Richard Davenport-Hines Life before

Viagra George Garnett The English

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

Gulags without guards

I{ate Brown

To be a baker's boy
Bee Wilson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C ove r picture : © Jonath an Kant or Stu dio. O th er pict ures rep rodu ced by kind permission o f: p3 © R cutcr slJacky Na cgclcn : pf © G etty Images: p2 0 © Ca rhcrinc Ashmore ; p21 © T he R on ald Grant
Ar chi ve ; p24 © AK G Im agesfErich Lessing; p29 © AKG Im ages
© T he Times Literary Supplem ent Limited , 2007. Published and licensed for distribution in electroni c and all other derivative forms by T he Times Literary Supplem ent Limited, Times H ouse, 1 Pcnn ington Street , London E98 IB S Tel ephon e: 020-
778 2 5000 Fax: 020- 7782 4966 Ecruail: lctterswthc- tls.co .uk T LS subscription rates (12 months/52 issues): U K£ 115, Europ e £ 140, US A S169, Ca nada (Air freight) $225, R est ofW orld (Airm ail)£ 165. Please send cheque or credit card detailsto:
T LS Subscriptions, Tower H ouse, Sovereign Park, M arket H arborough , LE87 4JJ, U K. T clephon e 01858 438781. For U S and Canad a please send to: TL S Subscrip tions, r .o . Box 3000 D cnvil lc, NJ 0783 4, USA . Telephone 1-8003709040
(IK' \\' subscriptions only) and 1-800 783 4903 (general enq uiries]. T he T LS (ISSN 0307 66 1, US PS 02 1-626) is published weekly and distrib uted in the U SA by O C S America Inc, 49-27 3 1stStreet, Long Island C ity, N Y 11101-311 3. Periodicals
postage paid at Long Island C ity, NY and at additional mailing offices. PO STM AST ER : send address corrections to TL S, p.a . Box 3000, D cnville, NJ 07834, US A

Slaves to dough
The rebirth of French bread, with dignity but without sweat
o be a baker' s boy in eighteenth-
T centur y Paris must have been pretty
close to hell. You were effectively a
slave, both to your master and to the
intricate demands of sourdough fermentat ion .
The working "day" began close to midnig ht.
Wearing roug h, uncomfortable underwear
made from old flour sacks, you were forced to
knead as much as 200 Ib of doug h at a time ,
using nothing but your hands and - in despera-
tion - your feet. This kneading took place not
once but many times over the night, usually in a
clam my ce llar too dark for you to see what you
were doing, and so hot that the dough
sometimes melted before it had risen. The
baker' s boy in charge of kneading was known
as le geindre, the groaner, on account of the
blood-curdling noises he made as he worked .
When you were finally granted rest, sometime
in the morning , you were obliged to sleep in the
blinding heat of the bakery. After three hours,
you were forced to wake up again , to minister
to the sourdoug h starter, which, like a newborn
child, req uired round-the-clock feeding . In
1788, the journalist Louis-Seba stien Mercier
described how unhea lthy bakers' apprentices
looked . Unlike butchers' boys, who were robust
and ruddy, baker s' boys were flour-coated
wretches, huddli ng in doorway s, haggard and
white .
All this misery was required to serve the pani-
mania of the French. Bread signifie d more to
the French than it did to other nations. It was
not just subsistence; it was a sacre d matter, as
well as an affair of state. The Comm union
wafer was holy, but so was the ordinary white
sourdoug h loaf of eve ryday life. To turn a loaf
upside down was con sidered bad luck, akin to
sacrilege . Before eati ng, it was customary to
trace the sign of the cross over the bread using a
knife . In 1789, the Encyclopedic met hodique
noted that " most peop le" in France " believe[d]
they would die of hunger if there [were] no
bread" - even if other food was availa ble. The
"tyrann y of bread", as Steven Laurence Kaplan
has it, tied the French toget her.
Kaplan, who probably knows more about
French bread than anyone alive, does not make
enough, perhaps, of how the French approac h to
carbohydrates differed from that of their neigh-
bours. By 1789, the Italians were swapping the
crustiness of bread for the slipperiness of pasta.
Across the channel, the British were abandon-
ing bread in favour of sugar. During the eight-
ee nth cen tury, British sugar co nsum ptio n
increased eightfold, to 16 lb per person per
year. W ith all these sweet ca lories, bread was
no longer so vital, especially since much British
bread now came adulterate d with alum, an
astringent chemica l which co uld make white
porou s loaves out of poor quality flou r. In
France, thoug h, bread remained relative ly pure
- and essen tial. Life without bread was unthink-
able. To have "lost the taste for bread" was syn-
ony mous with losing the will to live. By the end
of the nineteenth ce ntury, the average French-
man was still consumi ng close to a kilo of bread
per day. And "bread" for the French had
SOCIAL STUDIES
B E E WIL SO N
S t e v e n L aur e nc e K apl an
GOOD B R E A D I S BACK
A con tem porar y history of French bread , the way it
is made, and the people who make it
376pp. Duke University Press. $27.95; distributed
in the UK by Co mbined Academic Publ ishers.
£16.99.
978 08223 3833 8
extremely stringent and precise connotatio ns,
well cruste d with an alveolated crumb, kneaded
from white flour and made by a slow and
arduous process of fermentation and baking.
All consumptio n has its costs . Wh ile the cost of
Britain' s sweet toot h was the slave-dri ven sugar
colonies , the cost of France' s passion for bread
was the terrible life of the baker.
Eighteenth-ce ntury bakers were under threat
from all sides - from their customer s, who,
dependent on them for their subsiste nce, often
treated them with an unwarrante d hatred and
suspicion; from millers, whom the bakers
viewed as thieve s and scoundre ls, crea ming off
a portion of the wheat they sent them to mill;
from the State, which fiercely reg ulated the
price and weig ht of a loaf, sometimes setti ng
impossi ble standards on the bakers, such as the
requ irement that all loaves be of a certain
weig ht, not allowing for the fact that the same
A French baker with a model made out of bread by Jean Paul Gaultier, at the
Cartier Foundation for Art, Paris, June 15,2004
- 3-
weig ht of do ugh will bake up to differe nt
weig hts of bread ; and from their com petito rs,
for however miserable it might be baking bread,
they still wanted to sell as much of it as they
cou ld. Kaplan has already written the definitive
history of ancie n regime bakers - The Bakers of
Paris and the Bread Question, 1700-1 775
(1996 ). Good B read Is Ba ck co vers some of the
same story from a differe nt ang le. A magnifi-
cent com bination of polemic and scholarship
(marred only by an inadequate index), it asks
how the superlative French bread of the eight-
eenth, nineteenth and early twentieth cent uries
gave way to the disappointing industria l loaves
of the 1960s on wards; and how these , in turn,
have been happily supplanted by a new genera-
tion of artisanal baguettes, batards and boules.
Kaplan recog nizes that the yearni ng of the
French for "the good bread of yeste ryear" is
ofte n an exercise in nostalgia. This kind of wish-
ing and dreaming about bread can act ually be
co unter-productive . It was exac tly this kind of
nostalgia that ena bled the post-war baguette to
become so debased :
During the Second World War the only bread
ava ilable to the ord inary citizen in France was
a heavy, coarse, and sticky dark bread (pain
bis) of dubious quality and thoroughly unappe-
tising. The resultant nostalgia for white wheat
bread led to the development, after the war, of
a new method, that produce d a voluminous and
very white bread, light and attractive but
"washed out", "denatured" and essentially
tasteless. This is for all practical purpo ses the
bread that most French peopl e co ntinue to eat
today.
This new whiter-t han-w hite baguette was a
grote sque simulacrum of the old pre-war white
bread, but this didn't stop consumers from
buying it; they had forgo tten what good bread
tasted like. So grateful were they not to be ea t-
ing the "bread of deprivation" of wartime, that
they did not care at first how ove r-puffy the
crumb was on these new loaves, how the cr ust
had no heft, and how it staled after less than a
day. The bakers had lina lly yielded to the mech-
anized, over-k neaded bread which France had
held out again st for so long. They had suc-
cumbed to the cheap, speedy ways of yeast.
Many facto rs determ ine the perfect loaf of
French bread, and Kaplan anatomi zes them
in great deta il: the choice of llo ur, the gentle
rhythms of kneading, the shaping of the
unbaked loaves - or pdtons - and baking when
the dough is "at the peak of its exa ltatio n", in an
eighteenth-ce ntury phrase. But nothing was as
importa nt as the way that the bread was "fe r-
mented" from a sourdoug h culture. No less than
winemaking , French baking depend ed on a line
balance of fermentation. It was this, as the chem-
ist Antoine Parmentier observed in 1778, that
made bread-making such a " painful enslave-
ment" . The sourdough starter or "chef create d
solely from the wild yeasts present in the atmos-
phere, needed to be refreshed almost con-
stantly, and contributed to the extremely slow
rising time of French bread. By contras t, the
yeast baking of Brita in, where the by-products
of brewing were transfor med into "ale barm" or
later , bre we rs yeast, was fast and eas y_ Fo r all
that, Parmentier cou ld not cou ntenance the use
of brewer ' s yeast as a leavening. Sourdough fer-
mentation was "the soul of breadmakin g". It
contrib uted to the wonderful lloral complexity
of the cru mb and the deep chewi ness of the
crust. It was ju st a shame that this gastronomic
perfection cou ld onl y be bought thro ugh the
sleeplessness and swea t of the bakers' appren-
tices; Kaplan suggests that sweat must have
been like an extra ingredient in pre-ind ustrial
bread, "enriching (or infect ing) the doug h".
Such was "the hellish rhythm of a society that
lived on bread, that could not get along without
it for a moment" .
"Stop being a slave to dough ; be its master
instead" , urged a French advertisement for the
Frigidaire refrigeration system in 1939. It
would be a decade or so before significant
numbers of French bakers made the switch to
industria l methods, but the appea l was obvious:
no more sleepless nights; no more sweat. The
Thirty Glorious Years of post-war France saw
high-speed mechanical mixers, dough lea vened
with quick-rise yeast instead of tricky sour-
dough, froze n partially cooked loaves - all of
which made the business of baking far easier. It
was j ust a pity that what was produ ced by all
this industria l innovation no longer counted as
" bread" in the old sense, but white soulless pap.
Super markets opene d up " hot spots" where pre-
TLS J UNE 8 2 007

formed frozen loaves could be finished in the
oven , deceiving the customer into thinking that
the bread had been made on the spot - "arti-
sanal mimickry ", in Kaplans words: false
bakers' boys "mad e" bread all day long in a
theatrica l ambience ; the bread was always hot
and fresh, and the air was infused with the
pleasant aroma of baking .
Compared to their genuine counterparts in
the eighteent h century, at least these fake
appre ntices had a relatively easy life. On the
other hand, their labour was lacking in dignity.
These new baker s' boys could no longer claim
respon sibilit y for what they produced ; why
would they want to, in any case, since the cheap
baguettes they hauled from freezer cabinet to
oven were so insipid? Bread- lovers began to
despair of baker s, who produced baguettes
"without joy, without feeling, without appe-
tite", as the actor and gastronome Jean-Pierre
Coffe comp lained in 1992. French bread con-
sumptio n plummeted - from the high of 900
grams per person per day at the start of the
twentiet h century to a low of 150 gram s. The
status of the boulanger plummeted too. Gone
--------------------------~--------------------------
Fribbles and bobtails
alkin, pillock, fumbler, fribble,
M bungler, bobtail , domine-so-little
and John Cannot are some of the
old sobriquets for an impotent
man. This is the dishearte ning subject of Angus
McLaren 's latest book , which assesses the
vocabu lary, notions of manhood and concomi-
tant beliefs associated with impotence throug h
the centurie s. Though chielly concerned with
men's "loss of courage", as impotence was
called, he also treats the problem s of inferti lity
("debilitated loins") and premature ejac ulation .
The preoccupations of each successive epoch ,
he show s, are evident in its nostrums to treat
impotence. Bedroom fiascos have been attrib-
uted to witc hcraft, masturbation , libertinism,
homosexuality, contraception, venerea l disea se,
shell shock , the stresses of motoring , the Oedi-
pal comp lex, prudish upbringing, alcoholism ,
obesity and - since the observations of the sexol-
ogists William Masters and Virginia Johnson in
the 1960s - to depres sion , anger, monoton y,
fear and boredom.
Professor McLaren gets off to a slow start.
His two opening chapter s, on classical Greece
and Rome and early Christian Europe , contain
some analysis, but essentially provide a useful
compendium of quotation s on manhood, impo-
tence and cognate topics. He provides a careful
summar y of printed texts from Ovid , Petronius,
Catu llus, Plato, Marti al, Aristotle, Galen, Plu-
tarch, Augustine and St Thom as Aq uinas to
Shakespeare and Mont aigne , and con structs a
credi ble narrative, although we cannot know
the discrepancies between what a few literary
men wrote and what the unlettered actua lly
thought and did. The narrative takes off in the
seventeent h century with Madame de Sevigne
laughing uproariou sly with her son over his fail-
ure to be aroused by his poplolly: it is to
McLaren 's credit that he appreciates the role of
sex in humour and the importance of laughter in
sexual history. "We stern culture has simultane-
ously regarded impotence as life' s greate st trag-
edy and life' s greate st joke ", he says.
For centurie s impotence was attributed to
TL S J UNE 8 2007
SO CIAL STUDI E S
were his proud, independent, artisanal ways.
Working in a boulangerie became the career
choice of total no-hopers - baker s were "big ,
strong and stupid", as the cliche went. Bakers
who came of age in the post-war period
observed a "deg radation " in the profes sion. As
Kaplan writes, "Poorly trained and badly coun-
selled, baker s languished in a sort of anomie ,
turning in desperation to millers, equipment
salesmen and purveyor s of improving additi ves
in the hope of finding a way out".
The death knell for French bread was
sounded many times in the nationa l press; pre-
maturel y, as it turned out, because it is now pos-
sible to buy bread of the finest artisana l quality
again, all over Paris ; bread whose crust crackles
with the aroma of honey and gingerbread and
which does not lose its charms after only a few
hours. Good bread is back, as Kaplans title
says. In the end, the symbolic pull of bread
was too great for the French. The State, long
regarded as an oppres sive force by the bakers ,
came ga lloping to their rescue . The so-called
Raffarin decree of 1995, named after the charis-
matic Minister of Commerce Jean-Pierre Raf-
RI CH ARD D A V E N P OR T -HI N E S
Ang us Mc La ren
IMPOTE NCE
A cultural history
352pp. University of Chicago Press. Paperback,
$30; distributedin the UK by WiIey. £ 19.
9780226500768
witchcraft or sin: the Inquisitor Genera l blamed
Charles 11 of Spain ' s failure to father a child on
the bewitchment of his semen rather than the
physiological cause of premature ejacu lation,
and prescribed holy oils, fasting and exorci sm,
with so little effect that Europe was torn asun-
der by the War of the Spanish Succession . After
1700 impotence was increasing ly regarded as a
corporeal problem, and totemic of materia l
power, as McLaren describes in his lluent,
authoritative account of attitudes to impotence
and masculine authorit y during the Enlighten-
ment. Sexual dysfunction was seen by some
nineteenth- centur y physicians as the price that
Christian white men paid for their advance d
civi lization: the atavism of their subject races
was shown in their greater capacit y for venery.
Contraception - especia lly coit us interruptu s -
was condemned by medica l opinion as a cause
of impotence. An American proponent of cir-
cumcision - the fanatica l author of "The Pre-
puce as an Outlaw " - insisted that mass male
mutilation wou ld cure impotence.
If the nymphomaniac represented all that was
unwoman ly for the Victorian s, the impotent
rather than the highly sexed male represented
all that was unman ly. Women were increas-
ingly blamed for male dysfunction : wives were
so cu lpably unresponsive that they quenched
their husbands' ardour, and unmanned them; or
women (usua lly not wives) were so shame-
lessly insatiab le in their sexual needs that they
destro yed a man' s virility. Twe ntieth-century
Freudian s asserted that men practised homo-
sexuality as a cover to avoid their exposure as
impotent or (without any sense of contradic-
- 4-
farin, and an amendment of 1998, gave the arti-
sanal baker proper legal recognition at last. As
Raffarin himse lf commented, "It's humiliating
for real bakers to see people who sell bread man-
ufactured elsewhere passing themselves off as
bakers". Unde r the law of 1998, it became ille-
gal for a " boulangerie" sign to be placed except
where professionals had been "personally
involved in the kneading of the dough , its fer-
mentation and its shaping ". At no stage of
production were the products to be "deep-
frozen or frozen" . This law gave a huge boost to
the baker as artisan .
Meanwhil e, from the mid-1990 s, a new gen-
eration of bakers were giving fresh dignity to
the profession . Their inspiration was Lione l
Poilane, who had never stopped making bread
with integrit y, practising what he called "retro-
innovation ", developing new techniques for
making bread in the old traditions. Poilane' s sig-
nature loaf was the miche, a splendid sourdough
orb. The new retro-innovators such as Eric
Kayser and Dominique Saibron , both bakers
with shops on the rue Monge in the Latin
Quarter, turned their hands to rein venting the
tion) stigmatised homosexuality as " psycho-
sexual impotence". The ineffab le Ernest Jones
defined potency as the ability to perform
vagina l intercour se, by which delinition homo-
sexuals must " be regarded as impotent ", he
insisted, "and I think rightly so, however potent
they may be with member s of their own sex" .
The psychoanalytica l treatment of male
impotence, on McLaren ' s evidence, contrib uted
massively to "the problemati zing of sexualit y".
Freudians indicte d an impotent man's mother
as bearing the primar y guilt, and secondari ly
the wife. It was a long, difticu lt task to treat
men for impotence , conclude d a Freudian ana-
lyst investigating unconsum mated marriages ,
but "in a few weeks we can make them potent
by treating their wives" and enforcing a submi s-
sive role: "if the woman allows the husband to
be aggre ssive, and even enjo ys it, it might give
more to him than any psychiatric treatment " .
McLaren writes well on nineteenth-century
France, including a splendid passage from Stend-
hal on impotence, so it is regrettab le that he does
not mention Alphonse Daudet' s novel Le Nabab
(1877), which depicts Paris beaux using arsenic
to achieve and sustain their erections. Though
the dependency of Napoleon Ill 's half-brother,
the Due de Morny, on arsenic as a prototype Via-
gra killed him, Sir Richard Quam 's Dictionary of
Medicine (1882) continued to list arsenic and
strychnine as well as phosphorous and cannabis
as treatments for impotence . Serge Voronoff
studied eunuchs in Egypt before in 1920 implant-
ing testicular tissue from chimpanzees and
baboons inside the scrotums of patients seeking
rejuvenation. Among Voronoff' s contemporar-
ies, the San Quentin prison doctor implanted tes-
ticles from executed convicts as an aid to tumes-
cence while the German physician Eugen Stein-
ach pioneered vasec tomies as a means of sexua l
rejuvenation. A satisfied patient who had paid
£700 for a Steinach vasectomy booked the Royal
Albert Hall in 1nl to give a lecture entitled
"How I Was Made Twenty Years Younger", but
dropped dead just before going to the podium.
An American physician who transplanted the tes-
baguette, making slow-rise versions without
additi ves, using industrial mixers but set to a
gentle speed. One of Kaplan' s best chapters is
devoted to these new baking "mavericks" who
combine a love of the old ways with a know-
ledge of modern science.
Kayser has even invented something which
Parmentier in the eighteenth cen tury only
imagined - a sourdough ferment which is
gastronomically idea l without enslaving the
baker. "Fermento-levain" is a liquid leaven
machine which churns out a constant flow of
reliable sourdough, giving Kaysers baguett e
its "de lectab le" qualities - the toasty crust and
hazelnutty crumb. Whatever yearning one
might feel for the bread of the eighteent h cen-
tury, the bread made by Kayser and his contem-
porarie s is better. It is probab ly the best bread
that France has ever tasted, because it is made
by thinking men and women who have not
sacrificed themse lves to the tyranny of doug h.
As Kaplan concl udes, "It is worth recalling,
in the end, that good bread depen ds above all
on the quality of the men and wome n who
make it".
ticles of a suicide onto his own scrotum reported
that his difficulties in performing auto-surgery at
an awkward angle had caused a nasty accident.
Male performa nce anxieties were aggrava ted
by the empha sis in early twentiet h-cent ury
American marita l textbooks on "sync hronize d
orgasms", which supposedly produced both
happier marriage s and superior offspring . Some
sexologists classified any ejacu lation before the
woman climaxed as premature: the same author-
ities estimated that the average man took one or
two min utes to clima x and the average woman
thirty, which intensilied the anxiet y and frustra-
tion of their unhappy readers. Masters and
Johnson (who emerge with the least tarnished
reputations among the specialist s studied by
McLaren) identilied monoton y, work anxiety,
fatigue, over-eating and over-drinking as causes
of impotence, but highlighted the onerou s bur-
den of male respo nsibilit y in intercour se as the
chief trigger of performance anx ieties ca using
erectile dysfunctions.
Urology rather than sex therapy has increas-
ingly taken the lead since the 1980s, especia lly
in the United States: impotence has been seen
as a fixable mechanica l failure rather than an
affective prob lem. McLaren conc ludes with a
mistrustful account of the deve lopment of
Viagra, and its mass marketing since 1998.
There are vivid, striking quotations in each
chap ter of Impotence illustrating imbecility, cru-
elty, arrogance , humour and distre ss in ever y
age. Marie Stopes instructs her readers that pen-
etration is a "racia l act" that "should only take
place at special times and at rather infreq uent
intervals " and that "the penis, even from the
hour of birth", is constructed to fulfil "the vital
importance of this duty to the race". Alfred
Kinsey consoles the sexua lly inept: "it would
be difficu lt to find another situation in which an
individual who was quick and intense in his
responses was labelled anything but superior,
and that is .. . exactly what the rapid ly ejacu lat-
ing male is, howe ver inconvenient and unfort u-
nate his qualities may be from the standpoint of
the wife". Despite Angus McLaren ' s brisk, com-
passionate humour and fair-minded j udgement ,
his story of centurie s of humiliation and frustra-
tion cannot avoid being discouraging. His book
will leave many readers wishing they had been
born as oyster s.
100 BUTTERFLIES AND MOTHS THE CLASH WITHIN
Portraits from theTropical Forests of Costa Rica Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future
JEFFREY C. MILLER, DANIEL H. JANZEN AND MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
WINIFRED HALLWACHS "This isanextraordinarily interesting book ona very difficult subject. Martha
Gathered bybiologists Daniel Janzen and Winifred Hallwachs in theforests of Nussbaum's commanding familiarity withculturally related political issues across
northwestern Costa Rica, 100tropical butterflies and moths represent thediversity theworld, past and present, combines immensely fruitfully here with herinvolve-
in large-format photographs byJeffrey Millerthatdocument thedizzying variety ment and understanding of India." -Amartya Sen, Harvard University
of shapes, colors, and markings. The photographs are accompanied byspecies Belknap Press / newincloth
accounts and images of thecorresponding caterpillar.
Belknap Press / 221 colorillus./ newincloth THE CASE AGAINST PERFECTION
Ethics in theAge of Genetic Engineering
DIVAGATIONS MICHAEL J. SANDEL
Inorder to grapple withtheethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions
STEPHANE MALLARME
largely lostfrom viewin themodern world. As these questions verge ontheology,
TRANSLATED BY BARBARA JOHNSON
modern philosophers and political theorists tend to shrink from them. Butournew
As anexpression of theSymbolist movement and asa contribution to literary
powers of biotechnology make these questions unavoidable. Addressing them is
studies, Divagations isvitally important. Butit isalso, in Johnson's masterful trans-
thetask of thisbook, byone ofAmerica's preeminent moral and political thinkers.
lation, endlessly mesmerizing.
Belknap Press / newincloth
Belknap Press / newincloth

THE ACCIDENTAL MIND PROPHET OF INNOVATION

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

PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF

STEPHEN JAY GOULD
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Five years afterhis untimely death, Punctuated Equilibrium (originally published as JOHN RAWLS
thecentral chapter of Gould's masterwork, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory) EDITED BY SAMUEL FREEMAN
offers hisonlybook-length testament onanidea hefiercely promoted, repeatedly "Anyone seriously interested in thedevelopment of Rawls's thinking and his sense
refined, and tirelessly defended. of therelations between hisapproach and those of major predecessors in the
Belknap Press / newincloth history ofAnglophone liberalism will findtheinsight it provides onnumerous
points indispensable." -John Dunn, TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT
Belknap Press / newincloth
EVERYDAY JIHAD
The Rise of Militant Islam among Palestinians in Lebanon
THE EARLY CHINESE EMPIRES
BERNARD ROUGIER
Qin and Han
TRANSLATED BY PASCALE GHAZALEH
By staying very close to thereligious actors, theirdiscourse, perceptions, and means MARK EDWARD LEWIS
of persuasion, Rougier helps usto understand howradical religious allegiances GENERAL EDITOR TIMOTHY BROOK
overcome traditional nationalist sentiment and howjihadist networks grab hold in The firstof a six-volume series onthehistory of imperial China, The Early Chinese
communities marked byunemployment, poverty, and despair. Empires illuminates many formative events in China's long history of imperial-
newincloth lsm-eevents whose residual influence can stillbediscerned today.
Belknap Press / newincloth

