Love in a quarry
BROTHER TO DRAGONS. By David Hartnett. 440pp. Cape. Paperback, Pounds 9.99. - 0 224 05015 X. David Hartnett's obvious delight in language (he is also the author of three collections of poetry) is the...
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The dark not light enough
DOSTOEVSKY AND SOLOVIEV. The art of integral vision. By Marina Kostalevsky. 224pp. Yale University Press. Pounds 21. - 0 300 06096 3. One might say that the paramount concern of Russian philosophy is...
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Freelance
Two pieces of art have arrived at Sacy-le-Petit for the Midsummer's Day opening. Cars keep doing double-takes and reversing back past the front gate as they catch sight of Andrew Logan's larger than...
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NB
Who gets the royalties from Mein Kampf? Hitler's account of his "Four-and-a-Half-Year Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice" (the book's original title) was first published in Britain in...
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The character and aims of Francis Bacon
Sir, - In his review of Hostage to Fortune: The troubled life of Francis Bacon, 1561-1626 (June 18), Brian Vickers shows the flimsy foundations on which its authors, Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart,...
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The Jewish State
Sir, - It is always easier to blame others for self-inflicted disasters, and Robin Yassin-Kassab (Letters, June 12) is no exception to this rule. Fifty years after the 1948 war, the author still...
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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...