How do we find out what he meant?
LIBERTY BEFORE LIBERALISM. By Quentin Skinner. 142pp. Cambridge University Press. Pounds 19.95 (paperback, Pounds 6.99). - 0 521 63876 3. Historical context and the autonomy of ideas in Quentin...
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Over-optimistic
Sir, - P. J. Kavanagh (Bywords, June 5) is wrong in attributing "the artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist" to Stanley Spencer. This perhaps over-optimistic...
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Monarch butterflies settle on a guide in Sierra Madre
(Photograph) - Monarch butterflies settle on a guide in Mexico's Sierra Madre; from The National Geographic Society: 100 years of adventure and discovery by C. D. B. Bryan (528pp. Abrams. Pounds 34....
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W. D. Snodgrass
Sir, - "What became of Snodgrass? Only two books were published in this country, Heart's Needle and After Experience, the latter in 1968. Since then, he has been in the shadows" (NB, May 29). Well,...
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Late for the wedding
Sir, - I have seen Muriel Spark's letter to you (June 19). She is absolutely right: her religious background is none of my business. I am not in the least bit interested in whether she is Jewish,...
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The hour of the birth of death
Pontecorvo's long silence and the demise of political film-making The Battle of Algiers (1966), Gillo Pontecorvo's masterly account of the suppression of the liberation movement in Algeria's capital...
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Hellfire behind the old saws
AS I LAY DYING. By William Faulkner. Adapted by Edward Kemp. Young Vic. Not much actually happens in As I Lay Dying. Faulkner's novel tells of the death of a woman in Yoknapatawha County, Mississippi...
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Playing the coquette
THE BASSET TABLE. By Susanna Centlivre. Tricycle Theatre. All too many early modern women writers are prudes rather than coquettes, to cite the stereotypes of the Restoration theatre; so it is a joy...
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With a movement so slow
DR OX'S EXPERIMENT. By Gavin Bryars Coliseum. Jules Verne's Une Fantaisie du Docteur Ox, which appeared in 1874, soon after Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours, is not one of his adventure stories...
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The nouvelle cuisine of the turnover
THE OXFORD BOOK OF ENGLISH SHORT STORIES. A. S. Byatt, editor. 439pp. Oxford University Press. Pounds 19.99. - 0 19 21 4238 0. The short story in English is a well-mapped terrain; the English short...
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Pastoral in passing
THE SPELL. By Alan Hollinghurst. 257pp. Chatto and Windus. Pounds 15.99. - 0 7011 6519 7. The subject of Alan Hollinghurst's third novel is nothing less than the gamut of contemporary gay life, from...
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Deep in the forest of Aeros
THE WORLD AND OTHER PLACES. By Jeanette Winterson. 234pp. Cape. Pounds 14.99. - 0 224 05136 9. In such characteristically intense, lyric novels as Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Written on the Body...
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Ghost Country
GHOST COUNTRY. By Sara Paretsky. 386pp. Hamish Hamilton. Pounds 15.99. - 0 241 13263 0. V. I. Warshawski is in temporary retirement, and her creator has taken a break from crime fiction to offer us...
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Paradise, Jamaica
DUPPY CONQUEROR. By Ferdinand Dennis. 346pp. Flamingo. Pounds 16.99. - 0 00 225596 0. The twentieth century is a foreign place for most contemporary black British writers. The likes of Fred D'Aguiar...
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Upwardly-mobile men out of Wells
TRESPASS. By D. J. Taylor. 223pp. Duckworth. Pounds 15.99. - 0 7156 2825 9. For my father, with love (and thanks, H. G.)" reads the dedication to this, D. J. Taylor's fourth novel. But even without...