know something is wrong when you
Y Off the streets
OU
find yourself longing to be lying on a
wooden plank in a Gulag barrack s. The
"residents" of Nazino Island could only wish
for the stark comforts and liminal order of a
labour camp over the ghastly scenario that
played out before them in the early spring of
1933 in Western Siberia. In the middle of the
night, they were dumped on a small, barren
island in the midst of an icy, roaring river hun-
dreds of miles from civilization . With no food,
no shelter, not much for clothing, 6,000 people,
plucked from the streets of Moscow a few
weeks before, found themselves wondering
how their lives had taken this ghoulish and, for
most, fatal turn.
Nicolas Werth' s Can nibal Island: Death in a
Siberian Gulag recount s a chapter in a horribl y
train-wrecked experiment in penal reform.
Werth sifts the story of Nazino or "Cannibal"
Island , from an assortment of Soviet archives
to illustrate arguably the worst nightmare of
the whole liendish Gulag enterprise. He tells
the story admirably, setting it in context of the
trauma that took hold of Soviet society with the
tremors of collectivi zation, the first live-ye ar
plan and the resulting fam ine.
The tragedy grew out of a junction in Soviet
penal history when Soviet leaders dreamed of
doin g away with guards, barbed wire and
labour camps in favour of human e settlements
where prisoners would till the soil, log the
forests and become producti ve citizens in self-
reliant frontier communi ties. The se new com-
munities, called "special settlements", existed
New American Studies from LSU ~( P R E S S
Troubled Commemoration
The American Civil War Centennial, 1961- 1965
ROBERT J. COOK
"This book will stand up for a long time as the stan -
dard treatment we have needed of this tro ubled and
enlightening story:'- DavldW. Blight, author of Bsyond ths
Battlefield: Race, Memory & theAmericanCivilWar
Making th e Mode rn South I David Goldfield, Series Editor
$45.0 0
Rites ofAugust First
Emancipation Day in theBlackAtlantic World
J. R. KERR-RITCHIE
"A well-done, solidly researched, and innovative work.
There are many works that link English and continen-
tal and American abolitionism, but few if any mak e
solid parallels between African American and West
Indian abolition movements as Kerr-Ritchi e's work
does ."-Graham Russell Hodges, author of Slavery,Freedom
& CultureamongEarly AmericanWorkers
Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World
R. J. M. Blacken and lames Brewer Stewart , Series Editors
"",.
LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS - - - - - - - - - - - -
..It\. (800)861-3477 • (800)305·4416FAX • Order online at Www. /su.edullsupress • Shipping charges will apply
TLS J UNE 8 2007
HI S T OR Y
wrote, the Gula g was built on "self-reliant, mili-
tary discipline" and it had "economic l1exibilit y
and experience in overcoming obstacles arising
from harsh en vironment s".
Henryk Iagoda , then deput y director of
KAT E BROW N the Soviet Bureau of State Securit y (OGP U),
pounced on Eikhmanss memo. Prisons and
Nico la s W erth labour camp s, he pronounced, were a vestige
of the bourgeois past. Soviet penal authorities
CANN I BA L ISLA ND would conquer the frontier with groups of
Death in a Sib erian Gul ag inmates, self-reliant, hardworking, who would
248pp. Princeton University Press. £15.95 establish settlements, where they would build
(US $24.95). their own homes, raise their own produce and
978 06 9 1 13083 5
livestock, while workin g in mines and logging
Lynn e Viola operations. Wom en could go along and be
allowed to marry. And, he reasoned, since most
TH E UNKN OWN G ULAG of the prisoners were agrarian types (deport ed
Th e lost wor ld of Stalin' s special settleme nts
kulaks) who pined for the soil, they would not
278pp. Oxford University Press. £17.99 (US $30).
run away from the settlements, remo ving the
978 0 19518769 4
need for guards. Soundin g as though he had
Tomas Kizny cribbed Frederick Jack son Turner ' s frontier
thesis, Iagoda dreamed how the settlements
G UL AG would one day become the outpo sts for a Soviet
Life and death inside the Soviet concentration
manifest destiny. "In a few years", Iagoda
camps
fantasized, "these settlements will become
496pp. Firetly. $69.95; distributed in the UK
by Orca. £39.95. proletarian mining towns."
978 155297 964 8 With Iagoda' s blessing, Eikhman s wasted no
time. He emerged ju st a few month s later stand-
ing on the bridge of a ship steaming across the
in huge sweeps of territory run by the Gulag White Sea. He had with him one hundred prison-
adm inistration. Lynne Viola' s The Unknown ers, a handful of guards, and a few chem ists
Gulag : The lost world of Stalin 's specia l sett le- and geologists to start a mining settlement on
ments maps out the creation and spread of Vaigach Island. Tomas Kizny' s poignant collec-
this less well-known department of the Gulag tion of photos and essays, Gula g: Life and
administration. Viola shows how the settle- A R ussian or pha n, near Kiev, 1934 death inside the Sovi et concentration camps,
describes the short history of this experiment in
ments grew out of the need in 1930 to relocate polar expedition married to penal rehabilitation .
hundreds of thousands of farmers uprooted as
kulaks during the drive to collectivi zation. Des-
Like Alaskan prospector s, the settler-convicts,
swaddled in native fur, relied initially on the
ignating virgin territor y for the deport ees and indigeno us Nenet s of the island and shipments
shipping them to remote regions became an from across the frozen sea. Reportedly,
answer to the problem of swelling number s of Eikhman s ran a humane settlement. Prisoners
banished people corralled at train stations await- were not guarded. They worked an eight-hour
ing their fate. In the case of Nazino, "social day in the mines. After work they were free to
undesirables" who were caught begging, wander about and purcha se cheese, sausage,
thiev ing, black-mark eteering or simply stand- choco late and clothin g at the expedition com-
ing on the street durin g a round-up were sent to missary. Prisoners fraternized with the guards
the remo te Narym region of We stern Siberia. and profession als.
Instead of fellin g the thick forest for the social- They formed clubs, a choir, wrote a news-
ist cau se, starving people turned on each paper and took literacy classes. When prisoners
other, on their guards and doctors, killing, went out to the tundra, they were issued guns to
marauding and dying. Only the predator y fend off the polar bears. On Vaigach Island, in
Reading Melville's Pierre; or, The survived. Two-third s expired while Soviet fact, the chief function of guard s and guns
Ambiguities officials stood by. seems to have been in confrontation, not with
BRIAN HIGGINS and HERSHEL PARKER What were the Gulag planner s thinkin g? crim inals, but with nature. In one photo , a Chek-
"With impeccable scholarl y precision . .. Higgins and Who would send hungry, unshod people to the ist stands in a classic trophy-huntin g pose with
Parker provide a fascina ting account of geographical, Siberian Taiga without supplies, shelter and a foot on the belly of a felled white dolphin. In
familial, philosophical, religious, and literary forces tools in the midst of a fam ine in order to build another picture, Eikhman s' s wife, a prisoner
that inform the creat ion of th e fiction."-John Wenke,
a brave new world? If this wasn't sheer sadism, herself, is skiing, trailed by an armed guard,
authorof MBlvllfB's MusB:LltBrary CrBatlon andthB Formsof
PhilosophicalFiction
but really a utopian project, as Werth , I think there to protect her from bears.
rightly, asserts, who could imagine success? Eikhmans' s settlement was the shining
$35.0 0
Oddly enough, the dump-pri soners-on- model for an alternat ive to Gula g labour camp s:
frigid-island model had proved success ful ju st a a Turnerian vision of free, self-reliant and
River of Dreams
Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain few years before. Feodor Eikhman s, a decor- dynamic settlers who, in conquering the fron-
ated security officer, probably first came up tier , forged "pro letaria n mining town s" . In the
THOMASRUYS SMITH
with the idea. In a 1930 report, he noted that vast Soviet Union, this scene could have played
"River of Dreams pulled me along as irres istibl y as the the Soviet Union had miles of hard-to-reach , out endless ly: plent iful, untapped land continu-
Mississippi itself. . . . Though this book deserves rapt scarcely settled frontier overl1owing with treas- ously receding before the resourcefulness of
attention for its own insights and appreciativen ess,
ures: coal, timber, furs, fish, gold, lead, oil and Gulag frontiersmen, who, at the brutal but vital
explicators of Adventures of HuckJeberry Finn shou ld
absorb it before traveling further with or into Huck ,
silver. As director of the notoriou s Solovetsky junc ture of savagery and civili zation , temper
on the river or on shore."- LouIs J. Budd, coeditor of A Labour Camp, he boasted, he had made over convi cts into proletarian citizens. Admitt ed ly, it
Companion to Mark Twain the barren Murman sk region into a flourishing is hard to imagine Iagoda and Eikhman s, com-
centre of industry, education and socialist gov- mitted Soviet security officer s, as idealists look-
Southern Lite rary Studies I Fred Hobson , Series Editor
Illu st rated, $38.00 ernm ent. Exploit ing this frontier required skill, ing to make a better world . Yet it is important
he wrote, and organizationa l acumen, tough- not to overlook the idealism even in institutions
ness, and lots and lots of manpo wer. No civilian
agency cou ld accompli sh this gargantu an task.
as dreadfu l as the Gulag, for ideals can have a
self-blinding agency. Sadly, this humane vision
Only the Gulag could manage it because, he of self-reliant convict settlements was put into
- 6-
 HISTORY
FRO ILOSOPHY
ac tion, and in so doin g ca used a great deal of
suffe ring , in Nazi no and e lsew here in the vast
and spreadi ng Gul ag terri tories.
Vi ola ' s ma gn ificentl y wide-rang ing resear ch
offered T sepko v a refug e, a way to shove out of
sight the sava gery he kne w was com ing. He had
see n it before .
The guards ca st the ex iles off on the island
vetry +)

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

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

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

- 7- TLS J U NE 8 20 0 7

he phrase " national character " occur s
T on ly once in the works of Charl es Dick -
ens. In the midst of the least read of his
novel s, Barn aby Ru dge (1841), Mr Chester, "an
elegant and polite, but heartl ess and unprinci-
pled ge ntleman", is soliloquizing about his liter-
ary tastes. "Shakespeare was undoubtedl y very
fine in his way; Milton good, though pro sy;
Lord Bacon deep, and decidedly kno win g;
but the writer who should be his country' s
pride, is My Lord Che sterfiel d." "This enli ght-
ened writer" merits such an acco lade because
he has introduced Mr - later Sir John - Che ster
to certain "capti vatin g" hypocri sies and "super-
lative" selfishnesses with which he had previ-
ou sly been unacquainted. And this despite the
fact that Mr Chester had always Ilatter ed him -
self " that I was pretty well versed in all tho se
little arts and graces which di stingui sh men of
the world from boor s and pea sants, and separate
their charact er from those intensely vulgar senti-
ments which are ca lled the nation al char acter".
It is clear that Dick ens takes a dim view of
Mr Che ster , and of the rule s of etiquette com-
piled by Lord Che sterfie ld for sophisticated
"me n of the world". By strong implication,
Dick ens' s sympathies lie instead with "those
intensely vulgar sentiments" of "boors and peas-
ants" which "are called the nation al character".
Although , curiou sly, Dickens never used the
phrase again, in one sense his entire oeuvre (a
term to which he would probabl y take excep-
tion) might be interpret ed as an attempt to
ex plore that chara cter , thus defin ed . According
to Fraser's Magazine (1850) , he di splayed an
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _,
If you can't find it here,
it doesn't exist.
~ audienc e. "As its purpo se has generally been to
AbeBooks.co.uk
100 m illion new, se con d han d ,
rare,and ou t-of-print books.
Visit our Fantasy Book Room at
www.abe books.co.uk /famasy
T LS JU N E 8 2007
HISTORY
Riotous
GEORG E GARN ETT
P eter Mandler
THE E N G L I S H NATIO NAL
CHARACT ER
The history of an idea from EdmundBurke to
Tony B lair
320pp. Yale University Press. £ 19.99 (US $35).
978 03 00 120523
"exquisite comprehension of the nationa l char-
acter and mann ers". Almo st a century later , that
is also how Geor ge Or well , for instance, read
him (whil e commending him for his "lack of
vulgar nation ali sm"). It is there fore striking,
and odd , that Peter Mand ler almost entir ely
ignore s Dicken s in his attempt to write a history
of Engli sh national charac ter between the late
eighteenth century and the present da y.
Dicken s wrote durin g the period when, accord-
ing to Mandl er, the notion of nationa l charact er
was being fashioned in respon se to the progres-
sive extension in the curtil age of the political
nation . "It is here, on the democratic fringes of
respectable society in the turbu lent early Victo-
rian decades, that we can locate the origins of
the idea of the ' English nationa l character'. " It
is doubt ful whether Dickens would have recog-
nized this as a description of what he was doin g;
but he was, as Or well stressed, such an acute
critic of cont emporary socia l and politic al de vel-
opm ent s, and his inllu enc e, in his own lifetim e
and subsequently , has been so colossal, that it is
imposs ible to write a history of Eng lish national
character which ignores him . In the event, he
inveig les his way from time to time into the
pages of this book, despite Mand ler' s early
statement that he will not probe very deeply
into literatur e. But the book would have been
much richer had Dick ens been allowe d to take
his rightful place , somew here near centre stage.
Barnohy Rud ge , one o f Di ckens' s two
attempts at historic al fiction , set in 1780, is a
case in po int. Its subtitle is "A Tale of the Riot s
of ' Eighty" - the Gordon Riot s. It coul d have
been used to revea l a lot, from the perspecti ve
of 184 1, about another of Mandler' s centra l
them es: the tran sformation of the unru ly
eighteenth-century mob into a "solemn,
upright , self-reliant, ventures ome" peop le, a
model of (and for) hum anit y. Dick ens' s other
attempt, A Tale of Two Cities , cou ld have under-
lined the point , by con trast with what obtained
across the Chann el.
Mand ler' s belief that a study of "more
detailed and coherent expre ssions of the idea" of
national character req uires him largely to
eschew literatur e and other " imaginary . . .
material" leads him to focus on writing which he
considers addresses nationa l char acter directl y
and explicitly, whether for a learned or a popular
assimilate elites and masses into one psycho logi-
cal type it has to be accessible to both. " Mand ler
discusses a panopl y of erudi te scholars, men of
letters, incipient social scientists, and unsavour y
raci sts like Robert Knox, "a disgraced anatomist
who made a precario us living in the I840s lectur-
ing on anatomy to popu lar audiences in the north
of England". The author seems most at home
with these ninet eenth-century writer s, particu -
larly the historian s. Franci s Palgr ave (it is perti-
- 8-
nent to Mand ler' s theme that he adopt ed this
name only on marriage), Sharon Turner, John
Kemble , Lord Macaulay, Thom as Amold,
Charles Kingsley, J. A. Fro ude, Bishop Stubb s,
E. A. Freeman and J. H. Round are all shown to
have contributed to that remarkable efflore s-
cence in English historical writing which meant
that, by 1900, proport ionatel y more books were
being publi shed on Engli sh history than ever
before or since. Of cour se, they were preponder-
antly historian s of medieval England; but Man-
dler gives little sense of why this should be so.
One reason is the Norm an Conque st, the subject
of Freeman' s magnum opu s. Another is the his-
torica l writers of medieval England, particularl y
of post-Conquest England , whose attempt s to
reconn ect their England with the prc-Conquest
past have shaped all subsequent English histo-
ries, includin g those of the nineteenth centu ry.
Thi s applies to nationa l characteristics (or charac-
ter) too. Thu s, for instance, Mandl er quotes
Carlyle' s famous descript ion of the Ang lo-
Saxons as a "gluttonous race . . . lumbering
about in pot-belli ed equanimity", and sugges ts
that Stubb s shared this view. If so, it would
hardly be surprising, becau se Carly le was para-
phrasing a key passage in Willi am of Malmes-
bury' s Gesta RegumAnglorum, the most influen-
tial of all the medie val historie s of the English.
Th ose nineteenth-century scholars who had read
W illiam of Malmesbury, or Henry of Huntin g-
don , or any of the other great twelfth-century
historian s, wou ld have been bemu sed by
Mandl er' s assertion that in the l 850s and 60s
"the lack of [democracy] had previou sly inhib-
ited the developm ent of thinkin g abo ut nationa l
character except amon g a minority of out-and-
out democrats". Their sources were full of such
thinkin g, and sought, incidentally, to cont rast the
Engli sh with the barbarou s Celts.
Just as Mandl er pays no more than lip service
to the inllu enc e of medie val sources on tho se
medi eval historians who are so ce ntral to his
story , so the classical ed ucation from which
all his intellectuals would have benefite d is
scarcely ment ioned . When Richard Che venix
"concluded that climate and geography had a
potenti at ing effect", might he have been influ-
enced, directl y or indirectl y, by Aristotl e?
When Samuel Laing linked the "energy, per se-
verance, self-reliance and independence of mind
and action" of the Anglo-Saxon s to their seafar-
ing origins, might the parallel with Athen s have
been at the back of his mind ? And if, as Man-
d ler tells us, Kemb le, like others, paid a good
dea l of attention to Tacitus' Germania , what
did the y all make of the Agri cola, which is cen-
trally concerned with Britain and the Briti sh,
pre senting them , ironicall y, as embodying the
tradition al virtues whi ch the Roman s had lost?
Freeman was so steep ed in cla ssica l literatur e
that not only did he pick up on e very possible
cla ssical allusion in his medie val sources, he
clearly saw him self as some latter-day Virgil
for the Engli sh, expounding their destin y, albeit
in prose (thou gh prose which he progre ssively
purifi ed , in later editions, substituting what he
deemed to be pure Engli sh vocabulary for the
Latin ate adult eration s of the Normans).
A more ob viou s omi ssion than either earlier
historian s of the English or classical writings
is Protestanti sm . Mand ler touche s on religion
from time to time in, for instance , his discu ssion
of Liberal Anglica n intellectu als like Thomas
Arno ld, whose lectu res inspired Free man. He
quotes Stubb s saying in a letter to Freem an: "I
do not believe that a Dissenter could write a
histor y of England" ; but there is little sign that
he understand s why Stubb s was right to see the
Reform ation as fundam ental to the definition of
Engli shness. Man y of the virtues which came to
be seen as characteri stic of the Engli sh, includ -
ing libert y and self-reliance, were defined , at
least in part, in terms of Protestant ism.
M andler' s argum ent that the defin ition o f
Engli sh nationa l charact er was a respon se to
the wide ning of the franch ise and , in its Briti sh
man ifestat ion , to the intracta ble prob lem of
Ireland and the exp ansion o f the Emp ire,
means that his accoun t of twent ieth -century
de velopm ent s mu st lose some of its earlier
drive. Th e e ventual granti ng of uni ver sal suf-
frage, the creatio n of the Irish Free State, and
the turn of the imperial tide, did not mean , how-
eve r, that investigation of Engli sh or Bri tish
charact er ran out of steam. Rath er , it took on a
far wider variety of for ms. On e stimulus was
the apparent contrast bet ween Brit ish polit ical
ex perie nce in the 1920s and 30s and that on the
Con tinent. Lib ert y crumbled almos t every-
where else , alon g with democracy; Brit ain
becam e their last and stronges t redoubt. " In
these times o f dict ator ship abroad , we may
thank God that we are not as oth er men are" ,
wrote the historian J. E. Neale (iro nically pre-
figuring the logic of the wor k of the pupi l who
grew to loa the him , G. R. Elton) . Mandler does
not say so, but it was no co incid enc e that Ron-
aid Sym e' s cla ssic The Roman Revolution, con-
cern ed with the di sintegrati on of the Roman
Republic, and the erecti on of autoc racy on its
ru ins, was publi shed in Sept emb er 1939 .
The cont rast attracted a good deal of Conti -
nent al as well as dom estic comm ent, some of it
informed by the ex perie nce of fighting alon g-
side the British in the First World War. The Brit-
ish reception of, for instance , Andre Mauroi s' s
Les Silences du Colone l Bramble sugg ests a
characteristically understated national self-
satisfaction, evident across the dom estic polit -
ical spectrum, from Baldwin to Orwell. For
Mandl er this coy national narcissism - though he
does not describ e it thus - is epitomized in
Sidney Strube ' s 1930s cartoon s of the mode st
"little man" who decently mudd les through.
(His striking physical resemblance to Clem ent
Attl ee ex plains why Be vin often referred fond ly
to his Part y lead er as "th e Little Man".)
Wh y Mand ler deem s cartoons an acceptable
source, but literatur e - and especially popular
literature - not, remains as much a puzzle as is
his treatment of the nineteenth cen tury. J ames
Hilton ' s Goodbye , Mr Chips (1934 ), for
instance, set in a minor public school, is men-
tioned onl y in a qu otation from Peter Laslett .
Yet it could have provid ed M andl er with rich
material, with its survey, from a very Engli sh
perspective, of world eve nts from 1870 to the
1930s . Chip s' s resolut e adh erenc e to fair play,
and to sentiment, is demonstrat ed when, as act-
ing headmaster durin g the First Wor ld Wa r, he
reads ou t in chap el amon g the name s of the
school's fallen that of a former German master,
who had died fight ing on the other side . (This
incid ent foreshadows the Archbi shop of Canter-
bury' s insistence , to the reported anno yance of
Mr s Th atcher , on praying for the Argent inian
dead too , at the service of thank sgiving for Brit-
ish victory in the Falklands War.) Tha t the film
of the book was released in late 1939, ju st as
hostili ties were renewed, serves to underlin e the

point that mm , like literatur e, deserves more
attention than Mandler devotes to it. Churchill's
favourite film, That Hamilton Woman! (1941), is
not mentioned; but its adaptation of the Nelson
myth in Britain' s linest (and darkest) hour is
germane to M andlers theme. Of the post-war
period, he comments in passing that many of
the Ealing comedies are concerned with commu-
nities which were breaking up; but he makes no
attempt to reconcile this with the fact that the
Welfare State was being established at that very
time.
Thereafter, what Mandler deems to be the frag-
mentation in British society made it more and
more difficult to sustain any convincing notion
--------------------------~--------------------------
he Declaration of Independence illus-
T trated the Catch-22 in which would-be
state-makers from the Age of Revolution
to the present day have found themselves. If the
Continenta l Congress had been recognized exter-
nally as a legitimate executive body, then the
Declaration which it ratified on July 4, 1776,
would have been accepted as a positive act in
internationa l law. But if the United States of
America had already, by this date, been acknowl-
edged as "separate and equal" to the other "Pow-
ers of the Earth" as the Declaration claimed, then
there would have been no need for the Declara-
tion. The circularity of the logic infuriated,
among others, Jeremy Bentham, who did not
oppose American Independence per se, but
lamented that "so rational a cause should be
rested on reasons so much fitter to beget objec-
tions than to remove them". In other words, the
central question posed by the American Declara-
tion oflndependence and by the many others that
have been issued since is: can Independence be
effected merely by its announcement? How far
does the assertion create the reality?
The basic premiss of the Declaration was
that "the Laws of Nature and of Nature' s God"
entitled any "peopl e" (the problematic word
"nation" doe s not appear) to determin e their
own government, qualified only by a responsi-
bility on the part of the people break ing away
from another that they should explain their
reasons for doin g so. And most of the Declara -
tion is duly taken up with a litany of comp laints
about the conduct of the British Government. In
old age, Thoma s Jefferson recalled that his aim
in draftin g the Declaration had been "to place
before mankin d the common sense of the sub-
ject, in terms so plain and firm as to command
their assent, and to justify ourselves in the
independ ent stand we are compe lled to take". In
speaking like a state, the Declaration sought to
bring the USA into being as a state.
David Arm itage' s concise and penetrating
book, The Declaration of Indep enden ce, exem-
plifies the potential strengths of a truly trans-
national approach to the writing of history. In
some respect s it is not surprising that the Decla-
ration of Independence ha s not pre viou sly been
approached in this way. After all, by delinition,
it symbolized the moment when America broke
away from a sprawling decentrali zed transna-
tiona l entity (the British Empire) and set off on
its own path. Yet although it has since become
embedded in the American nationa l psyche as
"American scripture", the audien ce to which it
was implicitl y addre ssed was not a domestic
one, but the "Opinions of Mankind ". As "free
and independent states" , the American colo-
nies, claimed the Declaration, now had the "full
Power to levy War, conclu de Peace, contract
Alliances, establish Commerc e, and to do all
HISTORY
of an English national character - a term which
was in any case progressively replaced by the
pseudo-psychological "identity" (bizarrely first
coined in England by Thomas Arnold). Mandler
despairs at this disintegration, as well he might
when faced with John Major' s cackhanded
attempt to resurrect national character by blend-
ing Baldwin with Orwell, in a sequence of
bucolic images which were already self-con-
sciously out of date in the I930s. English
national character, or perhaps even national ident-
ity, might be a fit subject for dry irony; indeed,
irony became an essential constituent of it. But if
irony is turned into a joke, then national charac-
ter cannot survive. Mockery, especially national
All men
ADAM 1. P . SMIT H
David Arrnitage
THE DE CLARATION OF
I NDEPE NDE NCE
A global history
302pp. HarvardUniversity Press. £15.95(US $23.95).
9780674022 829
other Acts and Things which Indepen dent
States may of right do". The Declaration imag-
ined the world as a communit y of sovereign
states, all of equa l status, communicating with
each other throug h formal documents like the
Declaration . As Armitag e puts it, "the Declara-
tion of Independence was therefore a declara-
tion of interdependence". His primar y concern
is with that remarkab le docum ent' s significance
for a global history of the meaning and emer-
gence of states over the past 230 years. He
draws our attention to the Declaration ' s role in
inaugurating a whole new genre of declara tions
of independence , which in turn shaped the
meaning of statehood and the practice of inter-
nationa l relations. The Declaration' s distinctive
form ula - asserting a "natural" right to se lf -g ov -
ernment, and then justifying separation on the
basis of a list of violations by an imperia l power
- provided a temp late that was of particular
value in eras where statehood was contr asted
with empire: in Latin America in the early nine-
teenth century, by anti-colonial resistance move-
ments in the mid-twentieth centur y, and by the
independence movements that sprang up in the
wake of the collapse of the USSR.
If previous scholarship has focused on the
impact of the Declarat ion on the USA, undoubt-
edly the most familiar lines appear in the second
paragraph, which begins with the famous state-
ment that "all men" are "created equal" and
endowed with natural rights. In fact, although it
would be a slight exaggeration to say that this
passage was a mere aside , it wa s logicall y subsid-
iary to the main argument that the United States
of America were entitled to Independence. As
Abraham Lincoln later pointed out, the observa-
tion that all men were created equal was "of no
practical use in effecting our separation from
Great Britain" and it duly attracted relatively lit-
tle attention at the time, other than the passing
scorn of positivists like Bentham who thought
that to ascribe laws to nature, and to derive natu-
ral rights from such laws, was "rhetorical non-
sense - nonsense upon stilts" . Interestingly,
what Arrnitage' s global perspective shows is
that, while many of the world's declarations of
- 9-
self-mockery, destroys it. This is what Harold of the Opposition. How this recent development
Macmillan, that master of arch English under- is to be explained is a puzzle. If I were Mandler,
statement, discovered in 1963. I'd look lirst at Scottish and Welsh devolution. It
But it is by no means clear that English is no longer simply a case of "Fog in the Chan-
national character or identity is dead - hence the nel, Continent cut off ' - although this is once
number of recent books on the subject. Mandler again increasingly so - but fog on the Tees,
does not attribute much significance to the Severn and Wye. No wonder the Prime Minis-
current mania for llying llags of St George when- ter' s (Scottish) successor-presumptive has been
ever an English sports team is playing. Yet, even making speeches about Britishness (as opposed
a mere decade ago, only an eccentr ic would have to exclusive Englishness). Disraeli, who has a bit
llown a llag of St George. Now almost everyone part in this book, and Gladstone, who is unac-
does, right across the social spectrum, usually on countably almost ignored, might have approved.
his or her car. During the football World Cup, But what would Dickens, with his low view of
the Prime Minister was put under great pressure the political arts, have made of the attempt to
to conform with the precedent set by the Leader manufacture national character from above?
obscured , until now, a systematic evaluation of
the Declaration as a charter for states' rights,
and as one of the formati ve documents of the
contempora ry world order. Even so, surely the
independence follow the form of the American endurin g influence of the Declaration in the
original, few include an abstract commitment to world at large as well as in the United States
individual rights (a notab le exception being Ho lies in its conll ation of the rights of individuals
Chi Minh' s 1945 declaration of the independ- with the rights of states. Indeed, the Declaration
ence of the Republic of Vietnam). Such selec- somehow manages to imply that these two sorts
tive copy ing, Arrnitage argues, confirms that the of rights reinforce each other, when, in reality,
"main message" of the Declaration to the rest of it is far from clear how compatib le they are.
the world is as "an assertion of the rights of
The relationship between the rights of states
states among other states rather than an enumera- and the rights of individuals is one of the central
tion of the rights of individuals against their gov- concerns of our time, as of Jefferson' s. David
ernors", So by looking beyond the borders of the Armitage has shed new light on some of the
USA, Arrnitage alters our perspective on the most important questions about the foundation s
meaning of the Declaration. of the modern world by examinin g a document
That noble second paragraph, it seems, has that is both time-bound and timeless.
~-----------------------------------­
NEW FROM
ALDINETRANSACTION
First paperback edition First paperback edition
CULTURAL HISTORY NONVERBAL A HUNDRED YEARS
AFfER FOUCAULT COMMUNICATION OF GEOGRAPHY
E dite d by Joh n N eu ba u er Albert Meh rabi a n T. W Freeman
Thi s book discusses Foucault's In this ne w, multidimensional This new paperback edition
achievements and the approach to the subject of of A Hu ndred Years of
suggestive power of his work, nonverbal communication Geography draws together
as well as his methodological Mehrabian bring s together a the threads of a century
weaknesses, historical great deal of original work of progre ss, from the first
inaccuracies, and ambiguities. including descriptions of new scientific explorations and
Above all, it attempts to show experimental methods that mappings to present-day
how one can use Foucault to suited to this field. detailed trends toward specialization
open ne w approaches to findings of studie s scattered and generalization. It
cultural history. The essays throughout the literature , contains a synoptic view
broach the major and most importantl y, the of the development of the
contro versial aspects of integration of these finding s various aspects of ge ography,
Foucauldian cultural history, within a compact framework. showing how the field has
all of which are explicitly been differentiated from
978-0-202-30966-8 Paperback
analyzedwith respect to associated disciplines and
antiquity, the Renaissance ,
235pp $24.95/£16 .50 ho w it has differentiated and
and the nineteenth century. specialized within itself.
978-0-202-30585-1 Paperback 978-0-202-30920-0 Paperback
259 pages $24.95/£16.50 $29.95/19.95
ALDINETRANSACTION
Rutgers - The State University of NewJersey, 35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway, :-.u 08854-8042
Calltoll free (in U.S.) 1-888-999-6778 or fax 732-748-9801 www.transactionpub.com
IN THE UKAND EUROPE- AldineTransactionUK, stocked and distributedby Eurospan,
Tel: +44 (0)1767604972. Fax: +44 (0)1767601640.
Email: eurospan@turpin-distribution.com. web: www.eurospangroup.com/ bookstore
TLS J UNE 8 200 7

