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Consequences

Bernard Williams, 17 April 1986

A Matter of Principle 
by Ronald Dworkin.
Harvard, 425 pp., £19.95, May 1985, 0 674 55460 4
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... are represented only by a brief piece against utilitarian supply-siders, and his review of Michael Walzer’s book Spheres of Justice, in which Dworkin rather loftily denounces a theory which in fact has more to offer on these problems of equality than he allows – in particular, by allowing more room for the historical peculiarities of a given ...

Rigging and Bending

Simon Adams: James VI & I, 9 October 2003

The Cradle King: A Life of James VI & I 
by Alan Stewart.
Chatto, 438 pp., £20, February 2003, 0 7011 6984 2
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... this was how he preferred to spend his time, and he bitterly resented being dragged away from the chase to attend to more serious business. His favourite sport was pursuing deer on horseback, ‘with running hounds, which is the most honorable and most noblest sort thereof’, as he described it in Basilikon Doron. It was also particularly dangerous, but ...

Cold Winds

Walter Nash, 18 December 1986

Answered Prayers 
by Truman Capote.
Hamish Hamilton, 181 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 241 11962 6
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A Rich Full Death 
by Michael Dibdin.
Cape, 204 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 9780224023870
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Leaning in the Wind 
by P.H. Newby.
Faber, 235 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 571 14512 4
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The Way-Paver 
by Anne Devlin.
Faber, 155 pp., £8.95, November 1986, 0 571 14597 3
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... Monsters and delusions of a more agreeable kind lurk in the stylish, elaborately skilful pages of Michael Dibdin’s A Rich Full Death. Ostensibly this is a detective story, a species of Holmesian charade penned by a paranoiac Dr Watson: yet even at this level it teases the reader with mysteries that go beyond the conventionally mysterious. The story is set ...

A Dangerous Occupation

R.W. Johnson: The Land Wars of Southern Africa, 1 June 2000

... Country. He said that he’d bought the farm mainly because he wanted to build it up for his son, Michael, who worked alongside him. But a month ago he’d driven into Ixopo to get some provisions when the farm radio in his bakkie sounded an alarm ‘for Mr Arthur or Michael Mitchell’. Either Mitchell Sr or Mitchell Jr ...

Chasing Kites

Michael Wood: The Craziness of Ved Mehta, 23 February 2006

The Red Letters: My Father’s Enchanted Period 
by Ved Mehta.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 190 pp., £15.99, November 2004, 0 9543520 6 8
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Remembering Mr Shawn’s ‘New Yorker’ 
by Ved Mehta.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 414 pp., £19.99, November 2004, 9780954352059
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Dark Harbour 
by Ved Mehta.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 272 pp., £17.99, November 2004, 0 9543520 4 1
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... of some extraordinary exacerbations of the idea of running rather than walking. In Lahore the boys chase kites from house to house, leaping along the rooftops. The blind Mehta joins in, employing what he later learns is called ‘facial vision’ – ‘an ability that the blind develop to sense objects and terrain by the feel of the air and by differences in ...

Vermicular Dither

Michael Hofmann, 28 January 2010

The World of Yesterday 
by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell.
Pushkin Press, 474 pp., £20, 1 906548 12 9
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... for lunch together, and when Brecht comes back Eisler – really lovely, the stringent cut-to-the-chase of these Marxist types! – asks him how much Zweig shelled out for lunch. ‘Two and six,’ Brecht replies, a Lyons Corner House or something (and at the time the multi-millionaire Zweig was residing in Portland Place), and then it’s straight back to ...

Diary

Richard Usborne: On Cutting P.G. Wodehouse, 4 October 1984

... a gate towards the Golf Club. The young cop in pursuit was going well, and the last I saw of the chase was the cop throwing his helmet into the shrubbery the other side of the fence. I hope that, thus disencumbered, he caught his man. There was a don at Corpus Christi, Oxford named Grundy, of whom good stories were told, in imitation of his voice and ...

