Mark , is "such a rebel" , yet blocks
his working for CND ' s Committ ee of a Hun-
dred when it interfere s with his own plans. He
is genuinely glad to provide a home for his
parents, with whom he has little in common ,
while increasingly exasperated by their failures
to adhere to his own way of life. Sylvia, non-
intellectu al, instinctual, senses beyond her son,
his neighbour s and associates, beyond her three
likeable , dissatisfied grandchildren, a terrifying
expanse of emptine ss, and old age inexorably
approaching. Thi s must not defeat her; she
cannot become like the crazed old refugee
woman , a desert within , whom she sees going
on endless objectle ss walks.
As the letter from Harold illustrates, Late
Call makes extensive creative use of other
voices than the authorial , and harnesses
Wilson' s versatile abilit y for incisive, often
hilarious parody to a controlled account of
personal progress that advances with that relent-
less progression of the seasons which Barbara
Pym also employs - and it does so while partici-
pating in sociologica l debates familiari zed by
Richard Hoggart and Raymond William s.
Sylvia frequently lind s solace in soap opera
("Wardress Webb") and romantic liction
("Queen or Duchess"), but far from seeing
them as escape or addiction - as certain New
To wn busybodie s do - Wilson shows how they
provide her with ju st those other countrie s of
the imagination that will in the end enable
her, after sadness and even despair, to live at
peace with herself and others in her own real
one - in Carshall, and by herself. The depth
of penetrat ion of the difficulties of life in a
specific place at a specilic time parado xically
saves Late Call from the dangers of datedne ss;
it is inexhaustible in its subtle yet lively epipha-
nies.
As If By Magic (1973), Wilson ' s penultimate
novel, shares Late Call' s prob ing of the zeit-
geist and its values (something for which Wil-
son at the time was not unduly thanked). But
this is a novel of space as much as time, giving
us the interrelating global journeys of two con-
sciously modern individuals - Hamo Langmuir ,
agronomi st, and his god-daughter Alexandra
Grant , student at a (then) "new" university.
Both travellers carry with them from country
to country a baggage of knowledge, idealistic
hopes, self-deception and potentially destruc-
tive ignorance of other societies. The rice that
Hamo has developed may work "mag ic" in
its quick return s, but what about those this
"magic" will make redundant? His comp assion
for the many Asian boys who sexually attract
him can't remo ve them from lives of poverty
and exploitation. Alexandr a and the two boy-
friends with whom she forms a magic trio, linan-
cially upholstered though they are, spurn the
crassly materialistic and look for wisdom else-
where , in the as yet undevelop ed world. But
they move with an unackno wledged superiority
through all the more unfortunate deni zen s o f
our "g lobal village" , and in the end , as they well
know, it is money that will assert itself to rescue
them from difli cult y or disaster. Wilson was
of course tackling that counter-culture now
too loosely known as "The Sixties", and contem-
porary critics attacked certain (uncharact eristic)
minor errors here . Today these don 't trouble
us, any more than the slight over-insistence on
scientilic accuracy does. The novel still offers
powerful paradigm s for our cultural confu sions.
If we do not turn back to Wilson here, and to his
other major fiction as well, it will indeed be a
case of "bloody, shameful waste".
TLS APRtL 27 20 07

n a recent review in the New Yorker of The
I Iron Whim: A fragmented history of type-
writing, Joan Acocella mentio ns a number
of "typewriter-haunted authors". They include
Muriel Spark, whose first novel, The Comfort-
ers (1957) , features a bookis h heroine who
hears voices and, at the same time, the sound
of a typewriter coming throug h the wall. Ms
Acoce lla likens "the click-clac k of the type-
writer" to "the pulse of fate" in a writer 's
psyche. "Now that it' s gone , what will writers
think up to make their lives exciting ?"
A few days after reading this, we came upon
Hanif Kureishi in the enjoyable, unintention-
ally revealin g Guardian feature, "Writers'
Rooms" , in which a large colour photogra ph of
an interior is displayed next to the writer ' s
com ments. Kureishi' s room is cramme d with
books, though "I don ' t read very much" . He
claims to possess "several typewriters", though
none is visible. He does not use his typewriters
because "you can't get the ribbons". Like Ms
Acoce lla, Kureishi feels that computers lead
writers into bad habits, encouragi ng "books
that are too long". She refers to "the spurious
perfection of the computer-generated page".
Both are right to issue caution, but other-
wise wrong. Typew riters "gone"? Can' t get
the ribbons? Acoce lla mentions Paul Auster,
who writes all his novels on a typewriter (he
has even typed a book about his typewriter ).
The copy for the column which sits below this
one comes through our fax mach ine, on alter-
nate Mond ays, in typewritten form, as it has
done for over a decade. The writer Patrick
Leigh Fermo r rece ntly let fall that he is learn-
ing to type - at the age of ninety-two - in order
to speed the completion of the trilogy about
his long-ago walk from the Hook of Holland
to Constantino ple. Like Kureishi, he worries
t feels only natural that when I ask for a
I ticket to Exeter the man should tell me,
"You do know there are no trains out of Pad-
dington?" A woman has thrown herself under a
train, bringing everything to a standstill - not a
good omen for my poetry course at the Arvon
Foundation. He says the trains are turning round
at Ealing Broadway: I could go there. Three thou-
sand other people have been told the same thing
and we all surge off into various bottlenecks. At
Ealing, I learn I have j ust missed a train from
Paddington, where the crisis is now over.
At Exeter, the minibus for Totleigh Barton
has left and the station phone is broken. I have a
coffee in the buffet and a tall blonde woman in
sunglasses approaches me. Thi s must be the
first time for many years that Jerry Hall has not
been recognized in public, and by someone who
is supposed to kno w her. We met two years ago
on a reality TV show called Kept . The idea of
the show was to find her a toy boy by putting
twel ve finalists - American male-model types -
through various tests. I was hired to teach them
how to write an ode to Jerry - a thankless task
as the boys all thought it would diminish their
masculin ity (and hence their chances of win-
ning) if they did too well at this effeminate art.
"Wh at on earth are you doing here?" I blurt,
looking round for the cameras. "I' m taking your
course" , she says. "Don' t you remember? I told
you last year." "I didn' t think you were seri-
ous", I say truthfully. She tells me she was on
the train the woman threw herself under. She
has a taxi ordered and so it is that I arrive to take
my co urse in her co mpany.
TLS A PR IL 2 7 2007
COMMENTARY
about ribbons. So here' s a promise: if he types
enough to need a new one - we also want to
read that third volume - we will send him a
dozen.
For the answer to the great ribbon shortage
is that they are piled up behind the counter at
the high street stationer Ryman' s, We checked
at the weekend. Yes, they still stock them -
what' s more, they are adaptable, from Rem ing-
ton to Olympia and every other model exce pt
Brother, as the helpful assista nt at the Great
Portland Street branch told us. "But we have
specia l ribbons for Brother."
*
The organizers and j udges of the Man Booker
International (MBI ) awa rd have come in for
some rough handling since the announcement
of the shortlist on April 13. The general view
seems to be that it does not take three great
minds - in this case the minds of Nadine
Gordim er, Elaine Showalter and Colm T6ibfn
- to compile a list of fifteen household names.
In 2005 , Ismail Kadare won the inaugural
MBI, worth £60,000, and those who co uld be
bothered to applaud (in general, it is better to
read than to applaud) did so because he was
foreign, and there isn' t enough foreign lictio n
around these days.
Th is time, the judges drew up a list of eleven
authors who write in English (Chinua Achebe,
Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Peter Carey,
FREELANCE
I am shown to my quarters in the Old Goose
House, where I used to stay often in the 1970s
and 80s. I stand in the familiar wooden cabin,
look ing out on the same peaceful lieId of cows.
Nothing has changed, except that now there is a
bathroom and an arrangement of mirrors causes
the cows to wander amiably through the room
from time to time.
Our first meeting is for introductions -
names and reasons for attendance. Jerry says it
is like an AA meeting: "My name is Jerry and
I'm a poet". I am aware of fifteen complex back-
gro unds, all with smiling faces, like the tips of
so many icebergs. We play poetical j ourneys,
passing pieces of paper, adding a line, folding it
over: "In the frozen wastes of Antarctica I sits a
man with a harmonica".
Tuesday . Greta Stoddart, my eo-tu tor, has
drawn up a chart for the one-on-one sessions
and eve ryo ne fills in their names. Our blurb for
the course, which I think I wrote, seems to be
addressing the problems of Iraq rather than
those of poetry: "Not so much slash and burn as
hearts and minds. How to move on. How to
develop your own solutions. New starts. New
endings. Courage to fail for the greater good.
Greta will discipline formalists. Hugo will liber-
ate free versifie rs".
Arvon courses have a tried-a nd-tested routine
which usually works like clockwork. The tutors
give workshops and tutorials, eve nings are for
readings, and the participants do all the cookin g
and washing up. What happens in practice is
- 16-
Doris Lessing, Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan,
Alice Munro , Michael Ondaatje, Philip Roth,
Salman Rushdie), and one each in Dutch,
French, Hebrew and Spanish (Harry Mulisch,
Michel Toumie r, Amos Oz, Carlos Fuentes).
Because some have practically stopped writ-
ing, the MBI shower of gold will "highlight a
contribution to fiction on the world stage".
Meanwhile, the Lettre Ulysses Award for
the Art of Reportage is to be suspended this
year. The winner of the first award, in 2003,
was Anna Politkovskaya, for her book about
Chechnya, A Dirty War . Has the Goethe-
Institut suspended the prize out of fear that
winners will be killed for their writing? No,
the contract with the sponsor expire d, and "the
Found ation Lettre International Award has not
succeeded so far in finding a new partner to
finance the award".
*
Lavinia Greenla w, who in 2005 was poet-in-
residence at the Roya l Society of Medicine,
has edited Sig ns and Humours: The poe try
of medicine. It includes "poems about Alz-
heimer' s, autism, Post-Traumatic Stress Dis-
order, insomn ia, anorexia , depression, fertility
treatment, neuroscience and HIVI AIDS" .
There are a few poems about feeling better,
and a lot about feeling worse. A number are
specially commissioned, a number are familiar
to the general reader, and a number come as
surprises.
In the first group, there is Robin Robert-
son's harrowing poem about open-heart sur-
gery: "the sound I of a gull trappe d in his chest.
II To let it out I they ran a cut down his belly I
like a fish"; in the second, William Carlos
Williams' s lovely poem about remembering,
at the end of an illness, "an idiotic picture I
exce pt it was all I recog nized I the wall lived
that a half-hour tutorial inevitably spreads into
the following one, so that you become aware of
a poet loitering on the edge of the lawn, clutch-
ing some papers. Different levels of verbal skill
test your adaptability and you have to go easy
on the old negativity.
Wednesday. Greta and I take it in turns to run
the morning workshops round the massive oak
dining table. Greta makes them write a sonnet. I
tell them to write six good things, alternating
with six bad things, about a house they know
well. I wonder is there any real connection
between writing exercises and writing. One
thing is certain, this game is a doddle compared
to teach ing toy boys to write on reality TV. Vix,
a blind woman with a kindly black labrador, is
particularly impressive in the improvised exer-
cises. Her computer translates what she writes
into the voice of "Hal" , which she can then play
back through headphon es and read out loud
when asked to do so. The efforts of concentra-
tion, not to mention the technology, are hum-
bling to behold. Her dog George is stoical but
ill at ease in the creative-writin g context.
Thursday. I pass round two versions of Paul
Muld oon' s "C uba", one from Why Brownlee
Left , the other, longer one published earlier in
an Irish magazine. It is instructive to see what
lines Muldoon has seen fit to dispense with in
his quest for the perfectly balanced object, excis-
ing the merest suspicion of prose along the way,
but several students disagree with his improve-
ments. On the subject of rhyme, I point out how
for me in that picture" ; in the third group, Ben-
ja min Perets "Little Song of the Disabled" ,
from the First World War:
Lend me your arm
to replace my leg
The rats ate it fo r me
at Verdun
at Verdun
I ate a lot of rats
but they didn' t give me back my leg
Signs and Humours is published by the
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation at £8.99. It
hurts for a moment, but it really does make
you feel better.
*
Our definitive revision of the TLS Reviewer 's
Handbook is coming along nicely, no little
thanks [avoid redund ancies such as "no little"]
to contributions made by readers. All we have
to do is issue a proh ibition against the use of
"concerning" as an adjectiva l participle, for
some helpful soul to wave a copy of the TLS in
front of our eyes : "The evidence they have
amassed is impressive and concerning" (TLS,
March 30). We are thus grateful to John Black-
smith [avoid "thus"; avoid undue sarcasm] for
informing us that "like the gradual but irresisti-
ble spread of rabies and bird llu across Europe
[avoid overemphatic simile: it weakens your
argument], the dreaded 'comprised of' has
reached the shores of the TLS". There it is, in a
piece in the issue of April 20. According to the
well-educated types around here, "comprised
of" is not actually wrong, far less a "truly
disgusting phrase, which somehow scurried
like a black rat in the night into your pages"
[come off it, Mr Blacksmith]. Still, in the
Handb ook it will be stamped with the advice:
"We avoid" .
Le .
he has changed the line "And him with only to
give the nod" to "And him with only to say the
word" in order to avoid the numb ing rhyme
with "God" two lines later. Not everyone agrees
with this change either. Jerry is excited and fear-
ful because she has written a co lumn for the
Indep endent in which she includes a poem
about a certain popular "icon".
Friday. The Indep endent arrives. The Jerry
Hall column takes up a whole page, with a draw-
ing of her by Tracey Emin. She writes that she
is ju st off to do a course with me in Devon, but
is terrified becau se "I can' t write poems when I
am happy, but luckil y I have a deep well of sad-
ness from my childhood and lots of disappo int-
ments in love to draw on". The poem, "Icon" ,
ends as follows: "he fucks their women I and
fights their battles against mediocrity I but when
he comes home to me I all that's left is v.d.".
Everyone says they like the surprise ending.
Vix comes into the kitchen with George to
was h her hands, reaches for the soa p dispe nse r
and accide ntally sets off the fire alarm, which is
located next to it. A coup le of attractive young
firemen turn up, not at all put out, looking like
stripogram firemen. They are freelance firefight-
ers who take an interest in the course and say
they wouldn' t mind joinin g in. After apologiz-
ing for the disturbance, they leave.
Saturd ay. Spring has happened while we've
been here, a green haze on the wood, the tinny
cries of pheasa nts etched on the peace and quiet
we must now lea ve.
H UGO W1LLIAMS
 narrow-mind ed distinction. Certainly, the sug-
Shakespeare and the first Folio ges tion he goes on to mak e, that Robert son ' s
versions are "identica l" to his own, is difficult
Sir, - In "The Folio Restored " (Comm entar y, which does not apply to reprints. For another, have never properly acknow ledged. As their to accept : without a doub t, the feel and tenor, if
April 20), Jonath an Bate quot es the claim by the Pavier Quart os were printed by Isaac la g- attac ks increase in numb er, but avo iding a full not the literal sense, of their respecti ve English
John Hemin ge and Henr y Cond ell, in the gard, a friend of Thomas Pav ier, who in the and open discussion of the issue, one is bound versions is quite different. Indeed , for Fulton's
Epistle to the Reader of the first Folio (162 3), same year as the Folio was publi shed, to ask, how does one tell a revision ist critic appa rent accu sation of plagiarism to be worthy
that their colle ction includ es none of the appo inted Pavier an ov erseer, or ass istant execu- from a reactiona ry? of debate, we would have to accept the idea
"d iverse stolne, and surreptitious copi es, tor of his will. By one of those flexible accom- that the value of a poem resides in its literal
maim ed and deform ed by the fraud s and modati ons in the Elizab ethan print ing trade, BRIAN VICKERS meanin g and not much else.
stealthes of injuriou s impo stors, that expos' d althou gh l aggard had produc ed this unauthor - 7 Abbot' s Place, London NW6. No w, it is surely ob vious, when we say that
[printed] them". Since the ground-breaking ized collection of reprin ts (formall y block ed by poetry is what gets lost in translation, that what
work of A. W. Pollard a century ago this has Shakespeare' s company on Ma y 3, 1619), he Sir , - Jon athan Bate writes, "When I was com- matters in a poem is not its literal surface
been taken to refer to the illicitl y publi shed re-emerged as one of the four main stationers missioned by the Royal Shake speare Comp any (which any crib can convey ), but its subtleties,
ed itions of single plays, such as Rom eo and who publi shed the First Folio . Hemin ge and and Random Hou se to prepare the first new its suggest ions, its fabric of music and nuanc e -
Julie t (1597) and Haml et (160 3), a group which Cond ell would hardly be attackin g their own compl ete Shak espeare of the new century . .. I in other words, its spirit - and the true test of a
Pollard characteri zed as " Bad" Quart os. Both publi sher. realized that there was a true gap in the cro wded translation or version is, or should be, how well
texts are much shorter, full of errors and Jonathan Bate seems to have been driven to market: a modern- spell ing and lightl y corrected it con veys this spirit. So , while it is true that two
unShak espearian langua ge, and were ev idently this unlikel y explanation by his readiness to Folio-based edition" . translators, working from the same originals,
inauth ent ic, since Shakespeare ' s company join those "late twentieth- and early twenty-first- But Nick de Somo gyi' s paperback series of could hardl y avoid using common phrases or
promptl y issued a better text of the former play, centur y scholars [who] have begun to question individu al plays (Nick Hem Book s), begun in vocabulary in the ir English versions without
"New ly corrected , augmented, and amended" the whole edi fice" of Pollard' s theor y, which 200 I and now including most of the major going to perverse lengths to avoid doin g so, it is
(1599), and of the latter , "New ly imprin ted and was much strengthened by W. W. Greg, whose plays, exactly fills that gap, and better, thanks also the case that a good version of a poem will
enlarged ... accordin g to the true and perfect work is "a lso comin g under increasing attack". to de Somogyi' s scholarly, original and witty take that literal surface of the original only as a
Coppi e" (1604). The Folio echo ed this formul a, It is true that a small numb er of polemici sts introduc tion s and careful editing. point of dep arture. Beyond that, the fortunat e
being "Printed accord ing to the Tru e Originall have produ ced thund erin g denunci ation s of Surely someone at the RSC could have told translator may arrive at what J. C. ju stly call s
Copi es". Pollard and Greg, but they have failed to dis- Bate about this sterling precedent edition; a "som eth ing good in itself' (NB, April 20) - that
Professor Bate thinks it "much more likely lodge their identification of a small group of blurb on the back of the Haml et in this series is, a new poem , in a d ifferent langua ge, which
that" the " thunderous denun ciation " of Hemin ge Quartos (not "a large numb er" , as Bate main- (200 I ) reads : "I would certainly use it, and [ echo es, or eve n re-create s, not simply the sense,
and Condell , who had been fello w actors with tains), as having been produ ced by actor s recon - can imagine all my colleagues doing the but the music, the atmo sphere , the entire spirit
Shakespeare since 1594, " was directed at the structing a play from memor y and dicta ting same - Adrian Noble, Artistic Director , Royal of its original. It seems that the majorit y of
unappro ved Thomas Pavierquartos of 1619", a their version to a scribe. That this is the onl y Shak espeare Comp any". It is quit e wrong of reviewers have agreed that what Robert son
collect ion of ten previously publi shed texts, probable explanation for the man y types of Professor Bate to write as if this series d id not arrives at, in his marvell ous Tran stromer ver-
some with false dates. Howe ver, this is highly error characterizing these texts was definiti vely exist. sions, is an honourable, lyrically rich and
unlikely. For one thing, "s urreptitious" then established by two book s publi shed in the deeply sympathetic "something good in itself',
had the connotations of stealthy and secretive 1940s by G. I. Duth ie and Alfred Hart, which l A N PIGGOT T and the fact that he has cho sen not to dignify
beha viour in "expo sing" or printin g a text, recent opponents of the " new biblio graph y" 139 Silverdal e, London SE26 . Fulton ' s rather disappointing, vag ue and ill-
founded insinua tion s is most surely the mark ,
--------------------~-------------------- not of a tran slator with something to hide, but
funct ion of time. The co st of procrastination is outr age upon outr age". of one who prefer s to honour the spirit of
Carbon emissions high. Curr ently we have about 200 years to Elshtain gives considerable space to two odd Tran striimer ' s work rather than dra g it into a
Sir, - Robert May' s d iscussion of anthropo- achieve the desired target. For each year of and surely surpass ingly rare incident s: feminist mudd y, mean- spiri ted and potenti ally damag-
genically induc ed global warming (April 6) procrastination the available time decreases by room-mates' reject ions of a kitten , and a femi- ing squabble over nothin g.
provides a good background and biblio graph y more than two years. Wa iting at a stable emi s- nist mother' s rejection of her infant, in both
for those intent on under standin g the issue s and sion level for fifty years reduces the lead time to cases because those rejected were male. Are we JOH N BURNSIDE
exploring their remedie s. Unfortunately it falls about one hundr ed years and require s a much to think these inciden ts are serious evidence of School of Engli sh, Castle House,
into the common bear trap of misinterpreting greater effort for the remain ing period . a pervasive problem ? She tells us of men ' s The University, St Andrews.
the "wedge " model of Steve Pacala and Rob The Stern Report corre ctly suggests that a lower life expectan cy and higher suicide rates,
-----'~,-----
Socolo w. Thi s model, as presented , onl y reduction in emissions to about 20 per cen t of presum ably as evidence of the disadvantage s
addr esses the issue of stabilizi ng emissi ons at their present value will be required. In an aid to they ha ve suffered on account of fem inism. Captain professor
their present value rather than addressing the visua lizing the ef fort involved, Lam points out These probl em s were with us before the femi-
esse ntial issue of stabilizing the carbon concen- that non-carbon sources of energy must be nist revival and have nothin g at all to do with it. Sir, - Brian Holden Reid (April 20) quot es the
tration in the atmo sphere at some acceptable pro vided each year equivalent to seve ral 'T hree Every mov ement, and particul arly if it is late Shelford Bidwell' s statement about Sir
level, currentl y taken to be twice the conc entra- Gorges" power plant s on a worldwide basis. fighting injustice, tend s to attract extremists, Michael Howard that "t he stage had lost a great
tion of the pre-indu strial era. Pacala and Thi s will require substantial international and the feminist movement is no exception. But actor when Howard decided to becom e a don ".
Socolo w clearl y indic ated in their paper that the coop eration and determinati on. it is also true that sexual harassment in the work- I was a student of Howard ' s at King' s Coll ege
job will not be finished if the ir seve n-wedge place, dom estic violence, job discrim ination London in the late 1950s, and he perfo rmed on
programme is successfully impl emented in fifty BARRIE S. H. ROYCE and rape are still severe probl ems that are by no stage in his lectur es. He would walk into the
years; however, eve n this may be too late to Department of Mechanical and Aerospace means rare. To argue that men are now the room on the first chim e of Big Ben , and, on the
obtain a desirabl e goa l. Engineering , Princeton Univers ity, Princeton, persecuted sex and at a disadvantage comp ared first stroke of the hour, would say "Ladies and
A more recent approach developed by New Jersey 08544. to women borders on the delu sional. gentlemen" . The lectur es were dramat ic, the
Socolo w and S. H. Lam and publi shed as pauses very preci se, and the whole hour was
------~,------ BARBARA R. BERGMANN cap tivating. The lectur e would finish as Big
"Go od Enou gh Tool s for Global Warmin g
Policy Making" in Energy f or the Future: Philo- Feminist harassment 54 3041 Place NW , Di strict of Colum bia 200 15. Ben began to chime the next hour.
As undergradu ates in the History Depart-
sophical Tran saction s of the Roya l Soci ety
Sir , - Reading l ean Bethke Elshtain's review -----~----- ment, we were sometimes puzzled by the
Series A: Mathematical , Physical & Engin eer-
ing Scie nces (2007 ), pp365, 897- 934, pro vides of Legali zing Misandry by Paul Nathanson and
Katherin e K. Youn g (March 30) might lead
Transtromer versions number s of people at Howard ' s lecture s whom
we didn 't recogni ze as history students. I discov-
a simple mathematical under stand ing of this
focal problem. Thi s model notes that when those with a tenu ous hold on realit y to believe Sir, - Rob in Fulton writes (Letters, Febru ary 9) ered that quite a number of them were from the
carbon dio xide is emitted into the atmosphere, that extremists of the femin ist persua sion have that he has "yet to find a reviewer willing or Royal Academ y of Dramat ic Art who had been
appro ximately half of it stays to con tribut e to so gained the upper hand in our socie ty that able" to say that Robin Robert son' s Tom as told that Howard was the onl y academic in
the greenhouse effect. A con stant emission rate memb ers of the male hal f of our popul ation Transtriimer versions, publi shed by Enitharmon London who rega rded the lectur e as a work of
therefore implies a con stant rate of increase in now lead a tortur ed life, beset by negative as The Deleted World , "are neither dependabl e dramat ic art. They were there to learn the art of
the CO, con cent ration and an overshootin g of stereotypes, cowe ring in grave dan ger of translation s nor independ ent imitations". I won- public speaking.
the target steady-state concentration. To stabi- false accusations of horrid crimes. Elshtain der if the entirely stra ightforward reason for this
lize at any selected level requir es an appropri ate endorses the authors' recit als of men' s victimi- is simply that nobod y but Mr Fulton has man- KENNETH LEECH
sys tematic reduction in the emi ssion rate as a zation by "law upon law, case upon case, aged to arri ve at such a surprising and oddl y 89 Manchester Road, Mo ssley.