A Culture of Improvement
Technology and the Western Millennium
ROBERT FRIEDEL
'This is a spiendidbook, recaliing Mumford's Technics and Civilization in
its scope and erudition. It challenges usto think carefully about the idea of
progress, the 'culture of improvement,' and the uneasy reiatlonship that
persists between freedom, power,and socialresponsibility in the modern tech-
nological world. "
- MerriltRoe Smith , CultenProfessor oftheHistoryofTechnology, MIT
£24.95' cloth' 978·0·262·06262·6' 576 pp. (117 iIIus .)
In Praise of the Whip
A Cultural History of Arousal
NIKLAUS LARGIER
TRANSLATED BY GRAHAM HARMAN
Anewhistoryof voluntary flagellation in Europe, from its invention in medieval
religious devotionto its use in themodern pornographicimagination.Working
witha wide range of religious, literary, and medical textsand images, Niklaus
Largier explores the emotional and sensual, religious anderotic excitement of
the whip,a crucial instrumentofstimuiationin devotional and sexual practices.
£22.95 • cloth' 978·1·890951·65·8 • 550 pp . (52 iIIus, ) • A Zone Book
Who Are You?
Identification, Deception, and Surveillance
in Early Modem Europe
VALENTIN GROEBNER
TRANSLATED BY MARK KVBURZ AND JOHN PeCK
The prehistoryof modern passport and identiflcation technologies: the
documents, seals, and stampsthat could document and transformtheir
owner's identity in thecenturies before photography and fingerprinting-
from thechancelleries, courts and streets of late medievaland Renaissance
Europe, tothevagrants, merceneries and gypsies of early modern Europe.
£18.95 ' cloth' 978-1-890951-72-6'340 pp . (22 iIIu•. )· AZone Book
Secrets of Women
Gender, Generation, and the Origins
of Human Dissection
KATHARINE PARK
Katharine Parkexplores thehistoryofwomen on the dissectiontable through
a series of case studies, explodingthemyth that medievalreligious prohibi-
tions hindered thepracticeof human dissection in medievaland Renaissance
Italy and arguing thatfemale bodies played a central role in thehistoryof
anatomy atthat time.
£23.95' cloth' 978-1-890951-67-2'304 pp . (60 iIIu•. )· A Zone Book
Evocative Objects
Things We Think With
EDITED BY SHERRY TURKLE
Autobiographicai essays, framed by two interpretive essaysbythe editor,
describethepower of anobject to evoke emotionand provokethought.
"Evocative Objects is a collection of great richness andcomplexify. Reading
these essays transforms one's sense of the mostcommonplace objects, and
promptsus to explorethe palimpsest of the past within us."
- JiII KerConway, President Emerita, Smith College, author of The Road
from Coorain
£15.95' cloth' 978·0·262·20168·1 • 352 pp . (70 lIIu•. )· Ju ly 2007
The Inner Touch
Archaeology of a Sensation
DANIEL HELLER-RoAZEN
Anoriginal, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiryinto the senseof
beingsentient- what it means tofeel that one is alive - thatdraws on
philosophical, literary, psychological, and medical accounts fromancient,
medieval, and modern cultures.
£19.95' cloth' 978·1·890951·76·4' 300 pp.' A Zone Book
The Prism of Grammar
How Child Language Illuminates Humanism
TOM ROEPER
"Thisengaging, perceptive, andwide-ranging study investigates individual
ianguagesin terms of thechallenges theypose forfhe child as well as their
often surprising relations to other languagesand to the generalprinciples that
constitute thegenetically-determined languagefaCUlty. Lucid and engaging,
The Prismof Grammar leadsthe reader from strikingobservations and
experiments with children that anyonecancarryout to subtle andintricate
issues that concerneveryparent - in fact, anyoneseekingto understand who
we areand what we should be."
- Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor, MIT
£24.95' cloth' 978-0-262-18252-2'372 pp . (50 lllus)
P OLITI C S
On red rugs
ere are two polemics on the Blair years
H from clever and experie nced writers
who should never be left alone together
in the same room. Anthony Giddens' s habit is
to give mildly reproachful indica tions that some
aspects of New Labour governa nce have been
disappoin ting since Tony Blair was swept to
power in Britain on May I, 1997. Geoff rey
Wheatcroft' s rage against the man he describes
as a "pious God-botherer" and charlatan, one
who has des troyed his country' s independence,
bursts dyspeptically from virtually every page .
Both authors establish their perspective with
a scene-setting description of visits to Washing-
ton, DC. Wheatcroft applauds the refusal in July
2006 of Nouri al-Maliki, newly appointed Prime
Minister of democratized Iraq, to bow to Amer-
ican bullying and take Israel' s side in its short
war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. He contrasts
this stand with Blair' s subsequent refusal, in
Washington en route to a Carribean family holi-
day, to condemn the Israeli counter-att ack. It is
cited as further shameful evidence that Britain ' s
poodle Prime Minister has reduced a proud and
ancient nation to craven subservience.
As much the intellectual-as-court ier as
Wheatcroft is the armchair freedom fighter,
Lord Giddens' s anecdote is equally revea ling
about its author's perspective. He descri bes his
own first trip in the Blair entourage to the
twentieth century's New Rome in 1998: by
Concorde with New Labour' s VIPs, black
limos from the airport esco rted by police out-
riders, high-level meeti ngs, the White House
dinner where he stands in line to meet President
Clinton between Harrison Ford and Barbra
Streisand . The reader half-expects to learn that
both stars offered to play Tony and Cherie Blair
in the film of The Third Way if only Giddens
would knock his 1998 Blairite text into a script.
No such luck, but the visit was "a bit different
from teaching sociology in Cambridge", the
wide-eyed aut hor notes.
Indeed. A prime ministerial cavalcade is a
seductive expe rience and Giddens appears
seduced, albeit by red-carpet treatment that is
distinctly at odds with the unflashy and egalitar-
ian values of social democracy he preaches in
Over to You, Mr Brown. As Wheatcroft might
interject, "That's Blair for you, showbiz vulgar-
ity triumphs over substance every time". Yet
Giddens's book is by far the more useful of the
two as Blair hands the key to 10 Downing Street
to his long-term collaborator, No 11 neighbour
and rival, Gordon Brown. It contains little that
is likely to be unfamiliar to fellow toilers in
academe (he generously cites the research
of others), to policy-holies like Mr Brown or to
co lonies of think tanks on the banks of the
Thames. But to the lay reader contemplating a
Brown future or to students, it will prove acces-
sible and stimulating reading. Giddens knows
undergraduates well enough to bribe them with
a jo ke or three at the start of every chapter.
There is more Grouc ho Marx here than Kar!.
So what does Giddens propose? And will
Prime Minister Brown , steeped in ten years of
government experience as Britain' s finance min-
ister as Blair was not in 1997- 8, take any notice
of such an arch-Blairite scholar? Brown is
famously wary of those who have not sworn a
blood oath of loyalty, though he has promi sed
to be more open and inclusive. Giddens cou ld
TL S J UNE 8 2 0 07 - 10-
MI C HA EL WHIT E
A nt ho n y Gidd en s
OVE R T O YOU , MR B R OW N
188pp. Polity. Paperback, £9.99.
978 07456 42239
Geo ff rey W h e at cr oft
Y O , BL A I R !
128pp. Politico' s. £9.99.
978 I 842752067
be a test. His tone is respectful (twice as many
index refere nces to Gordon as to Tony) and he
certainly shares much of what will now become
the New Labour Squared agenda. Wealth
creation through a lightly but firmly regulated
free-market economy; a state in which power is
devolved but which ensures that its citize ns
have the necessary mean s - health and educa-
tion, jo bs and money - to lead fulti lled lives;
personal security from crime, terrorism, Big
Brother and clim ate change; a better work/life
balance; a better EUfUS balance too; it is a
familiar list, one which New Labour has pro-
moted while failing, Giddens concedes, to syn-
thesize as the "third way" between Thatcherism
and the lost semi-socia list world of 194 5- 79 .
All this is to be achieved in a society where
the overall tax burden remains roughly at the 40
per cent-plus of GNP where it now stands, but
rewe ighted in a more ega litarian and greener
way. The rich should pay more, the poor less.
The poor should also get their fair shares of
society's goodies, health care and Cambridge
bursaries for their kids, though they must be per-
suaded to take more responsibility for their own
lives too. It is an important insight of Blairism
that Attlee's welfare state model delivered
more to the middle class and the clever than to
the poor, a repro ach to Labour critics who extol
the Golden Age.
"Children First" should be Brown's guiding
principle. Yes, says Giddens. Excellent, but it
already is. The real question is how to do all
this. Giddens is right to say that New Labour' s
recor d in reshaping public services , red istribut-
ing money to the poorest and much else since
1997 is much better than genera lly acknow-
ledged by left-wing Labo ur critics of the
Betrayal School, let alone by libertarian upper-
middle-class conservatives like Wheatcro ft,
who ignores it. But, like New Labour, Giddens
is also better at saying what "should" happen
than at doing the difficult bit and setting out
exactly how a policy goal is to be achieved.
Lloyd George knew what to do: break a few
heads. But, on the home front at least, Blair has
usually been tim id and co nse nsua l. Hen ce the
pervasive sense of disappointment as he departs
that Young Lochinvar did not fullil his promise,
that presentational gloss - doubtful statist ics
about exam results, "spin" in the j argon of Fleet
Street's counter-spinners - has too often been a
substitute for delivery.
Giddens knows this and ruefully acknow-
ledges some of it, just as he admits that the activ-
ist, interven tionist foreign policy he sees as
essential to a globalized, inter-dependent world
has led to half-cocked disas ter in Iraq. Giddens
does make some specific proposals, such as a
1 per cent annual wealth tax on assets on a
 POLITICS

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

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

Eurospan I university presses

CHINESE MODERNITY AND AN ANTHOLOGY OFGREAT LA NILSSON BLOOD AND BELIEF BUILDERS OF EMPIRE
GLOBAL BIOPOLlTICS U.S. WOMEN POETS 1850·1990 MyLif, in Opera The PKKandthe Kurdish Fight for Independence Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717-1927
Studie s inliterature andVisual Cu ltu re Te mples and Palaces Birgit Nifsson Alila Mareus JessicaL.Harland-Jaeobs
SheldonH.Lu Editedby 1.;1 },l il""oll Translatedby
GlennRichardRuihley DorisJungPopper The first study of the
Chronicles thescarcely relationship between
Interdisciplinarystudy of The autobiographyof
Chinesemodernity in the ,' I believable saga of Freemasonryand
Collects classicwomen

H,, ~;t ~; l~
opera legend Birgit theKurdishidentity British imperialism.
.. contextof globalisation. poetsin onevolume Nilsson11918·100511, inTurkey.
Jun2007264pages finally availablein Eng lish. May 2007400pages
971-0-8248-3177-6 Feb2007608pages Aug2007368pages 25 illustrations, 6 tables,
Jun2007356 pages
3 photos, 2 drawings

~
~iiii~~ 978-0-8078-]088-8
Paperbackf14.S0 56illustrations, discography 978·0·8147·5711·6
978-0-9655735-0-4 .....----'--'-'-----'........L.:I.I Hal1lback f22.50 1 map, 1figure
971-0-8248-3111-0 1·5555]·67 0·0
c==------c::- =~ Hal1lback £35.95
'"----Z"-=""".... Hardbackf14.5D
~,---,---c.-c-----c-e Hard b"c k fZ 2 . S 0
New YorkUniveni tyPress Hardbackf25.9S
UnivenityofHl wei'iP re.. TheUniveni tyofMichigan Press Northlutern Unlvlrsity Prll1 TheUniven ityof Norll1 CerolinaPress
Univl rsity PrlSs 01Nl w England

