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Friend to Sir Philip Sidney

Blair Worden, 3 July 1986

The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke 
edited by John Gouws.
Oxford, 279 pp., £40, March 1986, 0 19 812746 4
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... an ideal and a reality, as Greville and Sidney well knew, the distance may be large. When C.S. Lewis, in the Oxford History of English Literature, called Sidney ‘that rare thing, the aristocrat in whom the aristocratic ideal is really embodied’, he provided unwitting testimony to the success of Greville’s legend. It is only recently that the gap ...

Rejoicings in a Dug-Out

Peter Howarth: Cecil, Ada and G.K., 15 December 2022

The Sins of G.K. Chesterton 
by Richard Ingrams.
Harbour, 292 pp., £20, August 2021, 978 1 905128 33 4
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... Jews would always be foreigners and honour-bound to have allegiances other than to Britain. The case that proved this to him beyond doubt was the Marconi affair of 1912, in which the attorney-general, Rufus Isaacs, profited from advance knowledge of government policy and bought shares in Marconi, his brother Godfrey’s company, shortly before it was ...
... to get them all going for a quarter of an hour. Descending and losing my companions I found [C.S.] Lewis alone in the smoking room and chattered with him until 1.30 a.m. ... Then I made for bed only to find Longwall Quad lit up by a bonfire composed of the Naafi canteen. I watched this for a bit and went to bed as Cleverly and the staff were putting it out ...

Operation Backfire

Francis Spufford: Britain’s space programme, 28 October 1999

... for reaching the Moon using two modules, one to orbit, one to descend to the lunar surface. The cost of the rocket – as much as a million pounds – was far more than they could raise, but they did have enough money to make a couple of instruments for it. ‘We were in the position of someone who could not afford a car, but had enough for the speedometer ...

On a Chinese Mountain

Frank Kermode, 20 November 1986

The Royal Beasts 
by William Empson.
Chatto, 201 pp., £12.95, November 1986, 0 7011 3084 9
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Essays on Shakespeare 
by William Empson.
Cambridge, 246 pp., £25, May 1986, 0 521 25577 5
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... play or melodrama, Three Stories, was written when the poet was 20, and performed, with him in the cast, by the Cambridge ADC. Long supposed to have been lost as Empson pursued his career in the East, it somehow turned up, and is certainly worth having. The poems mostly belong to the late Twenties. Some appeared in Cambridge magazines but were excluded from ...

Out of the Gothic

Tom Shippey, 5 February 1987

Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction 
by Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove.
Gollancz, 511 pp., £15, October 1986, 0 575 03942 6
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Eon 
by Greg Bear.
Gollancz, 504 pp., £10.95, October 1986, 0 575 03861 6
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts 
by Douglas Adams.
Heinemann, 590 pp., £9.95, September 1986, 0 434 00920 2
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Humpty Dumpty in Oakland 
by Philip K. Dick.
Gollancz, 199 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 575 03875 6
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The Watcher 
by Jane Palmer.
Women’s Press, 177 pp., £2.50, September 1986, 0 7043 4038 0
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I, Vampire 
by Jody Scott.
Women’s Press, 206 pp., £2.50, September 1986, 0 7043 4036 4
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... will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode.’ There is no doubt that this is in the right area. Compare, for instance, Darko Suvin’s now famous definition of Science Fiction as ‘a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and ...

The Ramsey Effect

Kieran Setiya, 18 February 2021

Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers 
by Cheryl Misak.
Oxford, 500 pp., £25, February 2020, 978 0 19 875535 7
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... Ramsey’s, one shared with Keynes. In philosophy: Ramsey sentences, the Ramsey test, the Ramsey-Lewis theory of reference, and the Mill-Ramsey-Lewis account of natural laws. Many of his ideas were so groundbreaking that they were taken up in earnest only decades later. This phenomenon has also been named after him: the ...

The Comeuppance Button

Colin Burrow: Dreadful Mr Dahl, 15 December 2022

Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl, an Unofficial Biography 
by Matthew Dennison.
Head of Zeus, 264 pp., £20, August 2022, 978 1 78854 941 7
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... Some do, some don’t, surely? Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, published in 1972 to cash in on the film of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory released the year before, is based on the assumption that kids like spaceships and space monsters and they loved Willy Wonka, so let’s put Willy Wonka in orbit, throw in some space monsters, and add in ...

Exasperating Classics

Patricia Craig, 23 May 1985

Secret Gardens 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Allen and Unwin, 235 pp., £12.95, April 1985, 0 04 809022 0
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Reading and Righting 
by Robert Leeson.
Collins, 256 pp., £6.95, March 1985, 9780001844131
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Pipers at the Gates of Dawn 
by Jonathan Cott.
Viking, 327 pp., £12.95, August 1984, 0 670 80003 1
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... Charles Dodgson’s right hand didn’t care to know what the left got up to. Do we have here a case of Jekyll/Hyde? Certainly the nimble Carroll seems endowed with a personality greatly at odds with that of the decorous Dodgson. And, unfortunately, after The Hunting of the Snark (1876), Dodgson succeeded in quelling his impulse towards entertaining ...

Can you spot the source?

Wendy Doniger, 17 February 2000

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 
by J.K. Rowling.
Bloomsbury, 317 pp., £10.99, July 1999, 0 7475 4215 5
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... are allowed to desire or hate. This is the Oedipal configuration, best known from the eponymous case that Freud wrote about, but also from the myth of the birth of the hero explored by Freud’s disciple, Otto Rank. The child’s joyful expectation of coming someday into the greatness of his parents sustains him in the present situation of humiliation and ...

Russell and Ramsey

Ray Monk, 29 August 1991

Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship 
by Nicholas Griffin.
Oxford, 409 pp., £45, January 1991, 0 19 824453 3
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Philosophical Papers 
by F.P. Ramsey, edited by D.H. Mellor.
Cambridge, 257 pp., £30, August 1990, 0 521 37480 4
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The Philosophy of F.P. Ramsey 
by Nils-Eric Sahlin.
Cambridge, 256 pp., £27.50, November 1990, 0 521 38543 1
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... work, and Volume XII onwards his ethical, personal and political papers. As is often the case with this sort of multi-volume edition, the order in which the volumes have been published is somewhat erratic, but it is already clear that the series is a model of its kind – it is certainly the envy of anyone who has had to work on Wittgenstein’s ...

The Suitcase: Part Three

Frances Stonor Saunders, 10 September 2020

... keys to an astonished official who stood between him and the first ferry which was just about to cast off.In less than an hour, he was in Bulgaria.That same day, 10 February, Britain severed diplomatic relations with Romania. Micheline was contacted by the British Legation and told to report with the girls at the Gara de Nord before 9 p.m. on the 13th for a ...

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