-17- TLS APRIL 27 200 7


Ways to beat an old enemy
P A TRI CK O ' CO N NOR
Te n nessee Will i am s
NOT E B O OKS
Edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton
828pp. Yale University Press. £27.50 (US $40).
9780300 116823
T HE G LAS S M ENAGE R I E
Apollo Theatre
T HE RO SE T ATT O O
OlivierTh eatre
hen Tenn essee Willi arn s ca me
W to Lon don for the first Briti sh
stag ing In 1948 of The Gla"
Menagerie, he was di sapp ointed
by the "air of hopelessness on thi s island, the
peopl e grim, cold, unpl easant " . As for those
from "upper soc iety" that he met , he found
them "heartless, snobs and hypocrites to a
shocking degree" . Twel ve yea rs ea rlier, at the
age of twe nty-five, Will iam s had begun th e first
of the surv iving noteb ook s, no w publi shed for
the first time. He co ntinued fairly co ns istently
to w rite entries until ju st before the first night o f
the or iginal Broadway produ cti on of The Glass
Menagerie in 1944 ; thereaft er th e journals take
on a more spora dic shape, but go up to 1958.
Th er e foll ows a twent y-year gap, before a
shorter se ries that he called "Mes cahiers
noir s" , written between 1979 and 1981 , two
yea rs before his death .
As anyo ne famili ar with his wor k will
ex pec t, th ere are heavy doses of the "blue dev-
ils", Willi am s' s nam e for the bout s of depr es-
sio n, rage and self-do ubt th at eve ntually verged
o n so me thing rese mbling the sc hizo phrenia
from which his bel oved sister Ro se began to suf-
fer at aro und the tim e he started kee ping the
notebooks. Six months after the first en try, he
writes defi antl y: "The old enem y - Fea r.
Toni ght I will lock him o ut of my hou se - I will
set the dogs on him . I' ll dri ve him a thou sand
mile s away! ". Thi s co nstant spec tre of madne ss
and delu sion bega n during the form ati ve yea rs
of his de vel opment as a creative w riter and
never ceased to plagu e him , ev en as it fuelled
his wor k. Befor e Rose' s illn ess had becom e
apparent, Willi am s wro te in Oc tobe r 1936 :
"Ro se o n o ne of her neuroti c sprees - fancie s
her self an invalid - talk s in a silly dyin g-off
way - trail s around the hou se in negli gees. Di s-
gusting" . In a not e added th ree yea rs later he
has scraw led , "God forgi ve me for this !". Wil-
liam s battl ed with his ner ves and with pani c
attacks; but as he matured tow ards his first
import ant wo rk, o ne ca n se nse a grow ing co nfi-
dence in his abilities . " So Go d let me live out
my due len gth of tim e and say my full say - and
drain my last ounce o f beauty into wo rds befor e
I go ." Willi am s co ns idered him self essen tiall y a
poet ; when he wro te a line he was please d with
- "The past keep s getting bigger and bigger at
the future 's expense" - he co mme nted, "too
goo d to be in a play" . Th e tone of many of the
passage s during the ea rly yea rs has a yea rning,
self-pity ing ado lesc ent qu ality. At one point,
TLS AP RIL 27 2 0 07
The productive neuroses of Tennessee Williams
Jessica Lange as Amanda in Th e Glas s M enag erie
Williams him self notes with shoc k, "what a con- w ith ease ... . It is never as bad as yo u think . It
glo me ratio n of wretched w hining it co ntains". is never as good as yo u think ." The ges tatio n
After sev eral unsuccessful rel ation ships w ith peri od for man y of his dram as was lon g indeed;
wo me n, in th e late 1930s Willi am s be gan to Vieux Ca rre, for instance , ev entually performed
co me to term s with his hom osexu alit y, althoug h in 1977 , already existed in an early draft way
as late as Jun e 1939 we fin d him reac ting with back in 1939. It was after he had spent a fru strat-
horror to the "amorous adva nce" of a new male ing few month s as a scriptwriter for MGM in
acquaintance. In a foo tnote , the edit or of the 194 3 that Willi am s found his matur e vo ice as a
Notebooks, M argaret Bradh am Thornton , sug- dramatist. Perhaps what was mo st important
ges ts that thi s may have been his first phys ica l was his deci sion to co nce ntrate o n tho se charac -
encounter , altho ug h ea rlier the same yea r in ters w ho wo uld always fascin ate him , who
New Orleans he ha s not ed , " I was introdu ced to possessed what he ca lled "the charm of the
the artistic and Boh emi an life of the Quarter defe ated " . In The Glass Menagerie he also sub-
w ith a bang !". Whatever reticen ce he may have dued his ten dency to write about se x in w hat
felt to start w ith was soo n overcome, and there wo uld then have seemed a blatant way (as in his
foll o w ye ars of cas ual pick -ups, dangerou s stories written at almo st the same time , "One
encounter s with strange rs w ho are anything but Arm" and " Desire and the Black Masseur " ).
kind , and ang uished love affa irs that often seem Instead , he allow ed his charac ters a sec ret
doom ed from the outse t. By 194 3 he ass erts that life , hinted at in the di alogue , and thu s filled
he has "accepted sex as a way of life and found with grea ter possibilities. " I think you'v e been
it empty, empty, knu ckl es o n an e mpty drum ". doin g thin gs that yo u' re asha med of
But then , in ano ther co mme nt added late r, he Nobo dy in their right mind goes to the movi es
correc ts him self, " Not tru e, I usuall y enj oy it. as oft en as you pretend to", acc uses Tom ' s
What I mean is it do esn't answ er all". mother in The Glass Menagerie . Later in the
Perhaps the mo st valuable as pect of the play, she rail s aga inst "that hideous book by
Notebooks is the way in which Willi am s allows that insane Mr Lawren ce ". It was Willi am s's
him self to describe so me of the proc esses of his study of D. H . Lawren ce ' s work, his pilgrim age
writing. " [The ] way to write a goo d pla y is to to Tao s to me et Frieda Lawren ce , and his
co nv ince yo urse lf that it is easy to do and do it attem pts to make a play out of the Lawrenc es'
- 18 -
time in New M exico that help ed him to achi eve
the balan ce between poet ry and reali sm that di s-
tingui shes his best work. He wrote, "Law rence
felt the myster y and po wer of sex, as the pr imal
life urge , and was the lifelong adve rsa ry of
those who wa nted to keep the subjec t locked
away in the cella rs of prudery" .
Th e last entr y in the Notebooks before the
premiere of The G lass Menagerie is dow n-
hearted: "We ll, it look s bad , bab y" . Nea rly ten
months had passed by the time he to ok the
journal up again , and by then he had tasted
success. As Thornton point s out in her introduc -
tion , throu ghout his life , Willi am s took littl e
troubl e to record the nam es of the rich and
famous peopl e he met. " In many ways what
Williams left o ut of his journ al is ju st as reveal-
ing as what he included ." Th ornton mu st have
de vot ed yea rs of her life to editing the Note -
books, and the result is a magnificent achie ve-
ment. The annotatio ns and footn otes amount
virtually to a sec ond book. There are man y pho -
togr aph s, rangin g from on e of Williams lyin g
naked in his New York apa rtme nt in 194 3, to
one of Jean Co ctea u's cover desi gn for the first
French editi on of Un Tram way nomme des ir.
Like many other see m ing ly neuroti c artists,
Willi am s had a stro nger grip on him self than
out sider s reali zed . Ev en in moods of depre ssion
his hand writin g is clear and well-rounded. "A
we ll-w ritten story sho uld alway s cont ain one or
two sentences which are intelli gibl e onl y to the
author." Pres uma bly Williams carried thi s
principl e over into his work for the stage, and
perh aps the diffi cult y man y people have with
all his later pla ys is a result of it. Unless on e
ca n accept them as essays in a so rt of trance -
indu ced poet ry, the y can seem fru stratin gl y
opaque . The publi cati on of the Note books will
certainly provide much material for a re-eva lua-
tion of many aspec ts o f his work.
M ean whil e, his maj or plays show no sign of
losing their grip on th eatr egoers. Has any other
writer since Chekhov pro vid ed a richer array of
parts fo r mature actresse s? His adm iratio n and
affec tion for the grea t female performers of his
time w as unshaken , ev en when he encountered
diffi culties w ith some o f the more garrulo us
monstres sacres. Laurette Tayl or, w ho crea ted
the role of Ama nda in The Glass Menagerie,
gave Williams many moments of anxi ety dur-
ing rehear sals, but once the role was hers, he
wrote : "There was a radiance about her art
which I can co mpare onl y to the g reates t lines
of poetr y, and which gave me th e same shock of
re vel ation as if the air abo ut us had been
momentaril y broken throu gh by light from
so me clear space beyond us" . Simil arl y, M au -
reen Stapleto n, who was Willi am s' s first Ser-
afina in The Rose Tattoo , was far too young for
the part , but he helped her to ga in the produ c-
ers ' co nfidence by ass isting her w ith a ne w
"aged" look. Williams had hoped that A nna
M agn ani wo uld pla y the role on stag e, but she
declined it, fearin g that her command of Eng-
lish was too wea k. M agnani did , of co urse, pla y
it on sc reen and wo n an Ac adem y Aw ard for
her performanc e. Williams wrote that Magnani
was "as uncon ven tion al a wo man as I have

known in or out of my profe ssion al world". He
added, "1 often wonder how Anna Magnani
mana ged to live within society and yet rem ain
so free of its conventions".
It is inevitabl y with the reputations of these
grea t performances in mind that one appro aches
the two new produ ction s in London. The Glass
Menagerie is by far the better play, and has
been give n an exce llent stagi ng by Rupert
Goold , designed by Matth ew Wri ght. Using the
full height of the stage, Wright has ti lled it with
fligh ts of steps that pro vide a platform for Tom
the narrator ' s rnusin gs, and allo w for some
tense exchanges bet ween the charac ters as they
mo ve out of each other' s sight. Will iams
rejected Tallulah Bankh ead for the part of
Am anda Wingtield in the fi rst mo vie version,
fearing that she would be too sophisticated to
portray the l1utterin g emotions of the sad
moth er. Jessica Lange looks too young and
glamoro us to be altoge ther con vincin g. On e
feels that no woman so con tident in her own
beau ty would have been left in such a dead -
end situation.
Neverth eless, L anges performance is full of
subtlety and flickerin g humou r. In particul ar,
she makes a great deal of the scenes in which
she is selling subscri ptions over the telephon e,
per suading peopl e to buy The Hom e-M aker's
Compan ion, or as Tom call s it, "one of tho se
magazines for matron s". In each of the duo -
logues with her children, Tom (Ed Stoppard),
and Laura (Am anda Hale), Lange rises to the
challenge of being by turns cant ankerou s,
exasperated and tender. Hale is altoget her
admirable in the pivotal role of Laura . After the
-------------------~-------------------
War and peace in the wings
L
ike Sir Thomas Bertrams billiards room
in Mansfi eld Par k, the top 1100r of Or
John son ' s Hou se in Gou gh Squ are has
been taken over , temporaril y, by the theatre.
Behind the Scenes: The hidden life of Georgian
theatre 1737- 84, in spite of its title, conc ern s
itself with eve ry aspect of this curious world.
Th ere are critics here, for example, fresh from
some red-faced debate in the co ffee house; a
volume of John son' s edition of Shakespeare
lies open at the title page, not far from the
mod el of the last set designed by Ph ilipp e de
Lou therbourg, an arrangem ent of watercolour
cli ffs in miniatur e grooves . Here is also a note-
book that record s the runn ing times of plays at
the Th eatre Royal in Drur y Lane (Hamlet
com es in at two hour s and fourt een minut es),
information that was made publi c for the benefit
o f the patro ns' long-sufferin g coachm en. The
actors have turn ed up as porcel ain statuettes, as
does Shak espeare; he lean s discon solately on
what must be a pile of unso ld Fir st Folio s.
A crowd scene such as the litho graph "Fit z-
giggo" (1763 ), depi ctin g a riot in Co vent Gar -
den over the abolition of hal f-price tickets,
shows what tumultuous places eighteenth-
century theatres could be. But there is also a
peaceful image from beh ind the scenes: that of
the scene painter Michael Angelo Rook er in his
loft at the Th eatre Royal Haymarket, wo rking
on a pastoral backdrop, his dog sitt ing pati ently,
cloud s visibly grazi ng past. It is a piece of
charmin g self-publicity, produced by Rook er to
adve rtise his talent s, and all the more cha rmin g
when seen next to an item such as the folding
ARTS
"Gentleman Caller", Jim (Ma rk Umbers) has
kissed her, she rem ains frozen, her hand s out -
stretched in wonder, a beau tiful ges ture that
recall s the line by e. e. cummings that Williams
uses as an epigraph to the play, " nobody, not
eve n the rain, has such small hand s" . J im is a
part qu ite as difficult as the other thre e, as he
has to rem ain ju st an ordinary man, unaw are of
the havoc he is about to cause. Umbers gets the
balan ce ju st right betwe en boyish delight at
Laura ' s recollection of his high-sch ool success
in The Pi rates of Penzan ce. and his disillu sion-
ment. A line such as "being disappo inted is one
thin g and bein g discouraged is something else"
emerges with a mel anchol y resonance. Ed
Stopp ard does not overdo the pent-up aggres-
sion in Tom ' s outbu rsts, and he succeeds in
sugges ting the narrato r' s fondness for Ama nda,
eve n in her mo st ex treme flight s of fantasy
about her days as a Sou thern belle .
The Rose Tattoo , like The Glass Menagerie ,
should have a claustro phobic feel to it; all the
action takes place in Serafin a' s living-room , or
on the veranda ju st outside. The decision to
play it on the huge expanse of the Oli vier stage
see ms a little odd . The production was to have
been dir ected by Steven Pimlott, who died ju st
seven days after rehearsals had begun . Nicholas
Hytner stepped in to see it throu gh. Th e set by
Mark Thomp son shows the whole house, revolv-
ing as if for some blockbuster musical. English
actors are seldom convinci ng when they
attempt Ameri can accents and here the ca st wal-
low in toe-curlin g mock-Sicili an-Am erican.
The first London production of the play, in
1959 , was directed by Sam Wanam aker , who
MICHA EL CAIN ES
BEHI ND THE SCE NE S
The hidden life of Georgian theatre, 1737- 84
Or John son ' s Hou se, Go ugh Squa re
fan, datin g from nearly the same season at the
same theatre, on which is print ed a dia gram of
the boxes and the names of tho se who have sub-
scri bed to them . Undoubtedly, this came in
hand y when a lady wished to kno w whet her it
was Lord Fitzwilli am or merely Capt ain Price
ogling her across the circle.
Behind the Scenes has been carefull y curated,
and helpfull y arranged in sect ions such as "The
Gre en Room" and "Theatrical network s", by
the former curator s of Or John son' s Hou se,
Fion a Ritch ie and Natas ha McEnro e. Th e new
curator , Stephan ie Pick ford , has ed ited the
exce llent accompanyi ng bookl et to the exhibi-
tion, in which Johnson , as in the ex hibition
itself , plays his part. Ine vitably, however, it is
John son ' s for mer pupil , fello w Lich field boy
and more successful friend, David Garrick , the
" English Roscius" him self, who dom inates
proceed ings. Thi s see ms only right: the ex hibi-
tion' s cho sen era, 1737-84, was Garr ick' s, if it
was anyone's. He made his debu t in the season
of 1741 -2, after a numb er of shadowy appear-
ances out of town ; mana ged Drur y Lane for
twen ty-nin e years; and continued to contribute
to the theatrical scene after his official ret ire-
ment in 1776. Th e progress of Bard olatr y - cul -
min atin g in the Shak espeare Jubil ee of 1769 -
- 19-
also took the role of Alvaro Mangiaca vallo . It is
under stand able that his dau ghter Zoe would
have been keen to play Serafina , and although IN MEMORIAM
she is the only memb er of the ca st who can hit
off the required accent with an y accuracy , this
is not a role that brings out the best in her. She
was a splendid Amanda a few years ago in Sam
M endess Donm ar production of The Glass
Men agerie, but as Seratina the mixture of
superstition, sentime ntality and roughn ess
eludes her. Magnan i in the Iilm fulfils Wil -
li amss desire for that res pect for the "religious
yearnings" which are the key to Sera fina' s
agitated condition. Susannah Fieldin g as Ro sa
and Andr ew Langtree as her sailor boyfriend
Jack pro vide some welcome moments of qu iet-
ness in an unnecessaril y no isy eve ning - the
"s ound desig n" by Paul Groothuis and the
music by Jason Carr go far beyond what
Will iam s called for C a folk singer with a
guita r"). The Rose Tattoo was Williams' s
homa ge to Frank Merlo , his lover for many
years , for whom he had the affectionate
nickname "The horse". Ha ving the unfortunate
hero bear the name "eat a horse" was no doubt
one of those pri vate jok es " intelligible only to
Edna
the auth or". The best scenes in this troubl ed
production are those bet ween Wanam aker as
Serafina and Darr ell D'S ilva as Al varo.
Hatlestad
To gether , they inhabit a territory mapped out
by the playwright in his introduction to the
play, "a world ... in which emo tion and act ion
have a dim ension and a dign ity that they
Hong
would likewise have in real existence, if only
the shatte ring intrusion of time could be
lock ed ou t". 1913-2007
Distinguished
Scholar
was ju st one way in which he shaped the Geor-
gian theatre in his own image. John son could be
niggardl y when it cam e to prai sing his friend
dir ectl y, but, afte r Garrick ' s death , he would
&
tell Sarah Sidd ons that he had been "the onl y Co-editor
actor I e ver saw whom I could call a master
both in trag edy and com ed y". &
Every co rner of Behind the Scenes concedes
Garrick' s celebrit y, not least as they co ntain Translator
treasures borro wed from the Garri ck Club. Gar-
rick ' s Chippendale armc hairs sit near a pair of of
silver shoe buckl es and the powder puff he used
to whiten his wig; his life mask stares out over a Kierkegaard's
statuette of him in the fanci ful cos tume of Tan-
cred, a Hun garian hussar. But if the mask is Writings
hung at the realistic height of five foot four, as
it see ms to be, then the mirror on the opp osite
wall is hun g too high; apparently , it belon ged in
Garrick' s dressing room . Thou gh it is poignant
that so many mementoes of Garrick survive, the
theatre of displa y cases is in one sense better
suited to his successors. Garrick ' s livelin ess
defies recaptu re, but there is something suitably
stately about represent ing Siddons by her coral
tiara, and her brother John Philip Kemble C an
icicle upon the bust of tragedy" , said Hazli tt) by
his " Gcorge" medal. Som e of Garri ck' s famed
contempo rarie s, mean whil e, ap pear here as
histrionic arm-wavers, isola ted tigures quaintly
etched. The images of two Irish actors,
Spranger Barry as Oth ello and Charles Macklin
as Shylock , rem ind us of the major Shak espear-
ea n roles that lay beyond Gar rick ' s reach . Ther e
is not much in this qu ietly beaut iful ex hibition
of which that might be said.
TLS A PRIL 27 2 0 0 7

Escape from destruction
his eloquent and super bly illustrated
T study of Anselm Kiefer' s caree r is built
round a powerful and provocative cen-
tral thesis. Until the early 1980s, observes
Andrea Lauterwein, Kiefer focused on "his
own German origins", "the vicious circle of
fascinati on and disg ust at the phantasmagorical
ties that bound him to the Third Reich". Much
of this work is marvellous, but it also has a
somewhat airless, solips istic l1avour. What
enabled him to escape from "the vicious circle"
- and come to terms with the deepes t human
costs of Nazism - was his encounter with the
writings of Paul Celan. Should we see Kiefer
using the Jewish poet "as a ' pharmacopeia' to
treat the patient that is Ger many"? Although
her more general statements (and commentary
on Celan' s notoriously hermetic poetry) can be
a bit arcane, Lauterwein' s responses to Kiefer' s
individ ual works, and the thread which lead s
from one to the next, are invaria bly subtle and
revealing.
Kiefer famously started off in 1969 with a
controversia l project in which he photogra phed
himself all over Europe doing the illegal Hitler
salute. What made this so "blasphemous" and
disturbing was that it cut through "the contem-
porary current of self-victimization", identified
with Nazism (however ironically) and implied
that "he co uld not guarantee his own incorrupti-
bility". Kiefer may have been born in 1945 but,
as he has pointed out,
I am one of the butchers, at least o n a theoreti-
ca l level , because I cannot kno w tod ay what I
would have don e at the time . Mankind is
capable of anything.
He went on to explore the imagery and myth-
-----------------------'~,-----------------------
dmund Morris begins his tribute to the
E latest eminence in the Eminent Lives
series with a winter's tale. In Febru ary
of 1978, spectacular blizzards hit Massachu-
setts. For two days and nights all was snow-
bound ; and then, on the third day, the sun broke
through. In Har vard Yard , a frosty-paned
window was throw n open and from it an
anonymous music-lover played the finale of
Beethoven' s Fifth Symphony, those crashing
chords in C majo r heraldin g the thaw. "There
are moments", Morri s remarks, "when only
Beethoven will do." These are moments of
protean signilicance, freakish weather and
epochal change. The anonymous music-lover
carefully chose the exact spot in the triumphal
groove whereon to lower the stylus, the
moment where C minor becomes C major, for
he "understood (even ifhi s listeners did not) the
symbolism of that transition, the most claustro-
phobic passage in all music".
Morris invokes another seeker of the trium-
phal groove, Leonard Bernstein, who con-
ducted a memorable performance of the Choral
Symph ony in Berlin in 1989. With the Wall
fallen and the Communist stranglehold
released, the Schauspielhaus resounded not to
a cry of Freude l, but Freihe it!, Bernstein
modestly improving Schiller' s text that it might
rise to the occasion. I listened to a recordin g
of this concert recentl y and at its climax agai n
found myself wondering if Mayday in
Pyongyang could really be so bad.
Of course, it is not Beethoven' s fault that he
TLS A PR tL 2 7 2007
ARTS
MA TTH EW J. R EISZ
An d r e a L aut er w ein
ANSE LM KI E FER / P A UL CELAN
Myth, mournin g and memory
256pp. Thames and Hudson. £39.95.
978 050 02 3836 3
ology once believed to embody "the German
spirit" : the primeval forest, the rustic hunting
lodge, the legendary battles, the fire, swords
and pantheon of "spir itual heroes" from the
Nibel ungenlied and Richard Wagner' s operas.
Alongside such themes, Kiefer confronted the
ways that Ku ltur in general and specific artistic
genre s were either complicit in barbarism or
exercises in denial. He implicitly analyses, for
example, the notion of landscape painting as a
"self-portrait of the German soul". Photograph-
ing himself saluting on a deserted beach, he
alludes to a portra it of a seaside "wanderer" by
Caspar David Friedrich which was seen as "a
memorial to the soldiers who had died durin g
the wars of liberation against Napo leon". Kiefer
mockingly adopts its central props - the bath
and plane - to underm ine the self-mythologiz-
ing "heroic allegory" of his former mentor
Joseph Beuys. And he clearly believes that
both Piet Mondrian' s abstraction and Donald
Judd ' s minimalism are perniciou s, styles which
consciously and irresponsibly avert their eyes
from crucial moral and political issues.
It was Celan's poetry, with its "never-ending
clash between two incompatible and yet comple-
mentary memori es", which spurred Kiefer into
new territory. To be precise, it was the famous
Hooked on
a triumphal
groove
RICHARD C O LE S
E d m u n d Morri s
B EE THOV E N
The universal co mposer
243pp. HarperCollins. £12.99.
978 00 072 13702
should be seized on by his admirers, Bernstein
in Berlin in 1989, Wilhelm Furtwangler in the
same city for a different purpose in 1942,
Morri s today. Nevert heless, there is something
uncomprom isingly big and wild and fateful
about those works - the Fifth Symphony, the
Ninth - that tends to extravag ance. Not only
those; the Joseph 11 cantata "is the sonic equiva-
lent of Cologne Cathedral"; the F minor quartet
is "as dense, black and bitter as a pickled
walnut"; the opening of the first Razumovsky
Quartet "grows directly, like a sequoia from a
cone, out of a tiny phrase at the end of
Beethoven' s previo us quartet .. .. Seeded
thus in one cent ury, it helped propagate the
- 2 0-
closing lines of "Death Fugue" (1945):
dein go ldene s Haar M arg arete
dein asc henes Haar Sulam ith
(your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith).
It ought to be impossible to miss the con-
trasting fates, under Nazis m, of the Aryan
Margarete and her Jewish "sister" Shulamith.
Lauterwein draws an interesting parallel with
the use of Shulamith and Mary to represent the
Old and New Testa ments (or the benighted
Synagog ue and the Church triumph ant) in
medieval Christian iconogra phy. Yet she also
claims that Celan' s jewelled but anguished
lines were sometimes grotesquely misread in
post-wa r Germany so as to turn "Death Fugue"
into "a ritualistic poem in the spirit of Judeo-
German reconciliation" - a small element of a
much more "general denial of the murder and
cre mation of the Jews" .
Kiefer had the tactlessness to use Celan' s
words to blast through this culture of den ial.
After a false start in paintings which depict
Shulamith as a voluptuous woman, he begins
to incorporate straw, or ashes and real human
hair into his work so that the destruction is
made both physical and unavoidable. In one of
the most compelling sections of Anselm Kiefe r I
Paul Celan, Lauterwein traces the way that
pictures of Margarete lead stylistically via
"Midsummer Night" (celebrated with lawless
hilltop fire ceremonie s by the Hitler Youth) to
Wagner's Die Mei stersin ger von Niir nbe rg
and finally the blasted landscape of the city
itself - the city whose rallies and trials have
made it "a modern codeword for ev il". Kiefer' s
exa mination of Ger man history is also inevit-
music of another".
Morris, who has made what the blurb
descri bes as a half-centur y study of
Beethoven' s life and music, is an amateur
musician himself. In place of an index he
appends a useful glossary of musical terms, but
his discussion of the work is not always so
useful. Describin g the piano part in the Op 96 G
Major violin sonata, he writes of Beethoven' s
"emancipation of the trill as a kind of musical
aerodynamic" ; the Op 130 B l1at quartet
"traverses more styles in fifty minutes than
Wagner did in fifty years"; at this point,
one begins to worry that the rhetorica l aero-
dynamics may emancipate the text beyond
intelligibility.
Morris is the author of a Pulitzer Prize-
winning biography, The Rise of Theodore
Roos evelt (1979), however, and the biographi-
cal material is handled more deftly. He dis-
cusses ef fic iently such questions as the identity
of the Immortal Beloved (Antonie Brentano,
although others disagree), Beethoven' s tricky
relationship with his teacher Joseph Haydn, the
custody battles over his hapless nephew Carl,
and the remorseless progress of his deafness.
The shrivelled auditory nerves and cartilagi-
nous arteries revealed by his autopsy suggest
that the compose r may have suffered from
lupus, which would also explain the pitted face,
the arthritis , the rages. But to what exte nt the
famous rages were symptoms of vascular
degeneration , of Romantic sensibility, of bi-
polar disorder, or of unimaginable frustration
ably an attempt to exhume individual and
collective "dark family secrets" which his
parents' generation refused to discuss. Hence,
perhaps, his fascination with the poetry of
Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73), the guilt-
ridden daughter of a Nazi schoolteacher who
had a tormented love affair with Paul Celan.
Lauterwein quotes some wonderf ul examples
of her work, includin g "The Game is Over"
(1954) , a lament for the end of childhood
addresse d to her brother:
Awake in the gypsy camp, in the desert berth,
from our hair the sand disappears ,
yo ur age and mine and the age of the earth
ca n' t be measured in years.
Kiefer uses the third line of this verse as the
title for a painting of a pyram id slow ly dissolv-
ing into a sandy sky. The real sand applied to
the surface of the canvas may recall the sand for
building roads which Celan was forced to carry
in a labou r camp (as he recalled in a poem
written while watching his son playing on the
beach). Much of Kiefer' s later work, as
Lauterwein reveals in detail, can be seen as an
exploration - and perhaps an exorcism - of "the
ubiquity of ashes" in post-war German y.
Kiefer is an artist of great emotional power
who has devoted his career to what this book
calls "a memory-based course of therapy". Th is
often lead s him to draw on motifs which are
fairly unfamil iar to non-German s (are there any
anglophones who feel a viscera l thrill at the
thought of Arminius's defeat of the Romans in
the Teutobu rg forest?). Andrea Lauterwein
relates them all to his self-assumed mission of
personal and national mou rning. Like all grief,
this moves from den ial through sadness and
separation to "the discovery of a new relation-
ship with oneself and the world". That is
Anselm Kiefer' s central achieve ment. And
when he got stuck, it was Paul Celan who
showed him the way out of the impasse.
with his grow ing isolation in dea fness is
impossible to say. Some have argued that
Beethoven' s behaviour during the litigation
concerning his nephew was all but psychotic,
its twists and turns dri ving him, and everyone
around him, to distraction. But what was bad
for Beethoven the man was not necessarily bad
for Beethoven the composer, becau se, Morri s
asserts, "a distinguishing characteris tic of the
creative mind is that it can accept reversals of
fortune without emotional damage". Really?
Did reversals of fortune leave the creative
minds of Robert Schum ann or Gustav Mahler
or Bernd Alois Zimmermann emotionally
undamaged?
Reckless jud gements and hyperbole are
symptomatic of carelessness, and this is also
occasionally evident in the detail. Morris quotes
a remark Beethoven made to Count von Braun,
"I don't write for the galleries!". Fifteen pages
further on , he repeats the quotation, and this
time Count von Braun is demoted to Baron.
Thi s should not have survived the sketchiest of
proofreadings.
But the real weakness of Morri s' s book is its
easy rapture. Enchanted by his SUbject's music,
and dazzled by his SUbject's eminence, the
author seems to have abandoned any interest in
locating Beethoven in history and context. The
exa lted figure, hymned so extravag antly, seems
dislocated , a figure apart, like Caspar David
Friedrich' s hero looking out across the sea of
clo uds. No wonder Ronald Reagan chose
Morris as his official biographer.