SHAKESPEARE AND New inPeperbBck GIORGIO AGAMBEN New in Paperback

THE NATURE OFLOVE
Uterature, Culture, Evolution
Mareus Nordlund
Exp lores Shakespea re's
treatmentof different
forms of love.
Aug2D07]04pages
978-0-8101-2423-]
Paperback £16,50
978-6-8101·2421·9
':-cc--::-:- ~ Hal1lback £38.50
Northwestem UniYfnityPress
HUNGARY ATWAR A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF Sovereignty andLife THE JEWS IN MUSSOLINI'S ITALY
CiviliansandSoldiers inWorldWar 1I THE EUROPEAN COURT EditedbyMatthewCalareo From Equality to Perse cution
OFHUMAN RIGHTS & Steven DeCaroli
ceao. Eby Michele Sartarri
Michaelo. Goldhaber Translatedby
Discusses material John & AnneC. Tedesehi
A historical chronicle extendingacross theentire
of Hungary'swartime Introducesthe judicial rangeof Agamben's writings. Thetreatment of Jews
I""::':;::~~'::-;:;::~ expe r i e nces armof the Council of infasc ist Italy comes
Europe- distinct from Jun2007296pages into sharpfocus.
~b2007]]6pages
the Europea n Union. 978-0-8047-5050-9
Paperback £14.50 Mar20074]8pages
18 i1Iustrations, 1 map May 2007 208 pages, 10 pho1os 17photos, 2 linemaps, 6 tables
978·0·8047·5049·]
~~~'~!IlI1 978-0-271 -0]244-] 978·0·81]5·]98]·6 "--'--" -"- " ~- Hal1lback £38.50 978-0-299-217]4-1
~ Paperbackf12.95 Hal1lbackf19.50 SlanlordUniversityPress Paperbackf19.50
PennStllteUnivenityPre.. Rulgers UniversityPress ThIUnivarsityofWisconsinPress

Eurospan Iuniversity presses Tel' +44 (0)1767 604972 Fax +44 (0)1767 601640 Email eurospan@turpin -distribution.com www.eurospangroup.com/bookstore

- 11- TLS J UNE 8 200 7

 POETRY

TLSlFoyles poetry competition 2007

Shortlisted poems: a poll of readers to decide the outcome

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

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

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

TLS J UNE 8 200 7 - 12-

 POETRY

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

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

- 13 - TLS J UNE 8 200 7

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

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

T the middle of London will have

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

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

TLS J UNE 8 2007 - 14-

 COMMENTARY

University of London Researc h Library Ser-

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

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

That was when the cat freaked out -

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

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

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

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

MATTHEW SW E E NEY
IT2> PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

- 15 - TLS J UNE 8 2007


f you haven ' t had much luck placin g your
I short stories in magazines recently, we
recomm end readin g an article in the Man-
chester-based literary magazine Transmission.
"Wri ter's Block" by the novelist Nicholas
Royle sets out some rules to help you get your
work publi shed in the future. "Rule No I: you
can 't win. The sooner you realize this the bet-
ter." Rule No 2: "resea rch your market" ; to put
it anoth er way, "do not send your fictionali zed
diary of a crack-whore to the Read er 's
Digest" . Rule No 3: "don 't put 'Fir st British
Serial Rights Offered ' on the cover sheet. It' s a
dead giveaway and should in all cases lead to
immediate rejection ". Nos 4, 5, 6 and 7: don 't
send your work to Granta. Mr Royle di fferenti-
ates the respective rules thus: No 4, "You' ll be
lucky to get much serious con sideration from
Gran ta", No 5, "You 'r e not likely to get much
con siderat ion from Granta", No 6, "You' re
still not likely to get much serious con sidera-
tion from Gran ta", No 7, "You' re unlikely to
get much etc etc etc".
Having got that off his chest, Royle tries
looking on the bright side: the British Council -
sponsored annual antholo gy Ne w Writin g is a
possible outlet for your work. Then again, "it
is publi shed by Granta Book s" . Submi ssions
are welcome, "but an unspeci fied proportion
of cont ribut ions are commi ssioned from estab-
lished writers", the likes of whom are favoured
by . . . (fill in the blank).
Mr Royle' s intention is to promo te the
market for short stories. The word " market"
suggests transaction, which sugges ts money,
which hold s out the promi se of nouri shment
and continuing life for the budd ing short story
writer. Mr Royle isn't that da ft. "A lot of
would-be writers do talk about 'markets' for
t is hard to under stand how Segolenc
I Royal' s harm less invention of "br avitude"
(for "bravoure") , uttered while out walking
the Great Wa ll of China, cou ld have lost her
votes in the recent presidential election : as
neologisms go it isn 't bad. But then the French
are more defensive about their language than
we are, perhaps becau se it is shrinking. English
isn't, of course. Five new words arrive e very
day. I' ve ju st heard it announced on the News
that the new edition of the Coliins Dictionar y
include s "season creep" and "carbon footprint" .
The lava no w allow s us the luxury of feeling
either smug or irritated according to our mood.
Sometimes the air seems to be full of vivid new
slang - "Croydon facelift" for that pulled-b ack
hairstyle, "pram-faced" for the sulky express ion
of young mothers, "gone bitch cake s" for
mad. At other s it seems to be losing its grip
with comm ercia l doub le-talk and politica lly
correct euph emi sms: "a lcohol issues", "walking
skills", " his head' s in a diflicult place". The
unforgivable " problem" problem was solved
long ago with "issue" , but I haven't notic ed
"No issue" supplanting the all-purpo se "No
problem". There are signs that even the word
"issue" is becoming culpable, with "situation"
taking over , as in "He had a situation with drugs
which became a situation with stealing". And if
the verb to steal is too much for you there is
always the coy "TWOC" for " taking without
con sent" (" He twoc'd it"). You have to smile at
"Noble cause corrupt ion" for the fabrication of
ev idence in a worthwhile cau se.
An upda te of the old "N ice legs, shame about
the face" is BOBFOC, body off Baywatch face
T LS JU N E 8 2007
COMMENTA RY
their work . The use of the word is not to my
personal taste. 'Outlet' see ms a more accept-
able alternative, one that allows for the more
plausible version of events in which your story
appears but you do not get paid."
The Summ er issue o f Transmission is ava il-
able for £4 from 8 Sydda l Clo se, Bramhall ,
Stockport. It carries nine short stories by fortu-
nate writers, and a note: "No payment can be
offered for any submission".
*
A grea t literar y discovery wouldn' t be great if
it didn 't turn up in a cob webb ed attic or a trunk
unop ened for cen turies. It was scarcely a sur-
prise, then, to learn from the Dail y Telegraph
(J une 4) that "one of the greatest co llection s of
letters ever amassed" - the collection of the
late Au strian industriali st Albin Schram,
which goes on sale at Christi es, London , on
Jul y 3 - "has been found in a laund ry room ".
As if that didn't give the story a sufficient
fairy-ta le element, we were introduced to Miss
Morris of Chri stie' s who, on being led to the
cabin et in the laundry room , "opened it and
could not believe her eyes" . As she flicked
throu gh the contents, "Miss Morri s' s eyes
grew wider ".
The Schram collection would widen any-
one' s eyes. The 1,000 items includ e letters
written by John Donne, Dan iel Defoe, Isaac
off Crimewatch , while a SINKSCUM is a
F REE LA NCE
single, independent no-kid s self-centred male.
The word "chav" sounds like an acron ym for
"co uncil house and vio lent", but it may derive
from the gypsy "chav i", a child. ("Cheval"
mean s lad in Spanish.) Chavisms include
" bashin", "bangin ", " kickin", "blatant" and
" buff' (nake d, but also well-ton ed). "Los ing it
big time" is more likely to be " big style" nowa -
days. I look to my beggar friend Mark outside
Tesco for the current mode of addre ss. He used
to ca ll me "G uv", then it was "Bruv", now he
ca lls me "Son" as I hand over my £1. The law
of dimin ishing return s.
The meaning of " partner", "lover" and " boy-
friend" are all up in the air, as far as I can see.
One can only guess the nuances. And whereas
"He' s seeing a woman" is quite a discreet expres-
sion, "He ' s seeing three women" isn't. In a
restaurant a man might "go for" the vegetarian
option. In the pub, once he has "got them in", he
might "come up with" an idea, althoug h anyone
who has been creative ly inspired by a hangover
will disagree that "a Mond ay mornin g idea" is
unlikely to be any good .
Mal apropi sms were around long befor e
Sherid an ' s rather force d jok es in The Rivals .
Shake speare started it with lines like "Compari-
sons are odorou s" in Mu ch Ado About Nothin g.
The television Mafia series The Sopranos con-
tinue s the tradition with suitably Freudi an self-
betra yals such as "Vito' s passing and all that
that entr ails" and "I was prostate with grie f '. In
modern parlanc e, " tortuous" is often used for
- 16-
Newton, Beetho ven, Pushkin , Volt aire, Char -
lotte Bront e and Ernest Hemingway. A letter
of 1948 from T. S. Elio t to Cli ve Bell come s
with a loisir de la po ste addressed to the post-
man on the enve lope. The lines were publi shed
in a 1948 sympos ium devoted to Eliot , but are
little enough kno wn to meri t reproduction
here. Lewes, where Bell lived (pronounced
"Loo-i ss", overseas readers please note), is a
trick y word to rhyme but Eliot succeeded:
o stalwart Sussex postman, who is
Deli vering the post from Lewes,
Cycle apace to Charleston Firle
While knitting at your plain and purl
Deliver there to good Clive Bell
(You know the man, you know him well
He plays the virginals and spinet)
This note - there's almos t nothing in it.
*
Iranian academics have been warned to abstain
from communicatin g with Western colleag ues,
on pain of being sacked, or accused of spying,
or worse. According to a report in the Guard-
ian (Ma y 3 1), an Iranian government official
claimed that "our lecturers are exposed to intel-
ligence threat s. We are worried about aca-
demic conferences which foreigners attend [to]
establi sh relation s with Iranian academic s".
You doubtle ss find it hard to imagine any
thinking person approv ing of attempts to for-
bid free intellectual exchange. The same news-
paper, on the same day, carried a report about
British academics, as repre sented by the Uni-
versity and Co llege Union, who have voted to
recomm end a boycott of all Israeli academic
institution s, in protest at the occ upation of
Palestinian land. Accordin g to the paper ' s
education correspondent, this cou ld involve
"refusing to work with journals publi shed by
"tortured", "enormity" for "hugeness", "simplis-
tic" for "simple" . "Well" has taken the place of
" very" , and "good" the place of "well" , as in
''I' m good, thank s", as if referring to something
more than mere health, moral hea lth perhaps. I
always say, "Good at what?" , which annoys
even me. I wouldn 't want to canute the sea of
words, but it' s hard not to when something is
being lost. I note that "a curate' s egg" is now
widely used to mean "a mixed blessing" ,
although one without any blessings presuma-
bly. "Iconic" and "s tate of the art" mean any-
thing slightly good and the usefu l "edgy" is
now short for the yuppy "cuttin g edge". Inten-
tional misuses include "d isappointed" for
"outraged", " unhelpful" for "damag ing" and
"so-called", as in "the so-called British Empire ".
I like to think that Mike Tyson ' s "I might j ust
fade into Bolivian" was actua lly a jok e.
The Sopranos' "We ' re in a fucking stag-
mire" join s a line of portmanteau words fun -
ning from "smo g" and "s lithy" throug h "alco-
holida y" to "chillax" (relax and chill) , "copy-
righteou s" , "trysexual" and "spindocracy".
"Irregardless" seems to have "irrespective" hid-
den inside it. A "ha sbian " or " wasbian" is a
former lesbian now in a hetero sexua l situation.
Needle ss verbal accumulations include "station
stop" (either would do) and the use of " today"
on the end s of sentences, as in "Will there be
anything else for you today?", which natters
with its suggestion that you are a regul ar
cu stomer. Equally, the contin ual use of your
Chri stian name in conversation is surely a "tell"
Israeli compan ies or collabor ate on research
contracts with Israeli academics" .
There is no need to force a glib parallel
between the prohibitions; only imagine the out-
rage of the British academ ics if their gove rn-
ment, rather than their union , had instruct ed
them not to work with Israeli journ als or collab-
orate on research with Israeli colleagues.
*
Our new ly formed association , the Defenders
of One, ded icated to preser ving the prono un
"one" against attacks by Muri el Spark and
others, has drawn widespread support. The
request was for sentences in which "no other
pronoun cou ld do the job as well". Anthea
Ingham of Leamin gton Spa draws attention
to several instances in Nancy Mitfor d' s novel
Love in a Cold Climate. The first - Cedric
Hampton' s declaration, "In Paris I have an apart-
ment of all beauty, one' s idea of Heaven" -
seems to us not to pass the test. The first-person
possessive would be as effective, and would
sound less " pompous" (Spark' s objection).
Ms Ingham' s second example of Cedri c' s
speech - "What one doe s so love about love, is
the time before they find out what One is like"
- hits the mark . Here, the first-person singular
would damp en the comic touch , while " what
you are like" would risk offending Cedric' s
interlocutor.
Jo hn North pro vides an example from Jane
Austen : "E verybody is always supposi ng that I
am not a good walker; and yet they would
not have been pleased, if we had refused to
jo in them . When people come in this manner
on purpo se to ask us, how can one say no?"
(Persuasion) . As Mr North says, " ' You' or
'we ' or T would ruin this sentence".
Le.
for duplicity? A strange survivor is "un-
beknown st" ; its popu larit y suggests its bits and
pieces are adding something vital to
"unknown", but what?
I was brought up to dislike most things; enthu-
siasm, as I remember it , was reserved for round -
ing things up and driving them over a cliff as
amu singly as possible. Today it is vaguely incor-
rect to dislike things, as if you might dislike cer-
tain peop le too. The height of persona l distaste
is voiced in phra ses like " I'm not overly fond
of ' and " I' m not a massive fan", which go out
of their way to respect the disliked thing. "I
hear what you' re saying" is the closest to dis-
sent. Maximum aggressi on is expressed with
"And your point is?" or "What?", spoken into a
silence, as it is in a new translation of Gork y' s
Phili stin es at the National , along with "great",
"s ure" , "s tuff', "w eird" , "What' s with the . . ."
and "She' s a great-looking bird , it has to be
said" , all in spite of the 1920s vacuum cleaner
being pushed about the stage .
Tracey, the "c rusty" or "hippy raver" in the
new Big Broth er realit y television show, was
being intervi ewed about her chance s of win-
ning . "That' d be proper havin' it, proper
buzzin ' '' , she said, without pausing for thoug ht.
Phrases like "butt-hotties" , " toe-cleavage",
"arse-horns" (rear tattoo s) and " Bingo wings"
(nappy upper arms ) might make you want to
"hurl" (chuck, vomit) , but as soon as the
thought come s into your head you' ll hear a tired
voice asking "Do you want a bag with that?"
Enjoy.
H U G O WILLIAMS

The importance of camouflage
Sir, - Aft er gi ving a succi nct d efinition o f
camouflage in her revi ew of the cur rent exhibi-
tion at the Imperial War Mu seum and the
accompan yin g book by Tim New ar k (Arts,
Jun e I) co m pa ring them with the fa sh ion fo r
camouflage design s, Cl are Grifliths tends to
underestim ate the importanc e o f camoullage in
both wor ld wa rs and a fter.
Perhaps this is not surprisi ng afte r viewi ng
the bel at ed but rather inconclusive ex hibition
at the IWM wi th its limi ted di spl ay of artefacts .
Camoullage was by no mean s an "abs urd ity"
in the We stern De sert in 1942 , as Gri ffith s
--------------------~--------------------
Communist collapse
Sir, - Chri s Patten rightl y not es, in his review of
Eli zab eth Rob erts' s histor y of Montenegro (Jun e
I), that the area o f the forme rly Communist
world that suffe red the greatest vio lence in the
break -up of Communism was the fornner Yugo-
slav ia, the part "that had mo st di stanc ed itse lf
politically fro m M osco w" . But it was not, as he
says, the onl y part to do so . He mi gh t have men -
tioned Roman ia, which und er its meg alomania-
cal nationalist lead er N ico lae Ceau sescu also, in
the I960 s, brok e wi th Mo sco w - and, con se-
qu entl y, wa s the onl y oth er part of the Commu-
nist world to ex perie nce any real degree o f
vio lence in the di ssolution of its Communi st
reg ime. Th ere was nothing, o f cour se, like the
bloodshed that convulsed Yu goslavia in the
1990s, but hundred s, perh ap s - the fig ures are
still not preci sely kno wn - died in the stree t vio-
lence of Timisoara and Buchare st in 1989. It was
ind eed a wide ly ob ser ved feature o f the revolu -
tion s o f 1989- 91 that a mo re or less peac eful
tran sit ion occurred wh erever Soviet influ enc e
was stro ng - inc luding, o f course, in the Soviet
Union itse lf.
W e do not I think still appreciate sufficie ntly
the extr aordinary cha racter of the break -up of
"th e So viet empire" , and o f its inform al ex te n-
sio n in Central and Eastern Europe. What
oth er em pire has ende d its life so peac eabl y?
Cer tainl y not the O ttoman, or the Ha bs burg, o r
the Frenc h, or the Briti sh . What was it about the
So vie t empire that m ad e it so di fferent ?
KRISHAN KUMAR
Departm ent of Sociology, University of
Virgini a, Charlottesv ille, Virginia 22904.
-----'~,-----
Off our backs
Sir, - Michele Pridmore-Brown ' s re view of
sev era l recent American studies on child birth
(Jun e I) goes too far in the d irection of sce pti-
cis m. In particular, she cas ts d oub t on Ma rsden
Wagn er ' s advi ce that pregnant wo me n sho uld
"tru st their bodi es" since , in Pridmore-Brown' s
words, " interpreting bodily sig ns is itself a cul -
turall y med iat ed, ind eed oft en faddis h, affa ir".
I wonder if Pridmore-Brown wo uld g o so far
as to sugges t tha t New to n's law o f gra vitat ion is
either culturally medi at ed or faddi sh ? Th e
tradi tional mid wifer y promoted by Wa gn er
ve ry often invol ves a birthing stoo l, or so me
oth er mean s by which a pre gnant wo ma n may
g ive birth in a po sture other than the supine .
T he we ight o f the in fant itsel f then become s an
aid to deli ver y - not an impedim ent, as with a
suggests , but an esse nt ial adjunct of the strate-
gic plan fo r the Battle o f El Alamein. Th e con-
structi o n o f a dummy railh ead and the siting o f
dummy ta nks and g uns co nfuse d the ene my as
to whe re the o ffens ive wo uld be launched.
The concealme nt o f shi ps at sea was far more
d ifficult than hid ing tar get s on land . The da zzle
paint design s of the Fi rst World W ar mad e
ships more conspicuous, and had to be replaced
by shades o f w hite and grey accor d ing to the
theatre of war. Sci enti sts began to repl ace art-
ists in devi sin g de sign s. On e o f them , A . E.
Schuill, while making ob ser vat ion s from a
wo ma n on her back who mu st rel y pur el y on
the forc e o f mu scular contract ion. Yet gi ving
birth in thi s po sture is the chief raison d ' etre
for man y o f the dub iou s pro cedures - Ca esa r-
ea n sectio ns, episioto mies, indu ction - that
Pridmore-Brown ag rees with Wagn er are rif e
with unnecessary and unpl easan t complications.
Is there any goo d reason why a woma n sho uld
give birth lyin g on her back ? Non e wha tsoever,
unl ess on e beli eves tha t a wo man should have
sex lyin g on her back. T he very term " mission-
ary po sition" - a long with the rallyin g cry o f
1970 s femi nis ts, "Off Our Back s!" - should
indicate that so me times a culturally med iated
practice can go be yond the merel y faddi sh.
Surel y thi s is the burden o f W agn er' s ad vic e
for pregn ant women to " tru st their bodies" :
w hen wo men admit that it is po ssibl e to ha ve
sex ua l ple asure (perhaps ev en more sex ua l
pleasur e) wi tho ut bein g on the ir back s, the y
might al so have the conlidence to giv e birth
in a way that scie nce, common sense, and
tradi tion al mid wifer y wo uld all rec o m mend.
PETER MORRIS
Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania 19081.
------~------
'Pelleas et Melisande'
Sir , - Andrew Port er ' s re view o f the Ro yal
Op era Hou se production o f Debu ssy' s Pelleas
et Melisande , ju stly characterize d as a "c he ap
mod ish spectacle" (Art s, Jun e I) , brin gs to mind
w hat in its way is perhaps an e ven mo re bizarre
ex amp le of the same deplorable tenden cy. Thi s
was provided by Rob ert Wil son , in whose pro -
duc tion of the wor k at the Pari s Op er a in 1997 ,
with Da wn U pshaw as a tou ch ing M eli sand e,
imag inative stag ing was mat ch ed to the mu sic
w hile res pecting the indications of Debu ssy ' s
libretto . Three yea rs later, in what was d isingenu -
ou sly bill ed as a "revival", this had mutated into
an exa mple o f Japanese Noh theatre (Wil son ' s
latest fad) in which the same ca st no w had to
strike sty lize d attitudes and mo ve stiff-lim bed
acro ss the stag e lik e automa ta, seem ing ly
una ware of ea ch other' s presence. Thi s was dou -
bly iro nic, since the composer him self, at a tim e
w he n he despair ed o f eve r seei ng his op era per -
forme d in France, had rem arked jokingly that
perhaps it wo uld be more welcome in Japan - a
place whose thea trica l aest he tic he we ll knew to
be the opposi te of hi s own, a point c lea rly not
tak en by Wil son.
DENYSPOTTS
12a Bushcomb e Close , Woodman cote,
Cheltenham.
-17-
submari ne, was kill ed after it had been torp e-
doed by a U- boa t in the Atlantic.
Camoullage continu es to be an ong o ing
requirement in warfare, but both the ex hibitio n
and Tim Newark, in hi s splend id ly illu strat ed
book, co nce ntrate on un iform s w hile ne gl ect ing
the countermeasure s against sys te ms of detect-
ion such as radar, in frar ed and so und alread y
being introduced in the latt er stages o f the
Second World W ar.
GUY HARTCUP
16 Temple Sheen, East Sheen, London SW 14.
Dustwrapped
Si r, - Jam es Ferg usso n as ks : "W he n is a lirst
edition not a fir st ed ition?" (Jun e I). He mi gh t
also have asked : whe n is a du stwra pper not the
du stwrapp er ? In R. A . Gekoski' s cur rent cat a-
logu e, w hich Fer gu sson go es on to describe, are
two items (not mentioned by Fergu sson) w hich
cause me un ease . A copy o f Sols tice and Other
Poem s (19 35 ) by Rob inson Je ffer s, inscribed by
the author to Edga r Lee M asters, is described as
"a good cop y, spine fade d, in a ve ry good du st-
wra ppe r which has been supplie d". And a copy
of D. H. La wr enc e' s The Rainbow (1915 ),
signe d on the title pa ge and bearin g Lawrenc e' s
Phoenix bookplate (and so pu tati vel y hi s own
co py), is offered " in a du stwrapper su pplied
fro m another co py" (d ustw ra ppered co pies
bein g appa rently ve ry rar e) .
Th is swa pping abo ut of du stwr app er s, I fee l,
erodes the authe ntici ty of historical obj ect s.
W ould the Je ffer s book, for instance, have a
faded spine if the wr apper had al wa ys been
present ? Ho w d o we kno w that Lawr ence didn 't
junk the (rather lurid) Rainbo w wra pper because
he hat ed it? At these pric es (£ 500 and £25 ,000
respect ivel y), one mi gh t ex pect a greater respec t
for the int egrit y of the goods o ffered.
GRAHAM CHAINEY
25 The Albemarle, Marine Parade, Brighton .
-----~,-----
Hughes the translator
Sir, - Cli ve Wilmer ' s review o f Ted Hu gh ess
Selected Translations (Jun e I) is perc ep tive o n
man y po int s but prompts larger que stion s about
ho w we use the wo rd "tra ns latio n". Of Pound
he tell s us that " In wri ting Cathay - at a tim e
whe n, incidentally, he kne w no Chinese -
Pound di sco ver ed a mysterious pro cess .. .".
People who tran slat e from lan gu ag es they can't
read cert ainl y mo ve in mysterious ways, ye t
"i nci denta lly" is an odd word to use here : sure ly
it wa s o f the esse nce of Pound' s text tha t at that
time he was unable to convey an yth ing at all
fro m a lirs t-hand kno wledge of Chine se?
Of a poem by Fer en c Juhasz, Wilmer tell s us
that Hugh es ' s " thrilling" ver sion d rives oth er
vers io ns "o ff the map", thou gh Hu ghe s de vised
it "w itho ut an y kno wl ed ge of the ori ginal lan -
gua ge and no Hun gari an spea ke r to advise
him " . O f a po em by Jrino s Pilinszk y, W ilm er
tell s us tha t Hu gh es "s uccee ds in putting hi s li n-
ger on the quali ty o f Pilinszk y' s visi o n". Ju st
how can suc h th ings be achi eved and e ven co m-
ment ed on wi tho ut refer enc e to the Hun garian
texts ? W e are in an Ali ce-in-Wonderl and
uni ver se here wh er e the ability to read the origi-
nal lan gu age in qu estion see ms to be regard ed
as a mere irrel evance - or ev en a di sad vantage.
Of a vid, Wilmer suggests that a " lim itatio n
in Hu ghe s' s art and outlook" helped him to
imi ta te the Metam orpho ses, "e lid ing the prin -
cipl e o f order that uni fies the poem and its
vision" . It mi ght be ar gu ed th at "eliding" her e
mean s some thing more lik e " igno ring " or e ven
"v anda lizi ng" - be that as it ma y, we are left
wonde ri ng if the all eged lim itation is a vice or a
virtue in Hu gh es as a " translator" of a vid .
Th ere are vers io ns in thi s book fro m fo ur teen
lan gua ges. It wo uld be int er estin g to kno w ho w
man y o f them Hu gh es read directl y. Th e wor d
"t ran sla tion s" in the titl e is a red herrin g. Wh y
no t call these text s " poe ms in spired by other
poem s" ? Th en we could tak e them or lea ve
them and eve n ad mire them witho ut imag ini ng
we have ga ine d access, mysteriously or oth er -
wise , to the wo rlds o f the ori g inal authors.
ROBIN FULTON
Mjughaug terrasse 8, N 4048 Hafrsfjord,
Norway.
------~,------
Foucault and madness
Sir , - In hi s repl y to critical int er ventions,
Andrew Scull (Le tters, Ap ril 20) quotes in
French and En gli sh Mi ch el Fo uca ult on the
Land graf Philipp o f Hainau havin g set up on e
of the fir st ho spi tal s for the mad in a Lu theran
country.
Scull , quite naturally, tak es the fact as give n.
However, there was no Landg rafschaft of
Ha inau in the em pire and, henc e, no Land gra f
Philipp of Hainau . M ost probably it is Land gra f
Philipp o f Hesse w ho is bein g referred to , on e o f
the fir st Gernnan princ es to embrace Prot estant -
ism and conse que ntly to sec ularize monasteries,
usin g their incom e to fund new ed ucationa l and
soci al institution s. Thi s he did to the Ci sterci an
abbey of Haina (not Ha ina u), which was secular-
ized in 1527 and then tran sfornned into a ho sp ital
for inli rm old men and the mentally ill.
HANS-JORGEN WAGENER
Diedcrsdorfer Strasse 2, D-I 5306 Fricdcrsdorf,
Ge rmany.
-----~,-----
The ideal economist
Sir , - In his ex ce lle nt rev iew of The Chance l-
lors' Tales, ed ited by H oward Da vies, Pet er
Hennessy (A pril 6) ci tes Keyn es twic e , once on
the qualities o f an ide al econo mis t, and seco nd
the we ll- known state ment o f practic al men
being the slaves of so me defun ct eco nom ist.
Ho wever, given the chancellors ' views
(rec ounted by Hennessy) on the shortc om ings of
economic theo ry as a guide to their poli cy-
mak ing, perh ap s the mo re appropriate qu otation
fro m Keynes wo uld be from his introduction to
the Cambridge Econ omic Handboo ks. Keyn es
wrote that "T he Th eo ry o f Economics do es not
furnis h a bod y o f settled conclusion s immedi-
ately applicable to a polic y. It is a method rath er
than a do ctrine , an apparatus o f the mind, a tech -
nique o f thinking, which help s its po ssessor to
dr aw correct conclusion s" . No wh ere d id Keyn es
say that economics was a sci ence offerin g read y-
mad e fornnulae for cha nce llors to apply.
KHALID IKRAM
8703 Victory Lane, Potomac, Maryland 20854.
TLS J UNE 8 200 7

Look back in bhangra
BHAR AT T A NDO N
Mihi r Ba s e
HO L LYW O O D
A history
352pp. Tempus. £20.
978 0752428352
A yub Kh an-Din
RAF TA, R A F TA
Lyttelton Theatre
n his 1992 essay on The Wizar d of Oz ,
I Salman Rushdie recalls that film's influ-
ence on his own earliest attempts at fic-
tion: "I have forgo tten almost every thing
about his adventures, exce pt for an encounter
with a talk ing pianola whose personality is an
improb able hybrid of Judy Garland, Elvis Pres-
ley and the ' playback singers ' of the Hindi mov-
ies, many of which made The Wizard of O: look
like kitchen-sink realism". It is a measure of
how far Bollywood has raised its profile in the
West over the past fifteen years, that the cul-
tural shock absorbers of quo tation that Rushdie
places around '''playback singers" now look
quaintl y redund ant (as if he were explaining to
us the mysteries of the "digital watch"); never-
theless, the pertinence of his memory remain s.
Instinctively reinvent ive, Indian mainstream
cinema has long been a space in which Jud y
Garland , Elvis Presley and singers such as Lata
Mangeshkar could meet metaphorically, an art
which flaunted its hybrid form and cultu ral
intertextuality decades before such actions were
given the stamp of legitimacy by European and
A me rica n acad emi a ; as so m an y time s before,
the issue of who is runnin g to catch up with
whom is not as clear as it might seem. The best
parts of Mihir Boses oddly shaped but often
absorbing history of Bollywood explore such
modes of reworkin g, and in particular how the
reconfig uring of old stories has served "to re-
create an old nation emerg ing after centuri es of
bondage, help it to rediscove r its roots, while
linking it to a present, very different world" .
Similarl y, at the National Theatre, Ayub Khan-
Din' s Raf ta, Raj ia .. . not only dramatizes the
influence of old stories (from Bollywood clas-
sics to skeletons in familial closets), but appears
itself as a cross-cultural updating of Bill Naugh-
ton' s 1963 domestic comedy A ll in Good Tim e.
Negotiating awkward generation gaps thus
becomes bo th a su bject and a dramatic method.
As Bose rightly notes, the term "Bollywood"
carries its own contentious freight, some
commentators rejecting it for perpetuating in its
very etymology the idea of modern Indian
culture as something intrinsically "belated" or
second-hand, and one of the most rewardin g
emphases in his history is on how the new
medium - thank s in part to the Lumier e broth-
ers' evangelical and entrepreneurial zeal for it -
made its first appearance in India only a few
month s after those epochal screenings in France
at the end of 1895, and was, within a few years,
spreading outwards from the metrop olitan
TLS J UNE 8 20 07
ARTS
The past and the future ofBollywood
Ronny Jhutti as AtuI Dutt and Arsher AIi as Etash Tailor in Raf ta, Raft a . . .
centres, with their largely white audiences, to
become an art form that, on account of its visual
priorities and mass reproducibility, had the
potential to reach a truly popular audience.
Tracing the cour se of this expansion via the
efforts o f num erous visiona ries and journey-
men, Bose offers a cinematic history whose
tirneline, from the early decades of the twentieth
century, runs in parallel to the more familiar
American one, rather than passively echo ing it.
For example, his account of the Madan family,
pioneers of the Indian studio system, shows how
the coming of the talkies offered distinct oppor-
tunities to Indian cinema, not least a chance to
adapt the works of indigenous literary giants
such as Rabindranath Tagore. Indeed, there
were clearly times when the wider access which
films offered to less oflicially sanctioned views
of Westerner s became a cause for concern:
Anything that undermined the supposed superi-
ority of the white races in the eyes of their
brown subjects was co nsidered very dangerou s
.. . . In 1922, H. L. Stc phc nso n, the chief secre-
tary to the Government of Bengal, discussing
the need to tighten ce nsor ship of Am erican
films, wrote about scenes in which "w hite men
and women [are] shown in a state of extreme
drunk enness in order to portray the degradation
caused by drink . Such scenes do not convey the
moral idea of Western mann ers and ideal s."
Once he move s on to the first "Go lden Age"
of Bollywood itself, typifie d by the defining
classics Moth er Ind ia (1957 ) and Mu gh al -e
A zam (1960) , Bose does well to steer clear of
the speculative gossip which that era brought
into the cult of cinematic celebr ity (the spirits of
- 18-
Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons live on
somewhere in Mumb ai), and to concentrate on
the internal and external factors which contrib -
uted to the films' status as milestones; his
cho ice of the Amitabh Bachch an Western
Sh o!ay (1975) and the anti-Imperialist cric ket-
ing drama Lagaan (200 I) as his later test cases
may lend the more recent history of Bollywood
a triumphali st air, but within the frame of his
chosen narrative, the selections are j ustified. It
is especia lly heartening to read an acco unt of
Sh o!ay that pays some attention to its cinematic
techniqu es, rather than simply reading it in
terms of its cultural resonances; it is a pity that
Bose does not go into the same kind of analyti-
cal depth with a tilm like M other India , which,
with all its visual symbolism (not to mention
its complex and often uncom fortable politics),
enshrines a particu lar cinematic image of post-
Independence India.
Bollywood: A history aim s to be a managea-
bly compreh ensive introduction to the topic ;
how ever , the desire for coverage mean s that
some of the most noteworth y parado xes to
which Bose alludes in passing are
frustratingly allowed to drop ; such as the long
history of contributions to the industry from
markedly left-of-centre figures, and Bolly-
wood's abilit y to rise, in its artis tic and roman-
tic collaborations, abo ve the divisions of com-
munali sm ("In the India of Bollywood, Hindus
fell in love with Mu slims and even married
them, as it was quite common for Mu slim
actors and actresses to play Hindu characte rs").
It is no coincidenc e that Bose' s discussions of
pricklier director s such as Shyam Benegal and
Shekhar Kapur are some of the most illumina t-
ing in the book ; as this account stands, how-
ever, the more intriguing and awkward stories
are fated to ho ver as ominous pressur es aro und
the edges of the main frame.
Raft a, Rafta . . . , for its part, makes much
both of the long shadow of Bollywood classics,
and of repressed back stories, as they bear on
the immediate unfold ing of the drama. Folk-
romance narrati ves so often end with weddin gs,
as a rewa rd to character s and readers; but this
play opens with the immedi ate aftermath of the
marriage, with what would be the untold "ever
after" in such a story, swiftly alerting an audi-
ence to the thought that all might not be quite
well here, and so it proves to be. Naughton' s
