Word: turner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Compared with Beard or Turner, Parrington seems a somewhat perfunctory figure. In a series of interlocking biographical sketches-marked by Anglophobia and a gift for rhetoric-Parrington, in Main Currents in American Thought, reconstructed the U.S. cultural evolution. His notion, deeply ingrained in the American character, was that art should have a social purpose; realism, it followed, was better than fantasy. The great republic, he said, had solved through a struggle between the ideas of Good Guy liberals, dissenters, democrats and humanitarians, like Roger Williams, Ben Franklin, and naturally, Thomas Jefferson, and Bad Guy conservatives like Jonathan Edwards, Increase Mather...
This kind of partisan polarity is as familiar to Americans as Sears Roebuck and peanut butter. But since World War II, modern scholarship has nitpicked Turner to death-on grounds of detailed inaccuracy and cloudy thinkng. Parrington has been buried by the New Criticism as a prejudiced bore and a square to boot-both of which he most emphatically was. Beard has not so much been demolished as deplored for his slighting of the non-economic complexities of history...
...fond if not indulgent critic, though, Hofstadter praises the vitality of his progressives and probes their private lives and times. In surprisingly effective thumbnail sketches, Turner appears as a generous teacher and enthusiast who would never have survived in the publish-or-perish world of today's scholar. During his lifetime he signed contracts to write at least nine books which he never finished, though he left 34 file cases of notes...
...scene is the "recent future" in Bonn, a time of Britain's critical attempt to negotiate her way into the Common Market. Leo Harting, a minor official in the British embassy, has disappeared with secret files that could ruin the negotiations. Alan Turner, a counterespionage agent reminiscent of the half-burnt-out, seedy Alec Leamas of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, has been sent from London to find Harting and recapture the missing documents. So far, a familiar situation. But Turner's main antagonists are not foreign spies; they are the British embassy officials themselves...
...moved them into the illusion-fed machinations of the diplomatic life. The search, ultimately, is not only for Leo Harting but for clues to the personal identity that Harting managed to retain while in the service of depersonalizing ideological powers. As it turns out, both Harting and Turner have been Counterpunching with a diplomatic shadow world; they are both, says Turner, "looking for something that isn't there." Le Carrè, playing off the man of ideals against men of duplicity, touches once again on the theme that has elevated him above the average suspense novelist. The philosophical conclusion...