A talent for self-invention
T H O MAS M E A N EY
L ou i s B e gl e y
MAT TE RS OF HON OR
320pp. Knopf $24.95.
9780 307265258
L
ouis Beg ley is America's most mondain
nove list. A succe ssf ul New York lawyer
for many years before becom ing a
writer, he is a deft chro nicler of the lives of the
A merica n upper classes. Readers of his work
can expect to be treated to disqu isition s on real
estate in the Ham pton s, the intricacies of inter-
national mergers and feasts at whic h the
Grand s-Echezeau x ' 7 1 flows like Stella Artois.
Th e bankers, lawyers, architects and adve rtis-
ing exec utives in his novels are sophisticated to
the point where their material and intellectu al
trappings distract them from their mora l predica-
ments. They may read the best boo ks and keep
fitful diaries, but they eac h have a damaged
capacity for intro spect ion, and that invi tes the
reader to do much of their rel1ectin g for them .
In Ab out Schmidt (1999 ), the stubborn
Schm idt cannot accep t his daug hte r's marriage
to a colleague because he is unabl e to co me to
terms with his ow n ge ntee l anti-Semitism. In
The Man Who Was Lat e (1992 ), the determ ined
Ben tries to make it as a Jew in the WASP
establishment but ends up insulating himsel f
from that wo rld.
Begley, who was born in Stryj , Poland in
1933, has written abou t displa cem ent mo st
striking ly in his lirst and most critically
acclaimed book , Warti me Lies (1991 ). Th at
nove l, based on Begley' s own childhood experi-
ence in Occupi ed Poland, follows the fate of
a Jewish boy named Maciek, who narro wly
escapes the Holocaust by passing as a Ca tholic
Pole and using false papers. Th e distance
bet ween Maciek and the successful men of
the world in the other book s is marked. The
accession to wor ldliness and the price it exa cts
has turn ed out to be Begley' s great subject, and
it has never been treated so thoroughly as it is in
his new novel, Matters of Honor , in which he
goe s a long way towards bridging the gulf
between the helpl ess boy from Warsaw and the
Manh attan power brokers of the later books.
Set at Har vard in the early 1950 s, the no vel
begins as a campus tale of three room-ma tes.
Sam Standi sh, the narrator , is the adopted son
o f a down-at-heel WASP fami ly from the
Berkshires who has recentl y learn ed he is the
reci pie nt of a large tr ust fund . A rchie Palm er
is a rugby joc k with a drink problem. The third
room-ma te is Henr y Whit e, a Polish Jew
recently emigra ted to Brooklyn, who has fierce
ambitions to ge t to the top of Amer ica's elite.
Wh en Sam lirs t meets him, Henry is tran sfixed
by a girl at the window who is blowing kisses
and gesturing wildly to him. Margot Hornun g,
who co mes from a promin en t Jewish fam ily
and is the only Radcli ffe freshma n who
possesses a diaphragm , will becom e his pass-
port to the beau mond e.
Harvard is a touchstone in Begley' s fiction.
In The Man Who Was Late, the narrator, Jack,
FICTION
Louis Begley's novel of Harvard in the 1950s
Louis BegIey in 1950 , the year he matriculated to Harvard
harks back to his undergradu ate days wheneve r
he tries to trace the genesis of his strange
friendship with Ben, "the W idmerpo ol of
Har vard Yard". In Ab out Schmidt , Schm idt' s
old room-mate chid es him about his latent
anti-Sernitism in his college days. (As Jerome
Kara bel docum ent ed in his 2005 study , The
Chose n, anti-Semitism was far more virulent
at Harvard in the 1950 s than in pre vious
decad es; the admi ssions process emphasized
"character" over academic achievement as a
stratage m to bar quali lied Jews from entry.)
Henry desperately wants to overcom e what he
ca lls his "Je wism" , but he realizes that, as a
matter of principl e, he cannot avoid it. "So long
as there are people who care whether I am a Je w
pretend ing to be a Gent ile", he tell s Sam , " I
have to rem ain a Jew, eve n thou gh inside I feel
no more Jewish than smoked ham."
Henr y is haunt ed by his early years in Poland .
When asked offhandedly about John Herse y's
1951 nove I, The Wall , he erupts into a tirade
on how a historical novel about his ex perience
is the last thing he needs. Sam becomes Henry' s
so undi ng board and even his reception ist,
lie lding worried phone calls from the paren ts
in Brooklyn. Having defe nded his cousin
Geor ge in a bar brawl durin g summer break,
Henr y asks if the injuries he suffered have
changed him. " Eventually I gras ped that he had
been gro ping for some sort of similari ty
between my ex perience of brutality in New
Orleans and his terror at being subjec ted to
something of that sort durin g the war." Henry,
Sam realizes , has channelled the entire force
of his personality into achieving a means of
sides tepping the crudities of history next time
around.
- 2 1-
Th e second hal f of Matt ers of Hono r races
throu gh the decad es up to the presen t. Archie
dies in a car crash during a night of reckl ess
dri ving. Margot gets shuflle d between severa l
men, all the while carrying on her affa ir with
Henry. Hen ry and George jo in the same white-
shoe law firm, where Henr y succee ds in ex pand-
ing the Europea n operation. Henr y' s paren ts,
who never co me to term s with his vertigi nous
asce nt, are the first casualties of his success .
Aloof from the main action, Sam becomes a
famous no velist, keepin g up with his old friends
at sporadic dinners ove r the years. Afte r Henry
gets into a legal entangleme nt in M itterrand ' s
France, Sam worrie s that he may kill himself. In
The Man Who Was Late, Ben commits suicide
after a failed love affair by taking a dramat ic
di ve off a bridge in Gene va. Henry 's ultim ate
plan s are no less elaborate, but when Sam
discovers them they bring the last pages of
the novel to an unexpected - and cath artic -
clim ax.
Begley' s prose is relentless ly precise and
typically braided with qu alification s that recall
the late sty le of Henry l am es. Few writers in
English still spin out sentences like this one
from the opening of Begley' s remarkable third
novel, A s Max Saw It (1994) , in which Max
relays his impressions of his hostess:
Although Edna had known me really quite well
- she and her best friend, Janie, had been the
most spectacular examples of a new species of
Radcliffe girl that appeared, miraculously,
out of the Midwest in the fall of my last year at
college, all patently rich and tall, and so beauti-
fully formed, their bosoms beckoning under
angora swea ters the shades of which matched
the subtle hues of their lipstick, that I felt
moved, against all dictates of good sense (I
was conducting with a much plainer, but sexy
and freckly, graduate student an affair that was
to endure until Easte r vaca tion of the year in
which this narrative opens, and besides, quite
clearly, I was not their sor t), to attempt to flirt
at first with her and later with Janie - she had
not telephoned or written to signify that she
expec ted my arr ival.
Thi s erotic meanderin g into the past that
sudde nly clin ches back to the present has been a
signatu re mark of Begley' s narrators. In
Matt ers of Honor , he has tempered this lap idary
inclin ation (his dem andin g sentences may be
part of the reason why he has enjoye d such a
big followi ng in German y) and adopted plainer
language more fit to carry his story forwa rd.
For all his atte ntion to orna te deta il, Begley
esc hews visual descrip tion s, and the bulk of
this novel is dedi cated to the tine shifts in
Henry' s psycholo gy as filtered throu gh Sams
detached gaze. Th e perspective preserves the
fundame ntal unkno wabilit y of Henr y, all the
while emphasizi ng his fullness as a character.
Wh at Matters of Honor does lack is the
intrusion of diary entries or interspersed literary
readings that have served as po ints of relief in
Beg ley 's work in the past (there are no letters
from Henry in the book). We hear only Sam ' s
me asur ed assessme nt, whic h mak es for occ a-
sional longueur s.
Philip Larkin once defined a novel as a story
that follows the fortunes of more than one
character. When Matters of Honor was pub-
lished earlier this yea r, some America n
rev iewers criti cized Begley for paradin g a cast
of blanched , bloodl ess hanger s-on who revolve
solely around Henry. Archie ' s death , George' s
clandes tine rape of Margot, Sams depression
and eve n the es trangeme nt of Henry' s parent s
are all passed over quickl y, it is true, but the
effect is to create the impress ion of a whirlwi nd
of socia l wreckage to which only the reader can
bear adequate witness .
Beg ley has been more co ncerned to give the
reader an unsen timent al seamless tapestry of a
cert ain A me rica n scene ra ther tha n a series of
sustained character stud ies. Th e friends and
lovers who surro und Sam and Henry dri ft in
and out of their lives like the people in the
nove ls of Anthony Powell , survive d only by the
dashed-out bits of dialogue they leave behin d.
Mo st crucia lly, this author has left the moral
question s he raises po werfully unresolved . Th e
price of Henry 's worldliness is a detac hme nt
that iron ically borders on exile from the wor ld
itsel f, yet Loui s Begley still registers a kind of
awe of this talent for self-inventi on.
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TLS A PRIL 2 7 2 0 0 7

here are m an y curio us thing s abou t La
T
Disparition de Richard Taylor; the mo st
im mediate and stri king is the fac t tha t
th is Fren ch no vel is se t entire ly in Brit ain . T he
characters are all Bri tis h, tho ugh they refe r to la
Tamise , not the T hames, and on e of them eve n
asks ano ther if he spea ks Fren ch - he do esn' t.
Among the ve ry few Engli sh wor ds in the
who le book are pork pie and mushy peas, the
foo d offered by one nei ghbour to anot her and
meant , I th ink , to sig na l the do wn -to -earth ,
eve ryday En gli shn ess of the situatio n. Th is is
also the onl y insta nce whe re the au thor, A rna ud
C athrine, ge ts his cu ltura l referen ces slig htly
wro ng. O therwise, the no vel is pitc h per fect ;
the abs urdi ty of these Brit ish peopl e spea king
in Frenc h soo n fades away, thou gh pe rhaps it
cont ributes to the un settling atmos phere.
Rich ard Ta ylor , as the title indic ates , is
largel y abse nt fro m the narra tive , w hich ope ns
wi th the vo ice of his wife, Su san , who rec oun ts
ho w she and Richard fou nd their flat , had a
bab y and se ttled do wn to a peac eabl e existe nce
un til a new nei ghb our , Jenn ifer Wi lson, mo ved
in and di sturb ed the ir qui et, passionl ess night s
wi th loud and prolonged bout s of masturbation .
T he n, on e night , Rich ard do es not com e hom e
and at aro und the sa me tim e, the nei ghb our
qui eten s do wn , thou gh the tw o ev ents seem to
be unr elat ed.
From thi s po int on , eac h chapter belongs to
ano the r female rel ati ve , friend , coll eagu e or
passing acquaintanc e of R ichard' s. T he onl y
unm edi ated ve rsio n com es in the form of two
letter s se nt by him to hi s moth er and yo unge r
sis te r. Th e cha racte r of the missing man
emerges little by little through the pri sm of the
va rious portraits and impr ession s; stille d by his
con ven tional upbring ing, he has sleepwa lked
into marriage and fathe rhood and cannot or will
not co me to term s with his growi ng se nse of
-----------------------'~,-----------------------
Orphans of the state
T
he birth rate in rich Western countri es is
fa lling , not least in child-lovin g Ital y
whe re the nati ve population has sto pped
ren ewing itsel f. Wh at ever the reason s -
Commissari o Guido Brunetti belie ves that
raised economic ex pectations are more signifi-
cant than the pollutant s said to cause a decline
of viable spe rm - they ha ve not ye t a ffected
immigrants from und er-de veloped countries,
who continue to produce more children than
they can af ford to ra ise . " It' s almost as if we ' re
livin g in two worlds " , says Signorina Elettra ,
the secre tary to Brunetti ' s bo ss in the Ven et ian
polic e . "T here's a world wh er e people ha ve too
man y childre n, and the y get sick and starve and
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _-t
Dr Frances Vi vian
Edited by Roger White
A Life ofFrederick, Prince of Wales, 170 1-175 1: A
Connoisseur of the Arts
512pp £84.95 Hardcover
978-0- 7734-55 47-4 Pub. Feb 200 7
". ..a worthwhile andvaluable contributionto scholarship,
particularly in its role in establishingits subjectas a
significantculturalpatron..." Or M Kilbum, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography
The Edwin Mellen Press Ltd
Tel: Ot5 70 423356
Email: cs@m ellen.demon.co.uk www .mellenpress.com
TLS APRtL 27 200 7
F ICTION
Lost in London
LUCY DALLAS
Arnaud C athrin e
L A DI SPARITIO N DE RI CHARD
T AYLOR
I94pp. Paris: Verticales. 17.50€.
978 207 078129 4
futility or, it seems, think of any thing oth er than
him sel f. T hose aro und him tend to exc use, fo r-
give and seek to mend ; the onl y per son who
rem ind s him of hi s responsibilit ies is the tran s-
vest ite Van essa, who run s the Soho bar he
frequ en ts and is in so me ways the moral heart
of the book. Richard' s di sapp earing ac t
unlea shes a set of con sequences he is utterl y
incapa ble of dealin g with, and all that is left
afte r his fug ue is a spread ing se nse of was te.
On e of the charact ers ca ug ht up in Ri chard' s
drama is the En gli sh pla ywri ght Sarah Kane ,
and her e we run into another curiosit y; Kan e is
introd uce d as a friend of Wi lliarn , who was in
love with R ichard, and she has a ch apt er in
whic h she med itates on ho w love affects her
friend , her self, her work and her world, and
thinks abo ut what mu sic should be pla yed at her
fun eral. Sh e is no t ex plici tly planning an ything,
but death is certai nly in the air. Wh at mak es this
ver y un easy reading is the kn owl ed ge th at
Sar ah Kan e did in fac t co mm it suicide in 1999.
Wh y Cath rine has mad e her a part of hi s
lictional wor ld is not clear ; she is a stro ng
presenc e and her monologu e is con vincing, but
La Dispari tion de Richard Taylor wo uld wor k
eq ua lly well without her , or rather , with a
SH EILA HALE
Danna Lean
S U FF ER THE LITTLE C H I L D R EN
264pp. Heinemann . £ 15.99 .
978 04340 1625 9
d ie , and our wo rld, w here peopl e wa nt to have
the m and ca n' t." Th e polic e are interes ted
bec au se the law that prohibits peop le o ver a
ce rtain age from adopt ing sma ll babies has
inev ita bly led to und er ground traflicking in the
infant s that desperat e infertil e couples will do
or pa y an yth ing to have.
Th e Pedrollis, the pri vileged couple at the
ce ntre of Oonna Leon ' s fo urtee nth no vel star-
ring the uxoriou s and widely read police
commissioner Guido Brun etti , are not the sort of
peopl e w ho wo uld want or need to break the
law. Gu sta vo Pedrolli is a respected senior
paediatrician . His beaut iful wi fe, Bianca, is the
dau ght er of the wealth y and po wer ful Giuliano
Marcolin i, who has mad e his fort une se lling
plumbing equipmen t and used it to fo und a
sepa rat ist poli tic al party rem ini scen t of Umb erto
Bossi' s Lega Nord. We lind the Pedrollis on e
eve ning at hom e in their apart ment whe re Or
Pedro lli, his heart bur stin g with paternal love, is
playing with hi s eighteen-month-o ld son
Al fredo , w ho entra nces him by say ing wh at
- 22-
fictional character in her pl ace . If Cathrine is
on ly using Kan e as a shorthand to ev oke the
vio lent, tro ubled wor ld of love and pain she
represen ted in her plays, he sho uld ha ve had
more con fid enc e in hi s own abili ty to cre ate and
man ipu late that wor ld .
Ea ch of the monologues he cre ates is nicel y
di fferent iat ed; the coll oqui al, oft en brutal way
the charact er s spea k - to each other and to
themsel ves - is shocking but it do esn 't feel
unn ec essar y. Th e regi ster is a world away fro m
beautiful, trad itional literar y Fr ench; if Cathrine
so unds like hi s very fi rst "Papa". Aft er putting
Alfredo to bed , the Pedrollis mak e love with a
passion they ha ve not enj oye d since the arri val
of the bab y. Th ey are woke n from their deep
pos t-co ital slee p by thr ee arme d men who break
into the apartment and grab the bab y. Bianca
run s naked an d screa ming from the bedroom.
When Or Pedrolli tries to rescu e their child, one
of the intruder s sm ashes hi s sk ull with the butt
of a rifle . Taken to ho spit al, he is di agn osed as
suffering from po ssible brain dama ge . Commis-
sario Brunetti, sum moned to the hospital in the
earl y hours, learns that the men who raided the
Pedrolli apart ment were carabinieri, the state
police of whom he has a low opinion at the best
of tim es. A Captain sporting rid iculous qu asi-
mili tar y ridin g boot s inform s him tha t Or
Pedrolli is und er arrest, charged wi th the illegal
adoption of Alfredo, who has been removed to a
state orp han age.
Leon plant s her clu es and red herrings so
deftl y th at we arc left wo nderi ng almost to the
end whe ther Or Pedrolli is or is not g uilty as
ch arged . If so Brunet ti, a loving father
him self, can onl y agr ee with on e of his j unior
offi cer s that sna tc hing a child from a lovin g
hom e is a serio us crime ag ainst humanity and
common sense . "P orco Giuda ", says the
yo ung er policeman, "thes e are children, not
shipme nts of cocaine we can seq ues ter and put
in a clo set. What sort of a country is th is, an y-
way , w here some thing like this can hap pen ?"
Brunett i decid es that he will do what he ca n to
protect the helpl ess Pedrolli, technicall y g uilty
o r not. It is, aft er all , not hi s case since it was
was tryin g to tran slat e hi s Brit ish inlluenc es
into his own lang uage , he has succeeded.
Fren ch critics ha ve sugge sted that La Disp ari -
lion de Richard Tay /or is an attempt to explore
the idea of a mod ern male identity crisis, nar-
rated and defin ed as it is by wo me n, but ge nder
do es not seem to be the dri vin g force; eac h of
the nar ra tor s is cl earl y defin ed ra ther tha n
ste reoty pica l and the traged y of the story goes
beyond male and fema le.
There are a couple of m ino r villa ins;
Rich ard ' s mother is cl earl y a diflicult figur e,
thou gh the bitt ern ess of her son' s lett er to her is
ex cessive , and hi s wi fe , Su san , is derid ed by hi s
coll eagu e and , we learn , by R ich ard him sel f, as
a "nice gir l" but no mo re, sha llow and essen-
tially unworthy of him . Ho wev er , her two mono-
logue s reveal some o ne cap able of grea t courage
strugg ling to understand w hy her wor ld has
collapsed ; her pain dri ve s her to an aw ful and
desper ate ac t, which we di sc o ver obliquel y,
throu gh the eyes of the d ispassion at e and
enig matic nei ghbour Jenn ifer Wil son . Another
curiosity: Wil son is based on a character
created by A . L. Kenn ed y in her no vel So I
Am Glad (1995 ), published in French in 2004 as
Le Cont ent ement de Jennifer Wilson . Cathrine
has borrowed the form of th is title for eac h of
his ch apt er s: L'infortune de Su san Ta ylor, La
deci sion de Rebecca Swift, La complainte de
Jean Ta ylor , etc . Th e afte rma th of a hu sband' s
di sappearance was also explored in Mari e
Darrieu ssecq ' s Na issance des fantiimes (199 8),
anothe r layer of the palimpsest that makes
up thi s problematic, intri guin g work. While
Oarrieussecq ch art s the int ern al journey of a
wo ma n w hose hu sband went out to bu y a
baguett e and ne ver cam e back , Arnaud Cathrine
exa mines the train of events and emotions set
off by a man ' s willed absence from hi s o wn
life.
the carabinieri, not the Ven eti an police, who
made the arre st. But wh y was it nec essar y for
no few er than five carabinieri (two more were
wa iting out sid e) to rai d the Pedroll i apartment
in the middle of the night in ord er to capture
on e small bab y? W ho tipped them off and why?
Wh y doe s the media drop the story afte r onl y a
few da ys? Wh y do es Bianc a Pedrolli show no
int erest in the fate of her bab y?
There is a par allel case of a seam invo lving
corrupt pharmacists and doctors. But summ ariz-
ing Leon' s plo t, lik e telling the story of an
op era , cannot do ju stice to the subtlety , dra ma
and narrati ve skill th at keep us turning the
page s, wonde ri ng until the end ho w she will
man age to tie up so man y loose ends . Wh at can
be sa id wi tho ut spo iling the sus pense is that the
villa ins of thi s piec e are not the criminals.
Al thou gh as a policeman Brunett i env ies the
ethical certainties of the Cl assical authors he
has read , he kno ws that in the modern wo rld
distinction s between right and wrong arc less
cl ear. And in the end it is law-abiding citi zen s
who impo se their rigid moral pro grammes on
others who do the mo st harm.
Leons fans who use Brunetti as an insid er ' s
g uide to Venice will not be di sappointed. As
usual he tak es us in all weathe rs an d se as ons off
the beat en track , into the bar s w here he keep s
go ing on qu antities of co ffee and delicious
snacks , and the o ut-of- the- way tra ttori e that
touri sts rarely di sco ver. Th ere is on e in the Via
G arib aldi whe re he lunches with Inspec tor
Vianello on turk ey breast li lled with herbs and
pancetta that so unds wort h see ki ng out.