original play drew on the anxiety of the newly
wed coupl e' s having to live back under the
parental roof, at a time when the power of trans-
lating eco nomic freedom into "a place of one' s
own" was far from guaranteed (Keith Water-
house' s late 1950s anti -hero Billy Liar, for
example, desires an "e lsewhere" at least as
much as he lusts after women); Khan-Din trans-
lates this central conceit convincingly into one
of the few modern contexts where it might still
ring true. The young groom , Atul (Ronny
Jhutti), working as a projection ist at his local
Indian picture-house in Bolton, breaks step with
social habit by refusing to j oin in the bhangra
dancin g after his own wedding to Vina
(Rokh saneh Ghawam-Shahidi) - a prefiguring
of what turns out to be a much more serious
disappointment of collective expectation s, as a
variety of pressures contri ve to postpone the
consummation of their marriage, to the point
where the whole neighbou rhood starts erupting
in ill-informed gossip. Against the background
of th is crisis, Atu l' s parent s Lop a and Eesh war
(Meera Syal and Harish Patel) find themselves
questionin g their ow n ideas of what is and isn't
usual, as some problematic memories of the his-
tory and preh istory of their marriage hove into
view, until the characters' pent-up energy spills
over into violence, only to expend itself, rapidly
and merci fully, in reconciliation.
Given his work with Alan Bennelt in the past
two decades, it is not surprising that Nicholas
Hytner' s direction should be at home with the
pitch of Khan-Din' s writing: here, as in Eas t Is
East (1996), the script displays a facility with
habit and its sudden disturbances, and an ear for
those turns of phrase which work as capaciou s
social connot ations rather than as stereotypes.
(Bennett can suggest whole, unnarrated short
storie s beh ind character s sayi ng " finger buffet"
or "Highly Commended at Harrogate" .) In
Raf ta, Raf ta . . ., Atul reminisces about bondin g
with Vina over their mutual admiration for the
canonical Bollywood melodrama Pa keezah
(1971), a female-led story in which a lush
visual style marries Indian classicism to the
late- 1940s palette of Powell and Pressburger.
Once some of the characters begin to speculate
on the reasons for Atul's non-performance in
bed, a kno wing audience might be tempted to
make retrospective leaps of innuendo, only to
be caught out by the play' s comic resistance
to stock wisdom, or at least to stock wisdom's

claims to know everything. If the beginning of
the first Act deliberately calls on conventional
associations (whisky, bhangra, Artex ceilings),
the second Act serves conscio usly to pull both
characters and plot into three uncomfo rtable
dimensions, so as to reco il from such expecta-
tions. In this, Khan-Din and Hytner are aided by
some spirited ensemble playing: Syal manages
to lend long-suffering restraint a saving feisti-
ness, and Harish Patel is this production's
dramatic centre, slipping almost impercepti bly
from Falstaffia n comic bluster to crumpled
defeat and bewilderment. It is perhaps unfortu-
nate that, in a co medy about parental pressure,
the parents' performances should so outweigh
the childrens'; nevertheless Ghawam-Shahidi
pulls off the diflicult task of playing a characte r
who is sexua lly inexperie nced without being
sexua lly naive, another recoil from safe expecta-
tion s.
For all the assurance of the production, how-
ever, Raf ta, Rafta ... is never as emotio nally
invol ving an experience as it wants to be - per-
haps because it wears its dramatic emotio ns so
barefacedly. East Is Eas t was able to move
between comedy and pathos more quickly and
less predictably, and despite the finely acted
unfolding of Lopa and Eeshwar' s buried trauma
- the fact that Eeshwar's long-lost best friend
remains the silent, invisible third party in their
marriage - the new play still works primarily as
a sparkling piece of comic entertainment, one
that revivifies Naughton's origi nal while feel-
ing at times confined by its "we ll-made" stand-
ards. In Tim Hatley' s design, the standa rd mid-
terrace hou sefront is merel y a trompe l'oeil cur-
tain, from beh ind which the interior opens out
into a two-storey set; but this visual coup also
highlights the play' s priorities, and the scales
on which it chooses to work. For example,
though it is a smart reversa l for Khan-Din to
cast the British Natio nal Party in the role of the
unseen owners of the corner shop where
Eeshwar buys his whisky, that is about as close
as they get - of all the dangers that might
threaten the periphery of the domestic drama,
these ones are oddly unthreatening, as seem-
ingly distant and avoidable as Kenneth
Grahame's Wild-Wooders, whereas their real-
life co unterparts might do more unpleasant
things with bottles than sell them. Then again,
for all its surface trappings of naturalism, the
Dutts' home might best be seen as an Artex-
ceilinged version of pastoral - all the more so
since Atul and Vina need to llee it for a while in
order to keep their wits and sex life about them.
Both Bollywoo d and Hollywood are cur-
rently in the process of self-conscio usly remak-
ing their own classic back catalogues. While the
Indian remakes have, for the most part, been
less pointless than their America n counterparts,
it rem ains to be seen whether they will continue
the tradition of creative reinventio n that made
Bollywoo d so fascinating, or succumb to the
imitation-by-numbers currently afflicti ng so
much of America n film. In its own way, Rafta,
Rafta ... makes over Bill Naughton in ways
that the terribl e Jude Law version of Alfie
(2004) couldn' t begin to understa nd, but it
remains overs hadowe d by some other old
stories . Before East Is Eas t, Khan-Din was
probably best known for playing the lead in the
bracingly ill-mannered Hanif KureishilStephen
Frears collaboratio n Sammy and Ros ie Get Laid
(1987) ; if Raf ta, Raf ta . . . had allowed itself a
few more of that film's two-fi ngered j ungli
salutes, even lurking around its edges, how
much more gripping it might have been.
ARTS
Glorious cranks and wrestling parsons
n the eighteenth cen tury, the terms amateur GILLI A N D ARL EY shire, who by "Contriving & Drawing all his
I and professional had not yet been strictly
defined. But Georgian architectu re was well
served by a veritable Territorial Army of gentle-
A P ASS ION FO R B UIL DI NG
The amateur architect in England 1650-1 850
Planns without an Architect" left results
described as coming from the "lunatic fringe
of the Baroque". Byron's daughter, Ada, Lady
men enthusiasts of means, dwindling cof fers Sir John Soanes M useum, then tourin g Lovelace built herself a Plinean villa overlook-
often replenished by advantageous marriages, ing Porlock Weir, and Sarah Losh, romantic
well placed to design their new country houses pantheist, designed a bevy of buildings on her
and estate buildings. They were all beneficia r- he had returned from a lengthy study tour in island home, Wreay, on Lake Windermere.
ies of the Gra nd To ur, and, once home, con- Greece , personally took on the entire design Sadly, a small exhibition cannot include any of
tinued to hone their skills, bent over the classi- and building process, working drawings and the practica l philanthropists, such as Lord Har-
cal treatises, builders' manuals and architec- stonewor k included, at Belsay Castle, his radi- co urt of Nuneham Courtenay, who drew up his
tural prints that they had brought back from cal Greek Reviva l house and estate buildings. own model village, or Ada's widower , Lord
Paris, Venice and Rome, and which now The task took him more than thirty years . Lovelace, who let rip with handmade bricks and
weighed down their library shelves and filled Others call for attention from the shadows. patterned llints on his Surrey estate, nor those
their folio cupboards. From these they taught Ambrose Phillips built a functionally pointless (usually Irish) dreamers who wanted to emulate
them sel ve s to draw and eve n measure , since but full-throttle Triumphal Arch on his estate, aspects of Vienna or Versa illes within the
they had to convey at least a minimum of infor- Garendon Park in Leicestershire, added a brace compass of a village .
mation to the crafts men and artificers who of classical garden buildings, but sadly died, Paradoxically, even the first President of the
would build their schemes. aged thirty, in 1739, before he had finished the Royal Institute of British Architec ts, Earl de
A Passion for Building starts with the Rest- house. A little later, the "Wizard of Durham" Grey, was an amateur. Had we, as the French
oratio n, apart from one very early example of Thomas Wright, not content with discovering did from the 1670s onwards, depended on state
an amateur's grasp of pure Vitruvian classical the Milky Way, just one of many intellectual training and educatio n for architects, there
architecture: a newly discovered drawing for achievements, also designed over thirty garden would have been little of this startling individu-
a "porticus" fronting the river at the bottom buildings ranging from cottages ornes to toy alism and the built landscape would be much
of Lord Salisbury' S garde n off the Strand, forts. He lived as a kind of perpetual guest whose the poorer. A Pa ssion fo r Building is a memo-
designed (we do not, frustratingly, know either house gifts were unusually concrete offerings. rial to ardent autodidacts, who took for granted
why or how) by Sir John Osborne well before Finally, there is space in A Passion fo r Bu ild - their own hard-won visual literacy and practical
Inigo Jones had hit his stride. It was the late, ing for a glorio us raft of cranks and ecce ntrics, competence, and richly dese rve to be celebrated
much missed Giles Worsley who initiated the none more splendid than the wrestling parson, for abilities long since undermined by the
exhibition, and it sprang from a very personal Sir Thomas Parkyns of Bunny in Notti ngham- unrelenting rise of the absolute professional.
interest: Worsley' s own ancestors made up a
spider 's web of interco nnected Yorkshire ,---- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
gentry families that included more than its fair
share of amateur architects . Rokeby Hall and
Hovingham Hall are their most notable works,
fine examples of the English Palladianism
promoted so zealously by Richard Boyle, 3rd
Earl of Burlington, another Yorkshirem an.
Lord Burlington had departed on his European
travels an enthusiastic amate ur but returned
from his second visit to Italy in 1719 a complete
professional with a mission. He established an
office, with assista nts and draughtsmen, and
became a "professional", charging clien ts for cityguest
his work. There lies the disti nction.
As well as the landowners who returned in
droves from their three or four years traversi ng
of honour :
the classical sites of Europe to recreate the
Lo~~~n
Veneto in Scotland , Yorkshire, or Ireland as the
case might be, there were men (and a handful of
women) who broke the mould, for, as amateurs,
their own clients, they could afford to stray, Will Self
..
experiment and simply indulge themselves. • ••
.. .
•
Some were seria l meddlers, whose effo rts
rarely left the page but add to the gaiety of his-
Martin Crimp
tory; others were more successf ul in their
endeavo urs. And here the fun begins. James Flint
There are tlamboyant early Gothicists such
as John Chute, who worked away on paper,
assembling a fantastic array of elaborate
studies for a new staircase at his family ho use ,
the Vyne, while also advis ing that prince of ohnson...
virtuosi (another indefinable category), Horace
Walpole, at Strawberry Hill. Among the early
nineteenth-century figures included in this
exhibition, Thomas Hope app lied great means,
and taste, to his intl uential houses in London
at Duchess Street and at Deepdene in Surrey
(demolished by British Rail in 1969 - the year it
threw off its fusty old British Railways image).
Sir John Soane, an arch-professional and him-
self a victim of the taste police in the House of
Commons, looked admiringly at Hope' s work.
In Northumberland, Sir Charles Monck, once
- 19- TLS JUNE 8 2 007
 ARTS

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

uring the 1980s, Steve Bell drew the

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

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

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

TLS JUNE 8 2007 - 2 0-


W
e meet the heroine of Af ter Dar k in a
late-nigh t diner, somew here in a
large Japanese city. The din er is
describe d first. Th e " unre markable but
adequ ate lightin g" , the "expressionless decor
and tablewa re", the "i nnoc uous back ground
music at low volume" :
Every thing about the restaurant is anonymous
and interchangeable. And almost every seat is
filled.
After a quick survey of the interior, our eyes
co me to rest on a girl sitting by the front
window. Wh y her? Wh y not someone else?
Hard to say. But, for some reaso n, she attracts
our atte ntion - very naturall y. She sits at a
four-perso n table, reading a book. Hooded
gray parka, blue jeans, yellow sneakers faded
from repea ted was hing . . . . Little makeup, no
jewellery, small, slender face .. . . Every now
and then , an earnes t wrinkle forms between her
brows.
Gradua lly, mo re details abo ut the gir l's late-
nigh t vig il are revealed. Her name is Mari , she
is in her first yea r at co llege specializing in
C hinese , and there is tro uble at hom e. W ith no
warn ing , her elder sister ha s dropp ed out of
norm al existence . Two month s ear lier, the beau -
tiful Eri decl ared that she was " going to go to
sleep for a while" , and has not wo ken up.
Mari read s her mysterious book wit h
co nce ntratio n, but keep s being interrupted . Her
first visi tor is an old friend of her siste r's .
Tetsuya Ta kahashi, a law stude nt and
trombon ist, is tak ing a break fro m an all-nig ht
ja mming sess io n to gra b a chic ken salad. The
seco nd is Kaoru , a former fema le pro -wrestlin g
cha mp, who run s "A lphavi lle", the local Love
Hotel. It tran spires that a man ha s brut all y
attac ked a C hinese wo man in one of the hotel
roo ms, an d nobody ca n und er stand what has
happened. Having heard that Mari speaks
C hinese , Kaoru ca lls on her as tra nslato r.
Meanwhil e, Haruk i Murakam i' s imperious
narra tive voice mo ves bet ween areas of the city ,
zoo mi ng in on Mari' s wo rld, on that of her
siste r, and, linall y, on the office of a co mputer
pro gramm er nam ed Sh irakawa.
Mu ch of this is familiar Mu rak ami territory.
From the detail s give n in the nove l, it appea rs
that Shirakawa is the per petrator of the cri me in
A lphav ille. As for the connections between the
other narrative strands, they are left loose. Vari -
ous reaso ns co uld be moo ted for Eris exte nded
nap. A model, she was living a highl y press ured
teenage existence , "i nsa nely busy, taking a
million lessons" . One co uld see her so mno lent
sta te as a ca se of h ikokomo ri - a so rt of slee ping
sic kness currently co mmon among de presse d
Jap anese teenagers. However, like so man y of
Mur akami' s sleepers, there see ms be so met hing
more uncann y tha n physio logic al going on. As
the narrative voice puts it, "we gradually co me
to sense tha t there is so me thing abou t her slee p
that is not normal. It is too pure, too perfect" :
We allow ourselves to becom e a single point of
view, and we observe her for a time. Perhaps it
should be said that we are peepi ng in on her.
Our viewpoi nt takes the form of a midair
camera that can move freely about the room
. . Her eye lids are closed like hard winter
FICTION
Whaddya mean?
Haruki Murakami' s exi stential musings
S O P H IE RAT CLl F F E
of our person al ity to some greater System or
Ord er ? And if so, has not tha t Sys tem, at so me
stage, demand ed of us so me kind of ' insanity' ?
H arttk i Murak ami
Is the narrative you now possess rea lly and trul y
A F TE R D ARK your ow n?" There ha ve alway s been elements
Translated by Jay Rubin of Mu rakam i' s liction that refe r to pro blems
208pp. HarvillSecker. £ 15.99. and questions in co nte mpo rary Jap an. Refe r-
978 I 846550478 ences to pop cu lture ha ve always jos tled with
reportage and ec hoes of film noir. However, up
buds. Her sleep is deep. She is probably not to now, one of the strengt hs of his writi ng ha s
eve n drea ming. . Her slender white neck been that one is never exac tly sure what his
preserves the dense tranquillity of a hand- message has been . In Kaj ka on the Shore, for
crafted product. Her small chin traces a clea n exa mp le, we ca n try to wor k out the relation
angle like a well-shaped headland. Even in the bet ween a tee nage boy, a villai n ca lled Colonel
profo undest somnolence, people do not tread Sa nde rs, some large fis h falling fro m the sky
so deeply into the realm of sleep. They do not and a gro up of soldiers - but we will onl y fai l.
attain such a total surrender of conscio usness There , as wit h the labyrinth ine workings of The
.. . . This is all we ca n concl ude for no w. Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , one may co nclu de
Soo n, eve n more abnorma l things happen. The along wit h Mu rak am i' s hero that the answer
te levision in the corner of Eri' s bedroom start s may be "so me thing intangi ble" . Tho se novels
to behave bizarrely. Th e set is unplugge d, but it are not so much me tap horical mapp ings or
begi ns to I1icker. A picture appea rs on its ex plora tions of any one tru th, as exp lorati ons of
An image from Mamoru Oshii's Anime-inspired film Ghost ill the She1l2 : Innocence (2004)
scree n, of a masked man. Thi s "new intrud er" wha t it migh t mean to inhabit more than one
in the telev isio n is " ne ither qu iet nor tra nspar- wo rld at a time.
en t. No r is it neutral. It is" , the narra tor tell s us, Aft er Dark, in co ntrast , see ms to offer the
" undoubtedly trying to inter vene" . reade r a clea r moral imperat ive, throu gh the
The fig ure in the telev ision is not the only figur e of Ta kahas hi. The law stude nt see ms to
piece of interference. Throughou t the novel , the have an opinio n on eve rything, fro m the differ-
reader notices so met hing both intr usive , and ent sor ts of bath ing suits girls wea r to the crisp-
newly " interventionist" about the narrat ive ne ss of the toast in the diner. His main gri pe, it
voice itse lf. On a forma l level , by using the seems, is with co ntem porary Japan ese society,
third person plural , Mur akami ca ptures the which he ca n onl y describ e as "a creature" :
reader and d raws them into a "sing le po int of It takes on all kind s of different shapes - some-
view ". But the re is also the suspici on of a sus- times it's "the nation" , and sometimes it' s "the
tained social criti que. Nea rly ten years ago, law" , and someti mes it takes on shapes that are
Murakam i wrote a book about the po isonous more difficul t and dangerous than that. You
sarin gas attack on the To kyo Unde rgro und, per- can try cutting off its legs but they just keep on
petra ted by the memb ers of a religiou s cu lt. In growing back. Nobody can kill it. It' s too
the book he argued that while the followers of strong, and it lives too far down in the ocea n.
"Aum" had a distorted view of the world, the Nobody knows where its heart is .. .. And this
phil osophy offered by mainstrea m society was crea ture, this thing doesn' t give a damn that
no better. The attac k, he arg ued, showe d up I' m me or you ' re you. In its presence, all
" the co ntrad ictions and weak nesse s deep within human beings lose their names and their faces .
our social system . ... Wh at was made clear We all turn into signs, into numbers.
was the struct ura l routing of 'o ur' system". His speec h about the "creature" is addressed to
" Haven' t we entrus ted", he asked , "so me part Mari , but the diatrib e also see ms intended as a
- 2 1-
guide to the novel' s ce ntre. T his is a no vel
about the sys tems of which we form a part,
about socie tal guilt. Ta kahas hi's account of the
face less ness of society chimes , all too neatl y,
with the fig ure that wa tches the sleeping Eri
from insi de the Son y televisi on, a fig ure whose
"mas k fits the face like a seco nd skin". "We
sha ll call him " , the narrator notes, "t he Man
with No Face ." And Ta kahas hi spe lls thin gs out
a little too c learly. He is give n to raisi ng his
index finger in orde r to emp hasize his po int - a
habit tha t see ms excessive, co nsidering that his
remar ks are fairly straig htforward. (He co mes
out with sentences like "you ju st have to live
one day at a time" , " people are all differen t.
Even siblings" , and " if yo u reall y wa nt to kno w
so mething, you have to be willing to pay the
price"). Wh en it co mes to one- liners, Kaoru
isn't much better, lean ing towa rds Ma ri to ask
"w hat's a gi rl like you do ing hangin g ou t all
night in a place like this?".)
In the handling of his characte rs, as with the
nove l as a whole, Mur ak ami see ms to have lost
hold of iro ny. Admitted ly, his teenage
characte rs do display it on a sma ll sca le.
Ta kahas hi makes a joke abou t why Mari
both ers to avo id bat tery-fed chicke n while
chai n-smo king her way through a packet of
Ca me l Filters. Mari finds hersel f defining the
co nce pt of iro ny to Kaoru , whe n she explains
the fact that the Love Hotel takes its name from
Jean -Lu c Go dar d's 1965 film : "Cause in
A lphavi lle, you 're not allowe d to have deep
feelings. So there' s nothing like love. No cont ra-
dictions, no irony. They do eve rything accord -
ing to num erical formul as" . Kaoru listen s, but
she claims tha t she does n't "rea lly ge t it" . Nei-
ther, in truth, do we. The phil osophi cal discu s-
sio ns in Af ter Dark are deadp an exc ha nges .
T he re is a se nse that we are listening to so me-
thing , as the narr ator put s it, "of great signifi-
ca nce ". This is not a no vel tha t wears itse lf
lightl y.
M urak am i' s vision o f ad olescent co nscious-
ness has always been an acquired taste, but
some of the awkwardness here co mes from Jay
Rubin' s mid-Atl antic translat ion , which see ms
vario usly inco ngruo us or over-egged in its hand-
ling of dialogue, as if so meo ne 's fat her had
found him sel f at an afte r- party , and was tryin g
to fit in. Tee nage rs "grab some shut-eye",
talk of their "buddies " and ask eac h oth er
"W haddya mean ?" .
Mur akam i is often co mpa red to J. D.
Salin ger, but his cult-stat us novel Norwegia n
Wood relies on the kind of ex iste ntial mu sing
and soft-foc us nostalgia that Hold en Ca ulfield
would have seen as " phoney" . In Aft er Dark,
Mu rakam i never seems fully to countenance the
potential co medy of his characte rs, or the fac t
that their discu ssions fall into a familiar sys tem
of their own. Th is tona l difference must be seen
as part of the sensibility of twentieth-century Jap-
anese art, which, from Ta nizaki to Anime ca r-
toons, relies on the dead pan and the absurd. But,
in the end, nothing abou t Afte r Dark, and its
wide-eyed philo sophizing, seems surprising. Per-
hap s this is because its message is far too clear
to be truly bewild ering. One wishes Haruki
M urakam i had left a little more in the shade.
TLS J UNE 8 2 0 07
 FICTION

nacy hasn't prevented him from having a

Fugitive lover passionate affair, and the picture he clings to

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

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

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

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

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

TLS J UNE 8 20 07 - 22-


f the many literary reference s in
O Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart' s second
novel, none is more apt than a brief
mention of Joseph Helier, who approached the
gravely serious matter of Air Force troops fight-
ing in the Second World War with relentle ss
mocking humour, deplo ying repetition as one
of his key comic weapons. "Golly Burton,
Goll y Burton", the ringing greeting with which
Absurdi stan' s prostitutes attempt to seduce the
corporate executi ves staying at the local Hyatt
Hotel, does not share the civilized detachment
of Helier' s catchphras e "Where are the Snow-
dens of yesteryear?". But it accumulate s a
freighted meaning neverth eless, for "Go lly
Burton" is a mispronunciation of "Ha lliburton" ,
one of many American corpor ation s setting
their sights on Absurdistan, the lictional , oil-
rich former Soviet republic where a good
part of this novel 's action unfolds. Shteyngart
targets corporat e greed and polit ical complicity
as surely as Helier did inane military bureau-
cracy. He has a similarly rebellious comic
vision. Nothing is off limits. The easily
offended are not welcome in Absurdistan.
Misha Vainberg is - for a time. Misha,
Shteyngart' s gargantuan Russian-born
narrator, is "a deeply secular Jew who finds no
comfort in either nationalism or religion ". He
embodies the excesses of the Shteyngartian
world, his "heroic gut spinning counterclock-
-----------------------~,-----------------------
City of the plains
ANDREW ROSENHEIM
Mark Smith
THE DEATH OF THE DETECTIVE
600pp . Northwestern U nive rsity Press . Paperback ,
$18.95.
9780 81012387 8
he Death of the Detective was first
T
published in the United States in 1974,
and although it was well received and
shortlisted for the Nationa l Book Award , it
soon disappeared, through a mixture of bad
luck and publisher' s neglect. Its re-emergence
has been equally capriciou s: an editor at
Northw estern University Press did an internet
search for a lawyer called Mark Smith, and
found an entry for the author of this remarkab le
novel.
Arnold Magnu son, a retired world-weary
widower living in Chica go, is an uncorrup ted
police detective who left the force and set up a
securit y agency which is called in for every-
thing from weddings to professional baseba ll
games. Magn uson lives in a Miesian tower of
"charcoal steel and glass" , cut off from his
neighbour hoo d root s and his children, who li ve
abroad. A summons from a former client, an
ageing millionaire named Farquarson, brings
Magnuson out of his disengagement , but before
he learns what Farquarson wants, the old man is
murdered.
Other murders follow, and it transpires that
all the victims are linked to a past conspiracy in
which Farquarson ' s wife was forcibly incarcer-
ated in a lunatic asylum, where she became preg-
nant by a fellow patient named Helenow ski.
The child of their union has been raised by
Farquarson as his nephew. It soon become s
clear to Magnuson that a seria l killer is on the
F IC TION
Golly Burton
MARK KAMINE
Gary Shteyngart
ABS URD ISTAN
352pp. Granta. Paperback, £10.99.
978 I 86207 972 4
US: Random House. $13.95.
97808129 71675
wise, [his] two-scoop breasts slapping against
each other". Stranded in St Petersburg because
his gangster father has killed an American
"biznesman", Misha wants only to be granted a
visa so he can get back to New York, where his
belo ved "Bronx mixed-race girl" Rouenna
lives. Rouenna has a disarming straightforward-
ness, offensive but refre shing, a manner not
unlike the author ' s. ("If you lost some weight ,
you cou ld be one of those fat movie stars", she
tells Misha on meeting him.) Misha travels to
Absurdistan to bribe an official as the first step
on his path back to New York .
The Absurdi civil war he becom es caught up
in, fought between the local Svanis and Sevos,
provides materia l for some gleeful satire, in
loose, and that the killer is Helenowski, though
the madman has switched identitie s with a
vagrant he murders at the beginning of the book.
Magnu son is alwa ys one step behind his
quarry, as he travels across the city, from its
wealthy northern fringe, through its flat lifeless
suburbs on the West Side , to Skid Row and
even into the no-go zone , the black ghetto of
the South Side. A subplot concerns the discov-
ery by Farquarson' s "nephew" of his real parent-
age ; ano ther invo lves a small-time hoodlum
who kills a cop and is ruthlessly hunted down.
The Death of the Detective is a long, sprawl-
ing novel, less a mystery than an odyssey. Not
all of its characters come alive - especia lly
since so many are murdered - and the whodunit
rime novelists are contin ually pushing
C against the limits of the genre. High
stylists create fantastic baroque per-
formanc es around the investigation of murder ;
blood-and-psychopathy devotee s invent ever
nastier ways for villains to torment their vic-
tims; and more restrained writers use the occa -
sion of violenc e for delicate explorations of
the contradictions of life and society.
Laura Lippman' s new novel, Wha t the
Dead Know, shows her to be one of the most
effective member s of the restrained school.
She has a way of dep icting peculiar families
with such clarity and sympat hy that she
throws light on the pains and pleasures of far
more con ventiona l relationships. This time,
her focus is on the battles between sisters.
Thirty years ago, the two Bethany sisters,
aged lifteen and eleven, disappeared, leaving
their parents to suffer all the agonies of fear,
false hope, malicio us hoaxe s and well-mean -
ing but erron eous sightings familiar from
- 23 -
which recent history is creatively skewed.
When war breaks out, "tank s guard the strategi-
cally importan t Benetton store" and Americ an
Expre ss nag s attached to a car assure a safe pas-
sage throug h checkpoints. Even Misha' s post-
sex talk with the daughter of the Absurdi rebel
leader has a commercial slant, as he tenderl y
recites the entrie s he has memori zed from
Zagat' s guide to restaurants in New York .
References to evildoers, oil pipeline s, Dick
Cheney, Halliburton, and the politically engi-
neered initiation of the bombing of the Absurdi
ghetto , drive home the point : Absurdistan is us.
Shteyngart takes full comic advantage of his
multicultural cast, to show how niceties of
diction can disguise important question s. "Tell
me, friend, who are you by nationalit y?" is
code, in Absurdistan, for, "You' re a Jew, aren 't
you?". And undereduc ated Rouenna , having
gone back to college in New York, writes
Misha a letter crammed with malapropi sms
including the information that she has "self as-
steam issues" and is working on a story that will
be the "pizza resistanc e" of a book to be edited
by her professor. There is even a wink at post-
modernism. Ruenna ' s profes sor turns out to be
aspect of the book is weaken ed by the earl y rev-
elation that Helenow ski is on the loose. The
nove l is told from a sometime s bewildering
number of points of view, and although
Magnu son is the protagoni st he is an elusive
character, alternately obsessive and despairing.
What become clear s is that the real hero of the
book is Chicago itself.
Writer s from Theodore Dreiser to Nelson
Algren have tried to stake out that city as their
own, but only Saul Bellow 's The Adventures
of Au gie Mar ch and William Brashler' s under-
valued City Do gs can rival Mark Smith for
visceral engagement with the place. His descrip-
tions of the city are relentlessly inventive, tilled
with mixed emotion s for "the vast, dirty, dilapi -
dated city that . .. stretched out in either direc-
tion like a Russian city built upon the plains".
Always counterpoised against Chicago 's indus-
trial drearine ss is its irrepre ssible vitality, the
La ura Lippman
WHAT THE DEAD KNOW
345pp. Orion. Paperback, £9.99.
978 07 528 88514
US: William Morrow. $24.95.
978 0 06 112 885 I
news stories. For the Bethany s, the stress built
up until it ripped their marriage apart . Now, a
woman who has illega lly left the scene of a
minor car accident in Baltimore, in which she
was injured, claim s to be Heather, the younger
of the two missing girls. The police, the
hospital social worker and the lawyer who has
been found to represen t her, all have to decide
whether to believe her. She tantali zes them,
and the reader, with snippets of information
about the day the sisters disappeared and
about what was subsequently done to them .
Although much of the information is cor-
rect - and unlike ly to be known by someon e
who was not involved in the case - the police
a character named Jerr y Shteynfarb, the author
of a book called The Rus sian Arriviste 's Hand
Job . (Shteyngart 's first novel was The Ru ssian
Debutante's Handbook.)
The pizza resistance of Absurdistan may be
the grant proposal Misha writes for the Absurdi
government, proposing the construction of a
Holocau st Museum . In a chapter titled "A
Modest Proposal," under bold-faced topic head-
ings such as "Project Name" and "Methodol-
ogy", Shteyngart turns the bland ly syrupy
language of academic fundraisin g against itself.
Eve n among the most thorough ly secular and
unaffiliated young Jew s, the Holocau st enjo ys
great name reco gnition . When asked to ident-
ify the following eight components central to
Jewish identity - Torah, Mishnah, Talmud,
Holocaust, Mikvah, Whitefish, Israel, Kabba-
lah - only Whitefish scored higher than the
Ho locau st in a survey of thirty drunk Jews at a
nightclub in suburban Maryland (cf Greenblatt,
Roger, "Oy! What a Feeling, I'm Jewish",
Annals of Mod ern Jew ry. Indiana Unive rsity
Press).
Having taken on religion, class, race, sexual
and global politic s, the oil industry and the
Holocau st in Absurdi stan, it is hard to imagine
where Gary Shteyngart will turn for his
next fearle ss romp. That this one ends on
September 10,200 I, may be some indication of
the direction of his thoughts.
beauty of its soaring skyscraper s, and its setting
on the sandy shores of Lake Michigan, where
the sun rises, "looking at first flat and razor-thin
and then like a bloody organ taken from a
body" . The city' s inhabitants have a "friendly
lour about their faces that stemmed from . . . the
arroganc e of their own awareness of themselves
as Chicagoan s" . Smith' s cameos are idiosyncrat-
ically preci se - of a feeble bartender posturing
as a tough guy, he writes: "Even his numerou s
tattoos did not suggest military service, manli-
ness or evil so much as his having been held
down forcibly by sadistic friends and muti-
lated". Describing the teenage sons of wealth y
men, he notes they "wou ld not have to hone
themselves like knives to move up . .. . They
were already there, waxing fat". There are
shortcomings to the plot, which often verges on
the prepo sterous, but the novel's stylistic rich-
ness is extraordinary.
officers do not belie ve her. Kay, the social
worker, is drawn to her client in sympat hy but
also repelled by her childlik e self-absorption
and her inability to empat hize with anyone
else. The woman ' s own thoughts are designed
to give awa y only so much, leaving as much in
doubt for the reader as for the officer in charge
of the investigation .
The smoothly written narrative switche s
betwe en many points of view and se veral
different periods, raising ever more complex
questions. The picture of the girls' lives before
the disaster become s as vivid as their parent s'
unhappine ss and the strugg les of the police
to work out what really happened . Laura
Lippman heightens the tension without any
savagery or melodrama, while at the same
time exploring the nature of family relation-
ships in all their misery and necessity. What