Run to the hills

James Meek: Rainspotting, 22 May 2003

Rain 
by Brian Cathcart.
Granta, 100 pp., £5.99, September 2002, 1 86207 534 4
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... you know the English have two hundred different words for rain?’ People go to Oklahoma to chase tornadoes. Siberians moan about the cold but exult in it, too. The heat and humidity of the tropics are also its attraction, but though the electric greenness of our land is due to the rain we find no joy in it except when it isn’t raining. It rains about ...

Done Deal

Christopher Hitchens: Nixon in China, 5 April 2001

A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China 
by Patrick Tyler.
PublicAffairs, 512 pp., £11.99, September 2000, 1 58648 005 7
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... on which he’d been elected, and to find a way of blaming it on others. It was decided to send Michael Armacost, an old China hand in both Democratic and Republican Administrations, to conduct the final obsequies. Armacost, indeed, refused to take on the mission ‘unless there was a consensus that the human rights linkage was going to be jettisoned. He ...

Spaces between the Stars

David Bromwich: Kubrick Does It Himself, 26 September 2024

Kubrick: An Odyssey 
by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams.
Faber, 649 pp., £25, January, 978 0 571 37036 8
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... drew a different response: he was sure he could make something better. For Kubrick (according to Michael Herr, his friend and collaborator on the screenplay of Full Metal Jacket), ‘there was definitely such a thing as a bad movie, but there was no movie not worth seeing.’ He told Herr in an exuberant moment that The Godfather must be the greatest movie ...

Fritz Lang and the Life of Crime

Michael Wood, 20 April 2017

... after a few more murders, some spectacular fireworks at a chemical factory and an elaborate car chase, goes mad and is locked away in his own hospital, where Mabuse had been a patient. The doctor’s name is Baum and has never been anything else, but when he finds someone in the room he is to occupy as a patient he introduces himself with great formality ...

One word says to its mate

Claire Harman: W.S. Graham, 4 October 2001

The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters of W.S. Graham 
edited by Michael Snow and Margaret Snow.
Carcanet, 401 pp., £12.95, November 1999, 1 85754 445 5
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... him a sizable audience. The Nightfisherman, a selection of Graham’s letters by his friends Michael and Margaret Snow, with 19 poems, photographs, drawings and his essay ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’, is the most useful and revealing book on the poet yet published and sets out the clearest record of his life. Graham was born into a blue-collar ...

By the Roots

Jeremy Waldron, 9 February 1995

The Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism 
by Stephen Holmes.
Harvard, 330 pp., £23.95, November 1993, 0 674 03180 6
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... suitable combination of Pope, throne and hangman, and he had profound reservations about the paper-chase of contemporary constitutionalism: ‘Houses of cards are being built both in and outside Europe.’ Views like these, common enough at the end of the 18th century, are flavoured in Maistre’s case, however, by a fanatical and bloodthirsty metaphysics that ...

Traven identified

George Woodcock, 3 July 1980

The Man who was B. Traven 
by Will Wyatt.
Cape, 326 pp., £8.50, June 1980, 0 224 01720 9
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The Government 
by B. Traven.
Allison and Busby, 231 pp., £6.50, May 1980, 0 85031 356 2
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The Cotton-Pickers 
by B. Traven.
Allison and Busby, 200 pp., £5.50, October 1979, 0 85031 284 1
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The White Rose 
by B. Traven.
Allison and Busby, 209 pp., £6.50, May 1980, 0 85031 369 4
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... same man. The two most recent books on Traven before Mr Wyatt’s The Man who was B. Traven – Michael Baumann’s scholarly B. Traven: An Introduction and Judy Stone’s journalistic The Mystery of B. Traven – agree that Marut and Traven were the same man. Moreover, Judy Stone, who questioned Torsvan-Croves remorselessly when she visited him, was ...

Secretly Sublime

Iain Sinclair: The Great Ian Penman, 19 March 1998

Vital Signs 
by Ian Penman.
Serpent’s Tail, 374 pp., £10.99, February 1998, 1 85242 523 7
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... prose to celestial poetry. (They hadn’t read, these promoters of the Penman in Hollywood fable, Michael Moorcock’s minatory letters to J.G. Ballard, the grind of lost years and aborted projects.) So, obviously, when I met Penman, this Schrader yarn was the one I put to him. Why did he come back? Where did it all go wrong? The truth was less ...

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