Girl, gun, nightclub
aucous and formally playful, Richard
R Flanagan' s last novel Gould' s Book of
Fish (2002) did not perhaps reinvent the
nove l but it came close. In his fourth novel, The
Unknown Terroris t, a curious ly unfoc used
ideologica l thriller set in Sydney, he opts for an
easier task.
Richard Cody, a failing television anchorman
and already failed hum an being, demoted
from the channel' s flags hip current-affairs
programme, This Week Tonig ht, is looking for
the story - the "exalted illusion" with a dash
or two of fear - that will "t urn truth into gold".
He' s think ing Islam . He's thinking terro rism.
He doesn' t really care what he says , so long as
it keeps him in the limelight. Meanwhile, a pole
dancer kno wn as the Doll, "twe nty-six pretend -
ing to be twe nty-two", with a vulnerable look
about her and "exac tly the wro ng face for our
age", spends the night with a sma ll-time drugs
mule called Tariq. Her image is captured on
CCTV with his. When Tariq is mistaken for a
bomber, Cody's incomp etent but calculating
eye falls on the Doll. Within hou rs she is on the
run. Hearsay and anti-terrorist fervour have
turned her ca lm if sleazy existe nce into a
nightmare of pursuit, violence and alienation, a
vortex which drags in eve ryone, from her friend
Wild er to Frank Moretti, the paraplegic crime
boss for whom she strips privately once a week.
Flanagan can turn a phrase. A man appe ars
"to have been asse mbled out of chipped billiard
balls" ; a coupl e of middle-aged , middle-class
jogge rs look "radioactive with health and
-------------------~-------------------
Synagogue scenes
laud ia Rubin presides over the most
C
celebra ted Jewish family in North
London, a family that, "everybody
agrees , seems doomed to happ iness". Conced-
ing to a very Jewish superstitious fear of the
power of utterance, no sooner has Charlotte
Mendelson' s new novel opened with this
gloomy apho rism than the entire family begins
to unravel.
W ith her third novel Mendelson enters the
fray of the Anglo-Jewis h comedy of manners. It
is a quirkily fashionable genre - Zadie Smith
had a go with The Autograph Man (2002) and
Naomi Alderman's Disobedience (2006) was
well received. Mend elson ' s previous two nov-
els, Lo ve in Idleness (200 I ) and Daught ers of
Jeru salem (2003), introdu ced a young novelist
with an eye for the tangled skeins of uncertainty
and doub t that, like dybbuk s, inhabit the minds
and bodi es of yo ung, impressio nable women.
Secret thoughts and unnameable hang-up s are
teased ou t in glowi ng, metaphorical and often
very funny prose.
In the new novel, When We Were Bad,
Mendelson explores the shadows and ghosts
haunt ing a family which appears to outsiders
to be a harmoni ous, messy, intellectual ideal.
Claud ia Rubin is a celebrated rabbi with an
influence far beyond her Belsize Park commu-
nity, indeed beyond the Jewish community as a
whole, reaching out to touch the Tho ught for
the Day listener with her earthy beauty and her
forthcoming book on how to steer a moral path
FICTION
M . JOH N HARRISON
Ri ch ard Flana g an
T HE UN KN O WN T ER R OR [ST
325pp.Atlantic Books. £ [4.99.
978 [ 84354 598 9
prosperity". The problem with these felicit ies is
that they do not help represe nt anything; they
are like endl ess scene-se tting for scenes which
never quite materialize. We read that
Nic k Loukakis, the llawed but decent cop who
tries to save the Doll from the political mach ine
which is hunting her across the city , has ruined
his own marriage. But Flanagan neglects to
give us a picture of Nic k's wife exce pt as a
sequence of unenacted emotions. She is
"enraged and anguished"; her anger is "abso-
lute" ; we don 't learn her name until page 175.
In the same vag ue spirit we are told about
dinner parties, sex acts, a gun, a body
in the boot of an abandoned car, a meeting
behind closed doo rs at which people' s fates are
ca llously decided; but although Flanagan is
constantly coac hing us on how to feel about
them , none of those things happen s in front of
us.
As a res ult, we are left to pro vide the exci te-
ment , the immediacy, the sense of place, the
drive normally asso ciated with a thriller. Over-
state ment can help with this: not content with
describ ing the swastika as "great brandin g",
Richa rd Cody carrie s a little bottle of antisep tic
NATASHA L EHR ER
Ch arlott e Mend el s on
WH E N WE W ER E BA D
304pp. Picador. £ 12.99.
978 0 330 449298
throu gh our sexualized modern world. She has
friends in high places, an obedient, underachiev-
ing husband and four interesting adult children
whom she has succeeded in keeping close to
her.
That fatefu l open ing phrase herald s a falling
apart that takes place around two well-
observed set pieces. The first is the elder son,
Leo ' s, wedding day. Arriv ing at the flower-
decked synagogue filled with expectant guests,
the groom announces his love for the wife of
his bride' s rabbi. He then leaves with her. The
second scene takes place seve ral months later; it
is the occasion of Seder night, the Passover
feast, which happens to be ju st days before the
publi cation of Rabb i Rubin' s eagerly antici-
pated book. Broadsheet j ournalists and BBC
docum entary-makers have been courted, and
the entire festive occasi on is being planned with
milita ry preci sion.
But eve n compli ant husband s and biddabl e
childr en have secrets. In almost farcica l succes-
sion, one by one, each member of the family is
shown to have a secre t the unveiling of which
will be the death knell of Claud ia' s book. The
- 23 -
about, and washes his hands after he has
touched another person. Not a nice man, then.
When Moretti is not staring at the Doll' s naked
body, an activity for which he ca n find a few
precious minut es every Mond ay morning while
listen ing to Chopin ' s Nocturne in F Minor, he
amuses himself in his black museum , which
features "bizarre souvenirs of massacres and
genocides around the world", including a rusty
Zyklon-B can. As befits their status as
villains of the mediated age, Cod y and Mor etti
are one pixel deep. Their crimes are last year' s.
All that comes over is how savagely angry
Flanagan feels about them .
We are left with the unkno wn terrori st
herself: racia lly prej udiced, in denial about her
origins, a surviv or of most kinds of abuse,
obsessed with a Louis Vuitton handb ag. She
buries herself in money each night yet finds a
kind of sour community with the Sydney beg-
gars who di sgust her. As her story frees itself in
sullen, amate urish striptease from Flanagan's
awkward struct ures, misplaced llashback s and
repetit ive prose, she almost unders tands that
she is her own vic tim, the consumer consumed,
a vital phase in the cycle of commodi fication.
At last we have a pictur e of something. "It' s all
good", the Doll reassures herself, wanderi ng
helpl essly from sleazy hotel to unkempt grave-
yard, her money gone, her sense of herself disin-
tegrating further eve ry time she sees her own
image on television or in a newspaper. Mean-
while Flanagan assures us it is all bad. Almost
cer tainly he is right, and since 9/1 1 we have
lived in a fictionalized world, man ipulated by
our own fear and tranquillized by our own
greed. But having its heart in the right place
doesn't make The Unknown Terrorist a thriller.
For that it would need to have thrill s.
elder daughter, Frances, is brimm ing with hope-
lessness over her failure to appreci ate her dull
and obsequiou s husband , Jona than, whose
tragic early widow hood has endowed his
second wife with two stepda ughters. She finds
herself unacco untably unable to love their baby
son. Simeon and Emil y, the Rabbi's two
younger children, disarmingly beautiful, feck-
less and underemployed, cling to their mother
with abject devot ion, their refusal to leave
home pro viding the perfect screen for their
failures as, respectively, novelist and actress .
Claudia ' s faithful husband Norman harbours
his own secret, threate ning to capsize the family
entirely when he overtu rns his lifelon g role as
an unrema rkable academic.
Mend elson navigates Jewish rites and tradi-
tions eas ily, while avoiding too much anthropo -
logical exp lication. The novel is sprinkled with
ear thy Yiddish syllogisms (Claud ia is describ ed
as a "brilliant shtuppable pioneer"), Hebrew
references to Jewish rites, and self-dep recating
Jewish humour. Th is is a mainstream novel
that by its bold refu sal either to divest itsel f of
Jewish markers or to explain them, asserts the
right of Jewish culture to be considered part of
the fabric of British culture.
The novel is not without its llaws. Only two
of the main characters, Leo and Frances, are
fully round ed characters. Claud ia, the charm-
ing, monstrou s matriarch, is a little too much
of a com posite of stereotypes to be really believ-
able, while Norman , her lopin g, do wntrodd en
husband , feels like a round ed-out cipher. Such
is the charm of Charlo tte Mendelson' s writi ng
that this does not detract from our enjoy ment of
When We Were Bad.
Bangla
Ma
CHITRAL EKHA BAS U
T ahmima An am
A G O L DEN AGE
288pp. John Murray. £ 14.99.
97807 19560095
Golden Age marks the arrival of an
A unusually restrained writer. Tahm ima
Anam knows her streng ths but prefers
to hold her cards close to her chest, so much so
that at the outset her writing might be thought to
be simply unselfcon sciou s. Her novel follows
the nine months of Banglad esh ' s liberat ion war
of 1971, culm inating in the birth of the new
nation, and it takes in the detail s like a hand-
held camera . Its literary qualities - charm ing as
they are - are meant to enhance and not ecli pse
the docum entary value of this picture of an
extraordinary people and what they made of
their own times.
The story of one of the most shoc king geno-
cides of the twentieth centur y, perpetrated by
the Pak Occup ational Arm y on the people of
East Pakistan, and of the hero ic resistance of
the freedom fighters of the Mukti Bahin i, is
worth seve ral retellings. It is a cri me to forge t a
people' s struggle to uphold their culture and
language agai nst repressive forces, and Anam
has done a service to her cou ntry by writing
about it for the Engli sh-speaking world. No
othe r writer has treated the subjec t with such
clarity before, in English.
Rehana Haque is Ta hmima Anam's Mother
Cou rage, or Bangla Ma. Widowed young and
pennil ess, she almost loses her two young
childre n to a scheming broth er-in-law and his
wife, but manages to claim them back, thanks to
her unll agging determin ation. Her ability to
hold out agai nst extre me odds is tested, in a
more challenging arena, when she is made into
a key person helpin g the guerri llas fighting the
military. Wh at begins as a motherly urge to
protect her children, and see they Ii ve in dignity
and freedom, grows to encompass thou sand s
like them who join the resist ance, go under-
ground, are exposed to torture and draw sus-
tenance from poetry in the time of danger.
The mother metapho r is stretched further. A
long sequence in which Rehana gets Sabeer, an
army oflic er-turned-rebel fighter, out of j ail,
dragging his inert bulk on a night of inclement
weather, is haunting in its cinematic detail. She
is both mother and lover to the ailing major ,
whom she is hiding in her bungalow. The only
occasion on which they make love is described
in a way which is both lyrical and direct.
A Golden Age addresses the issue of the
Islamization of East Pakista n, in particular the
renewe d adhere nce to the veil of young Muslim
women, the politics of the veil and how it ca n
compli cate and change a woman's identity .
Youn g Silvi, after she has lost her husband ,
Sabeer, to the freedom struggle, retreats into her
shell and starts weari ng a seve rely tied scarf
aro und her head. She eve n wonders if it is
wrong to resist the army who killed and drove
million s out of the land, arguing that they were
onl y trying to restore order and keep Pakistan
together. The veil here is seen as an instrument
of control , propaga ting regressive ideas.
TLS A PR IL 27 20 0 7

Roads from the canal
n the preface to Ends ofBritish Imperialism ,
I Wm. Roger Louis rem arks that he is about
to begin his forty-s ixth summer at the
National Archi ves at Kew, a rem inder that his
transatlantic pilgrim age began in the era of the
"fifty-year rule", when no record s were open
after 1914 and historians had to rely - as far as
foreign policy went - on the official publication
of the Docum ents on British Fore ign Policy
series for the interwa r years. Louis' s career
thus spans the great divide in modem British hist-
oriograph y. Once the "th irty-year rule" was in
place in the mid-1960 s, and with it the principle
of the progressive release of oftici al doc umenta-
tion, it became possible to write archiva lly based
history of the more or less recent past. Wha t
effec t this has had on the production of memoi rs
- for long the staple of the archiveless historian
- can only be guessed at. But any memo irist
whose career was spent in a field that came
under Professor Lou is' s scru tiny would have
been wise to be careful. No historian alive has
been more assiduous in bringing the cont ent of
the archives to bear on the study of modem inter-
national history, and of Britain' s imperial past.
Loui s is prob abl y best kno wn as the
organizer-in-chi ef of the Oxf ord Histo ry of the
Briti sh Empire, a multi -volum e series that has
made a huge con tribution to the re vival of
British imperia l history as an access ible, teach-
able subject. Befor e that, he had publi shed six
mono graph s on the history of (mainly Briti sh)
imperiali sm and edited a score of other collec-
tion s. In Ends of British Imp eriali sm , he has
ga thered some thirty-fou r essays that range
over the field of his interests since the early
1960s. The se inclu de the Scramble for Africa
(a major scholarly preo ccupation in the 1960s)
and the scanda l surro unding King Leopol d ' s
rule in the Con go ; the beginn ings of inter-
nation al trusteeship durin g the First World War
(trusteeshi p has been a perenni al them e in
Lou is' s work); British polic y in Eas t Asia
(repr esented here by ess ays on the Singapor e
strategy and British rule in Hon g Kong in the
"critica l phase" between 1945 and 1949);
Briti sh pol icy toward s India, Palestine and
Egypt in the immedi ate afterm ath of the Second
World War ; the on set and quickening of Brit-
ain's withdraw al from Emp ire; British diplo -
macy in Iran, Iraq and the Persian Gulf; Suez;
and, not least, the historio graph y of the British
Empire - the last reflec ting Lou is' s acknow l-
edge ment of the pre-em inen t inl1uenc e of
John Gallagher and Ron ald Robin son on the
conceptual e volution of the subje ct. It is an
ex traordinary range, and all serious students
o f interna tional histor y, or of Britain' s
twentieth-century imperial histor y, will benefit
IiIFOUR COURTS PRESS
T he Irish militia, 179 3-1 80 2
IVA N F. N E L SON
A detailed and fascinating account of a much maligned
force wr itten by a soldier abou t soldiers who have been
largely mi srepresent ed and seemingly forgott en in Ireland.
ISBN 978 -1 -8468 2-°37 -3 256 pages ills £40
Published: :1.7 April
7 Malpas Stree t, D ublin 8. Ireland
Tel. (Dublin) 453 4668 www.four-courts-press.ie
Ii1•
TLS APRIL 27 200 7
HISTORY
JOHN DARW IN
Wm . Rog er Louis
EN D S O F BRITISH IMP ERIALISM
The scramble for Empir e, Suez and decolonization
1,082pp. Tauris. £24.50
(US $35); paperback, £16.99 (US $25).
978 1845 11309 4
Barr y Turn er
SUEZ 19 56
The inside story of the firs t oil war
350pp. Hodder and Stoughton. £20.
978 03 40837689
imme nsely from having these essays at their
elbow.
One of the most inl1uential pieces reprint ed
here is "The Imperi alism of Deco loni zation ",
eo- written with the late Professor Robin son .
The argument is that, in British polic y, decoloni -
zation was not intended to sever the old colon ial
connection but to adapt its functions to a post-
colonia l world. A form of "s peci al relat ionship"
would replace the old imperia l tie. Ga llagher
and Robin son had argued , many years earlier
that the trajector y of Brit ish Imperi alism since
the mid-nin eteen th century had been from
" informal" to "formal" Empire up to 1914, and
then a gradual reversion to the informal mod e
after the First World War. Loui s and Robin son
developed this thesis for the post- 1945 period,
with the cruci al addition of the Am erican role as
the back er and banker of British efforts to retain
the substance of empire in the age of Cold War.
Man y of the essays in this book on the
post-I 945 world can be seen as the working out
in detail of this original insight: tracin g the
efforts of the Brit ish to preserve as much as they
could of their imperi al sphere; the often frac-
tious debate among the polic y-makin g elite as
to ho w this could be don e; and the often fraught
relations with the United States to which this
strange alliance of empires gave rise.
The hallmark of Loui s' s approach is the
meticulous recon struction of the "official
mind ". No historian has devoted mor e time to
the pati ent unra velling of the internal debate s
and unspoken ass umptions of the polic y-
makin g mach ine. The har vest of forty-s ix
summers has been reinforced by intervi ews
with many of the leadin g offici als of the 1950s
and 60 s. Some of the results are best seen in the
ess ay on "Mu ssadiq , Oil and the Dilemmas of
British Imperialism" (the lirst version of which
appeared in the TLS on Jun e 29, 200 1), which
brings out very well the way in which the Bri t-
ish persisted in seeing Iran as a "semi-colonial"
country and them sel yes in the rol e o f its
imperia l "guardian" . Muhammad Mu ssadiq ' s
seizure of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company' s
conc ession and its refinery enclave at Abadan
was a colossal affront to Britain ' s pre stige as
well as its pock et. But some of the ferocit y that
the Briti sh displayed toward s Mu ssadiq sprang
from the feeling that his hostility to them was
absurd and irrational, the product of ideolo gic al
ob session or e ven dem ent ia. Far from ackno wl-
edg ing Iran' s right to control its own oil, the
prevailin g feelin g in both Lond on and the Brit-
ish Emba ssy compound in Tehran was that the
Briti sh had created Iran' s oil wealth, and that
- 2 4-
M ussadiq ' s action amounted to theft in broa d
daylight. What also em erges from Loui s' s
account is the gradual replac ement of this
" Imperial" attitude amon g younger officia ls by
a preoccupation with the threat of a Communist
takeov er if Mu ssadiq ' s chaotic regim e was not
quickly demolished. It was preci sely becau se
this view cam e to be shared in Washington
(which had earlier frowned on the idea of
armed inter vention , eagerl y championed by the
United Kingdom' s Foreign Secr etary Herbert
Morrison), that the co vert operation to over-
thro w Mu ssad iq and restor e the Shah ' s author-
ity, which the British set in motion , was taken
up enthu siastically by the CIA.
But it is, of cour se, the shadow of Suez that
lies heavil y ove r most of the ess ays on the post-
war Middle East. Lou is argues con vincingly
that the Anglo-Egypt ian relationship was the
key to Britain' s M iddle Eastern position , and
that the decline and fall of British power in
Egypt was a major chapter in Britain' s end of
empire. He is surely right. For the shape of Brit-
ain ' s twentieth-century empire, the skirmish at
Tell el-Kebir in Sept emb er 1882 was almost as
important as the sc uffle at Plassey 125 years
M u ha m mad Mussadiq a nd US Am hassado r
Ernest G ross, 1951
earli er. It was from Cairo that the British had
dominated the Middl e East in the interwar
years. It was in Cairo (in 1921) that they deci ded
to creat e the state of Iraq. It was on Cairo that
they had clamp ed their control in the imperial
cri sis of 1942, disregarding the sovere ignty that
they had conc eded to Egypt some twenty years
earli er. Hence the Suez agreem ent of 1954,
when the British undertook to withdraw from
the Canal Zon e and end their militar y presence
in the country after seventy- two ye ars , was a sig-
nal act of decolonization . Of cour se, the British
expect ed that Nasser, with whom they had
struc k the deal , would no w mind his own busi-
ness and leave them to "ma nage" the rest of the
region . It was when Na sser "revolted" and made
his arms deal with the So viet bloc that the Brit-
ish began to see him as an enem y who must be
destroyed. Loui s' s accoun t of the huge crisis
that follo wed stresses the scale of the British
misjudgement of Wa shington' s views and of its
like ly reaction to an invasion of Egypt (indeed
this remains one of the most bafflin g aspects of
the Suez affair). But he is less inclined than
man y other historian s to heap the who le blame
on Anthony Eden , and remind s us that amon g
his ministerial colle ague s as well as his ad visers
in the Forei gn Office , there were enough who
shared his " Imperial" attitude to make the coer-
cion of Egypt more than a sing le sick man ' s
ob session. Loui s' s other key point is that the
dam age Suez did to Britain ' s reputation was felt
for more than a decade, and made London
morbidl y anxious not to seem to 110ut the anti-
colonial ethos of the United Nat ions. It was not
until 1970-7 1, with Nasser dead and Britain
withdraw n from the Gu lf, that the twenty-year
travail in Anglo-Egyptian relation s and Brit-
ain' s M iddle East polic y reall y came to an end.
Barr y Turn er ' s Sue z 1956 is not aimed at
a specia list reader ship, but it is highly pro-
fessiona l and very well writt en . It mak es very
ef fective use of the scholarly literature and
deploys the original sources (especially the
materi al held at the Lidd ell Hart Centre for Mili-
tary Archi ves) to good ef fect in a number of
places. Thi s is not j ust an account of dip lomac y
and high politic s but of the short shooting war
as wel l. Turner draw s on the eyew itness
accounts of Briti sh servicemen, now lodged in
the Imperial War Mu seum , to con vey the confu -
sion and uncertaint y felt by some of those
"ca lled up" to take part in the Briti sh invasion ,
but also the change of mood as the mom ent
of landing under enemy fire appro ached. In
Turner' s description of the Ede n gove rnment's
polic y there are few shades of grey . Th e strate-
gic argume nts for stay ing on in the Middl e East
after the Second World War are dism issed as
vac uous; the real rea son was the vain pur suit of
prestige, to avoid rele gation to the rank s of
second-cl ass powers. On Eden him self, the
author is scathing. Turn er' s Eden is petulant ,
domineering and neurotic ally sensitive to accu -
sations of weakness. He was comp letel y out of
touc h with "th e better-in forme d and better-edu-
cated generation that was comin g of age" . Nor
will Turn er have any truck with the idea that the
Suez operation was a mili tary success . Instead,
it was a case of " monumenta l bungling", with
the British and French command s at sixes and
seve ns, and a Brit ish Arm y ill-prepared for the
task thrust upon it.
The reader will sometime s resist the remorse-
less jud gement of hind sight and wonder whe-
ther the " better-informed and better-educated
ge neration" has been served any better by its
political leaders, or cho sen them more wisely.
But Turner doe s raise a number of interestin g
question s in a thou ght-pro vokin g book . Why
was it, he asks, that the lesson of Iran was not
learnt - that a military solution was not goin g to
work? Wh y was the British-l ed invasion so
slow and so clum sy? And why did Haro ld
Macmill an (Eden ' s Chanc ellor) give his Cabi -
net co lleagues such an absurdl y inflated
acco unt of the loss of sterling reserves - the
news that broke their resolve to go on ? It ma y
be id le to speculate. In fact the Iranian case
might well have sugges ted that Middle East
nationalisms were fierce but febrile, and easily
deflated by resolute action. It was Suez that
showed that this was delusion . The defects of
military plannin g may have reflected the fact
that the Briti sh expected to defend Egy pt not to
invade it, and wanted to overa we the Egy ptians
rath er than fight them (a class ic coloni al doc -
trine). As for Macmill an' s calcu lation s, they
seem as bafflin g as the rest of his part in the
Suez affair. Unless we conced e that, for a
politician in search of power and pre ferment ,
the literal truth is rare ly " fit for purpo se".