the Dead Know is an impressive and engaging
novel.
NATASHA COO PER
TL S J UNE 8 2007

A new tongue
" R ather drinke at the wel-head , than sip
at pudled streames; rather buy at the
lirst hand , than goe on trust at the
bucksters." John Florios enco urageme nt to
his readers at the start of his second Italian
language learning manual, Second Frutes
(159 1), cha racteri zes how the impetus for
language acquisition in sixtee nth- and early
seventeenth-ce ntury Eng land rested on gaining
reading proficiency. A desire to engage with
the literature, history, political philoso phy, and
other writings that had emerge d from Italy' s ce l-
ebrated, if at times suspect, culture prompted
English endeavours with Italian. In the latter
sixtee nth century , English printers issued Ital-
ian books directed at a native public keen to
drink at the Italian "we l-head", prompt ing a cul-
tural engage ment far greate r than mig ht be
acco unted for by the few hundred Italians living
in England at any one time after the Reform a-
tion - mostly merchants and Protestant refu-
gees, such as Joh n Florio's father
Michelangelo, who in 1550 became the first
Pastor of the Italian "s tranger" congregation in
London. For every Roger Asc ham castigati ng
the poisonous Circe- like Italians for making "of
a plaine Englishman" a debased figure who
abandons honesty, while acquiring pride and an
arrogant contempt for others, there were far
more dra wn to Italy as a cu lture that man ifested
;::::================::::;-l clerics
responses of Italian visitors, diploma ts and
to Britain. Baldassare Castig lione, for
Contemporary German Prose in Britain and
France (1980-1999): A Case Study of the
Significance of Otherness in Translation
Wiebke Sievers
"...an excellen t study which raises some very important
questions about contemporary trans lation practice in the
global market ..." Or Georgina Paul, St Hilda' s College,
University of Oxford
April 2007 / 312pp / 978-0-7734-53 60-9 / HB / £74.95
Eavan Boland's Evolution as an Irish
Woman Poet: An Outsider within an
Outsider's Culture
Pilar Vlllar-Argalz
.....This full-length book on a contemporary Irish woman
writer is something of a rarity in Irish studies and most
welcome ..." Or Eibhear Walshe, University College Cork
April 2007 / 442pp / 978-0-7734-53 83-8 / lIB / £79.95
Brian Moore and the Meaning of the Past:
An Irish Novelist Re-Imagines History
Patrick Hicks
.....it is an important and authoritative contribution to the
growing body of Mo ore criticis m..." Professor Norm an
Van ce, University of Sussex
April 2007 / 228pp / 978-0-7734-5403-3 / lIB / £69.95
The Problem of Translating
"Jabberwocky": The Nonsense Literature of
Lewis CarrolI and Edward Lear and Their
Spanish Translators
Pilar Orero
..The principal finding of the book may perhaps be the
simple recognition or affirmation that the translations of
nonsense calls upo n all available techniques of translation ..."
Or Alberto Mira, Oxford Brookes Univers ity
April 2007 / 382pp / 978-0-7734-5358-6 / lIB / £74.95
The Edwin Mellen Press
www.mellenpress.co.uk
Tel:++44(0) 1570423356
email: cs@mellen.demon.co.uk
TLS J UNE 8 20 07
LIT ERATURE
THOM AS H EAL Y
Mi ch a el W yatt
T H E IT ALI A N ENC OUNTER WITH
T UDO R ENG LA N D
A cultura l po litics o f translation
371pp. Cambridge University Press. £50 (US $90).
9780 52184896 I
J a s on L a wr enc e
" W HO T HE D E VIL TAU G HT T HE E
S O M UC H IT ALI A N ?"
Itali an lan gu age learn ing and literar y imi tatio n in
early modern Eng land
224pp. Manchester University Press. £47.50.
978 0 7 19069 147
a sense of civi lity that was ofte n perceived as
lack ing in England. As Frances A. Yates noted,
Florio's language manu als have something of
the courtesy- book about them, and Florio - and
to an exte nt his readers - may have felt that
acquiring Italian encourage d a refor matio n in
manners, the absence of which, eve n among
" the gentle classes" , was much remar ked on by
Italian visitors.
Michael Wyatt' s extensive consideration of
T udor England ' s enco unters with Italy divides
into two parts. In the first, he outlines the varied
instance, arrived in 1506 as the Duke of
Urbino' s envoy and was delighted by the hon-
ours accorded him. Surp risingly from a modern
perspective, most visitors were favourably
impressed with the food: its variety, abundance,
eve n its preparation. But many others tend ed
towar ds condesce nsion and alarm over aspects
of English life, such as the freedo ms enjoyed
by women, includin g the shock of witnessi ng
public kissing between the sexes. Alessandro
Magno disapprovingly noted that "if a foreig ner
enters a house and does not first of all kiss the
mistress on the lips, they think him badly
brought up". Yet, though often dismayed by
encounters with English xenophobia , Italians
frequentl y found England appearing in a new
desirabl e light if they ventured to Scotland or
Ireland. Enea Silvio Piccolom ini, the future
Pope Pius 11, retu rned to England from Scotland
as one who "see med that I was seeing, as if for
the lirst time, a civilized world inhabited by
hum an beings", finding the North, "horrifying,
primitive and in the winter never touched by the
warming rays of the sun" . Similarly, Francesco
Chiericati , a papal nuncio to England from
1515, undertook a pilgrimage to Lough Derg in
Donegal - the reputed portal into Purgatory -
and was clearly shaken by the rigou rs and priva-
tions encountered.
The Refor mation inev itably restricted Italian
wanderings in England, and also coloured the
accou nts of those who did visit, unless Protes-
tant themselves. The seco nd part of Wyatt' s
study exp lores the Engli sh acquisition of the
Italian language, focusing on the inlluential
John Florio. As well as a translator of
Montaigne, Florio is best known for A Woride
of Worde s, published in 1598, which set a new
benchm ark for bilingual dictionaries and
became an important resource for Engli sh
engage ments with a whole range of Italian
- 2 4-
Count Baldassare CastigIione (1630) by R embrandt
writing, not least because Florio was happ y to
include slang and dialect amo ng his 44,000
entries. His linguistic endeavo urs also impacted
on English. The Oxf ord English Dictionary
has him as the ear liest citation for 1,164 words,
mak ing Florio one of the most significant con-
tributors to the language (Chaucer is first with
2,004 words).
The most interesting part of Wyatts survey
of Florio, though, is his considera tion of Firs te
Fruites and Second Frutes, the language-
learnin g manuals he publi shed in 1578 and
1591. Presented in Italian and English in two
co lumns , these co nsist o f phra ses, di alo gu es,
prove rbs and borrowe d prose extracts. As
Wyatt demonstrates, Florio offered his readers
the possibility of constructing themse lves in an
imaginat ive world, one where theatricality - the
adopting of varying roles - was enco urage d for
moral and civ il refinement. Florio was awa re
of both opportunities and dangers in this, as his
English versio n of an Italian prove rb illustrates:
"with art and with deceit, halfe the yeere we
live: with deceit and with art, we live the other
part" . Further, he was not ave rse to employing
his language exe rcises to enter into poli tical
critique, suggest ing that the instability which
unchecked socia l disg uise generated ultim ately
resulted from the Queen. In Firste Fruites,
he observes that "a handycrafts man wil be a
merch ant , a merch an t wit be a ge nt leman, a
gentleman a Lord e, a Lorde a Duke, A Duke
a King, so that everyone seekes to overcome
another in pride". The source of this is
Elizabeth, who "is so pitiful, that she letteth
everyone to doe what he pleaseth most; lust
and covetousness are practised very much" .
Florin' s position bears similarities to arg uments
that Spenser was later to use in The Fae rie
Queene. Where Spenser employed allegory ,
Florin' s students might use Italian to engage
with ideas that might be risky to voice in their
own tongue.
Jason Lawrence' s " Who the Devil Taught
Thee So Much Italian ?" linds much common
ground with Wyatt ' s but, importantly, it
explores the impact of Florio on English
literary writing, es pecia lly Samu el Daniel, with
whom Florio was we ll acquainted, and Shake-
speare , whom he likely knew as well. As
Lawrence demonstrates, English interest in
Italian was notably directed at its literature and,
like Michael Wyatt, he shows that langua ge-
learners were less concerned with the spoken
language than with its written form. In exten-
sive analysis of work by William Drumm ond,
Daniel and Shakespeare, Lawrence shows how
the parallel-text appro ach used in language
learn ing impacte d not only on translation and
imitation during the period but on more original
literary writing, too . Unlike modern dispo si-
tions to reproduce as accurately as possible the
language of a text's original state, where the
translated version is witnessed as a type of
client to the original, Early Modern writers per-
ceive d original and translation existi ng in a con-
current symbiotic relation. Parallel texts enco ur-
age d comparison and observa tion of different
effects between languages, and the differences
of mean ing these could genera te. The printer
John Wool fe' s 1588 trilingual edition of Cas-
tig lione' s II Co rtegiano, for exa mple, prints the
Italian in para llel with Sir Thomas Hoby' s Eng-
lish version and Gabriel Chappuys' s French
one , a for ma t designe d to encourage thi s ty pe of
comparative readin g. Jason Lawrence' s study
adds significa ntly to our understandin g of how
English authors approac hed fo reign language
material s.
These two books complement one anoth er
and contri bute impor tantly to our knowledge
of how the Early Mod em English engage d with
Italian and, to a lesser extent, with Italians.
They both present compe lling arguments for
the importance of Florin' s impact on English
culture. His standard biography remains
Fran ces Yates' s 1934 acco unt. The time is
surely ripe for another.

Uncharitable remarks
nfuriated by the misogyn istic teach ings of
I the book with which her yo ung hu sband
metaph orically beat her about the ears,
Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath reacted with
the most se vere form of censorship: she tore
three leaves out of the offend ing manu script in
orde r to thro w them into the fire . Her hu sband
then turned fro m metapho ric to physical abu se
and hit her so hard on the side of the head that
she became dea f: future censorship was presum-
ably unnecessary since the Wife co uld no
longer clearl y hear any text that might be rea d
to her.
In the world before the inve ntion of the print -
ing press, censorship in genera l wor ked on a
local le vel, but it was not norm ally as ext reme
as in Chaucer' s fictional exa mple: vellum was
too valuable a commodity to co nsign indiscrim i-
nately to the lire. Sometimes margin al notes by
later readers querie d mistaken or eve n heretical
as pects of an author 's arg uments. Trul y offen-
sive passages co uld be blacked out or scrape d
off the page, and in Eng lish manu scri pts this
occurred mo st systematica lly in the l5 30s,
when it becam e illegal to use the term "Pope" to
descr ibe the "Bishop of Rome". In a lavishl y
produ ced Book of Hour s owned by a lady in the
Co urt of Henry VIII , not only has " papa" been
ef face d, so too are the King' s wife and daughter
purged of their respec tive titles: "the most
exce lent Prynses [deleted] Mary, dou ghter to
the moste hygh and myght y Prynce and Prynces
Kyng Henry the viii and Quene Kateryne hys
wyf e [deleted]" . This was a proto-Stalini st
rewritin g of histor y which the Qu een resisted
heroically, eve n though it mean t perm anen t
ex ile to the English equiva lent of Siberia, that
is, the East An glian fenl ands.
W ith printed book s, unlike hand -produ ced
manu scrip ts or personal dedications, it was not
as easy to unwrite inconve nient informa tion -
since there were inevitably multiple copi es of
the iden tical offendi ng mat erial - bu t this was a
probl e m tackled as early as 1521 when Card inal
Thomas Wolsey staged a large-scale publi c
burnin g of Martin Luth ers book s at St Paul' s
Ca thedra l in Lond on . Possessors of heretical
book s were as vulnerable to persecut ion as the
book s themse lves, eve n if the delinition of her-
esy became a moving target in the latter part of
Henry VIII ' s reign , something that the aged
Abbot of Glastonbury discovered in 1539
thank s to the cop y of a "co unterfe it life of
Thomas Bequ et in print" which was found in
his possession . A few yea rs later, when Mar y
was Queen, Thom as Cra nmer, forme r Arch-
bishop o f Ca nterbury, thru st his right hand into
the flames that were about to consume him
because with it he had signed, under dur ess,
bills re pud iat ing the wri tings to whic h he had
de voted his life and thus had , in a sense, subm it-
ted to censors hip. Afte r Chri stopher Marlowe' s
Or Faustus offered to burn his book s, he quickl y
reali zed that it was too late to repent. He had
already ingested the knowledge and it co uld not
be voided: ce nsorship is effective , as it were,
onl y avant rather than apres la lettre.
Two rece ntly publi shed book s exa mine
censorship in England, one before the print re vo-
lution and one afte r. Although both are written
by membe rs of Eng lish faculties, both concern
them sel ves with other disciplines, theology and
law, and neither is an easy read, eve n thou gh
LITERARY CRITICISM
the follo wer s of Joa chim of Fiore (the twelfth-
cen tury Italian abbo t and visionary) made
claims for unm edi ated access to the Holy Sp irit.
Thi s, by definit ion, posed a threat to the Church
hierarch y. Much of the fi rst section of Boo ks
lAM ES C A R LE Y manu script context, ow nership or early pro ve- under Susp icion is de voted to a study of
K athr yn Kerb y-Fulton
nance - as well as of quotation and imitation, and Joach imism in Eng land, and Kerb y-Fulton is
dealing prima rily with theolo gical texts in Eng- deeply indebted, as she ackno wled ges, to the
lish, she linds patterns suggesting that constraint pione erin g labou rs of Marjorie Reeves. On the
BOOKS UN D E R S U SPI CIO N rather than censorship may be the approp riate basis of (perh aps rather thin) manu script
Censorship and tolerance ofreve latory writing term to describe co ntrols over the transmissio n evide nce - I am uncon vinc ed, for exa mple, by
in late medieval England and reception of medieval writings. her conclusions abou t missing or putati vely cut
488pp. University of Notre Dame Press. $50; With re velat ion and with proph ecy - ge nres away leaves - she associ ates the English Bene-
distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £33.50.
favoured by wo men - truth depend ed, as the dic tine s with collecting and read ing, not always
978 02 68 033 t 2 5
authorities insisted, on the source, and this, negatively, suspect materials from a varie ty of
D ebor a Shu g er involving discretio sp irituum, was what needed sources. Th is in turn sugges ts to her that we
to be tested, constra ined or repr essed. It was for need not look onl y to John Wycli f and his fol-
CENS O RS H I P AN D CU LTU RA L this rea son that Jean Gerson' s De pro batione lowers to explain Reformi st eleme nts in Middle
SE N S[BILI T Y
sp irituum, De distinction e uerarum uisionum a Engli sh writings: these have a longer histor y
The regul ation of langu age in Tud or-Stuart England
fa lsis and De exa minat ione doctri narum deri ving from the radical Franciscan trad ition
346pp. Phi ladelphi a: University of Pennsylvania
becam e such pivotal texts in the Iifteent h ce n- on the Continent.
Press. $59.95; distributed in the UK by NBN. £39.
978 08 [2239 17 I tury. As Marger y Kemp e well knew, it was As Felici ty Riddy has don e so success fully in
incumb ent on her to conv ince the Archbishop her studies of Arthurian rom anc e, Kerby-Fulton
of York, or even the Archb ishop of Can terbury, uses manu script conte xt to unco ver the sources
both authors make use of (somet imes grating, Thom as Arundel - whose perh aps "d raconian" of the " buried" Joa chimite overtones in Piers
some times dub ious) mod ern analogies and col- Cons titutions of 1407-09 proh ibited the tran sla- Plowman . Cambridge University Library MS
loquial phrasing. tion of the Bibl e into Engli sh - of the divine Od.1.l 7 is highl y pertinent to her argumen ts,
In Books und er Suspicion: Censo rship and source for her spiri tual "dal iaun ce" , Pertin a- not only because of its cont ent s - especia lly an
tolerance of reve!atory writing in late medieval cious she may have been , but her trial con- "unknow n" proph ecy, "R egnum spiritus sancti"
England, Kathr yn Kerb y-Fulton conce ntra tes firmed her orthodoxy. Lik ewise, by Kerby- - but becau se of its ow nership by the Augustin-
on the reign of Rich ard II - a golde n age Fulto ns rec koning, Julian of Norw ich incl uded ian friars in York , who were, by Kerb y-Fulton' s
that saw the "publicati on" of the Lollard passages in the Short Text of her Revelations of rec koning, "on e of the largest pur veyors of
Bible, Chau cer ' s Canterbury Tales and Will iam Divine Love, such as tho se on wo men's right to Joachimite prophecies in England". Uniquely
Langland ' s Piers Plowman - and contends that teach , which she would later suppress in the found in this manu script , the "R egnum" proph -
total censorship was a more subtle process Lon g Text in order to avoid accusation s of ecy is attributed to Johann es de Lignano - it is
before the uniformity imposed by the printed heterod oxy. She was prepared to co mpromise describ ed in a headnot e as "Prophecia lohannis
book. As Kerby-Fulton observes (and so, too, on ge nder issues because she "had bigger fi sh de Lignunbio so lempnissimi docto ris decre-
did Chaucer with his curse on the careless scribe to fry" . In a sense, too, one could also see foru m uniuersitatis Bononi e" - and Kerb y-
Ada m Scriveyn), it was hard enough in the Mid- Chauc er' s Retrac tion to the Cante rbury Tales Fulton believes that this was deliberat e obfu sca-
dle Ages for authors to control the acc uracy of as an act of self-censorship or, as Kerb y-Fulton tion on the part of the scribelcompiler; that is, he
their texts, let alone for the ecclesiastical or polit- put s it, "cav [ing] in to j ust the kind of anti-hu- attributed a "dangerous" piece of writing to a
ical authoriti es to censor them effective ly. Never- mani st agend a the Opus [Arduum] author [possi- "safe" author in order to mislead possible cen-
theless, using the evidence of official interven- bly Nicholas Hereford] sets out". sors. She gives no hard evidence, however, and
tion, of audience response - that is, annotation, As well as advoca ting apostolic po vert y, does not establish precedent s for this practice.
(There is a later parallel in the De expunge ndis
haer etico rum proprii s nominibus [1576] of Juan
Bautista Cardona, who, as Oebora Shuger point s
ou t in Censo rsh ip and Cultura l Sensibil ity ,
arg ued that the name s of heretical writers should
be remov ed from title pages of printed book s,
whether or not the book itself was heretical.)
Mo re to the point: is there really any indica-
tion that these sorts of comp endi a, stored as
they were in virtually inacce ssible mon astic
librarie s, were checked by outsiders for their
orthodoxy, or that wily monk s or friars
routin ely "cleverly hid " or "laundered " suspec t
materials by makin g false author attribu tion s?
Is this not to confu se the wo rld of The Na me of
the Rose with reality? And who were the read -
ers of this particu lar compendium or recueil (a
term , by the way, eo-opt ed by Will iam Ca xton
in his first print ed book )? Pace Kerb y-Fu lton,
there is not any consensus about the pro venan ce
FOUR COURTS PRESS
Transmission and transformation in
the M iddle Ages: texts and co ntexts
K. CA WSEY &] . HARR IS EDITO RS
Nin e original case studies of cultural or textual
tran sfor mation in th e medieval p eriod over eight centurie s
in m edieval England and Ireland.
-•
ISBN 978 -1 -8518 2-990-3 256 pages £50 Published: 8 June
e
"La strada sempre que lla" (1955) by Mimmo Rotella; from Mimmo Rotella
by Germano Ce la nt (575pp. Milan: Skira. 020; d istrib u ted in tbe UK by 7 Malpas Street, D ublin 8, Ireland
Thames & Hudson. £80. 978 88 8491359 3) TeL (Dublin) 453 4668 www.fourcourtspress.ie
- 25 - TLS J UNE 8 200 7
 LITERARY CRITICISM

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

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiir=====:~?~~====]l tobetween
this reason that, in Richard 11, M o wbray cou ld
printed book s and manuscri pts, and
points o ut that for her perio d, whic h carries up assert that "Mine ho no ur is my life" . T his is
the co llap se of the T udor lice nsing system in also how we should read Ric ha rd Lovelace ' s
1641 , manu script ci rc ulation wa s virtually "cavalier" appeal to Lucasta that " I cou ld not
uncon tro lled . She also ob serves that because so love thee , dear, so muc h, Loved I not ho nou r
mu ch has been lost there may not be any lina l more".
MAKING ISLAM DEMOCRATIC THE PARADOX OF A GLOBAL USA answers to many of the qu estions she pose s Charit y, by these models, a llowe d for a dis-
Social Movements and thePost-IslamistTurn Edited by BmceMaz lish, abo ut the reg ulation of langu age . Shuge r is, continuous self thro ugh radical transforma-
AsifBayat Nayan Chanda, &
Kennetbr1iisbrode
moreover, very specific in her definition of ce n- tions , and it is this discont inu ity that makes
May 2007320 pages sorship, which "almos t alwa ys connotes the Wo lsey's complete (and psyc ho logically unco n-
978-0-8047-5595-5 May2007240pages
Paperback £14.50 978-0-8047-5156-8 exercise of state power ove r texts and their vinci ng) volte-face in Hen ry VIII, for exa m ple,
978-0-8047-5594-8 Paperback £12.95 authors " . One of her key distinctions is between possible. To pro be motivation and intention,
Hardback £34.95 978-0-8047-5 155-1
Hardback £32.50 Continental regulation, which was normally ide- which we treat as normal practice , co uld be
ological (the Index ce nsored books containing see n as libell o us. Shuge r, ho wever , sees a shift
Offers a new app roachto Describes thestrained relationship
Islam and democracy. between the US andglobalisation. heretical ideas), and insular regul ation , which to a Tacitean mod el towards the end of the six-
co nce rne d iniuria - that is, attacks on the "dig- teenth century: this postu late d a lixe d and irrev-
nity and integrity of the self'. Not surpris ingly, oca ble sense of character. In this case, censor-
THE BOUNDARIES OF THE REPUBLIC AGAINST FREUD
MigrantRightsand the li mits of Universalism therefore, there we re no laws pro hibiting the ship cou ld become a means of suppressing
CriticsTalk Back
in France, 1918-1940 possession of Catho lic books in Eng land - it know ledge of injustice. Historic para lle ls wit h
Todd Dufresne
.iWary Dewhurst Lewis wa s printing, not access, that wa s illega l - but contemporary issues, as in Ben Jonsons Seja-
May 2007200pages
Jun 2007384 pages, 4 tables, 978-0-8047-5548-1 there was, after 1599, a comprehensive ban on nus, lent cre dibility because they sho wed the
I 3 figures, 8 illustrations, 2 maps Paperback £12.95 satires and epigrams. universal link between power and corruption.
978-0-8047-5722-5 978-0-8047-5547-4
Paperback £16.50 Hardback £32.50 Queen Eliza bet h hersel f came under sus- T he shift, by De bora Shugers acco unt , is a
978-0-8047-5582-5
Hardback £41.95
tai ned attack from exiled Cat ho lics , Cardinal major one, because censorship was now trans-
Collects the fra nkmusings
of some oftheworld'sbest Wi lliam A llen descri bing her in 1588 as the formed into an instrument of ty ranny (or at least
Uncoversthe French Republic's
.nJ_ _ ---" hiddenhistoryof inequality. critics ofFreud. "incestuo us ba sta rd" of " an infamous courte- of utter control in the case of Christian doctrine
san" who used Leiceste r "only to serve her filty as James I interprete d it) rather than protection.
lust". T his was typical of the sexual insu lts Rewarding critical studies ultima tely lead
TERRORISM FINANCING REFLECTIONS ON LITERATURE
directed against Protestants from the Continent, you back to the pri mar y texts they elucidate and
AND STATE RESPONSES AND CULTURE
A Comparative Perspective Edited by HannahA rendt and in his Life of Ca lvin the Carmelite Jerom e- allow you to view them in new ways. In Henry
Edited byjeanneK. Giraldo Hermes Bo lsec describ ed the undou bte dly VIII, Cat heri ne of Aragon responds to the false
Mar2007400pages
& HaroldA .Trinkunas heterosexual theo logian as a stigmatized sodo- charge s against the Duke of Buck ing ham by his
978-0-8047-4499-7
Jul 2007384pages Paperback £16.50 m ite who se dea th ca me as a res ult of a "ho rrible di smis sed Surveyor with the follo wing state-
13 tables, 3 figures 978-0-8047-4498-0
978-0-8047-5566-3 Hardback £41.95 disease of lice and worms, whic h did eat his ment: "Take good heed I You charge not in
Paperback £16.50
bo dy over: & the most loathsome ulcer in his your sp leen a nob le person I An d spoil you r
978-0-8047-5565-5
Hardback £41.95 Brings tog ether for thefirst time fundament and pri vy me mbers". In Eng land , on nobler sou l" . As I now rea lize , the Q uee n is
Arendt'sreflections on literature
Examines terrorist organisations and culture. the other hand, Cat holics were ro utine ly alluding here not on ly to iniuria as ver ba l
suchas AI Qaeda andHezbollah. accu sed of plotting against the throne or king- transgression in all its legal ramifications, but
dom, In James I's reign, after the failure of the also to its theo logical dimension as a vio latio n
Eurospon I university presses
~
G unpowder Plot, the attacks tended be agai nst of charity, and therefore a cor rupter of souls. In
Tel: + 44 (0)1767 604972 Fax: + 44 (0)1767 601640 roya l policy in ge neral, cloistered scho lars fictio n, as in reality, Cat heri ne wa s a learned
Stanford Email: eurospan @turpin -distribut ion.com
" meddl[ing] wit h thing s above their capacity" . scholar , we ll equipped to cro ss-examine those
www.eurospangroup.com/bookstore Reg ulatio n of in l1ammatory texts directed who mi sled the King or them se lve s.

TL S J UNE 8 2007 - 2 6-

We're in charge
J
ohn Kucich explains that his new book ,
Imperial Masochism , seek s to demonstrate
the "continued relevance of psychoanalysis
to historicism" as well as to "e lucidate the
ro le masochistic fantasy" plays in forming
identity. Kucic h combines these two critical
preoccupations to reveal "the socia l function"
of masochis tic fantasy in nineteenth-century
Britis h imperial culture, paying specific
attention to its class implications. Rather than
adhering to the conventional sense of
masochism as a sexual impulse, however,
Kucic h exp lains that his usage derives from
relational psyc hoanalysis, emphasizing the
ro le played by "narcissistic fanta sies of
omnipotence".
The works - and to some extent the Ii ves - of
Robe rt Louis Stevenson, Olive Schreiner,
Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad are
Kucic h's central focus; and while his approach
produces some intrig uing rea dings , and should
perhaps be admired for attempting to expand
the fie ld of masochism studies, his critical inter-
ventions often feel arbitrary. He organizes his
study aro und four imbricated type s of "maso-
chistic fanta sy" : "fantasies of tota l control over
others, fantasies about the annihilation of
others, fanta sies that maintain the omnipotence
of ot hers, and fantasies of solitary omni-
~---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Heavyweight thinking
Featherweight prices
Get the TLS for less - save over 40%
Subscribe today and save over
40 % on the usual retail price.
You will also receive a
welcome gift of a set of two
steel TLS bookmarks.
" If I we re allowed o nly o ne w eekl y
it w ould be th e TLS" Tom Stoppard
• Save over 40% on the usual retail price
• Have the US delivered direct to your door
• Get exclusive access to our online archive
Subscribe now by callin g +44(0) 1858438781 (quo tin g code 2026 )
or VISit www.subsc riptron.co.uk/ tls/2026
Reader s In tbe US sbould call + 1-80 0 370 9040
LI T ER ARY CRITI CI SM
P A T RI CK DENMAN F LANERY
J o hn Ku c i c h
[MPERIAL MASOCH ISM
British fictio n, fa ntasy, and socia l clas s
258pp . Prince to n U niversity Press. £22.95
(US $35).
978069 1 [ 271 2 3
potence". His theory of the se is so broad ly
defined that it encompasses a range of disparate
experiences, from Sc hreine r' s evangelica l self-
lessness, to schoo lboy bullying in Kipling ' s fic-
tion, all gathered too tidil y under a sing le criti-
ca l umbrella . Kucic h regar ds this as a positive
and even necessary effect, since " masochistic
fantasy is ... more a part of dail y psychosocial
experience than many of us have yet realized".
But over the co urse of the book the repetitive
deployment of catc hphrases suc h as "omni-
potent fanta sy", "narcissistic excess" and
" magical groups" becomes a kin d of litany,
obscuring rather than illuminating the social
phenomena disc ussed .
There is vir tua lly no consideration of how
the masoch istic elements Kucich finds in
these fo ur writers' works mig ht ha ve been read
by a udiences at the time. For example,
TLS
~
- 27 -
in acade mic disco urse by "autochthonous" .
In a stu dy whic h takes imperial soci al experi-
ence as its subject, eve n when inte r-
racial encounte rs are not its pri mary foc us,
Kuc ich ' s racial voca bu lary is worrying ly
while he notes the initial periodica l publica- uncon sidered .
tion of Conrad' s, Stevenson ' s and Kipling ' s The author 's treatment and selec tion of his
works, there is very litt le investigation of the so urces are also occasionally naive. For
effects of this kin d of pub lis hing, an d on the example, he add uces as evi dence Sam ue l Cron
very speci fic class implication s of pu blishing Cro nwrig ht-Sc hrei ners description of O live
in periodica ls like Blackwood's Maga zine Sc hrei ner banging her head on a table, but fa ils
and The Cornhill Maga zine , whic h had, as he to draw atte ntio n to the fact that Crons
fleeting ly ack now ledges , "a pre domi nant ly accou nts of hi s wife as suffering, weak and
middl e-class readership ". me nta lly unsta ble have long been seen as less
Given the project's co lonia l focus , Kucich's tha n entire ly cre dible. Odd ly, too, nowh ere
racia l and national categories are lacking in does Kucich note Sc hrei ner' s use of the
nua nce . Samoans, black Sout h Africans, pse udo nym "R alph Iron" , sure ly relevant to
Indians, Afg hans and Malays are referred to, any discussion of her feminism an d se lf-
unironically, as " natives" , and Stevenson is effacement. He cites ear ly American pirated
described as " having gone native" in Polynesia. edi tion s of so me of Sc hreiner's works, an d
The closest Kucich co mes to ethnic specificity e lsew here in Imperial Masochism he relies on
in the Sc hreiner chap ter is a sing le re ference to a patch work of recen t paperback, crit ica l, an d
Zu lus and the Sa n peop le. In his discu ssion of first editio ns.
Co nra d, he switc hes between "Malays" and In his fina l paragraph, Kuch ich co nce des,
"natives" , wit h no apparent ratio nale for using so mew ha t de fen sively, that he may appear to
the latter except as binary oppo site for occu py the pos ition of critic who "becomes
" whites" ; in his discussion of Nina , in Conrad's master of all he ... surveys" , bu t asks us to
Almayer's Folly, he descri bes her, witho ut quo- ju dge the book on the basis of the "pro ductiv-
tatio n, as "ha lf-caste". ity and .. . interp retive yie ld" of his scholar-
T he sy m bo lica lly loaded " native" is in- ship . This is an unco nvi ncing apo logy for a
appropriate in this co ntext; the QED, in mu lti- meth odological approach whic h m igh t have
ple defi nitio ns, notes that it is now "considered be ne fited fro m greater critical se lf-awareness,
offe nsive" . Even the more po litically correct rat he r tha n the "st ringent critical askesis" Joh n
" indigenous" has recen tly bee n supersede d Kuci ch claims.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Choose your level of savings on th e usual retail prices Ref 2026
Quarte rly (savemore wit h Direct Debit' )
12 mon ths - save 32 %
D U K £27
D UK £92
0 Euro pe £3 4
0 Europe £ 112
D ROW £40
D ROW £ 132
24m o nths-save 4 1% D UK £ 16 1 0 Euro pe £ 196 D ROW £23 1
Title Mr D Mrs D Miss D Ms D Oth e rD
First name Surna me
Add ress
Postcode/ ZIP
Tele pho ne Mo bile
E-mailt
Easy ways to pay (please tick your preferred payment option)
1 0 I enclo se a cheque for mad e payab le to The Times Literary Sup ple me nt Ltd.
20 Plea se charge to my: Visa 0 Mastercard 0 Switc h/M aes tro 0
Ca rd No. IL --".--.JL-l..--'--'..---'_ L-.L-L--".---'_ -'--'--'..--"._ L-.L-L-'
Valid from[I] [ I ] Expiry date [ I ] [ I ] Card issue no.[ I ] Secu rity no.
(Sw itch )
ITIJ
(Ia , t thre e d igits o n , ign a tur e p a ne l)
Ca rdh olde r's signature Date
30 Please complet e the follow ing instruction to yo ur Bank o r Building Soc iety to pay by Direct Debit (UK only)
"Direct Debit - pay only £23 each quarter (UK only)
d)
Or iginator 's ident ification num ber Is 1919 11 12 11 I g':~
Name of account holder tsl
To: The Man ager Bank/Building Socie ty
Addres s
Postcode
Branch sort code I I I I I I I Account No. I I I I I I I I I
Thi, guaranTee i, o ife re d by a ll Ban k, and Building Societies that take pa rt in the Direct Debi t ,che me. The effic ienc y a nd ,ecu rity o f the ,cbeme i, mo nitored
an d pro tected by your own Bank or Build ing Soc iety. If the amo unts to be paid or tbe p ayment d a te s c ha nge The Time, Lite ra ry Su pplement will not ify yno to
wo rking day, in ad van ce of yo u r account be ing deb ited or as otherwi,e agreed , Ii an erro r i, made by Tbe Times Literary Supp lement or your Bank o r Building
Society, you ar e goa ranteed a iuBa nd immediate re iund from your branc b of the amount p a id. You can ca nce l a Di rect Deb it ,11 an y time by writing to you r
Ba n k o r Buildi ng Society. Plea,ea l,o se nd a copy o iyour let ter to u,
t By , up p lylng yo ur e -ma il ad dress you are bappy to re c e ive o tfers via e -mail from or m assoCIa tion With The TImes LIterary Su pp le m e nt (TLS). Tbe U S "
passi o nate abo ut ,ecuri ng great promotions a nd oif e rs for yo u. The TLS directly (or via its a gent s) ma y ma il or pho ne yo u ab out ne w p ro mo tion , . p rod uct , a nd
,ervice" Tic k if you do n't want to receive th e , e from u, r r or carefully ,e lec ted compa nies r I (He ld u nder UK law. See our p rivacy policy a t www.n idp.com )
Please ret urn this coupon to: The TLS,Tower House, Sovereign Park,
Market Harborough, LE16 9EF, UK. Telep bone +44 (0)1858 43B 781
Fax +44 (0) 1B5B 461 739. Readers in the US should call + 1·800 370 9040 TLS
TLS J UNE 8 2007
 SC IENCE

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

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

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

A "unbreakable" Nazi code, a string of

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

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

