1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF Telephone: 020 7782 5000 Fax: 020 7782 4966 [email protected] SOCIAL STUDIES 3 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 6 BIOGRAPHY & POETRY 7 Rory Waterman James Booth Philip Larkin – Life, art and love. John Osborne Radical Larkin – Seven types of technical mastery MUSIC 9 Paul Genders Greil Marcus The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs POEMS 9 28 Bruce Smith Erica McAlpine Three Poems Corinth CULTURAL STUDIES 10 Toby Lichtig Andy Miller The Year of Reading Dangerously – How fifty great books (and two not-so-great ones) saved my life. John Sutherland How To Be Well Read – A guide to 500 great novels and a handful of literary curiosities. Angus Kennedy Being Cultured – In defence of discrimination 13 Iain Bamforth Faces of his time – Attempts at a universal language in the photographs of August Sander Freelance TLS April 2, 1993 – Self’s the man – Ian Hamilton on Philip Larkin H ome – whether an Iron Age roundhouse or a New York penthouse – has always been COMMENTARY one of the deepest, most heartfelt human concepts. Bee Wilson reviews two books – one by the archaeologist Francis Pryor, one by the writer Judith Flanders – which look closely at ARTS what home has meant through the ages. The style of a dwelling can be a useful indicator of what is most valued by a society, such as sunlight or the street, hygge (cosiness) or hygiene – indeed, the treatment of dirt, we learn, merits close inspection. FICTION Bee Wilson Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Translating Proust, David Jones, etc Zinovy Zinik Then & Now 17 Ritchie Robertson Guy Dammann Judith Flanders 20 Natasha Lehrer Adrian Tahourdin Katherine Horrex Claire Lowdon Catherine Scott FRENCH LITERATURE “It’s also the case”, Wilson remarks, “that the real home has always fallen short of the ideal kind.” That is an insight shared by the poet Philip Larkin, whose “Home Is So Sad” views home as “A joyous shot at how things ought to be, / Long fallen wide”. Two academics at the University of Hull, Larkin’s own home for several decades, take contrasting views of the poet: a new biography of Larkin covers the old ground (including long-standing controversies over Larkin’s racism and nationalism), and a new volume of criticism puts “an erudite cat among the pigeons”. Rory Waterman appraises both, and wonders if either quite succeeds in setting things straight. Unsurprisingly, notions of home and homeland arise elsewhere in the paper too. Peter Leary discusses the damaging disconnection between state-drawn maps and life on the ground: after Syrian withdrawal in 2000, for example, half of Ghajar’s inhabitants, “who had seen themselves as Syrian until 1981, and then acquired Israeli citizenship, now found themselves in Lebanon”. George Bornstein commends a memoir by Yashka Mounk, one of only 15,000 Jews in post-war Germany, which recounts a long and unsuccessful struggle to feel German; while Ritchie Robertson, in a review of a remarkable exhibition at the British Museum, explores still further the question of where and what Germany is and has been. Finally, R. W. Johnson notes the confused affiliations of Kevin Pietersen, a South Africanborn cricketer who became one of England’s most successful batsmen of all time, yet is unlikely to play for his adopted country again. RP 22 Francis Pryor Home – A time traveller’s tales from Britain’s history. Judith Flanders The Making of Home Germany – Memories of a nation (British Museum). Neil MacGregor Germany – Memories of a nation Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Idomeneo (Royal Opera House) Royal Ballet Triple Bill (Royal Opera House). Akram Khan and Israel Galván Torobaka (On tour) Irène Némirovsky The Fires of Autumn; Translated by Sandra Smith Jérôme Ferrari The Sermon on the Fall of Rome; Translated by Geoffrey Strachan Denis Thériault The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman; Translated by Liedewy Hawke Paul Ewen Francis Plug – How to be a public author Paula Marantz Cohen Suzanne Davis Gets a Life Dan Gunn Marguerite Duras Oeuvres complètes; Edited by Gilles Philippe et al. Christiane Blot-Labarrère Album Marguerite Duras. Laure Adler Marguerite Duras. Marguerite Duras L’Amour; Translated by Kazim Ali and Libby Murphy LITERATURE & LITERARY 25 CRITICISM Stephen Bernard Claire Wood David Winter Eliza Haywood The Invisible Spy; Edited by Carol Stewart Simon Dentith Nineteenth-Century British Literature Then and Now Cathy Caruth Literature in the Ashes of History POLITICS 27 Tim Llewellyn Ziauddin Sardar and Robin Yassin-Kassab, editors Critical Muslim 11 – Syria. Malu Halasa, Zaher Omareen and Nawara Mahfoud, editors Syria Speaks – Art and culture from the frontline. John McHugo Syria – From the Great War to the civil war. Reese Erlich Inside Syria – The backstory of their civil war and what the world can expect HISTORY 28 Peter Leary Asher Kaufman Contested Frontiers in the Syria-Lebanon-Israel region – Cartography, sovereignty, and conflict MEMOIRS 29 George Bornstein Yascha Mounk Stranger in my Own Country – A Jewish family in modern Germany Andrew Borowiec Warsaw Boy – A memoir of wartime childhood; Edited by Colin Smith Zofia Stemplowska IN BRIEF 30 RELIGION 32 Scott Mandelbrote Richard Hooker Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity; Edited by Arthur Stephen McGrade SPORT 34 R. W. Johnson Kevin Pietersen KP – The autobiography Wendy Cope Life, Love and the Archers. Alan Ryan On Tocqueville. Dorothy Canfield Fisher The Home-Maker. Donelle Ruwe British Children’s Poetry in the Romantic Era. Roelf Bolt The Encyclopaedia of Liars and Deceivers. Pico Iyer The Art of Stillness. Tim Townsend Mission at Nuremberg. Justin Martin Rebel Souls This week’s contributors, Crossword 35 NB 36 J. C. Proust in 1923, Peter Handke and Serbia, Incomprehensibility Cover image & p2: Reconstruction of a Mesolithic roundhouse, Howick © Clearview/Alamy; p3 © Julian Stratenschulte/dpa/Corbis; p4 Courtesy of The Advertising Archives; p8 © Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; p10 © Olivia Harris/Reuters; pp13,14 & 15 © Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Köln/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London 2014; p18 © ROH/Catherine Ashmore; p20 © Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images; p25 © The Granger Collection/TopFoto; p26 © Rick Findler; p27 Courtesy of Saqi Books; p34 © Anthony Devlin/PA The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly except a double issue in August and December by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London UK, and distributed in the USA by OCS America Inc., 195 Anderson Avenue, Moonachie, NJ 07074-1621. Periodical postage paid at Moonachie NJ and additional mailing offices. 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