Beware foreign eggs
n August 1914 , Russia' s armies ras hly
I launched two simultaneo us offe nsives into
ene my territo ry. In the nort h they came to
grief spectacu larly at Ta nnen berg, while in the
sout h Ga licia was swift ly ove rrun, bringing co n-
siderable misfortun e to that Aus tria n pro vince' s
inhabitants. Bu t wit hin a few month s here,
too , the inva de rs were in retreat, and far more
serious setbacks followe d in 1915 . Each month
seve ral hundred thousand men , some of whom
lacked eve n a rifle, let alone ade quate art illery
support, we re killed or taken priso ner.
To de fle ct criticis m from its incomp etent
per form ance, the high comm and , or Stavka,
emba rked on a veritable witc h-hunt for allege d
traito rs. Niko lai Yanu shk evich , Ch ief of Staff
and "one of Russia' s most fanat ic anti-
Sem ites" , suspected non-Ru ssian civi lians
beh ind the front lines of liaison with the ene my .
Uproote d and evac uated to the rea r, they had to
endure frig htful co nditio ns . A British visit or
ob ser ved "serried ranks of emaciated, huddl ed
humanity, cor roded by disease, crow de d and
co nges ted like litters of pigs in an asphyxiati ng
sty". Th e wave of deportati ons gave a fore taste
of Stal in' s better-kn own measures, in a later
co nllict, against Crimean Tatars, Chec hens and
oth er " punished peopl es" .
In both wor ld wa rs, Russ ia's Germa n-
spea king res idents suffe red dispropo rtion ately.
Regul ations issued in Sept ember 1914 allowe d
official s to seques ter the prop ert y of anyone sus-
pected of "p an-German" sentime nts, regardl ess
of the economic impact. Pan ic and fear sp read
among the popul ace, someti mes to co mic
effect: in Ta mbov one officer ordered the conlis-
catio n of all "fore ign" eggs .
Mo re siniste r was the sea rch for enemy
age nts within the arm y' s rank s. An ob vious
ca ndidate for the role of prime sca peg oa t
was Lieuten ant -Colon el Serge i Mi asoed ov.
A for mer ge nda rme working in counter-
intell igenc e, he had onc e gone hunt ing wit h
the Kaiser and had later fought a much -
publ icized duel to clear his name. Th is onl y
inten silied sus picio n that he was an Aust rian
spy. His wife was Je wish, as were several of
his business associates, who operated on the
fringes of the law. After summa ry pro ceed ings
the unfo rtun ate oflicer was sentenced to han g.
His contacts were hastily round ed up: " half
of them are Yids" , Yanu shk e vich rem ark ed
ap preci ative ly.
Mo st historians have seen Miasoedo v as the
victim of an unsavoury intrigue, a pawn in a
power strugg le beh ind the sce nes . Now we
know that this was ind eed so. W illiam C.
Full er, professor of strategy at the US Nava l
Wa r College, has scrutinized the original docu -
ments o f the case with exe mplary thoroughness,
tracin g eve ry detail of the man ' s ac tivi ties , both
publ ic and pri vate. He sets the affa ir in histori -
ca l contex t as "a window into a socie ty in the
throes of deco mpos itio n".
For the sca nda l had immense resonan ce
among the publ ic, Liberal par liame ntaria ns and
intellectuals gene rally believed that so-c alled
dark forces at court and in gove rnment were sab-
ota ging the wa r effort. Th ey saw the mse lves as
true patri ots who represent ed the best e leme nts
in educated socie ty, but badly misjud ged the
popular mood , which by 1916 had turn ed ove r-
whe lmi ngly again st the wa r. This soci al di vide
HISTORY
JOH N K E EP
William C . Full er
T H E F O E WI T HI N
Fantasies of trea son and the end of Imperial Russi a
286pp. Cornell University Press. $39.95; distributed
in the UK by NBN International. £2 1.50.
978 08 0 1444265
aggravated Russia' s interna l cnsis, whic h
becam e insolubl e by peaceful mean s. Th is was
not at all what Stavka had intend ed .
Within three mon ths of Miasoedo v' s exec u-
tion the publi c clamo ur claimed a mor e prom i-
nent vict im, the War M inister , Vlad imir
Sukhomlinov. He had been in effect the Lieuten-
ant-Co lone l's patron and the two men' s fami-
lies con sorted socia lly. Th e Min ister owe d his
po sition to per son al loyalty to the autocra t,
and was no frie nd of the Dum a. In 1909 he
embar ked on an amb itiou s reform pro gramm e
that was bound to upset vested interests within
the mili tary establishment. Nota bly he conce n-
trated a reser ve of troops in the empi re 's inte-
rior and authorized de molition of "obsolete" for-
tresses in Russian Poland - a measure tha t was
techn icall y j ustilie d but naturall y aro used mis-
giv ings . Wh en war ca me, Sukhoml ino v vas tly
exaggerated the sta te of the ar my's prepared -
ness, and inevita bly was blamed for the catastro-
ph ic she ll shor tage that followe d. Th e Dum a
dem and ed his rep lace me nt by its own nominee.
Nic holas 11 , true to form , reluctantly yie lded,
while privately ass uring Sukhomlin ov of his
co ntinued support. Investigators disco vered
that he had rece ived kickba ck s on defence con-
trac ts; some 400,000 ro ubles rema ined untra ce-
able in his bank acco unt. Th is was not the
same thing as treason , yet in the hue and cr y
the distinct ion was ignored . Sukhomlinov was
arrested and eve ntually sente nced to imprison-
ment wit h hard labour for life. Th ank s to the
revolut ion he esca ped this fate, emig rated,
wrote his memo irs, and in 1926 was found dead
of ex pos ure in a wintry Berlin park .
Th is gri pping tale, too, Fuller relat es with
skill and autho rity, if somew hat discur sively.
Much attention is paid to the marit al and extra-
- 25 -
marital affairs of both Sukh omlinov and
Mi asoedo v. Th e War M inister ' s platinum
blond e wife, Yevgenii a, half his age whe n he
wooed her, invo lved him in messy di vorce
proceedin gs and her ex pensive tastes help to
ex plain his vena lity. But she stood by him
bravely in his hour of need and eve ntua lly per-
ished at the Ch eka' s hand s. She deser ves the
posit ive assess me nt she gets here. Mor e
questionabl e are Full er' s bro ad sides aga inst
the Dum a pol iticians, and es pecia lly A lexa nder
Guchkov: "a braggart , a bull y, and a seria l adul-
terer" , he tried to avo id goi ng back to the same
seasi de resort annua lly becau se, as his daughter
later recalled , "a ll the babi es in pram s looke d
embarrass ing ly like me". This was prob ably
meant as a joke; anyway, not all the charges
strike hom e. As with tho se levelled by Solzhen -
itsyn in The Red Wheel, one need s to rem emb er
that these men , for all the ir faults, stood for
constit utional legalit y in a country where the
idea was still a no velt y. They face d an irres pon-
sible regime , "drenc hed in corru ption, indo-
lenc e, deba uchery, [and] favouritis m" as Llo yd
Geor ge so mew hat polemicall y put it. (He went
on to say " treachery" , which was unfair.) Bot h
Stavka ' s spy mania and the public res ponse to it
were suicida l, but the pseudo -judicial act ion
taken aga inst the two chie f suspects was sure ly
on bal anc e less harm ful tha n the simultaneo us
Natural History, Travel,
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court-martiallin g of innumerable soldiers who
desert ed or infringed militar y discipline, to say
nothin g of the fate of Jews and oth er ethnic
mino rities. The ca rd ina l error was to undert ake
offen sive ac tion prematurely, but this was
ultima tely not so much the fault of the high
command as of polit ician s and diplom ats. Th e
sca nda ls in high places und ercut the dynasty ' s
prestige, but what fina lly toppl ed the autocracy
was general wa r weariness, food sup ply prob-
lem s, deterior ating urban living standards and
oth er familiar woes .
It is supe rficia lly att ractive to see the phobi as
and fanta sies of 1914-16 as carry ing over into
the So viet era, when counter-revolutionaries,
devi ation ists, kulak s and so forth became
targets of popular ha tred . "Th e belief that
trai torous conspirators were responsibl e for the
bulk of Russia' s misfortunes" , Full er claim s,
"obviously satisfie d some deep psychol ogical
needs ." Maybe so, but before one writes of f an
entire nation as con gen itally addicted to a con -
spira toria l style of politics, one should reflect
that, where ver they occur, wars and revolut ions
are liable to en gend er such a rea ction. Brit ain
intern ed 30,000 aliens in the First W orld W ar
and Franc e twic e that many. Western orchestras
banned mu sic by German composers, and wild
rumours ga ined credenc e. Ma ss hysteri a is a
feature of mod em societies und er the stress of
belli gerency, whethe r the foe be a ri val empire
or ju st a band of terrori sts. Edmund Bu rke saw
it coming: "no passion " , he wrote, " so effectu-
ally rob s the mind of all its powe rs of acting and
reasoning as fear".
Ernest ShackLeton
The Heart af thaAntarctic.
London: Heinemann, 1909
First Edition, Presentation Copy
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TLS A PR I L 27 20 0 7

he best-kno wn photographs of Louis
T MacNeice hardly capture his personal-
ity. They suggest someone poised,
urbane, even debonair, perhaps a bit haughty.
Hat at a careful angle, ciga rette in hand, the
effec t is entirely compo sed; even the late pic-
tures, where the face is a little puffy, the hair
receding, give off an air of self-possessi on. Yet
an altogether different characte r looks out at us
from the poems: reactive, socia l, undecided,
searching for intimacy - above all, pressed.
Obsessed by time, and our helplessness in the
face of it, the poems convey urgency, even des-
perat ion, rather than composure. The clock
face, the church bell, the rhythm of the train
which drums out the tempo and keeps us mov-
ing inexorabl y towards our end - MacNeice
was torn between a desire to embrace the
onward rush (captured in the long, tumbling
line of his earl y poems, the speed ratcheted up
by internal rhyme) and the need to throw up lit-
tle incendiary devices in its path. Some of his
most celebrated lyrics conjure freeze-frame
moments of stillness and fulfilment: "The
Brandy Glass", "Meeting Point", or "The Sun-
light on the Garden" :
The sunlight on the garden
Harden s and grows co ld,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
W e cannot beg for pardon.
Our freedom as free lance s
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
So nnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.
The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every ev il iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying .
So many of the elements of this poem are char-
acteristic of MacNeice - the focus on a passing
moment of natural beauty; the intricate verbal
pattern , a cage of internal rhyme and modulated
rhythm; the relaxed parenthetic personal
address (my friend, my dears, my darling); the
literary allusion (Antony to Cleopatra); most of
all, the sense of impending catastrophe and the
urge to "cherish exis tence" in the face of it.
The intensity and comp ression of lyrics like
this have gained MacNeice an increasingly high
reputation since his early death in 1963. Born in
Belfast in 1907 to a com fortably-off, middle-
class fam ily (his father was a liberal Protestant
Rector), he is now regarded as one of the two
finest mid-centur y Irish poets (along with
Patrick Kavanagh), inheritor s of the great gap
left when Yeats died in 1939. Like Yeats, how-
ev er, MacN eice lived outside Ireland for mo st
of his life. Schooled from the age of ten in Eng-
land, he was a contemporary of John Betjeman
and roomed with Anthony Blunt; at Oxford, he
was friends with W. H. Auden, Christopher
Isherwood and the rest of the so-called
"Thirt ies" generation. His poems are now gener-
ally hailed as a central de velopment of twe-
ntieth-centur y English verse.
"The Sunlight on the Garden" was published
in the 1938 volume, The Earth Compe ls, and it
is one of the great pleasures of reading Peter
McDon ald' s edition of the Collected Poems,
published in the centenary year of MacNeic e' s
TLS APRtL 27 200 7
POET RY
Will and choice
CLAIR WILLS
Louis M acN eic e
C O L L ECTE D POEMS
Edited by Peter McDonald
400pp. Faber.£30.
978 057 121574 4
birth, that we can now encounter such poems in
their original setting. When MacNeice' s friend,
the Classicist E. R. Dodds, edited the work soon
after MacNeice' s death in 1966, he kept to the
broad principles of the writer's own Collected
Poems of 1949, grouping the poems chrono logi-
cally, but losing the shape of the published vol-
umes. In Dodds' s edition, readers could see (for
example) that "The British Museum Readin g
Room", with its reference to "the guttural sor-
row of the refugees", was written in July 1939,
and could appreciate the ways in which so
much of MacNeice' s work respond s immedi-
ately to the moment. But they missed out on the
way that MacNeice had placed the poem amon g
others. Given his decl ared interest in dialogue
and the dialectical - one of his favourite verse
forms was the eclogue - this was particu larly
unfortunate. Perhap s most damagingly, Dodds
followed the poet' s lead of 1949 by separating
the shorter lyrics from the longer poems.
Barring some of MacNeice' s later revisions
to individual poems and his decision to drop a
few pieces, McDonald has restored the original
volumes. The lyric intensity of "The Sunlight
on the Garden " thus appears alongside, and not
in opposition to, more extended dramatic pieces
such as "Eclogue from Iceland" and "Eclogue
Between the Motherl ess":
A. What did you do for the holiday?
B. I went home.
What did you do?
A. 0 , I went home for the holiday.
Had a good time?
B. Not bad as far as it we nt.
What about you?
A. 0 quite a good time on the whole -
There is no doubt that these discursive, con-
versational poems speak less easily to the con-
tempor ary poetic temperament, and indeed to
the current popular appetite in poetry. The mix-
ture of everyday cliche and rhetorical nouri sh
may now seem awkward, yet for MacNeice
compression and the demotic expansiveness of
the long poems were equally apt responses;
they would be fused to brilliant effect in
Autumn Jour nal and in the later verse plays.
Indeed, this Eclogue explicitly echoes the
Shakespearean allusion of "The Sunlight in the
Garden" when one of the motherless clum sily
anno unces o f the woman he is to marry that
"She is dying / Dying".
McDonald' s arrangement gives us more Mac-
Neice, with more fidelity to the way he
appeared to his contemporaries. He includes the
whole of the early volume Blind Fireworks,
which MacNeice published with Victor Gol-
lancz when he was only twenty-two (later select-
ing only twelve of the poems for republic ation),
but as an appendi x. We first meet MacNeice ,
then, not as the rather opu lent, decadent Oxford
undergraduate of 1929 (a poet who fits those
suave and studied photogr aphs rather well), but
as the revolutionary author of Poems (19 35 ).
- 2 6-
We begin with "Eclogue for Christmas", with
its first line, "I meet you in an evil time" . Th is is
a poem which spits out its disdain for a bour-
geois class, "pivo ting on the parquet", and the
world of the countr y gentry alike, who "cannot
change, they will die in their shoes / From
angry circumstance and moral self-abuse". In
the public imaginati on the volume may have
established MacNeice as one element (with
Spender , Auden and Day Lewis) of the left-
wing poetic ama lgam "MacSpaunday" . But in
fact, to the extent that the group existed at all,
MacNeice was always on the edge of it. This
had partly to do with contingencies. MacNeice
not only came from the provinces; he went back
to them. In 1930, soon after leaving Oxford, he
moved with his wife and child to the suburbs of
Birmin gham, where he worked as a lecturer in
Classics at the university. Unlike his fellow
left-wing poets, who tended towards London,
MacNeice found himself living in an industrial
city through the worst years of the Depression .
But his tangential relation ship to "the Auden
Generation" also had to do with personality.
Poem s (1935) may share with Auden ' s collec-
tion Look. Strange r! (1936) a real impatience
with mass-cultural conformity and polit ical
half-measures. But MacNeice was both more ill
at ease with the revolutionary solutions to the
rule of the "little sardine men" and more anar-
chic. While Auden exhorts his reader to look
down on "this island" and j udge it from on
high, MacNeice is less keen to pass sentence on
the culture and certainl y less confident that
poetry could change it.
Nonetheless Poem s (1935) set the seal on
MacNeice ' s reputation as a "Thirties poet", a
reputat ion which was only strengthened by the
two books he brought out in 1937, the two-act
play Out of the Pictur e (produced with music
by Benjamin Britten), and Letters from Iceland,
which included the wonderfully over-the-top
"A uden and MacNeice: Their Last Will and Tes-
tament". By now his wife had left him and he
was living in London with his son and the boy' s
nurse and teaching at Bedford College. And he
was writing furiously. In addition to The Earth
Compe ls and two prose travelogues, in 1938 he
published a large critic al book on modem
poetry, and then, in the last month s of the year,
he wrote Autumn Journal. Compo sed during
the Munich Crisis, this long poem sets the col-
lapse of his marriage, the ups and downs of sub-
sequent relationships, and an intensely honest
description of his own aspirations, snobberies,
doubt s and failures, alongside the collap se of
the political hopes and ideals of his generation.
Like the First World War, and the war in
Spain , so the comin g European war was bound
to see all princip le squandered in "panic and
self-deception". MacN eice watched as the trees
on Primro se Hill were cut down for gun
em placements ("Each tree falling like a closing
fan") and feared as much for the destruction of
menta l freedom s as for physical attack:
And we who have been brought up to think
of "Gallant Belgium"
As so much blague
Are now preparing again to essay good
through evil
For the sake of Prague;
And we must, we suppose , becom e
uncritical, vindictive ,
And must, in order to beat
The e nemy, model ourselve s on the enem y,
A howling radio for our paraclete.
With conscription looming, and the British prop-
aganda machine gearing up to match the mobili-
zation in German y, MacNeice grieved for sub-
tlety, variety and comp lexity - all to be lost in
the one-mind edness of war:
And the individua l, powerle ss, has to exe rt the
Powers of will and choic e
And choo se betwe en eno rmous ev ils , e ither
Of which depends on somebody else's
voice .
For MacNeice the game was already up; the
return of war was itself the defeat. Besides, the
poetry of the battle between democracy and fas-
cism had already been written, in the I930s;
that war had already been fought and lost in
Spain. In the face of such proleptic disaster the
poem asks what really matrers, "what is there of
value / Lasting from day to day?". It was a ques-
tion that MacNeice had tried to answer explic-
itly in earlier poems ("I give you the incidental
things which pass / Outward through space
exactly as each was") and would attack again in
later work:
And what is life apart from lives
And where, apart from fact, the value.
Autumn Journ al does occa sionally get
bogged down in fruitless philosophizin g about
"life as collective creation ", and so on, but in its
finest passages, through its allentive catalogue
of the everyday , it enacts the irreplaceable
nature of ordinarin ess. Colloquial address
brushes up against satire and even disdain with-
out quite falling into them. Imagine the differ-
ence in tone had the Eliot of The Waste Land
painted this scene, typist and all:
The c urate buys his ounc e of shag,
The typist tints her nails with coral,
The housewife with her shopping bag
Watches the cle aver catch the naked
New Zealand sheep between the legs -
What price now New Zealand?
The cocker spaniel sits and beg s
With eye s like a waif on the movies.
The suburban milieu os not disparaged here, but
accepted as the place where modern life is
lived. Thou gh he could be caustic, MacNeice' s
report age and light verse are driven less by a
need to reveal our shortcomings than by a demo-
cratic and humane impulse to record, and to do
so generously, without cond escension . His
famou s comm ent, in the preface to Autumn
Journal, that "poetry in my opinion must be
honest before anything else and I refuse to be
'objective' or clear-cut at the cost of honesty",
suggests not only that he liked to change his
mind about things, but that what he enj oyed
above all was change, or as he put it rather bet-
ter, "things being various" .
The view that "only change prevails" sug-
gests a sensibility which chimes with ours -
though arguably MacNeice was schooled to
sce pticism and mutabilit y throu gh be ing sur-
rounded by too much confessionali sm, and too
much idealism, rather than too little, But it was
also a sensibility which dovetailed with the
deglamorized mood of what was to become , in
Britain, the people' s war.
The Munich crisis was over in a month , but
MacNeice' s disenchantment remained. A year
later the same feeling s of helplessness and disil-
lusion were played out again st the backdrop of
an Irish landscape. In his lyric series "The Com-
ing of War" , MacNeice recorded the experience
of hearing the news of the German advance into
Poland while on holiday in the west:
 POETRY

o the crossbones of Galway
The hollow grey houses,
The rubbish and sewage,
The gra ss-grown pier ,
And the dredger grumbling
All night in the harbour:
The war came down on us here.
Salmon in the Corrib
Gently swaying
And the water com bed out
Over the weir
And a hundred swa ns
Drea ming on the harbour:
The war came down on us here.
MacNeice later discarded more than half of
the poems in "The Coming of War", and it is to
Peter McDona ld's credit that he has included
the whole of the 1940 Cuala Press volume The
La st Ditch as an appendix (even though this
means that some poems published later in Plant
and Phantom appear twice) . The Last Ditch was
written while MacNeice was researc hing his
book on Yeats, and it marks an important stage
in his deve lopment as a poet. "As soon as I
heard on the wireless of the outbreak of war,"
he wrote in his autobiograp hy, The Strin gs are
False , "Galway became unrea l. And Yeats and
his poetry became unrea l also." But so too did
the literat ure of socia l conscience . As he put it
in his study of Yeats, "war spares neither the
poetry of Xanadu nor the poetry of pylons" -
neither the poetry of rubbish and sewage nor the
poetry of dreaming swans. "Tormented by the
ethica l prob lems of the war", MacNeice none-
theless said of Ireland in Septe mber 1939 that it
was able to "poise the toppling hour", to give
him "time for thought" in a world where
thought was being everyw here sacrificed to the
dema nds of total mobilization . Neutra l Ireland ,
and later the neutra l United States, seemed to
offer the chance for him to seek clarilication of
his duties and his commitments - to his relation-
ship with the American writer Eleanor Clark, to
socia l realism , to aesthetics , and to the war
itself, to which he returne d in Decem ber 1940.
Over the next four years, while working at
the BBC, MacNeice would complete two new
Faber collection s, Plant and Phantom (194 1)
and Springboard (1944), his book on Yeats and
The Strings are False, as well as scores of radio
features and plays such as Christopher Colum -
bus and He Had a Date. All of these were in dif-
ferent ways attem pts to solve the ethical prob-
lems of the war, but through - rather than in
spite of - aesthetic s. Writing to Dodds from Ire-
land in September 1939, MacNeice had rejected
propaganda work: "There must be plenty of
people to propagand , so I have no feeling of
guilt in refusing to mortify my mind". On his
return to Britain , however, he was rejected by
the navy on ground s of ill health (he had suf-
fered a near-fata l attac k of peritonitis while in
the United States), and it was propaga nda work
which claime d him. Most of MacNeice 's war-
time output (over sevent y progra mmes) were
news features exploring the background to
major event s. He had a sympat hetic and imagi-
native superior in Laure nce GilIiam, who also
worked with Dylan Thomas, Elisabeth Lutyens
and Benjamin Britten. None the less, Mal direc- other power , which compe ls, and death which
tives had to be followed. These might include makes life valuable; God is "whatever means
instruction s to highlight stories from Nazi-occu- the good". Throughout his writing life Mac-
pied Europe , and acco unts of German barbarity, Neice stuck to traditional forms, preferring the
for examp le, to represent voices from around classical and baroq ue "cage " of rhyme to free
the British Isles, to feature Irishmen serving verse forms. But in spite of the fact that he
with the British Forces, to praise British demo- never experimented with the styles we think of
cracy, the freedom of the press, religious free- as quinte ssentia lly "modern", as for examp le
dom, or the relationship with the Dominions. Eliot did , MacNeice was in many ways the
If this felt like mortification of his mind, it more modern writer. His world was the one that
was poetry 's task to hold on to the counter- most people ended up living in after the war,
weight of princip le. What has been called Mac- urban , secular, and without redemption save
Neice 's "sceptica l vision" had an ethica l intent , what we create for ourselves.
in the sense that he believed it the duty of It may be that poems such as "Ten Burnt
poetry to witness events faithfully, without Offerings " and "Autumn Seque l" will yet have
tragic posturin g or rhetorica l bombast. It is true their moment, but for now, following the tre-
that there is also a mystica l side to the wartime mendo us creativity of the war years, the long
poetry . The invocation of the destructi ve pow- discursive poems of the 1950s seem less
ers unleashed throug h the blitz in "The Tro lls" successful. Sometimes verbose , they lack the
or "Brother Fire" ("0 delicate walker, babbler, documentary, visual vividness of Autumn Jour-
dialectician Fire, / 0 enemy and image of our- nal. What they revea l is MacNeice deter-
selves") can sound at moments like passage s mined ly building from classical poetry and
from Eliot's "Litt le Gidding " or the highly mytho logy, Englis h literature , and persona l and
wrought images of destruction in Dylan politica l history a system of reference fit for the
Thomas ' s Deaths and Entran ces . All three new Elizabethan age. No doubt he felt he
poets responded to life, and deaths, in London needed the architectonics of the long poem to
during the blitz through poetry which measures shape his persona l mythology. But it was in the
human time against its enemies. But while both ghostly and surrea l late lyric poems that his
Eliot and Thoma s (to varying degrees) proffer own everyman found lina l expression:
conso lation through the redemptive power of For himself
organi zed religion on the one hand, pantheistic He was not Tom or Dick or Harry,
faith on the other, MacNeice ' s wartime poetry , Let alone God, he was merely fifty,
despite the tinct ure of mysticism, remains reso- No one and nowhere else, a walking
lutely secu lar, focused on and rooted in the Que stion , but no more cheap than any
human,. For MacNeice it is still earth, not any Que stion or quest is cheap .

The Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition 2007

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- 27 - T LS APRIL 27 2007

Down to his socks
hen the French Revo lutio n turned
W ove r the sto ne that covered the old
regim e, ma ny brightly coloured, if
putrid , creatures crept out. No ne was more
irides ce nt than Charles- Mau rice de Talleyrand-
Peri gord . Thirty-five years old whe n the
Bast ille fell, his ca ree r to that poi nt pers onifie d
the se lf-indulgent corruption that had drained
legitimacy fro m the system.
Altho ugh he was the elde st son, a club foot
den ied him success ion to the family es tates and
cond emned him to enter the Church. Untro u-
bled by a lack of faith, he was con secrated
priest on April Fool' s Day, 1774. W ithin a few
wee ks, a prel atical uncl e had sec ured him sine-
cures at Re ims yie lding 26,000 livres a year - at
a time whe n paris h priests we re luck y to get
500. Well might Talleyrand later write that onl y
those who had lived be fore 1789 had kno wn the
full joy s of life, for he spent the next fiftee n
years living the life of a ric h and leisured man
abo ut town in Paris. In Janu ary 1789, Loui s
XVI' s last episco pal appointment before the
Re volu tion was the elevatio n of Talleyrand to
be Bishop of Autun, e ven thou gh that meant
turn ing a blind eye to his ga mbling , whoring
and agnosti cis m.
Talleyrand showed his gra titude by biting
hard the hand s that had fed him . Before the yea r
was out , he had helped to draft the Declaration
of the Right s of Man and the Citizen and had
prop osed to the National Asse mbly that the
prop ert y of the Church should be placed "at the
d ispo sal of the na tion ". Escap ing the guillotine
during the Te rror by Ileein g, first to England
and then to Am eri ca, he returned after the fall
-----------------------'~,-----------------------
atthew Denn ison prefaces his Life of
M Princ ess Beatrice, the last of Queen
Victori a' s nine children by quo ting a
remark made by the Que en to Tenn yson: "I have
a dear devoted child who has always been a dear,
unselfish comp anion to me" . This, The Last Prin-
cess, makes clear, was an accur ate summatio n of
her younges t daughter' s life. The idea of a daugh-
ter ' s freedom and will being sacrificed to her
mother' s strikes us toda y as macabr e, yet Denn i-
son' s gentle, thou ght ful presentation of Beat-
rice ' s life of filial devotion allows us to see it on
her own terms.
Born in 1857, when her moth er was nearl y
thirty-eight, Beatrice was very much at the
tag end of the fam ily. Victo ria' s childbearing
year s had lasted nearly two decades: within less
than a year of Beatrice' s birth , her eldest sister
was married . A typical younges t child, Beatrice
seems to have been sunny and equable, a univ er-
sal dar ling, indul ged in a manner very different
from the firm d iscipline met ed o ut to her
siblings . But when she was onl y four years old,
her father , the Prince Con sort, died sudde nly of
typhoid fever. Her distraught mother, plunged
into that state of absolute mournin g that she was
to occup y for the rest of her life, looked to her
youngest daughter for emotional support. It was
rumou red that Victori a, returning from her hus-
band ' s deathbed, wrapped the slee ping Beatrice
in his nightshirt and held her all night. For the
rest of her life, Beatrice was to be her moth er' s
stay and com fort, a position in the monarch' s life
rivalled only by that of John Bro wn , her faithful
Highland servant. The charming Ilight y infant
TLS AP RIL 2 7 200 7
BIOGRAPHY
TIM BLA N NI NG
D a vid La wd a y
N A P O LE ON 'S M ASTE R
A Life of Prince Talleyrand
400pp. Cape. £20.
978 02 24 073660
Robin H a rri s
T ALL EYR A ND
Betraye r and saviour of France
436pp. John Murray. £30.
978 0 71956486 4
of Rob espierre to resum e his ca reer as an ava ri-
ciou s opp ortun ist. Accord ing to an eyewitness,
Benjamin Con stan t, he gree ted the news of his
appointme nt as Foreig n Secretary, in 1797, by
repeating over and over again , "W e sha ll make
an imm en se fortune . . . an imm en se fortune . ..
an immense fortune" . Eve n by the standards of
late-eight eenth-century di plom acy, his vena lity
was prodigi ous. In that respect , at least, he was
entire ly consistent. He was still at it after the
fall of Nap oleon , trying to se ll to the Au strian s
a large quan tity of State-papers he had squir-
relied aw ay. For onc e, he had met his match:
afte r asking to see the m "on approva l" , Metter-
nich returned them witho ut payment - but not
before having the m copi ed .
It is not the least achi evem ent of these two
biograph ies, Da vid La wda y ' s Napoleon '.I' Mas-
ter and Robin Harris' s Talleyrand, to have
reveal ed the shee r sca le of Talleyra nd 's rapac-
ity. Also we ll and trul y expose d is the depth of
Mother's girl
NICOLA H UMBL E
M atth ew D ennison
THE LA ST PR I NCESS
Th e devoted life of Queen Victor ia 's yo unges t
dau ght er
352pp.Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £20.
978 0 297 84794 6
disappeared , replac ed by a shy, withdraw n girl,
kept deliberately without close companions by a
mother who wanted her solely to herself.
While Victori a had enco urage d the unions of
her old er children , most o f whom marri ed
almost stra ight out of the schoolro om, she was
relu ctant to countenan ce Beatrice' s ever lea v-
ing her . It wa s not until Be at rice was twent y-
eight that she man aged to slip the maternal net ,
makin g a lo ve-match with the dashingly hand -
some He nry of Battenberg. Like her mothe r' s
before her, Beatrice' s domes tic idyll was to be
cut sadly short. Afte r a decade of marria ge and
the birth of four children, He nry died of
malaria . Beatri ce return ed to her mother' s side,
where she rem ained until the Queen' s death
five years later. Even then , the loving filial servi-
tude did not end. The Qu een bequ eath ed to her
youngest dau ght er the task of editing her volu-
minou s journals for public at ion - a labou r that
was to occup y Beatrice for the next thirt y yea rs.
- 2 8-
his treach ery. In 1809 , as war with Austria
loom ed yet aga in, Talleyrand was leakin g intel-
ligen ce to the enemy about Frenc h tro op mo ve-
ments in Germ any - and of cour se asking to be
paid. Napol eon was und er no illu sions about his
Foreign Secr etary' s charact er, memorably apos-
troph izing him as " shit in a silk stoc king" and
as "gold and shit in one" . Yet he never ceased to
admire the talent s of "the mo st cap able minister
I ever had " . It was not a compliment Talleyrand
returned. Characteri sticall y, he faw ned on Napo-
leon when he was stro ng (" I love you, [ am dis-
tressed to be leaving yo u, [ burn with impa-
tience to return to you" ) but dism issed him as a
"highway robb er" when he was do wn and out.
Both Lawday and Harris demonstrate that
Talleyrand reali zed very ea rly on that the Napo-
leoni c adve nture was bound to end in disaster.
Aga in and aga in he urged restraint , but could
make no impr ession on a megalomaniac who
ne ver gras ped the first rul e of statecra ft: that
wa r mu st be the instrum ent of poli cy, not the
oth er way round . Talleyrand could also gras p
"the ultimate foible of empire" : " I attest that
any sys tem which aims at tak ing freedom by
open force to other peoples will only make that
freedom hated and preve nt its triumph" . Law-
day repeat s that sage obser vation twice,
alth ough he might have adde d that it had been
anticip ated by Rob espi erre ' s mor e pithy for mu-
lation: "Nobody loves armed mission aries" . Its
relevan ce to cur rent eve nts is so obvious as to
need no ex plicit underlining, which is what it
gets here. But the undimmed topica lity of
Na poleon's mete oric rise and even more precipi -
tate fall cert ainly add spice to any acco unt of
Queen Vic toria and Princess Beatricc, 1860
She far outli ved the era she typ ified , losing one
son in the trenches of the First World War , and
anoth er to the haemophilia whic h was her
family's legacy. Her daughter, Ena, who was
also a ca rrier , passed the infec tion into the
Span ish Royal Famil y. Beatrice, her forty-eight
years of widow hood out strip ping her moth er' s
forty, died in 1944 .
Denn ison ' s is an old -fashioned biograph y,
both in its subje ct matter and its appro ach .
Ob scure Ro ya ls are not the Ilavour of the
mom ent , and this is by no mean s an iconoclas-
Talleyrand ' s parallel ca ree r. His ratlik e sense of
whe n to leave the sinking ship, and unc ann y
knack of mak ing him self see m indi spen sabl e,
gav e him ju st as glittering a ca reer und er the
restored Bou rbon s. Wh en they predictably suc-
cumbed to revo lution in their turn in 1830, he
popp ed up onc e agai n as king-maker, endi ng
his career as an oct ogena rian ambassa dor to the
Court of St Jam es.
Th is is a wonderful story and both biogra phers
make the most of it. Lawday has the lighter touch
and writes with such gusto that the occasional sty-
listic vulgarity, contex tual confusion and factual
inaccur acy ca n be overlooked. He is better on his
subject' s American sojourn of 1794--6 and his
relations with women. But the title must be dis-
carded . As Tall eyrand himself recog nized, he
was never Napoleon ' s "master". " Poodle" would
be a better sobriquet, or eve n "pimp", for as
Napoleon com mented about his Polish mistress,
Marie Walewska: "Talleyra nd procured her for
me. She did not put up a fight". Harris' s subtitle
- "betrayer and saviour of France" - hits j ust the
right note. He is also the more scholarly, pro-
vides proper notes and references, and appears to
have read more (Law day does not supply a bibli-
ograph y). Among other thin gs, Robin Har ris' s
more detailed kno wledge allo ws him to deal
authoritatively with Tall eyrand ' s complicity in
the abduction and j udicia l murder of the Due
d ' Enghi en in 1804 . Both books are very readabl e
and ca n be recomm end ed warmly for illumin at-
ing the times as well as the life, albeit without
penetra ting very far into the wider contex t of
what had gone before and what was to co me.
Astonishingly, neither author cites Paul
Schro eder ' s The Transformation of Europea n
Politics, 1763-1 848 (1994), which would ha ve
helped them to understand and co nceptualize
j ust what Ta lleyra nd got right and ju st where he
went astray.
tic account of the life of a princ ess. Yet in its
pain stakin g, resp ectf ul unra vellin g of the tribu -
lation s and sma ll success es of Beatr ice ' s life, it
also has something to tell us about the lives
lived out by many other, ap parently very differ -
ent, wo me n during her mo ther' s lon g re ign . The
tedium and patho s of Beatrice ' s du tiful life is
indi cated as much by her achie vem ent s as her
privation s. Denn ison mak es much of her pa int-
ing; of the birthday book , decor ated with her
wa tercolour borders, which was sold to ben efit
the Belgra ve Hos pital for Children; of her mu si-
cal talent s. But these accomplishme nts differed
little from the time-fillin g hobbies - the tattin g
and the pok er-work , silhouette cutting and wax-
tlo wer mak ing - that filled the lon g da ys of the
average Victori an middl e-class wom an. It is
hard not to see Bea tric e' s life, like the irs, as one
of potenti al restrain ed and stilled . We tend to
like our Royals racy these days, and Beatric e
was simply not that sort of girl. Matthew Denn i-
son do es atte mpt to stir in some spice - speculat-
ing on the adolesce nt Beatri ce' s fee lings for the
ch arming Loui s Na poleon, unfortun atel y killed
before his nineteenth birthday; and entertain-
ingly recoun tin g the Ilirtat ion Beatric e ' s elde r
sister Loui se, marri ed to the prob ably hom o-
sexua l Marqu ess of Lorn e, conducted with Beat-
rice ' s husband . He hand les Court gossi p we ll -
but the sad fact is that there j ust was n' t very
much to gossi p about in Beatric e ' s quiet life.
This is a we ll-researched and pleasantl y writte n
biogr aph y, but it doe sn't reall y ex plain wha t it
is about this particular Princ ess that mak es her
life worthy of res uscitation.

In the Garden Rea lm Dessau-Wiirlitz, a miniature version ofthe I ro n Bridge over the River Severn
n 1764 , Prince Franz of Anha lt-Dessau trav-
I elled with his arch itect and gardener from
his small princip ali ty in Germ any to Eng-
land in order to see manu facturin g centres in the
Midl and s as well as inno vative farms and land-
scape ga rdens. Instead of following the trails of
most Euro pean aristocrats who went to Italy for
their Grand Tour, Prince Fran z was an Anglo-
phile who wanted to turn Anhalt-De ssau into " a
mod el state" based on the English exampl e. At
a time when much of Europe was under the rule
of absolutism, Princ e Fran z introdu ced a series
of reform s such as provision s for the poor, reli-
gious toleranc e, free educ at ion and agricul tural
reforms which were inspir ed by his visit to Eng-
land , makin g Anha lt-Dessau "the secret birth -
place o f the Enlightenment in German y" .
Th e Gard en Realm Dessau- Wiirlit z was the
physical ex press ion of the princ e' s ambition,
using the same philo sophical idea s, icono -
gra phy and arbor eal languag e that had shaped
the Engli sh land scape garde ns. In England , gar-
den de signe rs and owner s had turned agai nst
the rigid formalit y of the French Baroque, the
refl ection of the tyrannical rule of Lou is XIV.
English ga rdeners had stopped clippin g their
trees, tran sform ed straight avenue s into mean-
derin g walks and geome trical water parterres
into serpentine lake s as signs that libert y had
entered the garden.
Over the next decades (and seve ral visits to
England) Prince Fran z created one of the mo st
magnificent garde ns in Germany. In fact, it was
a se ries of six gard en s and land scap es that
co vered about 700 square kilom etres (tod ay
about 150 square kilom etre s), almo st the entire
territory of the small principalit y - thu s deser v-
ing the name "Garden Realm ". Th e gardens of
Wiirlit z, Oran ienburg, Mo sigkau , Luisum ,
Georgium , Gro sskiihnau are one harmonious
Gesamtkunstwerk which, as the current director
Thom as Weiss writes, are "s taged highli ghts,
arran ged like a string of pearls".
Some of them, such as Oran ienburg, were
ori ginally Baroqu e gardens which the prince
altered by giv ing straight canals a more natur al
outline and planting thick ets instead of topiar y.
GARDEN H ISTORY
Anglomania
ANDREA WULF
Thoma s W eiss
I NFINITEL Y B EA U TI FU L
The Dessau-Wcrlitz Garden
304pp. Frances Lincoln. £35 (US $85).
9780 7 1122 776 7
Som e of the prince ' s ga rdens were en tire ly new
creations. Wiirlit z was the mo st ambitious and
mo st " English", its meado wland snaking along
the River Elbe reminding the princ e of the land -
scape along the Tham es. Laid out aro und sev -
eral interconnected irregu larly shaped lakes,
Wiirlit z imitated the English landscape garde n
includin g a haha , "belt walks" and serpe ntine
paths which led into groves that were fringed
with colourful and per fumed shru bs. Th e whole
landscap e was peppered with templ es and stat-
ues, ju st as he had seen at Sto we and Kew.
The Garden Rea lm is England writ small and
presents itself almost like a tour of "the best-o f
Engli sh garde ns" . Stourhead, for example, is
represent ed with the "English Seat " which
Friedrich Wil helm von Erdmannsdorff, Prince
Fran z' s archit ect , built after their first visit to
Britain , whil e the Templ e of Flora is mode lled
on Willi am Chamber s' s Casino at Wilton in
Wilt shire. From Kew, Princ e Franz copied
Chamb ers' s Wh ite Bridge and the pagoda
(alb eit a few storeys lower) while the Templ e
of Venu s was inspired by John Vanbru gh ' s
Rot unda at Sto we. Princ e Fran z built the fi rst
neo-Gothic garde n building in German y, a style
of architecture he had admired at Sto we. He
adored his Gothi c House so much that he turned
it into a retreat for him self and his mistress - the
gardener ' s dau ghter.
But the Garden Realm is mor e than ju st a
wonderful garde n shaped by Ang lomania. As
Weiss expl ains, "the existing fea tures of the
- 2 9-
land scap e are linked with a far-reach ing
philosophical- ethical and educational reform
programme of extraordinary, universal value" -
the reason wh y UNESCO put it on the World
Heritage list in 2000. Ther e is, for example ,
the "Synagog ue" to illustrate Princ e Franz' s
religiou s toler ance, as nowhere in the Germ an
territori es did the Jews enjo y more freedom in
the eighteenth century. Simil arly, to celebrate
indu striali zation and progress Prince Fran z
erec ted an exact cop y (I :4 ratio) of the
Coalbrookdale Iron Bridge; and to assert his
intere st in agricu ltural reform there were model
farm s and experimental orchards scattered in
the Garden Realm.
One of the most exceptional sights was the
"Worlitz Vesuvius" , an enormous artilicia l vol-
cano situa ted on an island in one of the lakes,
inspired by the real Vesuviu s which Prince
Fran z had climb ed together with the English
ambassador at Napl es, Sir Willi am Hamilton.
Bangers and cra ckling twigs imit ated the sound
of the eruption whi le a waterfall bathed in red
light simulated red lava - a spectacle whic h can
still be admired once a year. The "Worlitz Vesu-
viu s" with the Villa Hamilton below it (lill ed
with illustration s of ruins of antiquity) also illus-
trated the princ e' s passion for learning , scie nce
and education, if in a rather theatrical, not to say
whimsical manner.
Infi nitely Beau tiful is the first book com -
prehen sively to introduc e the whole Gard en
Realm to a Briti sh audience. It is a del ectable
collection of essays, lavishly illustrat ed with
atmo spheric photo graph s as well as eighteenth-
cent ury engravi ngs and paintings - although
some detaile d maps wo uld have aided the under-
standing of the geograph y of the gardens. The
layout of Wiirlit z, which con sists of live dis-
tinct areas, for example, remain s incomprehensi-
ble for readers who have not been to the Garden
Realm . Th e horticulturally inclined reader may
be disappointed at the paucity of information on
the planting of the landscap es and shrubberies -
which is a shame as there are detailed plant lists
in the guide books of the time. In fact , Princ e
Franz' s vast selection of foreign tree species
(main ly North Am erican but bought from
Engli sh nurserymen ) was one of the main
attracti on s for the eighteenth-century visitor.
But Wei ss and the other contributors paint a
round ed port rait of the creation of the wonder-
ful landscapes in the Garden Realm, makin g
Infinitely Beautiful much mor e than a sumptu-
ou s coffee-table book . Archi tecture, landscape
design and Franz' s philo sophi cal concepts are
explaine d in dept h, without losing the narrati ve
pace. Gi ven the Engli sh passion of Prince
Franz' s gardenmania, there is only one thing to
do after reading Infi nitely Beautiful - to visit the
magical Gard en Rea lm Dessau-Worlitz,
.,t-greenw ood
'f' WORLD PUBLISHING
greenwood .enquiries@harcourt.co.uk
www.greenwood.comlgwp
T LS APRIL 27 2007

Poetry
lain Sinclair
BUR IED AT SEA
98pp. Worple Press, 12 Havelock Road,
Tonbri dge, Kent TN9 lJ E. £ 12.
978 I 9052 0806 7
I nveterate Londoner though he is, lain Sinc lair
has been getting out of town of late. Since his
circu mambu lation of the M25 in London Orbital
(2002) , he has recrea ted John Clare' s flight from
Essex in Edge of the Orison (2005) , and now, in
a welco me return to poetry, has devoted a book
to the seaside delig hts of Hasting s. "Hast ings",
Ed Dorn wrote, "is the lower jaw of an alliga-
tor", and Sinclair ' s roving eye displays preda-
tory intentions of its own. It abso rbs diverse and
recalcitrant materia l, showing its taste for blood
in the "cut wrist, warm silt sea" of "Ow l Towe l"
and escapi ng elsewhere into a "healthy indiffer-
ence to the present world".
The title "Language Dentistry" provi des an
aptly descriptive title for Sinclairs rebarbati ve
style. Skuldugger y of some kind is neve r far
away , as in "Yesterday's Money": " Politica l
detectives launder bloody sheets / virus passed
before midnight strike s / shallow drawer lined
with crappy sand" . Places in Sinclair invariably
come with presiding genii loci, and the cast of
Buried at Sea includes Waiter Sickert, Patrick
Hamilton and Aleister Crow ley. Wh en he
writes, in "Aryan Dates", " I ' d run out of film
(again) (agai n) / you ' ll have to take my word
for it", he signa ls both his cinematic perspective
and willingness to let his poem s trail away into
the Hastings sand.
The list is a favo urite device . "A sequence of
image s is no evidence", Tom Raworth writes in
a line Sincla ir recycles as an epigrap h. His litto-
ral imager y may be " no evidence", but this is
not poetry with a point to prove. Dipping in and
out of Buried at Sea in hope of a cheer y lyric or
two can only lead to disappointment. As its title
suggests, tota l immersion is req uired. Repeated
readings of these poem s, and in particular the
centra l sequence " Blair' s Grave " , may be
requ ired before drowning turns to swimming,
but there are pleasures to be had here, if the
reader knows where to find them.
D AVID W H EATL EY
Politics
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
IMPE RI AL LIFE IN T H E
EM ERA L D C IT Y
Inside Baghd ad' s Gree n Zo ne
368p p. Bloomsbu ry. £ 12.99.
978 074759 1689
I mperial Life in the Emerald City offers a kind
of participant-observer' s acco unt of the Coali-
tion Provisional Authority in Baghdad and its
forerunner, the ORHA (Office of Reconstruc-
TLS A PRIL 27 20 07
IN BRIEF
Liverpool IV, 1968, by Candida Hiifer; taken from Centre ofthe Creative Uni verse:
Li verpool and the Avant-garde, ed ited by Cbristopb Grunenberg and Rob ert Knifton
(288pp. Liverpool Univer sity Press. £35 . 978 184631 0898). Tbe book is publisbed
to coincide witb an exhibition a t T at e Liverpool, whicb runs until September 9, 2007 .
tion and Humanitarian Assis tance, also known
as the Organization of Rea lly Hapless Ameri-
cans), the transitory ema nations of the occ upa-
tion of Iraq in the disastrou s year 2003-04. It is
well sourced and US-cen tred. Many of Raj iv
Chandrasekaran 's inter viewees , including a
number who served in high-ranking positions in
the CPA, were happy enoug h to talk, appar-
ently, but did not want to be identifie d by name,
" because of fears of retribution from the Bush
administration". It is crafte d (a little too much
so) as a character-rich expose. It is strong on
backgro und, in a Washillgton Post kind of way:
the author is a former Bureau Chief in Baghdad.
It is racily writte n, in the slightly souped-up
argo t of the newshound: "Whateve r could be
outsourced was"; "He hit the phones" ; " Aziz' s
death had made the issue radioactive". It tells
revea ling stories - but it doe s not probe their
meaning.
In as much as Chandrase karan has a thesis, it
is that imperia l life as lived by the CPA was
both delusional and dysfunctio nal, a condition
personified by its head , "the viceroy " Paul
Bremer, a man whose invincible ignora nce of
the country, the peop le and the task at hand left
him capable of doing the only thing he knew -
exe rcisi ng authority - a brief strutting on the
bomb ed-out stage, heedless of advice or conse-
quences. Breme r was inadequate, but he was a
made guy. He also personifie d one of the defin-
ing characteristics of the CPA : they were con-
nected. NOI only were they overw helmingly
Republi can, they were "the right kind of Repub-
lican" : brother of the President's press secre-
tary, director of a faith-based relief organiza-
tion, donor, fund-raiser, proselytizer.
Imperial Life in the Emerald City is soon to
be a major motion pictu re. It surely has drama-
tic potential. For scenario , characte r and inci-
dental deta il, however, it borrows (uncredited)
from The Assassins ' Gate (2005) by George
Packer , a brilliant synthesis of reportage and
reflecti on as yet unmatched in this llo urishing
genre, the literature of debacle in Iraq.
A LEX DA N CH EV
- 30 -
Cultural History
Elizabetb Salter
CU LTURA L CREATIV ITY IN T HE
EA R LY E NGLISH RE N AISS AN C E
Popular culture in town and cou ntry
23 1pp. Palgrave. £45.
978 I 4039 9 179 9
T he ambition of this book is admirable - it
aims to be a historical ethnography of
every day life in the Renaissance. The project
entai ls close scruti ny of early modern docu-
ments (wills, inventories , charte rs, deeds, rent-
als) in order to illum ine assumptions and prac-
tices that structu red individual perception and
experience at the time. The idea is to present a
study of "self-fashioning" from belo w. But it
does not quite come off. Elizabeth Salter is so
concerned to get her theoretical framewor k and
terminology right that much of the detail she
covers ends up in a cloud of genera lities. Her
opening two chapters are concerned with
" Reconstructing Perception and Experience". A
variety of cur rent approac hes are briell y dis-
cussed : we are (at least) thrice remi nded that the
book addresses a current critical "cr isis" or
"i mpasse", the aims and assumptio ns are set
forth, questioned and req uestio ned, and the
objective s are grad ually narrowed to "the uses
of material culture in the process of self-fashion-
ing". A ten-page transcript of the will (151 6) of
o ne John A unse ll, merch ant tailo r, is fo llowe d
by an illustrative "thick description" of what it
tells us about the "prag matic constructio n of
iden tity". We learn that " the name John seems a
crucial element in John Aunse ll' s definition of
himself', but not his age, the extent of his trav-
els, illness, length of marriage nor much of his
Catholicism (the names "Mary" and "E liza-
beth" appea r to have been similarly important
to him). Salter' s accou nt of this text is thoro ugh
but when filtered thro ugh abstractions of
"a ppropriatio n", " performance", "cons um p-
tion" , "emulation", "reception" and "cultural
creati vity", it loses impac t. Salter' s direct
question , "So what is cultural creativity ?",
receive s no direct answe r. The chapters thereaf-
ter are de voted to d iscussions of inheritance and
property, possessions, "life-" and "death-" fash-
ioning and "the creati vity of reading". Whil e
these tackle interesting aspects of personal and
communal life (rooms, buildings, heirlooms,
apparel, burial choices , memoria lization and
book bequests), their conclusions remain frus-
tratingly general. There are simply too many
vague or elliptica l sentences like the followi ng:
"The concept of performance used throughout
this book is exp lored explicitly in this chapter
by interrogati ng the inlluence of personal expe-
riences on how per formativity is conceptu alised
and represe nted". Notwit hstanding these cave-
ats, the book ' s attemp t at synthesiz ing different
strands of cultural history with the deta il of ordi-
nary life in the period remains laudable.
D U N CAN SALKELD
Media Studie s
Tbomas de Zengotita
MEDI AT ED
How the med ia shape the world aro und you
304pp. Bloomsbury. Paperback, £8.99 .
978 0747 57086 8
T he late Jean Baudrillard notoriously
defi ned the postmodern age in terms of the
ascendancy of simulacra over the "desert of the
real". Thomas de Zengotita' s sharp-shooting
decoding of the modern media uses this frame-
work to ponder the effects that the endless prolif-
eration of seductive simulacra exe rt upon the
indivi dua l - or, rather, the post-mediated "indi-
vidual". De Zengotita 's thesis, stated baldly,
is that Western culture has recently passed a tip-
ping point after which the sum total of represen-
tations has excee ded the materialities that
they represe nt. This has created a culture of
optionality and ubiquity in which each
of us is llattered with a God' s-eye view of the
world and, accordingly, a deified sense of
choice. As de Zengotita puts it, this is a
world where "everything is addressed to us,
eve rything is for us and nothing is beyond us
anymore".
Admitte dly, such notions have been broiling
around the firmament of received ideas since at
least the time of Marshall McLuh an and Roland
Barthes , but de Ze ngotita distinguishes himself
with his wit and empathy. Topics ranging from
Witt genstein to the Simp sons are traversed and
melded with speed and elan. Written in the wise-
cracking style of a Bret Easto n Ellis narrator,
this is less a dissectio n of modern cultural
mores than a personal, anthropo logica l acco unt
of how it feels to live in a world of endless
commercialized surfaces, which tug at wallets
and synapses in equal, relentless measure.
Throughout his diverse, provoca tive disquisi-
tions, de Zengot ita remains alive to the charges
of amorality and re lat ivis m. Whil e one virt uos o
chapter puts forward the exa mple of child deve l-
opment as an area in which the ever-i ncreasi ng
field of representations can yield concrete
benefit, he does not fail to stress the numbn ess
and sociop olitica l apathy that overwhelming
options beget. A coda on 9/11 provides a spark-
ling analysis of how the final point of post-
modern representation is to occl ude the unrepre-
sentable possibilities that underlie our psycho-
logical and material security. Depressingly, no
escape routes from these mind-forged manacles
are proffe red or envisage d.
JO N G ARV IE