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

T LS JUNE 8 2007 - 28-


wo thousa nd years ago , Caesar Augus-
T tus was in his late sixties and facing
the ange r of the gods. The Rom e to
whic h he had bro ught peace and pro speri ty, a
city adorn ed with his bron ze and marble mon u-
ment s, had been struc k in qu ick succession by
earthquakes, floods and a de vastating lire . His
son and heir had died , aged twent y-two . The
Ba lkan prov inces he had added to Rom e ' s
Em pire were in revol t fro m the Danube to the
Adriatic; rese rvists had to be ca lled up, ex-
slaves enlisted, new and unp opul ar taxes
impo sed . Wo rst of all, successi ve har vests
fa iled. There was fami ne in Rom e.
The poet Ovidiu s Naso (or "O vid", as the
Engli sh have called him since Cha uce r's time)
was in his late forties. W itty, sop his ticate d, end-
lessly inventi ve, for thirty yea rs he had ce le-
brated the life of love and pleasure, chro nicli ng
his tempestuous relatio nship wit h "Co rinna" in
the Amores, imagi ning the desires and jealou s-
ies of mythological lad ies in the H eroides, and
finally co m piling a three-volume manu al of
seductio n in the A rs Amat oria, followe d by a
fourth on how to reverse the pro cess. As one of
his co nte mpo raries put it, "he has li lled this
age (ho c saeculumi wit h ero tic handb ooks and
erotic epigra ms". However, Ovid' s age was a
saec ulum of a very part icul ar kind, a new era
announced by August us wit h elabora te reli-
gious cere mo nia l in 17 BC to mark the end of
the bad old days of civ il war and moral wic ked-
ness. The hymn to the gods on that occas ion,
Horace 's Carmen Saec ulare, hailed the return
of "ancient Chast ity and neglected Virtue " .
That was n't ho w O vid and his rea ders saw it.
"It's useful that gods sho uld exist " , he wro te
in the A rs Amatoria , "so let' s suppose they do ."
A ugus tus , on the other hand , was a belie ver ; he
knew that the gods had mad e his ac hieve me nt
possible, and that if they we re offe nded they
co uld take it all away again . The moral rearm a-
ment program me reall y mattered to him.
Ovid had already change d tack by the time of
the disaster s of A D 5- 7 , and was now working
on two big new projects. The first was the great
epic narrat ive ca lled Metamorphoses, a huge
"sea of sto ries ", eac h mergin g into the next,
fro m the whole range of Gree k mythology;
among its cast of thousa nds are Apollo and
Daph ne, Pyramu s and This be, Mid as of the
go lden touch , and the encha ntress he ca lls Tita-
nia. Th e ot her poem was the Fast i, similarly
kaleidoscopic but this tim e struc ture d on the
calendar of rites and festivals that mad e up the
Roman yea r; planned as twe lve volumes for the
twel ve month s, it includes the rape of Lucrece
and the sto ry Botticell i painted as "P rimave ra" ,
O vid li nished the Metamorphoses, but the Fas ti
as we have it break s off at the end of Jun e.
He dedica ted the Fasti to August us, and very
pro perl y incorporate d in it all the significant
A ugus tan ann iversaries. " I' m no soldier, Cae-
sar", he wro te, "but in yo ur service I bear wha t
a rms I ca n." Usi ng the Rom an yea r was itse lf
a tactful artili ce . The crea tion of an astronomi-
ca lly acc urate ca lendar was one of the most
lasting ac hieve me nts of Augustu s' father Juliu s
Caesar, and Augustus himsel f had been respon-
sible for the final necessary adju stm ent to it. In
hon our of the res pec tive refo rmers , the month
Qu inctilis was renamed "July" in 45 BC, and in
8 BC the mon th Sex tilis became " August" . Part
of the Senate ' s dec ree on the latter occ asion
happen s to survive: " Since in this month Egypt
was brou gh t into the dom inion of the Rom an
Peopl e, and in this mon th an end was imposed
on the civi l wa rs, and since for these reason s
CLAS S ICS
Days at a time
T . P. WI S EMAN
R. J o y Littl e w o od
A C O M MEN TA R Y O N O V ID 'S
"FA ST ] "
Book 6
352pp. Oxford University Press. £60 (US $ 115).
9780 19927 1344
Ri ch a rd J. Kin g
D E SI RI N G R O ME
Ma le subje ctivity and readin g Ovid' s "Fasti"
328pp. Ohio State University Press. $69 .95.
97808 142 10208
this month ha s been and is most fort unate for
our empi re, the Sen ate resol ves that this month
be called Augustus" . The reference was to the
day in 30 BC when the yo ung Caesar, as he then
was, had entered Cleopatra' s A lexa ndria as the
victor in the last of the civ il wa rs. It was the first
day of A ugust, when sacrifice was made each
year at the temp le of Hope (Spes); now it
becam e a public holid ay, to celebra te "the liber-
ation of the republic from most grievo us peril " .
Wh en A ugustus ina ugurate d his new age , the
choir 's hymn had ended wit h Hope, an emotio n
that was also a goddess. Bu t now the templ e of
Ho pe was in ruins, destroyed probabl y in the
grea t lire of AD 5. August us was terrified by
the loss of the gods ' favo ur, and is said to have
conte mplated suici de. He was afra id that the
sta rvi ng peo ple might rise up against him , and
he suspec ted treason within his ow n fami ly.
Wh en he was told that Ovid had see n somet hing
suspici ous and failed to report it, his long resent-
ment at the immora lity of the A rs Am atoria
turn ed to fury. In AD 8 Ovid was bani shed to
a fron tier town on the Bla ck Sea, ju st sout h of
the Danub e delt a.
In one of his poe ms fro m exi le (there are ten
vo lumes of them) O vid cla imed to ha ve co m-
pleted all twe lve books of the Fast i. If that' s
true, though it may we ll not be, it is easy to see
why he suppresse d at least the Jul y and August
vo lumes , which would inevi tably have been full
of upbeat materi al abou t the rule of the Caesars.
As it was, he abando ned the poem for nine long
years. Augustus died in A D 14. His successor
T iberiu s was not dispo sed to revoke the bani sh-
men t ord er, but Tiberius was alrea dy in his mid-
fift ies when he ca me to po wer, and no one
knew how long he wo uld last. His heir appare nt
was Germ an icu s, yo ung, cha rismatic and a
poet. Would he want the glory of Ro man litera-
ture to go on ro tting in ex ile? In AD 17 , amid
sce nes of grea t pop ular enthusiasm, the glamor-
ous yo ung prince held his long-awai ted tri-
umph , and dedi cated the re built tem ple of
Hope. O vid meanwhil e had embarked on a
re writt en versio n of the Fasti, dedi cated , of
co urse , to Ge rmanic us him self. He had fin ished
Book I , and mad e some adj ustme nts to Boo ks
2-6, when death too k him in the same yea r.
The rece ption of the Fast i in rece nt times has
been very uneven . Sir Ron ald Sym e believed
that the poet had found "the vers ified calenda r
of the sta te religion" an uncon genial them e. In
History in Ovid (1978) he wro te: "A ma n need s
to have the passion for antiquaria n erud ition as
we ll as a ce rtain sy mpat hy wit h superstition or
entra nce ment with myster y .. .. O vid was on
- 2 9-
HercuIes driving away Pan from the bed
of Omphale (1590), by Tintoretto; an
illustration of an episode from Ovid ' s Fa sti
the wrong track , and he ran into imp edim ents" .
Part of that was special plead ing to prepare the
reader for Syme ' s redatin g of the poe m to
before AD 4 , a pro posal whic h has fo und little
favo ur. But there are a lso some grat uitous
assumption s at wor k. Th e poem is not a versi-
fied ca lendar, eve n though tra ditiona lly editors
try to make it look like one by inser ting dates
and various ca lendrica l formul ae into Ovid ' s
text. Nor is there the slightest reason to think
that O vid' s imm en sely fert ile storytelling talent
was un sympathetic to mat er ial fro m obsc ure
sources, or unint erested in the gods and ho w
mortals wo rshi p them . Ce rtainly the subject
was a cha lle nge, but this is a poet who thrive s
on cha llenges.
More recentl y the poem has at last found
prop er appreciatio n, wit h va lua ble monograph s
by John M iller tO vid 's Eleg iac Fes tivals,
1991) , Geraldine Herber t-Bro wn (Ovid and the
"Fasti", 1994 ) and Carol e New lands (Play ing
with Time, 1995), and a brilli ant one by A lessan-
dro Barchiesi (The Poet and the Prince, 1997).
Up-to-da te co mme ntaries ha ve appeared for
Boo k 4 (Elai ne Fantha m, 1998) and Book I
(Steven Gree n, 2004), and we ca n now we l-
co me a vade mecum for Book 6 as we ll. R. Joy
Littlewood ' s lirst study of the poem was pub-
lished in 1981 , and the co mme ntary shows all
the bene li t of her long familiar ity with it. There
are a few slips (An cu s Marciu s as a son of
Numa , a self-sac rilice by Mettu s Curtius), and
not eve ryo ne will be persu aded that there is a
running the me of war in Book 6 corresponding
to one of peace in Boo k I. But what matters
about co mme ntaries is that they shou ld help the
reader to understand a dem and ing text, and in
that Littl ewood ' s work is exe m plary, an impor-
tant add ition to O vid ian scholars hi p.
W ith Rich ard J. Kin g' s Desiring Rome: Male
subjectiv ity and readi ng Ovid 's "Fas ti", we are
in qu ite differen t scho larly terri tory. You ca n
ge t away with an esse ntially mean ingless title,
as man y authors do, if you r subti tle ex plains
what the book is about. But Kin g never makes it
cle ar what " male subjec tivity " means; his read -
ers are expec ted to be fami lia r with the conce pt
alread y, j ust as they have to understand
" homoerotic spec ter" , " libidina l exc ha nge",
" the symbolic scree n", and "q uilting point"
(this last an obsessively recurring co nce pt bor-
rowe d fro m Jacqu es Lacan ). He help s his read-
ers only by poin ting to other boo ks, as whe n he
cites "w hat Lacan ca lled anamor phosis ", "w hat
Pierre Bo urd ieu called ' a sy noptic illusion"',
"w hat Victor Tu rner called comm unitas ", "w ha t
Marcel Chio n ca lls 'acousmatic' '', " what
Majorie Ga rber ca lled 'ca tegory crisis'''.
Throughout, the language is relentl essly
abstrac t and metaphorical. Here is the pro-
gramme sta teme nt: "This book acc ounts for
the inco mpletio n and discont inu ity of the Fasti
differentl y [from previ ous scho lars ' work]; it
embraces lack of co mpletio n and discon tinu ity
as tro ubli ng ' blots ' (of Ovids unm ana geable
' real' life), obsc uring direc t views of the poem
and prov oking the reader's desire of who leness
and (narra tive) co nti nuity". And here is Kin g' s
ex planation of O vid' s choice of subjec t:
The ca lendar, as syno ptic illu sion. provides a
rationa lized sce nario of ritual repetition - an
ideo logica l fanta sy - that person s ca n use to
scree n the Real of co nflicti ng force s that other -
wise threa ten to split the subj ect's imagi nary
and symbo lic identification s. Spec tral return of
the Rea l adumbrates the dark, repressed under-
side of ideologies (fantasies) bolstering the
symbolic order.
T he arg ume nt rests on the unexamin ed
premiss that Ovi d 's reader s we re "elite Rom an
males" , sometimes further specilied as
" upwardly mobil e elite males" , su bject to "e lite
male anxieties" and behavin g with "e lite male
wari ness". From the start, O vid' s poetry had
been addre ssed ex plici tly to men and wome n
alik e; in the Fasti, his varied subject matter
leads him to add ress all sorts of imagi ned rea d-
ers , such as schoo lchildren (March 19) , married
wo me n (Ap ril I , Jun e 11), pro stitut es (April
23), farmers (Ja nuary 24, April 12) , shep her ds
(Ap ril 21), artisa ns (March 19) , and the Ro ma n
People as a whole (April 4, Ma y 12, Jun e 23) .
But King has chose n to operate with "E ve
Sed gwick ' s model of male 'ho mos ocia l
desire" ' , so all tha t evi de nce has to be ignore d .
For him , the Fasti is "a ' locus of media tion ' ,
where the poet plays with scree ning his own
desire of knowing wha t the com plex Oth er
wo uld want" ; the ex iled Ovid is submissive,
fem inized and, of co urse , sym bolica lly
cast rated .
If psycho anal ysis has a value, it is sure ly
therape utic. Th ere see ms little po int in atte mpt-
ing it on a man who ha s been dead for nearl y
two millenni a. Besides, the diag nosis depen ds
not on the sto ries Ovi d ac tua lly tell s, but on
"a ngu lar views" and "s kewed vantage po ints"
which enable the analys t to ext ract the required
mean ings fro m texts tha t say somet hing quit e
differen t. The book offe rs plen tiful evi de nce for
King' s close rea ding of the poe m and wide read-
ing of the scholarly literatu re, but in the end it
has nothing to of fer to read ers interested in liter-
ature or history. They may prefe r to reme mber
the O vid who never gave up hope, and ended
his Metamorphoses with an ep ilog ue that de lied
August us ' power. As A. D. Mel ville translates
it, "Now sta nds my task acco mplished, such a
wo rk / As not the wra th of Jove, nor lire nor
sword / Nor the devou rin g ages ca n de stroy".
TLS J UNE 8 2 0 07

revolution has swept America n Christ-
A ianity durin g the past thirty years. With
the old mainline Protestant denomina-
tions and the Roman Catholic Chu rch facing
serio us problems, the third great force in Amer-
ican religion, populi st Evangelicalism, has
surged to the forefront, numerically, culturall y
and politically. President Bush not only identi-
fies with this tradition, but would not be in the
Wh ite House without its formidable electoral
support. American Evangelical Protestantism,
though still not well understood, is now, through
its political clout, one of the most important
ideological shapers of the modern world. But
how is it to be interpreted? What are its historical
roots, and what are its contemporary cultural
characteristics? These are the themes of Richard
Kyle' s authoritative and readable book. Kyle
writes as both an insider and an outsider. As an
Anabaptist-Mennonite he is from one of the
lesser known and least powerful of the groups
that make up the variegated Evangelical family,
and as a professor of history he is at an elite dis-
tance from the populi st style of contempor ary
Evangelicalism about which he writes.
The main theme of the book , as the title
suggests, is that instead of creating a Christian
America, as was their initial intention, Evangeli-
cals have effectively Americanized Christian-
ity. Although Kyle supplies a useful historical
account of how and why this happened , the
real punch of the book lies in its characteriza-
tion of what has taken place in the past thirty
years, particul arly through the rise of the mega
and electronic church es. Just as striking are the
huge numbers who listen to Christian radio, or
watch televangelists, or read the acres of print
produced by popul ist Evangelicals such as Hal
Lindsey, Rick Warren and Tim LaHa ye, who
are amon g the bestselling author s of all time.
All of this has been produced by a movement
which has traditionally regarded itself as dis-
tinctly countercultural or even marginalized by
culture . How can this be explained?
Kyle' s method is to show how Evangelical-
ism' s longstanding embrace of a market eco -
nomy in a nation with no Established Church
has shaped its cultural style. Throughout its
history, Evangelicali sm has peddled a conserva-
tive, sometimes fundamentalist, message
through modern and inno vative method s. From
George Whitefield, the eighteenth-century
reviva list, to Bill Hybels, the pastor of the
Willow Creek mega church in Chica go, Evan-
gelicals have been both trend-setters and trend-
follo wers in adapting their message to popular
culture . Althou gh this feature of Evangelical-
ism has a long historical pedigree, its signili -
cance has increased since the 1960s for a
variety of reasons. The democratization of the
airwaves, the easing of immigration control s,
the decline of denom inationalism, and the den i-
gration of elite cultur e have all contribut ed to
a baby boomer religiosity which is seeker-
friendl y, conve nient, non-liturgical and thor- Baro que. Bernardino de Sahaguns Psatmodia
oughly Americ an. Bubblin g up primaril y from Christiana, originall y compo sed in Nahuatl ,
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --, orioles, you grosbeaks, you mockin gbirds, you
NEW AUIHORS
PUBLISH YOUR BOOK
ALL SUBJECTS INVITED
FICTION, BIOGRAPHY, HISTORICAL, POETRY, FANTASY & SCI-FI, the question of angels' pin-dancin g capaciti es
RELIGIOUS, SPIRITUAUSELF·HELP, ACADEMIC &REFERENCE
WRITE OR SENDYOUR MANUSCRIPTTO:
:~
7 '\J '!!!!!!2~~Y~!~
TWICKENHAM TW1 4EG , ENGLAND
www .athe napress.com
e-mail: info@athenapress.com
TLS JU N E 8 2007
RELIGION
Gods of TV
DAVID H E M P T O N
Rich ard K y l e
EV A NGELI CA LI S M
An Am ericanized Christianity
327pp. Transaction. £26.50 (US $34.95).
978 07 6580324 5
the South and from California , the new media-
savvy Evangelic alism has little time for the
liberal agendas of the old East Coast Protestant
elites or their power bases in the Ivy League uni-
versities, and the legal and scientilic worlds.
Indeed, one of Kyle' s main points is that just
as the Christianit y of mainline Protestants has
caved in to elite cultur e, the Christiani ty of the
Evangelicals has capi tulated to popular culture.
The centr al paradox of Kyle' s book, namely
that count ercu ltural Evangelicals have ridden
to power on the back of relentless cultura l adap-
tation, gives rise to lots of secondary paradoxes.
For example, most Americ an Evangelicals
plead for less government in economic matters,
but more government regulation in moral
-----------------~-----------------
hat does it say about historians of
W early modern supernaturalism that
they have been so much more inter-
ested in witches, ghosts and de vils than in
angels? The editors of An gels in the Early
Modem World, Peter Marshall and Alexandra
Walsham, ask whether post-medievalists have
been put off the topic because it has been
associated too exclusively with early Christian
and medieval thought. Certainly, historians'
often scornful treatment of angelology has clear
Protestant antecedent s. The question of how
many angels cou ld dance on the head of a pin,
long used to parody over-relined academic
inquiry in general, has been wrongly attribut ed
to Thom as Aquinas, but see ms to have first
appeared in print in 1638, in The Reli gion of
Prot estants by William Chillin gworth .
A reconsideration of angels is, then, an
excellent and very timely project, and the
collection's intercontinental breadth lives up to
the promi se of its title. The main focus is inevi-
tably on Reformation and Counter-Reform ation
theology and its reception and development in
England , but Raymond Gillespie, Elizabeth
Reis and Fernando Cervantes contribute strong
essays on - respectively - Ireland, Puritan New
England and Spani sh America . In the early
stages of evangelizing South America , Euro-
pean missionaries practised the kind of cultural
syncretism analysed by Peter Davidson in
his forthcomin g monograph The Universa l
compares angels to native bird life: "You divine
hummingbirds, all you sons of God, you angels:
come, circle round the court yard of our
church". More common, though, was the con-
ceptualization of angels as superhuman. Even if
was never seriously posed, both medie val and
early modern thinkers were fascinated by the
question of how these higher being s
differed from humans: How do angels talk to
each other? How do they digest? Do they have
- 30 -
spheres such as abort ion and homo sexua lity.
Evangelicals may therefore be protesting
against the nation' s moral breakdown , but they
are not compl aining much about its materialism
and consumerism. Evangelicals may claim to
uphold the Bible, but their biblical illiteracy has
reached unprecedent ed levels. In the elucid a-
tion of paradox, however, Kyle' s main aim is
not to expose hypocri sy or promote cynicism,
but rather to issue a warning to Americ an Evan-
gelicals that shrewd cultural adaptation is one
thing: wholesale cultural accommodation is
quite another.
Perhap s the most important part of Kyle' s
argument is his explanation of how Evangelical-
ism emerged from its relatively marginal posi-
tion in the aftermath of the Second World War
to its promin ent position today. Borro wing
from other s, Kyle reiterates the point that after
the ignom iny of the Scopes Trial in the 1920s
and their loss of influence in most Protestant
denominations in the interwar years, Evangeli-
cals and fundamentalists patientl y built up their
institutions (Bible institutes, Christian colleges
and ubiquitou s grassroots organization s), kept
Come,
circle
ALISON S HELL
P et er Marsha ll and
A lexandra W a lsh am , e d i t o r s
ANGELS I N THE EARL Y MODER N
WORLD
326pp. Cambridge University Press. £55 (US$99).
9780 521843324
sex, and if so, how ? Thanks to Pa radise Lost,
scholars of early modern literatur e have paid
more attention to angels than have their oppo-
site number s in history departm ents; Joad
Raymond ' s essay, focusing on the logistics of
Milton ' s poem, conclude s that Milton' s angels
are conceived in exceptiona lly bodily terms.
As this suggests, while the collection ' s over-
all focus is more historical than literary, it con-
tains many leads for literary critics. Among
these is the possibility of gaining a sharper focus
on the language of flattery. All angels were by
delinition subservient to God, while the notion
of angelic hierarchies was given its most delini-
live formulation by Dion ysius the Pseudo-
Areopagite in the lifth or sixth centuries. Thus ,
to call someone an angel is sometimes a straight-
forward hyperbo le, sometimes a term of scrupu-
lously limited praise. Thi s helps to contextualize
the famously abstruse ending of Donne' s poem
"Air and Angels" , often interpreted as implying
that women's affections are less spiritual and
more bodily than men' s: "Just such disparity I
As is ' twixt air and angels' purity I 'T wixt
women's love, and men' s will ever be". At their
best, angels were only ever transmitter s of
God' s goodness; at their worst, they could sub-
vert creation . Angels mirrored devils in the
their faith in free enterprise, and marched to
the heartbeat of American popular culture. Pro-
voked into action by the pro-abortion , femini st
and secularist lobbies of the 1960s and 70s,
Evangelicals came out swinging in the late
1970s and 80s . They are now a force to be reck-
oned with, as anyone who follows the careful
cultivation of Evangelicals by the 2008 presi-
dential hopefuls will know. More generally,
Kyle' s account of how this American version of
global fundamentalism constructed its founda-
tions before its increased visibility in the 1970s
makes for an interesting compari son with other
forms of religious fundamentalism elsewhere.
Thi s book is under-edited, too sermonic and
too repetitive to be the definitive text on the
American Evangelical tradition , but it is prob-
ably the best general account of the historical
roots and contemporary characteri stics of this
compl ex phenomenon. Very little of the Evan-
gelical past and present has esca ped Richard
Kyle' s gaze, which is genera lly straight and
penetrat ing. His exposition of how American
Evangelicalism has at once condemned, appro-
priated and consumed popular culture is not
only an appropriate way of viewing that tradi-
tion, but helps explain the paradox that has
befudd led secularization theori sts for years
of how modern America has become more
religious and more secular at the same time.
Christian cosmology, and devils were them-
selves routinely identilied as fallen angels.
Robin Briggs' s contribution, appropriatel y
titled "Dubious Messengers", stresses how
angels and demon s were "inextricably bound
together, seen as formed of the same mysteriou s
immaterial substance and subject to similar limi-
tations" . Thi s metaphysical similarity between
good and bad spirits helps to suggest why
visions of angels were often treated with suspi-
cion: they might be a satanic deception in them-
selves, or accompany evil spirits, or imply that
the visionary was tamperin g with forbidden
matter s.
Some individua ls at this date experienced
angel s or demon s as an advisory presence at
their side; others saw the supernatural battle
between good and evil played out before them
in positively cinematic terms. Amon g them was
the Commonwealth minister John Pordage,
who had strong links to the underground mysti-
cal tradition associated with Hendrik Niclae s
and Jacob Boehme . Ejected from his rectory in
1654, Pordage published a vindication of his
conduct in which he described his visions of
both evil and good angels: the former had "ears
like those of Cats, cloven feet, ugly legs and
bodies" ; the latter were "spirits, in ligurati ve
bodies, which were clear as the morning-star,
and transparent as Christal".
Angels, in other words, can have a dangerou s
imaginati ve polyvalency: which may be why,
comp ared to the early modern wo rld, not much
is heard about them in today' s Church . But as
a glance at the "Mind, Body and Spirit" section
of most bookshops will conlirm, belief in
angels forms a large part of popular occultism:
in particular , the notion of the guardian angel
provides comfort at a remarkable distance from
its Catholic origins. As the editors of this vol-
ume put it, "Modern popular culture in North
America and (particu larly) Western Europe
may have discarded much of its foundational
Christian heritage, but it retain s an almost
visceral understanding of the potency of images
of angelic care and protection ".

ebb Keane' s Christian Modem s
W discloses a beautifully simple idea.
Religious faith in the transce ndent
can not help but be expresse d through material
forms and represe ntations, in what Keane calls
a "semiotic ideology". All worship, even the
worship "in spirit and in truth" of a God so tran-
scende nt he cannot be named or represented in
images, has to be materialized through human,
and therefore social, media of expre ssion, even
where the med ium is language (creed s, sacred
texts) rather than material objects. This means it
can never attain a condition sufficie ntly abstract
or "spirit ual" to preclude corruption, nor can it
be wholly spontaneous and sincere beca use
even inner contemplation involves socia lly
constructed conscio usness. Consequently, most
faiths, particularly those that emphasize divine
transcendence, are prone to recurrent bouts of
"p urification".
This is an idea that has found its time. There
has been a recent spate of publications in
the sociology of religion and religious studies
dealing with religious dress, liturgical language,
the choreography of ritual, religious architecture,
and a new jo urnal, Materializing Religion,
in which something close to Webb Keanes
idea provides the underlying rationale. What is
distinctive about Keane's approach is the theoret-
ical thoroughness with which he pursues the
implications of the paradox of transcendence,
which takes a particularly striking form in the
Calvinist mission field of Indonesia where his
own field work took place. He worked on the
island of Sumba , where Dutch missionaries of
the re-Reformed Calvinist Church have been
meticulous in keeping the faith uncorrupted by
syncretistic influences from the indigenous
ancestor cult.
-----------------------~-----------------------
mmet Larkin established his pre-
E eminence as an interpreter of nineteenth-
century Irish Catholicism in 1972, with a
seminal article in which he argued that the years
after 1850 had witnessed a "devotional revolu-
tion" in Ireland, during which the disorderly peas-
ant relig ion of the poorest co untry in Western
Europe was gradually brought under the control
of a disciplined, educated and increasingly asser-
tive clergy. That revolution, to which the death
or emigration of the poorest third of the popula-
tion during the famine years was the single most
significant contributory factor, turned the Irish
peasantry into the most docile Catholics in the
world, and, in the process, helped determine the
character of the modem Irish state.
Over the past thirty years Larkin has fleshed
out that manifesto in a series of book s offe ring a
decade-by-decade analysis of the activities and
attitudes of the bishops and higher clergy ,
closely based on manuscript sources , though by
and large stronger on the political dimensions
of the story than the devotional. In The Pastoral
Role of the Roman Ca tholic Church in Pre-
Famine Ireland, 1750-1 850 he turns away from
the fraught episcopal politics of the later nine-
teenth century to explore in fascinating deta il
the charac ter and pastoral dilemm as of the pre-
famine Irish Church, the background from
which the devotional revo lution emerged .
There have been a number of excellent mono-
grap hs on pre-famine Catholicism by historians
such as Sean Conn olly and the late Donal Kerr.
In its detailed statistical and archival underp in-
ning, however, in the brio and clarity of its argu-
ment, and in the century-long sweep of its narra-
tive, Larkin' s new book stands alone.
RELIGION
Mission statements
B ER NI C E M ARTIN
W ebb K e an e
C H RIS TIAN MOD E R NS
Freedom and fe tish in the mission encounter
336pp. University of Califo rnia Press. Paperback ,
$21.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £ 13.95.
9780 520 24652 2
Christian Modem s is not an ethnography,
though it deploys illustrations from historical
and contemporary ethnograp hic work. Rather,
it is a theoretical exploration of the way the
paradox of transce ndence works itself out
in a missionary enco unter between the most
abstract and morally rigoro us form of European
" puritan" Christianity, and indigenous practices
in which the materialization involved in
ancestor cults, marapu , is elaborate, taken for
granted and wove n into the moral construction
of the Sumb anese. Keane seeks to show that
the drive to deva lue the material, which the
missionaries introduced, has had consequences
beyond the immediate practice of relig ion, and
ultimately alters the constitution of Sumbanese
"subjects".
He draws on structuralist and post-structural-
ist theories of language and of representation,
but remains flexible and eclectic, particularly in
avoiding overdetermined models of symbolic
actio n or language use. He takes his basic cues,
however, from Bruno Latour, particularly
Latours use of the term "purificat ion". The
To your Stations
E A M ON DU F FY
E m me t L arki n
TH E P ASTORAL RO LE OF TH E
ROM A N C ATH O LIC C HU RC H IN
PR E -F AMI N E IR E LA ND , 1750 -1 8 50
308pp. Washington, DC: Catholic University of
America Press. $69.95.
978 0 8132 1457 3
The Irish Church in 1750 was recovering
from the dracon ian anti-Catholic legislation of
the Willi amite period, when hundr eds of clergy
had been forced to flee Ireland. Bishops and
religio us superiors recruited frantica lly once
persecution eased, and many unworthy
candidates were ordai ned in early Hanoverian
Ireland , persuading not only a hostile British
Gover nment, but also a scandalize d Vatican,
that there were too many priests in Ireland. In
the 1740 s, Pope Benedict XIV issued a series of
wellintentioned but counter-productive re-
scripts designed to improve Irish clerical stand-
ards : the worst of these limited the bishops to a
maximum of twelve priestly ordinations durin g
their lifetime, and requ ired all novices for the
religio us life to study (at crippling expense) on
the Continent. The resulting chronic shortage of
priests and religious was made worse by the
lack of permanent places for Catholic worship,
fewer than 700 chapels for Ireland' s thousand
or so parishes in the early eighteenth century,
- 31 -
argument is that human beings are chronically
prone to displace their own agency on to objects
- images, natural phenom ena, animals, and so
on, understood as the vehicles of invisi ble
forces - in what is commonly known as "fetish-
ism". "Purifica tion" is essentially a classifica-
tion exercise, sorting out persons (with agency)
from things (without agency). The idea l of
human agency, "freedom", "emancipation", at
the heart of the moral project of modernity, is
itself derived, via the secularization of the
Enlightenment, from ju st this purification drive
in Protestantism, from which it passed into
European politics and science alike.
The problem Webb Keane addresses is none
other than the classic sociological conundrum:
if humans are the product of interaction with
other humans, in the context of cultural forms
they themselves did not create, how can they
have pure agency without stripping themselves
(an impossibility in any case) of all the things
that went into making them human ? Keane
attributes this perception to Marx, but it goes
back at least as far as the Enlightenment origins
of the social scientific enterprise : it underlies
Montesquieu ' s dilemma over ass igning moral
responsibili ty for the "climatically determined "
institutions of slavery and polygamy, and
Locke' s attempt to devise a purely "objective"
language as the vehicle for unbia sed empirica l
observation. At all events it is, as Keane
stresses, built deep into the project of moder-
nity, and finds apparently secular or "c ultural"
express ion in the drive to extend the distinction
and these very unevenly distributed.
Since there we re no se minaries in eig ht-
eent h-century Ireland, the clergy were trained
abroad, mostly in France. The sons of farmers,
shopkeepers and tradesmen, their expensive
studies were funded by the bizarre expe dient of
ordaining candidates at once, often belo w the
canonical age, so that they cou ld pay their way
through co llege from the income of Mass
stipends. Rome fretted about this blatant irregu-
larity, but the Irish bishops simply could not
afford to reform it. Larkin' s book, however,
sympathetically traces the heroic if not ulti-
mately successful efforts of three remarkable
generations of bishops to cope with a mountin g
series of pastoral crises: the destruction of the
entire Irish seminary syste m durin g the French
Revolution, an extraordinary population explo-
sion (a 270 percent increase in the century
before 1847), and the strident factionalism rife
among the clergy in the ear ly nineteenth cen-
tury. Increasingly united in commitment to
reform, the bishops created new co lleges in Ire-
land, most famously Maynooth in 1795, slow ly
improved clerical standards, and in the seventy
years after 1770 increased clergy provision by
50 per cent. But none of this could keep pace
with the galloping growth in population, and the
ratio of priests to people was dramatically
worse in 1840 than it had been in 1750.
Wha t prevented pastoral catastrophe was
the unique Irish phenomenon of "Stations", the
practice by which for several weeks around
between persons and things, good spirits and
bad ones, to distinctions among objects and
what they imply for the persons who possess ,
exchange or use them.
Webb Keane provides subtle and sympa-
thetic analyses of the two-way adj ustments and
mutual incorporations that can occur where the
Calvinist "representational economy" encoun-
ters that of the indigenous Sumbanese. Early
in the colonial enterprise Dutch administrators
and anthropologists, as well as missionaries,
found it necessary to make an (inevitably)
arbitrary distinction between what constituted
"religion" and "c ulture" respectively, in order
to protect local custom and define the legiti-
mate field of mission activity. Its long-term
consequences run through all the concrete
instances of the mission enco unter discussed in
