And perhaps more interestingly why this sort of book couldn’t be written about British crime fiction, or if it was, would be little more than pamphlet-size. Our Vietnams were Northern Ireland, the Falklands and the Gulf, but little reference is made to this in home-grown crime writing. A handful of crime novels have featured returned veterans, but compare this with the literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of books from the US, where either the protagonists of the crime, or the hero, or sometimes both, is suffering, or has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder related directly to the police action in South-East Asia during the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, maybe that’s what we need in this country to give our own crime writers a kick up the backside – a damn good war.. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

by Harold Bloom Fourth Estate pounds 25
Five years ago, in his hefty bestseller The Western Canon, Harold Bloom stepped forward as the stout defender of our greatest literature against the dark forces intent on dethroning it in the name of political correctness. is his latest broadside – a massive 750-page swipe at all who would reduce the chief glory of the canon to a mere dupe of the ideology of his day.In the harsh light of present-day critical theory, Bloom contends, Shakespeare’s drama has become either an embarrassment to be explained away or a whetstone on which to grind the axe of the latest enlightened agenda.

For Bloom, the only way of saving Shakespeare from these mean- minded peddlers of disenchantment is to restore the sense of utter awe that the masterpieces he bequeathed us demand. And the chief source of that awe, he maintains, is Shakespeare’s genius for forging unforgettable characters.Professor Bloom has no qualms about adopting such a flagrantly unfashionable approach. On the contrary, the self-styled “Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolater” prides himself on his pose as “an archaic survival among Shakespearean critics”. Like his heroes Hazlitt and Bradley before him, he proceeds on the assumption that Shakespeare’s supremacy resides in his convincing depiction of individuals, who strike us as more real and rounded than the actual people we know, including ourselves.What has fascinated ordinary playgoers and readers down through the ages, and what will still fascinate them – Bloom is willing to bet – long after the current vogue for debunking the Bard has abated, is the extraordinary pantheon of protagonists Shakespeare created to inhabit his plays. It is the personalities of characters such as Hamlet, Falstaff, Macbeth and Cleopatra that loom largest in our memories, he believes, teasing us out of thought as we strive in vain to pluck out the heart of their mystery. It is they who are responsible for the fact that Shakespeare’s art always leaps beyond our reach, defying complete interpretation.

For Shakespeare blessed his most complex characters, Bloom claims, with a self-conscious capacity for change that allowed them to evolve an elusive life of their own, to dwell beyond the confines of the plays that cradled them.The book’s blanket contempt for today’s Shakespeare critics as “gender and power freaks”, driven to detraction by their jealousy of his genius, affords the author endless scope for amusing abuse, but finds little justification in reality. The critical “School of Resentment” Professor Bloom excoriates does indeed exist, and it deserves all his scorn for trying to turn Shakespeare into a patriarchal Bard whose plays are the wily allies of oppression. But there are also plenty of theoretically hip, politically savvy critics whose Bardolatry could give even Bloom’s a hard run for its money.The awe of these critics for the author of Hamlet is founded, however, not on vapid invocations of Shakespeare’s sublimity, but on his plays’ power to question the crippling divisions of his world and our own. Derrida himself is among the many living subjects who actively support it It is not his first foray beyond text.

He played himself in Ken McMullen’s film Ghost Dance (1983), where he attempted to explain his theories to Pascale Ogier (the beautiful French actress, who died aged 23). Post-feminism argues that we may not have as much to congratulate ourselves on as we like to imagine.In what is supposed to be a post-ideological world where the only refuge is irony, we may need the series more than we think. Apart from a small army of men whose wives have left them, few could fail to applaud the success of the women’s movement over the past 150 years. Feminism is based on an unashamed emotional appeal, making use of a tradition of radical propaganda, some of which will bring the glow of nostalgia for readers who remember the 1970s It is propaganda in a good cause.