Wine
Natalie MacLean
RED , WH IT E , AND DR U NK
ALL OY ER
A wine-s oa ked journey from grape to glass
288pp. Bloomsbur y. £14 .99.
97807475 80607
N atalie Macl. eans account of her de velop-
ing relation ship with wine combines the
hedonistic with the tec hnica l. W ine, she says ,
mak es her feel "invi gor ated and animated" . Her
first experien ce of brun ello was like " the sigh at
the end of a long day; a gathering and a letting
go". And she is rem ark abl y can did about her
con sumption, admitting to being "born thirsty" ,
to drinking a lone, to con suming win e faster
than anyon e else at dinners and to needin g a
glass to ge t her throu gh the "arsenic hour s
bet ween five pm and seve n pm".
Yet wine is mor e than ju st a relea se.
M acL ean, an awa rd-winning Canad ian wine
write r, is also intere sted in the reason s why it
tastes the way it does. In Burgundy, where
"w isps of white smoke snake up from piles of
burning dead vines, ca stin g a pale haze on the
land scape , like a Mati sse dr ained of its co lor" ,
she ex plores the some times perp lexin g conc ept
of terroir. Th e idea that the region's win es owe
their len gth , depth and min eral charac ter to the
foss il-rich earth created 200 mill ion yea rs ago
is explored with such a lightn ess of touch that it
see ms like a stateme nt of the obvious. So , too ,
doe s her description of malolactic ferm ent ation ,
which is lent a refre shin g new dim en sion by her
de scription of listen ing to the gentle bubblin g
throu gh the ho le in a barrel of Domaine de la
Rom anee-Con ti.
Th e fact that Red, White, and Drunk All Over
is arbitrary in its outlook, foc using on j ust a
handfu l of the author' s pet subje cts such as
pinot noir , champagne and the relationship
bet ween wine and gas tronomy , mean s that it can
rem ain eng agin g throughout. For anyone bur-
dened by the demands of this weighty subjec t
(inc luding Macl.ean' s fello w student on a wine
course who had read all 820 pages of the Oxf ord
Comp an ion) this book will do much to sugges t
its lighter side. Wine ex perts might offe r author-
ity but there is no doubt that it is the enthu siasm
of newcom ers that brin gs the subje ct to life.
GILES KIM E
Biography
Malcolm G illies , Da vid P ea r , Mar k Carro ll,
edi tors
SELF-PORTRAIT OF PERCY
GRA ING ER
330pp. Oxford University Press. £3 8.99.
978 0 19 5305 37 I
S elf-Portrait of Percy Grainge r is culled
from the writings of a man who spent much
of the second ha lf of his life intensely con sider-
ing the first. In particular, the suicide of
Graingers mother, in 1922, dro ve him to
rell ect on their relation ship and how it inspired ,
variously, his musica l virt uosity, his love life
and his taste for self-flagellation. "A s a chil d" ,
he wro te the yea r afte r her death , "th e thou ght
of ten cam e to me that moth er was rea lly Go d."
Grain ger also has musical heroe s to pra ise (such
as Edv ard Grieg, who preferred Grain ger ' s pian-
ism to his composition s) ; compliment s to
record ("That's as good as Bach", said Ralph
Yaughan Wi lliam s of the younger man ' s setting
IN BRI E F
of an Irish melod y); and " the chee k of band -
bosse s" - meaning the quips of Sir Thomas
Beecham - to fume about. Yet in Delius As I
Knew Him , Eric Fenb y reco llect s on ly that
Grain ger showed ex traordinary non cha lance
about a Beecham jibe.
Self-Portrait is full of coin ages like "ba nd-
bosse s" and other sig ns of Graing er' s polyg lot
mind ; "My Wretched To ne-Life" was a work-
ing title for his a utobiog raphy . In "Notes on
Whip -Lu st" he shows ho w his "tone -art" and
his taste for "cruel-joy " (sadis m) are conn ect ed .
It is " life-wildness" that lies at the heart of the
matter: "that wildn ess that makes young men
yea rn to do fool-hard y acts, that makes the ed s
[nations] wors hip war & murder- stori es". The
"sam e stir . . . cram s a whole rebi rth into a
crowd ed all-wit hin-a-fifth- y chord in Tchaiko-
vsky, like a brok en-bottle end into the rounded
ca p of whic h the sun strea ms many-angled-y
until a bush fire is star ted" (a couple of bars
from Tchaiko vskys Pathetiqu e Symp hon y
then follo w).
Gr ainger' s language is easier to stomach,
however, than his raci sm . "The Je ws are, it
see ms to me, a very wretched & pit yworth y
folk in toneart"; they " sit co sily inside of the
hou se of paid-for tone-art" , whil e "we Nordics"
"stand jobless & freezin g outsid e" it. Not that
he belie ves in "raceful fore-fatedne ss" or
"typechange lessne ss" - " I believe hotl y in giv-
ing all folk the same ch ance s" . Mean while , a
strain of pitiabl e self-loathing emerge s with
regard to Grainger' s virtuos ity, his fame, his
looks, even the sound of his voice. He blames
both himself and his audience when his works
fail to be understood; not one drop of blood is
perm itted to slip beneath the brid ge unmourned .
Hence the sublime ly ridicu lous essa y title
"Roger Quilt er Fa iled Me at Harrogate".
All this fret ful retro spection must ha ve kept
Malcolm Gi llies, Da vid Pear and Mark Carro ll,
the editors of Self-Portrait, very busy. Grain ger
ga ve them half a million words of frag mented
autobiography to choo se from, depo sited at the
Grain ger M useum in the Univ ersity of Mel-
bourne, and they have done a thorough job of
ex pos ing him in all his glory and his madn ess.
It' s a long way from "Country Gardens".
MI CHA EL CAI N ES
Cultural Studies
Ka th lee n M , Barry
FEMI N IN ITY IN FLIGHT
304pp. Duke Unive rsity Press. $22.95 ;
distribu ted in the UK by Combined
Academic Publi sher s. £ 13.95.
978 0 822 3 3946 5
T he uncanniness of sitting in a metal box
with win gs at grea t speeds and altitudes is
such that comfort had to be added to speed and
safe ty as a con sid eration; passengers on com -
merci al flight s had to be babi ed out of terror,
kept quiet and st ill. In the early chapters of
Kath leen M . Barrys exce llent study , Feminin-
ity in Flight , she explains wh y the airlin es we nt
with pretty young white women, man y of them
train ed nur ses, rath er than, say, the middle-aged
A frican Am eri can men who acted as stew ards
on Pullm an cars; cutting-edge modernity in the
1930s co lour-coded itself as white.
The story of those once kno wn as hostesses or
stew ardess es , who came to be known as !light
attendants, is a micro co sm of the world of work
in the last century. Wom en were policed by the
airline s into slim glamour and an aura of sex ual
- 3 1-
availability, and learned quickl y the importance
of organi zation and autonomy: Barry' s well-doc-
umented histor y spends more of its length on
union chart ers and test cases than it does on hem-
lines. One of its strengths is a demonstration that
cultura l histor y doe s not have to be impre ssioni s-
tic, and that economic imperatives and con-
sciousness- raising can be as enterta ining to read
about as exploitation mov ies.
Th ere was always an inher ent contradiction
between the two func tions of !light attendants -
as mana gers of panick ed passengers in em erg en-
cie s and pro vider s of comfort the rest of the
tim e. A profession which dem anded real exper-
tise in peop le-handling was perp etu ally stripped
of its mo st ex perie nced members by discrimina-
tory ru les on age and marriage. An impo rtant
part of Barr ys argum ent is her demonstration
that the pur suit of equal rights was not ju st mod-
ish radicalism, but common sense in the face of
a man ageri al etho s that, by bein g raci st and sex-
ist, forgot what its employe es we re origina lly
hired to do.
Roz KAV E N EY
Medieval History
J eff r ey Jerome Co he n
HYB RIDITY , IDENTITY AND
MONSTROSITY IN MEDlEY AL
BR ITA IN
On difficult midd les
264pp. Palgrave Macmillan . £37 .99 .
978 I 4049 6971 2
I t is ea sy to forge t that Brit ain was not onl y a
colonial power, but also, onc e, a co lon y. In
the twelfth century, Brit ain was a hybrid, a mix-
ture of distinct peop les that had been in vaded
by, among oth ers, Rom an s, Ang les, Saxon s,
Dane s and Norm an s. Even the groups who had
mo st rece ntly arrived , due to intermarriage ,
chan gin g customs and varied geogra phica l ori-
gi ns, were not as distinct as the labels sugges t.
Je ffrey Jero me Coh ens book Hybridity,
Identi ty and Mon stro sity in Medi eval Brit ain
trac es dif feren t ways of cre ating ethn ic commu-
nity and di stinction in the multicultural society
that was twelfth-century Britain. The volum e is
itself a hybrid of literar y and historical studies,
insisting that ethnic identity is sha ped thro ugh
writing as well as throu gh bodi es, architecture
and the medi eval author s' lineage. It uses exam-
ples ranging fro m Gerald of Wales' s fantastic
description of an ox-man hybrid , which betra ys
unea se with his own mixed Norman-Wel sh
ance stry, to a murd er in Norw ich that was muc h
later blamed on the local Jewish community.
Aside fro m Gera ld, Coh en discu sses three
Latin historio graph ers - Bede , who had , befor e
the Conquest, imagined a unifi ed Engli sh
people; Will iam of Ma lme sbur y, who trie s to
link post-Conquest Engl and to this past, but ,
like Gerald , betra ys conc ern about mixed herit-
age in his fasci na tion with mon sters; and G eo f-
frey of Monmouth, with his eve n more fanciful
history of the Briti sh kings. Co hen then turn s to
Nor wich as a case study of a city extens ively
rebuilt by the Nor man in vaders, which a cen-
tury later was still di vided enou gh to invent a
Jewish scapeg oat again st which it cou ld pre sent
a unit ed fro nt.
Coh en is established as one of the prim e
research ers on mon stro sity, masculinity and
pos tcolonialism in medie val Bri tain, and the
New Middle Ages Series (in which this book
app ear s) as one of the most in venti ve in medi-
eva l stud ies. Given the author' s and the series'
proli lic output, it is und erstand able but non e the
less unfort unat e that this book has the mark s
of a rushed job: it relies on secondary sources
and on Coh en ' s own previou s work , and it is
imp erfectl y ed ited. Even so, it make s for a rivet-
ing - entertaining as well as disconce rtin g -
read about the important and neglec ted after-
math of 1066.
B ETT INA BILDHAU ER
Jewish Studies
Geoffrey Ca n tor a nd Ma rc Swetlitz, ed itors
JEW ISH TRAD ITION A ND THE
C HALLENGE OF DARWIN ISM
240pp. University of Chic ago Press. $24 ;
distributed in the UK by Wile y.
Paperback, £ 15.50.
978 226 09277 5
T his co llection has a vast sco pe and a short
reach. Its aim is to ex plore the " relation-
ship among Jews, Jud aism and evolution", but
it concentrates primarily on Israel , Nazi Ger -
man y and the contemporary United State s. Th e
notable exception to this somew hat reducti ve
historiograph y is Geof frey Cant or ' s meticulous
account, which open s Jewish Tradi tion and the
Challenge of Darwinism , on Anglo-Je wish
respon ses to evolution. Cantor reminds the
read er that ther e are oth er cont exts in which to
discu ss the inl1uence of Darwini sm than Jewish
nation alism , genocida l Nazism and Americ an
religiou s fund ament ali sm.
Th ere has been little serious work on this
topic, and the ed itors, Cantor and Marc Swetl-
itz, ac know ledge that they are on ly beginn ing to
scratch the surface of an ex pansive and worth -
while field . They rightl y argue that the over-
ridin g focus on Creationi st American Prot estant-
ism has meant that discu ssions o f religion and
e volution have hitherto been narrowly con -
ceived . Judaism in its man y form s (from
Reform to ultra-Orthodox) has had a not ably
various respon se to Dar wini an evolution which
is a useful coun ter-e xamp le to the literalism of
Prot estant Crea tioni sm. Essays by Swetlitz and
Ira Robinson bot h high light this religious plural-
ity. Less intere sting are the essays, in the fina l
section, which focus on part icu lar rabbinical
authorities, Je wish educa tional institutions or
ind ividua l accounts of intelli gent design.
Wh en it mo ves the discu ssion away fro m the
vu lgar uses of Social Dar win ism by the Nazis
and other anti-S ernites (a topic usefully summa-
rized by Richard Weikart), this book is most
va luable. The essay on "Zionism, Race , and
Eugenic s" by Raphael Falk is especially useful
in this regard . By show ing delini tively that
the language of Dar win , race and euge nics was
not confined to tho se who merely hat ed Jews,
Falk pro vides a useful cor rec tive to the rest of
the volume.
There is ampl e ev idence that man y European
and Ame rican Jewish sc ientis ts who lehe arted ly
embraced eugenics and the lang uage of race
before the Second World W ar. A s the editors
are well aware, much of the impact of evolution-
ary theor y depends on the particular social and
scientilic conte xt in which it ope rate s. Onc e
decoupled from Jewi sh nationali sm , religiou s
funda mentalism and letha l anti-Serni tism , the
theory and rhetori c of Darwini sm could quit e
easily be used by those in favour of Jewish immi-
gration and inte gra tion . After all, it was Darwin
him self who noted in The Descent of Man that
"Europeans differ but little from Jews".
BRYA N CH EYET T E
T LS APRIL 27 2 0 0 7
 POLI TI C S

In Israel's archives
he forest of Birya lies close to the Jewish M .E .YAP P

T holy city of Safad, where once settled

Sephard ic Jews who had been expelled
from Spain at the end of the lifteenth century.
Like many similar forests elsewhere, it is man-
made and a popular place of recreation . Sixty
years ago, the land belonged to farmers: under
the trees today lie the almost invisible remains of
six Palestinian villages which were destroyed in
1948 and their inhabitants murdered or expelled.
One of the villages, Ein al-Zeitun, situated about
a mile north-west of Safad on a road which led to
the village of Meirun, a notable place of Jewish
pilgrimage, has achieved some celebrity in
books and lilm. For some years its inhabitants
had been a thorn in the llesh of the Jews of Safad
and the subjugation of that city (principally popu-
lated by Arabs) was deemed to require the prior
capture of Ein al-Zeitun. On May 2, the village
was attacked, the inhabitants were rounded up,
many of the men and boys killed and the
women, children and the elderly driven out. It
was a pattern repeated many times during the
Arab-Israeli war fought between November
1947 and the end of 1948, when more than
700,000 Arabs lled or were expelled from the
areas that fell under the control of Israel, a ligure
which represented 85 per cent of the Arabs who
had lived there previously.
Why did the refugees leave? One view,
l l a n Papp e
THE ETHN IC CL EA NSING OF
PALESTINE
320pp. One WorldPublications. £14.99.
978 18516846 70
which for long remained the principa l Zioni st
explan ation, but which is more or less worth-
less, was that the refugee s left because they
were ordered to do so by their leaders. A second
view was that they left because they wanted to
get away from the lighting and intended to
return when times became quieter. To anyone
familiar with images of long co lumns of French
refugees moving west and south in the summer
of 1940 this explanation seemed plausib le
enough and it turned attention away from the An Arab refugee, Pal estin e, 1948
causes of the departure of the Arabs and
towards the Israeli decision in June 1948 not rence for which the regular forces of the Jewish murder s and expulsions were deliberate and
to allow them to return. But from the beginning community, the Yishuv, were not responsible. intended to drive out the Arabs. A second line
another factor was recognized, name ly the fear With the opening of Israeli arch ives from the of inqu iry, led by the Israeli-Arab historian,
of being murdered by Jewis h forces. It was 1980s and the emergenc e of the so-called new Nur Masalha, produced evidence which demon-
acknow ledged that the massacre at Deir Yassin historians, evidence has been produced, particu- strated , contrary to previous views, that Zion-
in April 1948 inspired great fear in some Arab s. larly by Benny Morris in his Birth of the Pales- ists had long contemp lated the compu lsory
However, although Arab writers laid much tinian Refugee Problem (1988), that Israeli transfer, as it was called, of the Arab popu lation
stress on this factor, other historians tended to atrocities were much more numerous that had of the future Jewish state. And, finally, the Arab
think that Deir Yassin was an isolated occur- been suppose d; moreover , that in many cases historian Walid Khalidi uncovered some of the

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 POLITICS

story of the lost Palestinian Arab villages. To
Arab writers all this was proof of a deep Zionist
plot , ruthlessly executed in 1948, to clear Arabs
out of the Jewish state . Morris, however,
despite his detailed researches in the Israe li
archives, found no evidence to support this
theory. Yes, Zionists had long speculated about
transfer, and yes , Israeli unit s expelled Arabs,
but there was no systematic policy of expulsion.
Even in the second edition of his book (2003),
Morris concluded that, in the last analysis, the
refugee problem was created by military fac-
tors, the unsteady progress of a war which the
Arabs began. Local commanders may ha ve
been influenced by a con viction that Israel
wo uld be better off with as few Arab s as cou ld
be contrived but there were no directions
from the centre to that effect; orders to units of
the Israe li army always emphasised what was
necessary to win the war.
With this background it is possib le to under-
stand the importance of the contribution made in
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan
Pappe , a historian from the University of Haifa.
Pappe argues that there was indeed a central
policy of expu lsion sufficient to ju stify the use of
the term "ethnic cleansing". He claim s that in the
autumn of 1947 the Yishuv leader, Da vid Ben
Gurion , called into existence a shadowy, infor-
mal, unofficial body, with a shifting membership
and little direct recor d of its tran sactions, espe-
ciall y to consider and make recommendations to
implement a policy of expelling the Arab popu la-
tion. The body was anon ymou s: Pappe calls it
the Consu ltancy. Information about its proceed-
ings is found in the letters and diarie s of those
who took part in its meetings, especially those of
Ben Gurion him self. Its membership consisted
of politic al and military figure s and of experts on
Arab affairs; one important and inIluential
member was Joseph Weit z, who had acquired an
intimate knowledge of Arab villages and who
was an old and powerful advocate of expu lsion .
Weit z played a central role at what Pappe calls
the Long Seminar, a three-day meeting of
the Con sultancy in Ben Gurion's house at New
Year 1948. Uniquely, a protocol for this meeting
exist s in the Haganah archives. At the meeting it
was accepted that the exist ing policy of retalia-
tion and casual destruction of Arab houses prac-
tised by Yishuv force s was inadequate and that
a more aggre ssive policy of systematic attacks
on Arab villages , destruction of house s and the
transfer of their inhabitants was required. Weit z
was given perm ission to form a sma ll tran sfer
committee and militar y commander s were
encouraged to act in such a way as to promote
the polic y of expulsion. These developments of
polic y paved the way for the adoption and
imp lementation of the famous Plan Da let - "the
mast er plan for the expu lsion of all the villages
in rural Palestine" , as Pappe describes it, in
direct contradiction of the judgement of Benny
Morris - in April 1948. At that time the Yishuv
passed to the offen sive and extended its opera-
tions deep into the area designated by the United
Nations for the Arab state of Palestine. Similar
princip les informed later campaigns, including
the ruthles s forays into Galilee and the Negev in
the autumn of 1948.
In a second way Pappe departs from the
prevailing views of Israeli historian s. Both tradi-
tional and new historians agree that the war was
a major factor and that the Yishuv was forced on
to the defen sive in the perio d from December
1947 to March 1948 and again in the latter part
of May and earl y June 1948, after the armie s of
the neighbouring Arab states entered Palestine .
At these time s, they argue, the Jew s of Palestine
were lighting for survi val and were in no posi-
tion to execute an aggressi ve polic y of ethnic
clean sing . Pappe take s a different view , rejects
the familiar David-and-Goliath metap hor used to
describe the contestants in the war, and sugge sts
that Ben Gurion was not especially worried by
the military situation and felt free to look at less
immediate issues, in partic ular what he saw as
the nece ssity of removing most of the Arab s
from the Jewi sh state . His orders, therefore, were
not dictated by militar y exigenc y but by longer-
term political con siderations. Nor does Pappe
accept that the Arabs started the war or that they
refused to accept Israeli rule: the true situation
was much more ambig uous , he claims .
It is clear that Pappe will be criticized on
both the se points. It will be argued that the evi-
dence for the exi stence of the Consultanc y and
for the role he ascribes to it is all too ten uous. It
should be said in Pappes defence, however,
that this situation cou ld hardl y be oth erwi se.
For international and domestic political rea son s
Ben Gurion had to keep any plan s for expulsion
secret. It will also be said that Pappe !lies in the
face of much evi dence to the contrary when he
denie s that the war was so great a factor in
Israeli calculations as is usua lly supposed .
And yet he de serves prai se for a rea l effort to
offer an alternative explanation for what other-
wise seem s on the face of it to be a strange
coincidence. The Zioni sts want ed the Palestin-
ian Arabs to go, they did go , and Israeli actions
helped to produce that result. But we ha ve been
asked to believe that , while this may have been
the con sequ ence of some vague general Yis hu v
con sen sus, the outcome was not the result of
any orders from the centre and that the depar-
ture of so many Arab s from Israel was no more
than a happy acci dent for Israel.
One of the most dangerous forms of rea son-
ing is that from moti ve: if someone want s a parti-
cular resu lt or benelits by it he or she is prob-
ably responsible for procuring that outcome. On
this basis one cou ld even argu e, as many Arabs
ha ve done, that Israelis were behind 9/1 1. Pappe
has tried hard to avoid this peri l. Whether he has
succeeded remains to be seen, but he has
opened up an important new line of inq uiry into
the vast and fateful subject of the Palestinian ref-
ugee s. His book is rewarding in other ways. It
has at times an elegiac, even sentimental charac-
ter, recalling the lost, ob literated life of the
Palestinian Arab s and imagining or regretting
what Ilan Pappe believes cou ld have been a bet-
ter land of Palestine , one forme d on something
like the long-discarded ideas of the binationalist
scholar Judah Magnes.
Attractive as the binational idea may seem,
one wonders whether it cou ld have worked. The
Z ioni st leaders were determined that Israel
should be democratic and if that were the case
it coul d not also be mu lticultural. Before
Turkey cou ld become secu lar it had to rid itself
of its Chri stian s and before Israel co uld be
democratic it had to remo ve most of the Arabs.
Democracy and mu lticu lturali sm are very
uncomfortable bedfe llo ws: mo st recently in
Yugoslavia and in Iraq multicu ltura l states ha ve
been wrecked by democracy.