the book. The powerfully perform ative mode of
ritual language spills over from the ancestor
cult into the newly minted ritual of a conver t
announcing his imminent Christian baptism.
Conceptions of bride-wealth mutate from the
ritual and material goods that connect the
families in a marriage exchange into a Christian-
inflected valuation where they are dematerial-
ized as symbols of the inherent value of an indi-
vidual bride. Keane' s final discussions of how
the traditional description of the house is turned
from a powerful ritual of communication with
ancestors into an inert poetic text, and how the
introdu ction of state-backed money articulates
with the Sumbanese ritual exchange system,
are rich demonstrations of the explanatory and
interpretive purchase his theoretical tools have
in co ncrete instances of modernization. He
concludes we should never assume that, jus t
because we use the same words, we fully know
what eve n the modern Other means.
Christmas and Easter the parish clergy became
itinerants, travelling round their parishes to say
Mass and hear the confessions of an entire dis-
trict, basing themselves in the houses of the
wealthier farmers, at the same time collecting
their "dues", the levy on property and income
which form ed their main inco me, and conso lidat-
ing links with the better-off laity by receiving
hospitality from them. These Stations were
always intensely problematic - because of the
drunkenness which attended the station dinners,
the financial strains and resentments the practice
created, the moral ambiguities and scandals sur-
rounding the hearing of women's confessions in
a domestic setting, and in general the blatant lack
of conformity between the turbulent "Stations"
and the decoro us church-based pastoral norms
established by the Council of Trent. In Larkin' s
j udgement, however, the "Stations" with all their
drawbacks averted the breakdown of pre-famine
Irish Catholicism, maintaining pastoral contact
with a population which could not be reached in
any other way, and for whom the Tridentine
ideal of weekly Mass attendance in the parish
church was a simple impossibility. The alliance
which Stations promoted between the clergy and
the farming class would survive the cataclysm of
the famine, he argues, and would provide the
basis on which a new Catholicism would
emerge. The famine itself would redefine the con-
ditions under which the Irish Church operated,
wiping out the poorest stratum of Irish society
which was least amenable to ecclesiastical disci-
pline, reducing the ratio of people to priest which
had frustrated earlier reform, and clearing the
ground for the devotional revolution. This is
Emmet Larkin' s best and most persuasive book.
TLS J UNE 8 2007

Gardening
Christopher Lloyd
CU TTIN GS
A year in the garden with Christopher L10yd
288pp. Chatto and Windu s. £ 18.99.
9780 7011 8 134 5
A number of Christopher L1oyd' s books -
most notably The Well- Temp ered Garden
- have been hailed as modern classics; but it
was his weekly column for the Gua rdia n that
made him an unlikely national celebrity. Over a
hundred of these pieces - dispatches from his
garden at Grea t Dixter in Sussex - have been
collected in Cuttin gs. They are, in the main, sea-
sonal bulletins on topics which exercise all seri-
ous gardeners - plant ing, pruning, plant asso-
ciations, etc - interspersed with vignettes of
individual genera . The pieces have been well
chosen to illustrate L1oyd ' s determinat ion that
something exciting could and should be happen-
ing in the garden every day of the year.
As a formidable virtuoso plantsman and
skilled horticulturali st, L10yd was well quali-
fied to advise; but his popu larity deri ved in
equal measure from his perceived eccentri city.
He spent almost all his life tendin g the grand
Edward ian garden laid out for his father by
Edwin Lutyens around the Tudor manor house
at Great Dixter. It was the inspiration for almost
everything he did and the breeding ground for
the apparent contradict ion s in his charact er. He
was fiercely protective of the place and relished
the sybaritic possibilitie s of house and garden.
He changed nothing about its design ("The orig-
inal bones were so sound and satisfyi ng"), yet
embarked on a programme of uproot ing the
roses and replacing them with subtropical bed-
ding plants in violent colours - "a sense of exoti-
cism and lush flamboyance. It has been and con-
tinues to be exciting - and it isn't fashionab le".
He espoused many traditional values and was
relentlessly professional with an almost Presby-
terian de votion to back-breaking work; but he
abhorr ed "the asphyxiating boredom of the
good taste gardener who hasn't a fresh idea in
his/her head" .
Lloyds willingness to experiment with all
type s of ga rdeni ng led to a rar e intima cy with
his readers, though he himself rema ined an
intriguin gly inscrutable ligure who hardly ever
wrote about himself. His style has been
described as "Edwardian", and it is indeed
schoolmasterly, but leavened with conspirato-
rial colloquialism: "Speaking personally, I
don't really enj oy beds carved out of a lawn and
looking thoroughl y self-conscious. Open jam
tarts my mother used to call them. But if that is
what you like, then you' ll be aiming for a blaze
of colour". Christopher Lloyds was a maverick
voice in the panoply of twentieth-century
gardeners, but one which spoke with such un-
TLS JUNE 8 2007
IN BRI E F
Th e cent ra l axis of the garden at Villa Allegri Arvedi in Cuzza no, nea r Verona;
tak en from Italian Gardens: A cultural h istory , by Helena Att lee
(240p p. Frances Lin coln. £30. 978 0 7112 2647 0).
paralleled authority and enthusiasm that it is cer-
tain to endure.
AL EXA N D E R URQ UHART
Socia l Studies
John Belch em , edi tor
LIVERPOOL 800
Culture, character and history
416pp. Liverpool University Press. £35.
978 I 8463 1034 8
W hen Diana Mosley was incarcerated in
Holloway Prison during the Second
World War she was haunted by the words of her
cousin Win ston Churchill on visiting the slums
of Liverpool: "Imagine how terrible it would
be, never to see anything beautiful , never to eat
anything savoury, never to say anything
clever". Had Churchill lived to see this new
history of Liverpoo l, he may have revised his
opinion.
Liverpool 800: Culture. character and
h istory pro vid es a lon g o verdue reappraisal of
Liverpool' s chequer ed history from its glory
days as the second city of empire and gateway
to the New World in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, to its rapid decline in the post-
industrial, Thatcherite era and its regenera tion
in the twenty-li rst centur y as European Capital
of Culture for 2008. Liverpool ' s uneasy connec-
tion with the slave trade, on which the city first
flourished, is fully addre ssed, its rich maritime
history explored, and its contribution to music,
art, theatre , fashion, popu lar culture, comedy,
architecture, poetry and literature made clear.
Lavishly illustrated, this is a vibrant, stylish and
- 32-
witty book. Amon g many small items, it notes
that the University of Liverpoo l was built in a
disused lunatic asylum .
The exodus south by many of the leading Liv-
erpool families had a lasting impact on the city
which had previou sly benefited from the philan-
thropy and ci vie valu es of the Ro sco es and the
Rathbon es (the role of John Moor es is rather
unfairly dim inished). Jane Longmore' s excel-
lent essay shows how eighteenth-century Liver-
pool did not subscribe to the same notions of
polite sociability as leisure towns such as Bath.
Rather, Liverpool' s cultural pursuits were
shaped by its mercantile sensibility, with an
empha sis on outdoor acti vities. The masculine
ethos of a port town was reflected in drinkin g
club s such as The Ugly Club. Insufficient atten-
tion is accord ed to the importance of Liver-
pool' s Theatre Royal. Stars of the London
stage, such as Sarah Siddon s, Dora Jordan and
Edmund Kean , toured during the long summer
seasons; Georg e Frederick Cooke famously
berated the asse mbled gentry at the theatre for
their in vol vem ent wit h the slave trade.
Nor has enough been made of the fact that
Liverpoo l has always been a matriarcha l city,
which is a key to its character and its strong
family values. Nevertheless, prominence is
given to many of Liverpool' s notable female
figures, including Kitty Wilkin son (founder of
public wash-houses), Margaret Beavan (first
female Lord Mayor), Agnes Jones (who started
a training school for nurses in the Liverpoo l
Work house Hospital) and "Battling Bessie
Braddock". This volume gives a clear-eyed
and unsentimental overview of a city steeped
in pride and a deep emotional comp lexity so
often misunderstood and misrepresented as
mawki sh self-pity.
PA ULA BYR N E
Geoffrey Ashe
THE OFFBEAT RADICALS
The British tradition of alternative dissent
274pp . Methuen. £17.99.
978041377 460 6
W ith The Ojjbeat Radi cals, Geoffrey Ashe
marks fifty years of antiqua rian inquiry,
in which he has produced more than twenty pop-
ular and academic works on the condit ion of
mythical England . Much of his work is on
Arthuri an legend and its putative basis in fact. It
is not surprising therefore that in this book Ashe
traces the roots of a peculiarly British type of
radicali sm to Geoffre y of Monm outh' s prophe-
cies of Merlin in the twelfth centur y, a pro-
phetic tradition that was explored and given a
theoreti cal framework by Joachim of Fiore.
The twin notion s of prediction and the crea-
tion of a utopia on earth inform the visionaries
that Ashe examine s, from Blake and the Shel-
leys to G. K. Chesterton . Such visionaries
looked towards a revolution theorized in proph-
ecy and based on the transfig uring leap, a trans-
formation into another world; they all stood in
oppo sition to the Anglic an church. Seeking "a
transformation in attitu des, in thinkin g, in life-
styles, leading to a fundamenta lly different
society", Ashe' s radicals were not without
achievement: Robert Owen , for example,
created a welfare state in miniature with reason-
able wages, lower working hours, fair prices,
decent housing, proper draina ge, refuse dis-
posal and schooling incorporatin g physical edu-
cation and music lessons. These practical appli-
cation s of the "utopian" society are now so
assimilated into modern life, that it is difficu lt
to comprehend how revolutionary Owen was.
Ashe makes a good case for including
Chesterton , with his back-to-th e-Iand Dis-
tributist League , claimin g that this was the last
flowerin g of a kind of English radicalism
before the Russian Revolution rather dimin-
ished the appeal of a utopia on earth. On the
way he nods to Richard Brother s, who pro-
moted the belief (not entirel y dead today) that
the English were the true inheritor s of Israel;
and to Edward Carpenter, who popularized the
wearing of sandals (he made his own) and a diet
of fruit and nuts. Ashe has not exhausted the list
and I was sorry not to lind the honey-lovin g
philanthropic landlord William Thomp son,
who creat ed the theoret ical underpinnin g for
the Co-operati ve Movement; or the goddess-
domin ated utopias such as that promi sed by
Elizabeth Carlile, aka Isis, who appeared at
meetings in the Blackfriars Road with the floor
before her strewn with whitethorn and laurel,
offering the promise of a mystical feminist reli-
gion to co me .
Ashe is in a tradit ion of reading primary
sources directl y, which makes a refreshing
change from academic texts that give the
impression of being refracted throug h the lenses
of many other thinker s, but this does mean his
notions appear unchallenged, or unique to him.
More engagement with other thinker s (and bet-
ter references) would have made this a richer
book. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating ramble
through the lives of visionary eccentrics for a
radicalism that long predated Marxism and has
survived it in New Age thinking.
JADADAMS

Art History
Sheri KIein
A RT AN D LA UGHTER
168pp. 978 I 8504 3 931 8
Kerstein Mev
ART AN D OBSC E N#ITY
I92pp . 978 I 845 11 235 6
Laura Brandon
ART AND W AR
I92pp . 978 I 845 11 237 0
Tauris. Paperback , £14 .99 each.
T hese adro it little book s aren't reall y about
art per se, but about the role of art in gener-
ating or modi fying various discour ses on what
the publisher call s "the real stuff of life" . They
aren't quite as accessible as they are made out
to be, but, in genera l, theory is related to prac-
tice with a light touch .
The troubl e with the real stuff of life is that it
tend s to bridle at neat taxonomi es. Jake and
Dino s Chapman ' s work, to cite one example, is
"about" war, laughter and obscenity, and so fea-
tures in all three of these book s; it' s also about
sex and death , two even more ambitiou s titles
slated for future publica tion , and so may be
expected to crop up there too. One might add
that it' s also abou t technolo gy and con sum er-
ism, and eve n assert that if it's any good it
ought to be about plent y more besides.
Mean while , Robert Mapplethorp e, to cite
another, was more than just a paper tiger
dreamed up to displease the American Right: he
was also an acutely original craft sman and styl-
ist, a strange sort of abstractionist and an intrigu-
ing criti c of the classical tradi tion . Slottin g indi-
vidual artists into wide thematic overviews like
this risks makin g them seem like one-trick
ponies, passive instruments of discour ses
which, in realit y, they transcend or disregard.
Neverthe less, each of these book s gives a
rich sense of the vitality of art in public life over
recent years: its problematic relation ship with
the State and with established moralities, its
power to get peop le talking and thinking about
important things. The cedin g of visual art ' s old
function s - ornamental, doc umen tary, commcm -
orati ve - to other media is taken for grant ed,
and presum ed to have little impact on its ability
to bear mean ing, or rather its right to have mean-
ing imputed to it. One coro llary is that the role
of photojournalism, say, or cinem a, to do thing s
that art used to do, is somew hat overlooked;
there ' s no Don McC ullin in Art and War , for
exa mple. In fact, none of the three troubl es
itself with con vertin g the sceptic. Nobod y who
wants to know why Anni e Sprink le' s cervix or
a can of Piero Manzoni ' s shit must be thought
"art" at all will find the answer here. The empha-
sis laid on the cont emporary also mean s the
book s will date quick ly. A notable absence
from Art and War , for instance , is Ste ve
McQueen' s recent set of stamps depic ting Brit-
ish se rvi ce me n killed in Iraq .
KEITH MILLER
J ohn Berger
HOLD EV ER YT HIN G DEAR
Dispatches on surv ival and resistanc e
142pp. Verso. £ 12.99.
978 84467 1380
A ny book by John Berger is an event. This
one is more fragmentary than some of its
predecessors, but his is an art of fragment s, and
admirer s will recognize the charact eri stic blend
IN BRI E F
of sympathy and lucidity, directn ess of address,
human warmth , and cosmopolitan example.
Berger is difficult to classify. Ever since Ways
of Seeing (1972 ) he has been a significant cul-
tural presence. He describ es himself here as a
story teller, which may be as apt an appellation
as any. The strength of his writing is his reading
- his ability to evok e the work of other writers,
poets especia lly. He has the gift of friendship
and correspond ence , and has encouraged and
inspired all manner of creati ve artists.
This collection of short essays and reflec -
tions from the past five years or so is a miscel-
lany on art and politic s, like The Shap e of a
Pocket (200 I). Each piece is dated, but no pro v-
enance is given, for the most part ; some frag-
ment s look familiar from publi shed article s and
exhibition catalogues . The watchwords are sur-
vival in the face of displacement , disempo wer-
ment and despair, and resistance to the depreda-
tions of "the economic and mi litary global
tyrann y of today" , that is, globa l capit alism.
"Yes, I'm still amongst other things a mar xist."
There are nuggets of pure Berger. On first
disco vering the poems of Nazim Hikmet, for
example, he writes,
They didn't describe space; they came through
it, they cro ssed mountains.
They were also about action. They related
doubts, solitude, berea vem ent , sadness , but
these feelin gs follo wed actions rather than
bein g a substitute for action . Space and action s
go together. Their antith esis is prison , and it
was in Turki sh prisons that Hikm et, as a polit -
ical prisoner, wrote half his life' s work.
Or again , on the forest photograph s of Jitka
Hanzlo va:
It is as if they have been taken between times,
where there is none . .. . Yet in a forest there
are "events" which have not found their place
in any of the forest' s numbe rless timesca les,
and which ex ist between those scales. What
events, you ask. Some are in Jitka' s photo-
graphs. They are what remain s unnam eab le in
the photographs after we have made an inven -
tory of eve rything that is recogni zab le.
Hold Everything Dear is a meditation, an
injunction, and, in Bergers own word, a contes -
tation.
ALEX DANCH EV
History
Ewe n Mo ntagu, THE MAN WHO
NEVER WAS; Duff Cooper,
OPERAnON HEARTBR EAK
224pp . Spellmount. Paperback, £14 .99.
978 I 86227 364 I
T he idea of publi shin g these two quite sepa-
rate and distinct book s in one volume is an
appe aling one . Both tell the story of the decep -
tion oper ation in 1943, in which a British sub-
marine launched the body of a dead officer into
the sea off the coa st of Spain in the confid ent
expectation that it would be washed ashore and
that the briefcase attached to the body would be
opened and cop ies of its contents passed on to
German intelligence . The documents in que s-
tion, whic h included a letter from Lord Mount -
batten to the C-in-C Medite rranean Fleet , were
devised to reveal an Allied plan to recapture
Southern Europe throug h Greece - rather than
(as was in fact the case) thro ugh Sicil y and
Italy.
Operation Heartbreak is a novel by Duff
Coop er, first published in 1950, about the imagi-
nary career and love life of the man whose body
- 33-
was used for the deception. It was no coinci-
dence that the body was that of a man with no
close family and few friends and whose body
would not be undul y missed. The poignant
point of Duff Cooper' s story is that his hero had
always wanted to go into action again st the
enemy and had only achieved his ambi tion after
death. Duff Cooper, who had doubtl ess learnt
about the operation in his ministeria l capacity,
was di scoura ged by the government from
revealin g what had been a wartime top secret;
but he persisted, because - as his son John
J ulius Norw ich explains in his preface - he did
not see an y circumstances in which the ruse
could be used again and therefore had to be kept
under wrap s. It is an engaging novel in its own
right, whic h gives a nostalgica lly sepia-tinted
picture of life in Britain between the wars.
The Man Who Ne ver Was was written by
Ewen Montagu (the naval offic er who con-
ceived and executed the decept ion) over a
single weekend at the request of the security ser-
vices as an immediate attempt to tell the story
as it really was - and possibly to take the wind
out of Duff Cooper' s book . The meticu lous
detail of the plannin g is totally absorbing, and it
was serialized in the Dail y Expre ss in 1953 and
subsequently made into a popu lar lilm . The
deception had paid off, and Mont agu was decor -
ated for his part in its success - though he found
it difficult to explain to King Geor ge VI ju st
what he had done when the king inquired at the
investit ure .
Both book s - in their contr asting ways - are
well worth rereadin g, and they benelit from a
j uxtapo sition that has more than a mere "t wo
for on e" to commend it.
JOH N UR E
Journ alism
J enna Bail ey
CAN ANY MOTHER HELP ME ?
Fifty years of friend ship throug h
a secret mag azine
330pp. Faber. £ 16.99.
978057 123 3 137
T he Mass Observation Archive at the Univer-
sity of Sussex is a treasure trove of quirky
national remini scence. Jenna Bailey, a Cana-
dian researc h student looking for a subject for
her Master ' s thesis, was told about a collection
of home -made magazines circu lated between
1935 and 1990 by a group of women, born
between 1894 and 1927, who called themsel ves
the Coope rative Corre spondence Club (CCC) .
She obtained permi ssion from those still living,
and from the familie s of the decea sed, to pub-
lish extract s, which she has intelligently organ -
ized into topic s co vering different aspect s of
their lives and annotat ed with short biograp hies
of the twenty main contributors.
The Club began with a cri de coeur letter in
the Nurs ery World, signed " Ubique". asking for
ideas to alle viate the writer 's loneliness. One of
those who replied suggested an exchange of
letters between like-minde d women . Under
pseudon yms the memb ers contributed a fort-
nightl y article to the editor, "U bique" at lirst,
who stitched the entri es together into a book
with a decorative lin en cov er , which wa s circu-
lated by post. The first memb ers were recruited
from Nurse ry World respond ents and later one s
by persona l recommendation, the last in the
early 1950s. They all had to be mothers but
mothers who coul d write engagingly about all
their experiences and intere sts, not ju st about
dom esticit y. Most were midd le-class graduate s,
frustrated, in the 1930s, by having to give up
emplo yment through the marriag e bar, but "Cot-
ton Good s" was a working-class member who
here writes proudl y about her Lanca shire mill
backgro und. When a hint of anti-Semitism
tinged some entries in 1938, "Ad Astra" asked
"E lektra" , who was Jewish, to join.
Members follo wed each other s' activities
close ly and sympathetically, so that strong
friends hips were soon forged. They all rejoiced
at the success of "Angharad"' s television plays
and wept for the few who se marriage s failed or
whose children or grandchil dren were handi-
capped or morta lly sick. The entries are some-
time s candid about private matters like orga sms
and birth contro l. In a poignant series of confes-
sional letters, "Isis" recount s her unreq uited pas-
sion for her doctor, subsequent mental collapse
and quest for peace within Catholi cism. The
details of life durin g the Second Wor ld War are
especia lly vivid, but the book ' s main impact is
as a human rather than sociological document.
SARAH C URTIS
Comics
Will Eis ner
A CONTRACT WITH GOD
192pp. 978 0 39332 804 2
A LIFE FORCE
160pp. 978 0 39332 803 5
D ROPS lE AV EN UE
192pp. 978 0 39332 811 0
Norton . Paperback , £10 .99 each.
W ill Eisner was one of the patriarch s of
comic s, but where most of the other
grand old men were content for others to further
de velop the grammar of pictur e, dia logue and
grid that they had creat ed, he struck off in pro-
duc tive and largely new directions. His long-
running strips and book s abo ut the Spirit , a
crime -li ghter dra wn and written with a lighter
touch than the Shadow or Dick Tracy, had
always tended to concentrate as much on ordi-
nary peop le as on vampy villainesses and cow-
licked polic emen. Among all the murd ers and
gang wars, ordin ary people had good and bad
luck, committed small sins and occasionally
paid terrib le prices.
In the works of his middle age and later, he
ditched everything but this sense of ordin ary
life and its small melodram as. A Contra ct with
God is perhap s the most cruci al of the three vol-
umes, made up as it is of four short stories in
which he demon strated once and for all that the
skills he had used for commercial ente rtainment
cou ld tell deeper and darker stories . A piou s
man loses his faith and becom es somet hing of a
mon ster; an unpleasant jan itor is destroyed by
malice and goss ip; a vain young woman
recei ves an edu cation in lo ve.
A Life Force is a more transition al collection
- here the stories are less about indi vid uals and
more about the South Bronx and how it
changed . Th is theme gets picked up rather more
systematically in Dropsie Av enue, whic h takes
a neighbo urhood from Dutch farmland to smart
townho uses to decaying tenemen ts to burnt-out
shells and to new housing estates. The ethnic
charact er of Dropsie Avenue chan ges as often
as hemlin es - Eisner is mord ant about the way
there are always nati ves and newcomers. All of
these are pat, tight narrative s whose ironies are
nothing new ; Eisner ' s drawing style gives them
universality and a poignant darkness.
Ro z KAVENEY
TL S J UNE 8 2007
 AWARDS & ACCOMMODATJON
FELLOWSHIPS ."''ANTED: peaceful 2-bcd flat in Central
London for mature author and insomniac paint er
(without paint), for fortn ight in late June . 020 8946
0871
The Criticos Prize B. H. BRESUUER FOlJ~DATION
THE LONDON HELLENIC SOCIETY ANNOUNCEMENTS
The Foundarlon's Board of Director", now
The 2007 John D. Criticos Annual Prize WOLFSONHISTORYPRIZES 2006
a ccepts r equests for grants from institutional
Sponsored by the Criticos-Foteinelli Foundation Sir Keirh Thomas fBA , Chairman of the
librar-ies to hclp fund major acquisitions of lud ges, hosted a reception at Cla rldgc's
£10,000 or equivalentin US$ manuscripts, printed hooks and bookbindings. on Tue sd ay 5 June 20 07 for the
pr esent ation o f th e Wolfson Histor y
The London Hellenic Society invites submissions for the 2007 lohn 0. Criticos Prize
Applications for grants to make specifi c acquisitions ca n be made by Prizes 2006 . Prizes were presen ted to
established in /996 by one of its founders.
Adam Tooze for The Wages oj Distruction
corres pondence o r c-m ai l, a nd IIr5e n t rC(l'wCitH m ay even be mad e b y te le p h o ne.
(Alien Lane), Chri stop hcr Clark for Iro n
The Society is pleased to announc e that the 2006 Criticos Prize wa s awa rded to Averil They should be accompanied by a s much relevant do cumentati on a s possible
Kingdom (Alien Lane) and Vie Ga tre ll
Cameron for The Byzantines (Blackwell). on the de sired acquisition, a s well as precise information on provenance and for City of Laughter (Atla ntic Ho ok s).
p rice. Because or the n atu re or th e ra re b ook m ark et and the a u ction P I'OceS~ ,
The 2007 Critico s Pri ze wil l be award ed to a writer, arti st or resear cher for an ori ginal
work 0 11Hellenic culture (Anc ient, Helleni stic, Byzantin c or Mod ern ) publish ed in 200I the officers of the Foundation re alize that effe ctive decisions o fte n need to be
A reas of pa rticu lar inte rest to the spo nsors arc A rt, A rch ae olog y, Art Histo ry, History mad e promptly. Unde r an y circu msta nce s, th eir d ecision will he final. BOOKS & PRINTS
an d Literature. parti cu larl y fiction (in pro se or poetry) inspi red hy and related to Hell enic
culture. In addition to indi vidu al appl icant s. the Prize is a lso open to su bmiss ions by Th e Fou ndation is a p ri vat e ch aritable foundati on under Sec 30 1 (c) (3) of th e Intern a l
publi sher s es tablished in the lJ. K., USA and Gre ece. Revenu e Cod e. I L~ ma in p llrp os~ is 10 mak e dis tr ib u tio ns 10 lib ra ries d omi ciled in th e Book Search
Uni t ed States an d to U.S. affili ate s of fore-ign institutions t hat con sti tu te 'Ch a r ita b le Books Bought & Sold
w ork s are ju dged by a competent panel of experts ill ea ch field appointed by the Societ y. Orguuizurions' unde r th e I n ter n al Heve.nuc Cod e. Old, Rare & Out ofPrint Books
The winn er of the 200 7 Priz e will be annou nced befor e June lst, 200 8.
Correspondence address: E -mail addres s: Marsha J. Shapiro
355 West 85th Street, Apt . 77
Submission s for the 2007 prize ..hould be made no later than January 31st, 2008 to: Ivan S. Hos cnblum, secr etary Br cslau erFDX@att.n et
New York, N.Y. 10024
Th e London Helleni c Society, 'Criticos Prize' . Hellenic Centre, 444 Park Ave nue Sou th , 7 th floo r T el ellhone : +:-J:i-6-2 2.04 .75.8 0 212·595 ·4219; fax 212·875·1948
16-18 Paddington Street, London WIM 3L B Xew Vo"" NY 10016 Felix de Murez Dyens, president
All enquiries sho uld be se nt to this address or [axed to +30-210-7298494
GENERAL
VACANCIES
CONFERENCES
fellowships Want ed. Part-ti me bookshop assista nt able
to catal ogue using 'Word'. SUitab le f or
someo ne wishi ng to be sem i-retired.

availabLe Salary to be agreed.

Hours: Monday to Friday l pm-6pm
Occasional Sat urdays by arrangement.
London WC1 locat ion. References essent ial.
The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study For more informati on Tel: 020 72 42 5288
at Harvard University awards 45 funded e-ma!l: orienta l@fine books.demo n.co.uk
residential fellowship s each year designed
to support scholars, scientists, artists, HOLIDAYS
and writers of exceptional promise
• Rome - his toric al centre - one bedr oom <lp<lrt -
and demonstrated accomplishment, mcnt available for short term rental. Images on
hu p.swwwp aula howarth.nct
Formoreinformation, please contact:
Radcliffe Application Office To book your
34 Concord Ave. TLS Classified
Cambridge, MA 02138 advertise me nt
617-496-1324 with
fellowships@radcliffe.edu FREE
www.radcliffe.edu online
insertion,
ple ase contact
....~ ~~ Lucy Smart:

lucy.smart@newsint.co.uk

www.the-tls.co.uk

Coming up
in the TLS...
15th June
Scie nce
GRANTS 22ndJune
T H E WOR LD 'S L A RGE ST
I N D EPENOENT LE N D ING LIBRARY
Italy
29th June
Founded in 184<1 by Thomas Carlyle,
the Library otters unrivalled access to a vast
Summer Books &
The Roya l Litera ry Fund collect io n of book; and period icals from the Independent Publish ers
16 th to the 21st centu ry.
Financial Assistance for Writers
M EM BERSHIP IS OP EN TO ALL
'1'1. . . S ~~"--:_
_.:=..-:- '.- · --·
Grants and Pen sions arc availabl e to publi shed authors of several works who are in
I~ "
financial difficulti es due to personal or profe ssional setbacks. ,, 1 , , I...
If you wo uld like t o loin . please co nt ac t Il.IBRARYBOOK
Applications are considered in confidence by the General Committee every month .
Bridle M acmahon on 020 77664 720 by Tonv M clntyre
For further details and application form , please write to Eileen Gunn, General Secretary, o r memb ershipeslo ndcnlib rarycc.uk An illust rated architectural jou rney
The Royal Literary Fund,3 Johnson'sCourt, London EC4A 3EA, t hro ug h t he London Library
telephon e 020 7353 7159 or ernail: egu nnrlf@glo balne t.co .uk
Wcbsite: www .rlf.org.uk NO W AVA i LA BLE
Registered Charily No 219952 Registered charit y num ber 3 ·12175 £12 .50 by post or £10.00 in t he Lib rary
 THI S W E EK 'S CO NTRIB UT O R S IN N E X T W E EK' S
J ad Adams 's recent books incl ude publis he d last year. Her Villa ges of most rece nt book is Methodism : Rob ert Sh ore is wr iting a book o n th e

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- 35- TLS JUNE R 200 7

 "One ofthe most admirable publishingprojects now afoot."
-THE NEW CRITERION

THE CLAY SANSKRIT LIBRARY

•• •
General Editors: RICHARD F. GOMBRICH (Oxford University) and SHELDON I. POLLOCK (Columbia University)
• .- .
Finally, the ancient gems of classical Sanskrit literature are available to a wide
international audience. This literature combines great beauty, enormous variety,
and more than three thousand years of continuous history and development.

R a lll tl } ,llh l The Clay Sanskrit Library makes everything easy and enjoyable for any reader: the
R~I)L
lhree Sanskrit text, written in familiar Roman letters, faces the new English translation,
rh ~ rrr~ ,1 and the convenient pocket size is both elegant and practicaL In addition to the nine
by\:II I1I IJ..1 volumes of the Ramayana and thirty-two volumes of the Maha-bharata, The Clay
Sanskrit Library will include more than fifty other classics of Sanskrit literature.

"The books line up on my shelf like bright Bodhisattvas

ready to take tough questions or keep quiet company.
They stake out a vast territory, with works from two
millennia in multiple genres."
-Willis G. Regier, THE CHRONICLE REVIEW

BIRTH OF KUMARA
: .. LOVE LYRICS RAKSHASA'S RING
By Kali·dasa. Translated by David Smith. By Amaru and Bhartri·hari. Translated by Greg Bailey. By By Vishakha·dalta. Translated by Michael Coulson.
Bilhana. Edited and translated by Richard F Gombrich.
THE EMPEROR OF THE SORCERERS (VOL. 1) RAMA BEYOND PRICE
By Budha·svamin. Ediled and lranslated by MAHA·BHARATA BOOK 2: "THE GREAT HALL" By Murarl, Edited and translated by Judit T6rzs6k.
Sir James Mallinson. Translated by Paul Wilmot.
RAMAYANA BOOK 1: "BOYHOOD"
THE EMPEROR OF THE SORCERERS (VOL. 2) MAHA·BHARATA BOOK 3: "THE FOREST" (VOL. 4) By Valmfki. Translated by Robert Goldman.
By Budha·svamin. Ediled and lranslated by Translated by William Johnson.
RAMAYANA BOOK 2: "AYODHYA"
Sir James Mallinson.
MAHA.BHARATA BOOK 4: "VIRATA" By Valmfki. Translated by Sheldon I. Pollock.
THE EPITOME OF QUEEN L1LAVATI (VOL. 1) Translated by Kathleen Garbult.
RAMAYANA BOOK 3: "THE FOREST"
By Jina·ratna. Edited and translated by Richard Fynes.
MAHA·BHARATA BOOK 7: "DRONA" (VOL. 1) By Valmfki. Translated by Sheldon I. Pollock.
THE EPITOME OF QUEEN L1LAVATI (VOL. 2) Translated by Vaughan Pilikian.
RAMAYANA BOOK 4: "KISHKiNDHA"
By Jina·ratna. Edited and translated by Richard Fynes.
MAHA·BHARATA BOOK 8: "KARNA" (VOL. 1) By Valmfki. Translated by Rosalind Lefeber.
FIVE DISCOURSES ON WORLDLY WISDOM Translated by Adam Bowles.
RAMAYANA BOOK 5: "SONDARA"
By Vishnu·sharman. Edited and transialed by
MAHA·BHARATA BOOK 9: "SHALYA" (VOL. 1) By Valmfki. Translated by Robert Goldman and
Palrick Olivelle.
Translated by Justin Meiland. Sally Sulherland Goldman.
THE HEAVENLY EXPLOITS: BUDDHIST
MESSENGER POEMS THE RECOGNITION OF SHAKONTALA
BIOGRAPHIES FROM THE D[VYAVADANA
By Kali-dasa, Dhoyi, and Rupa Go·svamin. Edited and By Kali·dasa. Edited and translated by
Ediled and lranslated by Joel Talelman.
translated by Sir James Mallinson. Somadeva Vasudeva.
"THE LADY OF THE JEWEL NECKLACE" &
MUCH ADO ABOUT RELIGION THREE SATIRES
"THE LADY WHO SHOWS HER LOVE"
By Bhatla Jayanta, Edited and translated by By Nila-kantha, Kshernendra, and Bhallata. Edited and
By Harsha. Translated by Wendy Doniger.
Csaba Dezs6. translaled by Somadeva Vasudeva.
THE OCEAN OF THE RIVERS OF STORY (VOL. 1) WHAT TEN YOUNG MEN DID
By Soma·deva. Translated by Sir James Mallinson. By Dandin. Translated by Isabelle Onians.
11

Orders & enquiries to Eurospan Group clo Turpin Distribution:

Teiephone: +44 (0) 1767604972 I Email: eurospan@lurpin-distribution.com
Ordering On line: www.eurospangroup.com/bookstore
Addilional informalion: www.claysanskrillibrary.org

NYU Press Champion of Great Ideas since 1916 WWW.NYUPRESS.ORG

© T he Tim es litera ry Su p p le me nt limited , 20 07 . Publ ished an d licensed for dist ribut ion in e lect ro nic and all other de rivative forms by The Times Lite rary Supplement L imrted, Times Ho use, 1 Pen ningto n Stree t , London E98 1SS, Eng land .
Telep ho ne0 2Q.7782 5000, w itho ut whose exp ress permiss ion no part may be reproduced , Print ed by N.I.N. Lld, Kit ling Road, Prescot, Merseyside, L34 9 HN, England. Su bscription rates incl ud ing postage a re: UK £ 115, Europe £140, USA $1 69,
Ca nada $2 25, ROW £165. EUROPEAN PRICE S : Belgium £2 .8 5 , France € 2. 8 5 , Ge rma ny € 4 ,20 , Greece £ 4 ,20 , Italy £ 4 ,0 0 , Netherlands £ 4.2 0 , Port u g a l £ 3 ,10 , Spa in £ 2.6 5 , C A N A D IA N PRICE S : Toronto $5 .20. Ou tside $5 .45.

TLS J UNE 8 2 007 - 36- 9 77 03 07 66 10 13