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t he Univers ity of Lon don' s School of Adva nc ed St udy.
Fo r more deta ils , a nd to re giste r,
please visit www.philoso phy.sa s .a c.uk. Tel +44 (0)20 78 6 2 8 68 3 .

- 3 3- T LS APRIL 27 2007
 CLASSIFIED CONFERENCES

UNIVER SITY
APPOINTMENTS
Renewals:
Prince Fahad Bin Sultan University, Tabuk, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
(With Technical Assistance from the American University of Beirut) Refiguring University
is seeking qualified faculty in the following fields: English in the 21st Century
a. En glish Language, English Literature, Applied Lingui stics, TEFLlTESLffESOL
Minimum qualification : M.A. (Ph.D. preferred); high level of spoken and written English; and
teaching experience (preferab ly some experience in the Middle East). B.A . holders will also be
considered for the Orientation Progra m Unit (pre-Freshman) with a minimum teaching
experience of three years.

b. Humanities and Social Science s Program This second English Subject Centre international
Minimum qu alifications: Ph.D. in sociology, anthropology, psychology, or history; high level conference will address the matter of English as a discipline
of spoken and written English; and teaching experience. through performance, writing, rehearsal, technologies,
pedagogy - all the ways inwhich studentsand scholars
c. Mathematics and Computer SciencelI nfor mation Technology 'do' their subject.
Primary responsibilities will be the teaching of introductory level courses in the Orientation
Program Unit, although there may also be an opportunity to leach upper-level courses. Strands include:
Minimum qualifications: M.A./M.Sc., high level of spoken and written English, and teaching
experience. • Pedagogy· Performance· Creative- critical crossover
• New writing/e-writing • Style and language
d. College of Information Technology Faculty Positions in Computer Engineer ing, Compnter • Life writing
Science, Information Systems, or a closely-related field.
Minimum qualifi cations: Ph.D., high level of spoken and written English, and teaching
Speakers include:
experience .
_ - English
• Alan Liu • Andrew Motion • . 0 Subject
. . ' :' Centre
e. Technicia ns to run the computer labs. • Elaine Showalter • Jonathan Bate •
Minimum qualifications: R.Sc. in Computer Science or related discipline, high level of spoken
and writte n English, and tcaehing experience.
Tofind out moreor to register, visit
Salaries and Benefit s www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/renewals
Salaries are competitive and commensurate with qualifications. Benefits include housing, annual
round trip travel, medical insurance, and settling allowance.

Contac t
-.. . EVENTS

11
Applications must include a letter of interest, teaching. research, and service statements. complete O'
Forum for European Philosophy
curriculum vitae, and the names. e-mails, and addresses of at least three professional references. . Annual Lecture Seriesand Conference Secularism
Interested candidates should send their applications to the following address by mid-May 2007: . • '0
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Jacobsen Programme for New York , N.Y. 10024
212-595-4219; fax 212-875-1948 11.15 -12.30
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TheRoyal Institute of Philosophy is pleased to offerfree1O-week AUDIO BOOKS 2.00-3.15
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The Roya/ lnstitute of Philosophy, 14 Gordon Square. DOCUMENTARIES TalalAsad
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 THI S W E EK ' S C O NTRI B UTO RS IN N E X T W E E K 'S
C h itra lek ha Ba su is Dep uty Features Richard C oles is Lectur er at St Heathers to Veronic a M ars was Alan R yan is W ard en of New
Edi tor at The St atesman . Bo to lp h ' s C hurch, Bos ton . pub lishe d last year. Co llege , Oxford . His books incl ude

M ary Beard is the co- author of The
Colosseum , publ ished last year, and
o f Classics: A very shor t intro du ctio n,
1995 . She is the Classic s ed itor of
the TLS .
Bettina Bildha uer is a lec turer in
Germa n at the Univers ity ofSt
Andre ws . Her book M ediev al Blood
was publi shed last yea r.
P aul Binding ' s With Vine- leaves ill
Hi s Hair: lbsen and the artist was
publi shed last year. Hi s no vel My
Cous in the Writ er appeared in 2002.
Ti m Bl annin g ' s new book, The
Pursuit ofGlory: Europ e 1648- 18 15 ,
is published th is mon th. He is
Professor of Modern European
Hi stor y at the Un ivers ity of
C ambridge, and the author o f The
Culture oJ Power and the Pow er of
Cultur e: Old regim e Europe,
1660 -1 789 ,2002.
Mich a el Cain es is ed iti ng a book on
Dav id Garrick. Hi s antho logy of plays
b y eigh teen th -cen tur y wo men was
publi shed in 2004.
Br yan C heyett e is C ha ir in
Mode rn Litera ture at the University
o f Reading. H is books include Muri el
Spa rk , 2000, and , as co -ed itor , The
Im age ofthe Je w in Eu rop ean Lib era l
Cultur e 1789- 1914, 200 1.
Matthew C o b b is Senior Lectu rer in
Animal Behavio ur at the Un ivers ity of
Manc he ster. Hi s book The Egg and
Sp erm Ra ce: The se vente enth-cent ury
scie ntis ts who unra velled the sec rets
of sex, life and gro wth wa s publ ished
last year.
Lucy Dalla s is the editor o f the TLS
w ebs ite and In Brief pages.
Ale x Danche v is Pro fe ssor of
Int ern ati on al Rel at ion s at the
Un iversity of No tting ha m . H is mo st
recent bo o ks are the co llectio n of
essays The 1raq w ar and D emo cratic
Politics, 2004, and George s Braque:
A biograp hy, j ust ou t in pape rba ck .
S tep hen Darwall is Professor o f
Philosophy at the Univers ity o f
Mi chigan. H is mo st recent book is The
Sec ond- Per son Standpoint: Mo rali ty,
respect, and acc ounta bility , pu bli shed
last year.
.lohn Da rwin is a Fe llo w o f N uffield
Co lle ge , O xford, and the author of
Britain and Decolonisation , 19 88. His
h istory o f empire , After Tamerlane , is
pu blished th is mo nth .
J on G arvie is a freel an ce write r livin g
in London.
S he ila Hale' s book, The M all Who
Lost His Lan guage , is pub lished in
pape rb ack th is mon th. She is working
on a biograph y o f T itian.
M . J ohn Harrison' s most recent
novel , Nova Sw ing, w as published last
year. His co llectio n of sho rt stories,
Things That Ne ver Happ en, appeared
in 2004 .
Nicola Humble is a Se nior Lectu rer in
E ng lis h at Roeham pton Univers ity .
Her Culina ry Pleasures: Coo kboo ks
and the transform ati on of Briti sh f ood
w as published in 2005 .
Roz Ka veney ' s boo k Teen D reams:
Reading teen film and televi sion fr om
j ohn K eep is the co -aut ho r of
Stalinism: Russian and Western
views at the turn ofthe Millenn ium ,
2004 . His Last ofthe Emp ires : A
history ofthe So viet Union,
1945- 1991 ap pe ared in 19 95.
G iles Kime is the dr in ks
co rre spo nde nt for the Sunday
Teleg rap h and is a for me r ed itor
of Decan ter Ma gazin e .
j ohn Kinsella ' s mo st rece nt
co llec tio n of poems, The New
Arcadia, was pub lished in 2005 .
He is a Fe llo w of C hurc h ill Co lleg e,
Cambridge .
U r ia h Kriegel is A ssistant Pro fessor
of Ph ilosop hy (a nd Co g niti ve
Sc ience) and A ssociate Director of
the Ce nter for Co nsc iousness Stud ies
at th e Uni ver sity of A rizo na , as we ll
as SES QUI Fellow at the Univers ity
o f Syd ne y.
N a ta sha Lehrer is De put y Edi tor
of the Jewish Qu arterly .
John McDowell is University Professor
of Philosop hy at the University of
Pittsburgh. He is the author of Mind and
World , 1994, and two essay co llect ions
publi shed in 1998.
Thomas Mea ney is the lit erary edi tor
o f the New York SUIl.
Patrick O 'Connor was Co ns ulting
Editor to The Ne w Grov e Dictionary
of Opera , 199 8. His book To ulou se-
Lautrec: The nightlife oJ Paris
ap peared in 19 9 1.
Matthew J. R eisz is Ed itor of the
Jewish Qu art erl y .
TLS
John Dewey and the High Tide of
Am eri can Liberalism , 1996 , Ber trand
Russell: A political life, 1988, and The
Philosophy ofJohn Stuar t Mill ,
seco nd editio n 1987.
Duncan Salkeld teach es in the
De partm ent of E ng lis h at the
University of C hic he ster. He is the
autho r of M adness and Drama in the AndrewKahn
A ge oJSh ak espeare, 1993.
Da vid Wheatley ' s poe ms feature in
R etrial for
the first volu me of The Wak e For est
Seri es ofIrish Poetry, 2005 . Hi s mo st
j oseph Brod sky
recent co llec tio n of poems is Mocker,
pub lished la st year.
Hugo Williams ' s most recent James M. Murphy
co llectio n of poem s is Dear Room ,
pub lished last year. In m edi a
C lai r Wills ' s new bo ok, That Neu tral
wars
Island: A cultura l history oJ Ireland
durin g th e Second World War, wa s
pub lished la st mo nth. She is Professor
oflr ish Literatu re at Q ueen Mary,
University of Lond on .
Denis Feaney
Frances Wilson ' s book abou t
Doroth y Word sworth w ill be
T echnically
pub lished next year. She is the a uthor ero tic
of The Courtesan 's Revenge: The life
ofHa rriett e Wil son , the woman who
blackmail ed the Killg, 2003.
Andrea Wulf is the co-author of Thi s lan Bostridge
Oth er Eden: Sev en g reat ga rdens and
300 years oJ En glish history , 2005 . H andelon
M . E . Yapp is the ed itor of Politics
and diplom acy ill Egyp t, 19 97. T he th e stage
re vised ed itio n of The Near Ea st since
the First World War wa s pub lishe d
in 19 96.

A UTHOR, A UTHOR 1,345 TLS CRO S SWORD 692

Readers are invited to identify the three on, over there ? T he se nde r of th e first co rrect so lutio n op en ed on Ma y 18
quotations which follow, and to send The restaura nt buzzes. She might as we ll w ill receive a cas h pri ze of £40.
the answers so that they reac h this office be on Mars. E ntri es sho uld be addre ssed to TLS C rosswor d 692 ,
nol ater thanM ay 18. Time s Ho use , I Pe nnin g ton Stree t, Lo ndon E9 8 IBS .
A prize of £25 is offered for the first 3 Julia had practised almost to lassitude the
correct entr y opened on that date. art of tracing in the people who looked at her The winner of Crosswo rd 688 is Derek Jervi s, Bogn or Regis.
Entrie s, marked " Author , Aut hor 1,345" the impression promptly sequent; but it was
on the en velope, should be addressed to a singular fact that if, in irritation, in depres- SOL UTIO N TO CROSS WOR D 688
the Edi tor, The TLS, Time s House, I sion, she felt that the lighted eyes of men,
L Y S I S T R A T A S C A R
Pennington Stre et, London E98 I BS. stupid at their clearest, had given her pretty U A 0 E I A E
Th e solution will appear on Ma y 25. well all she should ever care for, she could K A B A L E V S K Y G L Y N
stillgather a freshness from the tribute of her E A Z I H M I A

I As I was waiting for the bus own sex, still care to see her reftexion in the R I C H E N 0 B A R B U S
A girl came up the street, faces of women. Never, probably, never M S E W N J A C
A U M 0 N I E R J 0 A N N E
Detectable as double-plu s would that sweet be tasteless - with such a
R I R B R N
At seve n hundred feet. straight grim spoon was it mostly adminis- P S M I T H B A R B A R I C
tered, and so flavoured and strengthened by R 0 S M S A E E
2 - Black hair, comp lexion Latin , the competence of their eyes. Women knew E P 0 N Y M 0 U S R I D D

jewe lled eyes so much best how a woman surpassed - ho w L N N R A B ~ I

downcast ... The slob beside her and where and why, with no touch or tor- A B L E R 0 U N 0 A B 0 U T
T I S I R N E
feasts . . . What wonders is she sitting ment of it lost on them . M
E A T H M E M 0 R A N D U
ANSWERS C O M PETITIO N N O 1,341
ACROSS DOWN
WINN ER : PHlLIP T UDOR 1 Not to be confused with one of one ' s own (6, 4) 1 Associated with ferret by Louisa M. Alcott? (4)
I . . . mihi quidem ipsi quid est quod iam 3 He said he had recen tly been looking 6 Let it remain in Durrell' s tetra logy (4) 2 Joyce the novelist (4)
ad vitae fructum possit adquiri, cum prae- over the old books in his grandfather' s 9 Vehicle Mr Frayn gives Woo lf s ecce ntric intellectual ( 10) 3 The Ma ster' s gin, for instance, from No rth Sea port , say (6, 6)
sertim neque in honore neque in gloria library. I was expecting piety of some 10 Bad mark for behaviour in Vigo film (4) 4 Early fifth columnist from Acc ra (habitual collaborator) (5)
virtutis quicquam videam altius quo mihi sort; but there was none. They were tcrri- 12 20' s poem about the sun coming back at last? (3, 4, 2, 3) 5 O ur sly one, perhaps like Uriah Heep, may act in a
libeat ascendere? ... Denique ita me in re ble books for the most part, he said. 15 Akenside' s were in the imag inatio n (9) troublesome way (9)
publica tractabo ut meminerim semper "Memoir s and boasting" . .. . and "boast- 17 "T hus in thy - box Thou dost inclose us" (George 7 Traditionally the best jo kes in Wesker work (3, 3, 4)
quae gesserim, curemq ue ut ea virtute non ing" - with the special bite Julian had Herbert)(5) 8 "... an uncompromi sing girl whom none of them liked; a
casu gesta esse videantur. given it - was now made fresh and new for 18 Wi ld eve nings in Paris for Hall Caine protago nist (5) suspect of- " (Evelyn Wa ugh) (to)
Cicero, In Catilinam . Ill. me. I became aware of how constantly 19 Disgracefully rig survey of Simms work (3, 6) 11 Bail out to describ e dramati st with ailment ( 12)
people boasted, especially in public 20 Word sworth said that there was no doubt this p(x)r man was 13 Helper swam despair ingly to reach one-legged sailor 's
2 They gave me my battalion before the places. I heard them boasting in restau- mad (7, 5) quarry (5, 5)
Somm e, and I came out of that weary bat- rants; I heard them boasting in airport 24 No velist familiarly known as author of Ra venshoe (4 ) 14 General name for playwright ( 10)
tle after the first big Sept ember fighting queues. Men boasted to men, mainly; 25 Resemblin g As You Like It, or apiece by Beckett ( 10) 16 Dane' s and Berger' s Ama zon units? (9)
with a crack in my head and a D.S.O .. I women boasted to wome n, using a special 261t is therefor e in Cartesian ob ser vation (4) 21 Let first literary efforts add some excitement (5)
had recei ved a C.B. for the Erzerum boasting voice they never used with men 27 Evaluation of Mod estine, perhap s, by some chaps at start of 22 Juliet and Romeo, both get instrument backing (4)
business, so what with the se and my ... . I think of Julian whenever I think of 10m (10) 23 Indian from Cumberland( 4)
Matebele and So uth Africa n medals and the word "boasting", or when I hear peo-
the Legion of Honour, I had a chest like ple boasting: the boasting he hated, and
the High Priest' s breastplate. suffered from.
John Buc han, Mr Standfa st. Part I, V. S. Naipaul, "Memoirs and Boasting", in
Chapt er One. A Dedicated Fall: Julian Jebb 1934-1984.

- 35- TLS APR IL 2 7 200 7

 arie Antoinette did not wear red,
TLS flingly claustrophobic court an authorit y she

M white and blue to the Revo lution, or

jewe llery which had been fashioned
out of stones from the walls of the Bastille, or
A frigate on her head otherwise lacked durin g the first seven years of
her marriage, when her position as dauphine
was rendered increa singly weak by her hus-
shoe buckles engraved with "Long live the band' s failure to impre gnate her. (Weber goes
Nation" and trimmed with tricolour ribbon. Nor FRANCES WILSON along with the theory that the dauphin had an
did she wear a "bonnet a la Bastille", topped by over-tight foreskin , but Marie Antoinette' s
white satin "towers" and surrounded with a Caroline Weber brother, Joseph 11 , heard from Louis himse lf
black lace "balustrade" in imitation of the that he "introduces the member, stays there
prison ' s pre-siege arch itecture . She wore Q UEE N OF FASHION without moving for perhap s two minute s, with-
instead , as Madame de la Tour du Pin put it, one What Mari e Antoin ette wore to the Revolution dra ws without ejacu lation and says good-
of her "everyday gown s" , "but elabor ately 352pp. Aurum.£18.99. nigh!"). As the marriag e remained unconsum-
decorat ed and absolutel y co vered in diamond s". 978 I 84513205 7 mated , Marie Antoinette "could at least do her
Marie Antoinette used clothe s to express her best to resemb le a real dauphin e - to appear , as
autonomy and her sartorial attitud es always pro- and a Ilower. The portraits, which she thought one courti er later expressed it as if she had been
voked a reaction : while the nation was con- endearing, were generally loathed . At times like born for the throne ". Before long her wardrob e,
cerned with eliding social differenc e, the Queen this, when the Queen appeared defiantl y unglit- filled with gowns she wore only once , took up
determined on "defiantly glittering". tering, her style was interpreted not as a recogni- three entire room s of Versaille s.
Of course, by the time she got to the guillo- tion of equalit y (of sorts) but one more mark of Weber ' s focus on the semiology of the
tine, Marie Antoinette was wearing that plain the Austrian licentiousness she had injected into Queen 's style is most successful in her analysis
white dress in which she looked so becoming in her adopted countr y. of the notoriou s "Diamond Necklac e Affa ir". In
the paint ing by Will iam Hamilton and so fright- The most hated woman in France is in the 1784, when Marie Antoin ette was scandalizing
ful in the sketch by Jacque s Louis David, and in midst of a retrial. Queen of Fashion is part of the countr y with her white muslin "gau llcs" , a
prison she had worn widow' s weeds in mourn- the tidal wave of sympathy for the doom ed con- prostitute was paid by an impoveri shed aristo-
ing for the executed King. But before that, in the sort generated by Antonia Frasers defence of crat called Jeanne de La Motte to impersonate
days when she kept perfumed sheep at the Petit her exce sses in Mari e Antoinette: The journey the Queen and pass a message to Cardina l de
Trianon , Marie Antoinett e had frolicked about (2001), and Soph ia Coppo las celebr ation of Rohan in the gardens of Versaille s. Clad in the
in a loose white chemi se of the kind which was them in her giddy MTV- style biopic loosely infamou s peasant costume, the prostitute
now being adopted by the people as a sign of based on Frasers book, Mari e Antoinette handed Rohan a rose and murmured "you know
demo cracy. Two portraits painted by Elisabeth (2006) . An academic with an interest in women what this means". Con vinced by La Motte that
Vigee-Lebrun durin g the Queen ' s "pastoral" more remembered for their fashion than for any Marie Antoinette had ju st given him permission
period show her not as a monarch, absolute and other statement they may have made (Jackie to buy her a particularl y vulgar diamond neck-
imperiou s, but as a spontaneous and fresh-faced Onassis and Diana, Princess of Wale s get a men- lace, the Cardinal duly paid the required 1.6
woman much like any other, with flowing hair tion although Imelda Marcos doe s not), Caro- million Iivres to the jewe llers and waited for
A J ohn Ga lIiano gown comme morating royal favours to ensue. Pocketin g the diamonds
Marie Antoi nette; th e embroide re d hip herself, Jeanne de La Motte fled.
pan els de pict her in a shep herdess costume The brilliance of La Motte' s heist was to
at her pal ace, and in r ags on her way to the anticipat e not only that the Cardinal would
guillotine. From th e book und er review. believe that Marie Antoinette should want a
bauble of that sort, but that he would mistake
line Weber takes a rather different approach . If the prostitute for the Queen: and herein lay the
Marie Antoinette stands accused of caking her power of the dress. "It had been a stroke of gen-
hair in the flour that was needed for bread , it is ius on La Motte' s part" , Weber writes,
less because she was indifferent to the nation' s to intuit that Rohan would read the "gaulle" as
hunger than because she was a fashion victim; proof not ju st of its wearer's identit y, but also,
and who amon g us, member s of the jur y, could implicitly, of the Queen' s willingness to
not be found guilty of that? engage in non -royal beha viour.
Marie Antoinette became the image of all that Having already provoked public outrage on
was wrong with France, and through careful the Queen's person at the Salon of 1783, the
analysis of her sartorial choices Weber reveals plain whit e gown now figured , to a bigger -
not only how various, and how selfconscious, than -ever readin g public , as a clear sign of her
those images were, but "the startling consist- mu ltifaceted wickedness.
ency and force with which her costumes trig- The argument is sustained with great style
. wed in the gered severe socio-politica l disorder". Weber unti l the very end of the book , when it quick ly
\<s revle r
All bOO
t-,
a millionot, ,e treats as Marie Antoinette' s principal relation- come s apart at the seams. The prose in the
lLS and over available from ship the one she enj oyed with her dressmaker, final two chapter s, "Black" and "White", turns
,. '" t are I, hOP
·tles In pn" , S BOO....5 Rose Bertin , while the principal events in her purple , most strikingly in Weber' s description
tl the TL d prices with life are her selections of hair, clothes and jew els. of Marie Anto inette' s final luminous costume,
at discounte . the UK. Thi s is an origina l, almost Wildean, approach to when she all but loses her head: "White the
fREE delivery In biography, and in general it works very well. colour of the Ileur-de-Iys and of a young bride ' s
From the moment the young bride, en route compl exion. White the colour of a cor set' s
dvice, bOO\< from Vienna to Versailles, had her clothes whalebone stays. White the colour of costum e
e and a 'A-
removed in a purpose-built wooden pavilion, to parties and sleigh rides in the snow. White the
Assist anc ping , gl' \.
gift-Wrap . be re-attired down to her underwear in French colour of a powdered head . . ." and so on
catalOgues, mendatlons cloth, Marie Anto inette fought to regain control through ten more example s until we reach ,
reCom m
vouchers, estions frO of her body. Weber argues that her male riding "White the colour of a ghost too beautiful, or at
and sUgg d helpful wear, her refusal to lace herself up in corsets, least too wilful, to die" .
able an
\<nowledge boO\<sellers. and the three-foot-tall Marge Simp son-style
"poufs" on which she would display issues of ,- _
© Th e T ime s Lit erary S upplement Lim ited . 2007. Published and lice nsed
topical importance - such as an Olive tree with for distri bution in elect ronic and all other de rivat ive forms by The Times
Lite rary Supp leme nt Lim ited , Times House, 1 Penning ton Street,
a serpent wrapped around on the occasion of the Londo n E98 1SS, England . Telepho ne 020- 778 2 5000 , w ithout w hose
King' s smallpox inocu lation, or the French frig- express pe rm ission no part may be reprodRoa uced. Pr inted by N ,I.N, Ltd. Kitli ng
d, Presco t, Merseys ide, L3 4
ate she sported on her head when the countr y 1 7> 9H N, Eng land . Subscription rates
including postage are: UK £ 115 ,
Europe £ 140 , USA $ 169. Canada
won a naval victory against the British - were $225, ROW £165 . EURO PEAN
means by which she asserted her independen ce. PR ICES : Be lgi um £2.8 5, Franc e
£2 .85 , Germ any £4 .20, Greece
Cross-dressing or power-dressing, Marie £4 .20 , It aly £4.00, Netherlands
£4 .20 , Portugal £3.10, Spa in
Antoinette was able to masquerade to a sti- 9 77 03 07 66 to 13 £2 .65. CANAD IA N PR ICES
Toronto $5 ,20. Ou tside $5.45

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