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Hanson, Michele

articles by, [1] 15; [2] 19; [6] 37; [10] 48; [16] 45; [20] 7; [23] 35; [25] 55; [34] 40

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20050601131110 Keeping the microparasites at bay - Michele Hanson on William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples; Ian & Jennifer Glynn, The Life and Death of Smallpox - Slightly Foxed Issue 6

A Positive View of Parasites

Michele Hanson on William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples; Ian & Jennifer Glynn, The Life and Death of Smallpox

A parasite is often to be admired for its ingenuity and persistence, even if it isn’t always attractive. A friend of mine once discovered a worm in his bed. It had come from his own body and had been living there for several months, beginning its tour in the previous March, when it manifested itself by giving him a cough and a bad chest. He found this out later when researching the life of the roundworm, which had apparently completed a convoluted journey round his interior, beginning in the spring. ‘The female roundworm’, he said proudly, ‘lays a quarter of a million eggs a day!’ It is perhaps a good idea to take this sort of positive view of parasitism, because, according to W. H. McNeill, author of Plagues and Peoples, we are all parasites. ‘Most human lives’, he writes, ‘are caught in a precarious equilibrium between the microparasitism of disease organisms and the macroparasitism of large-bodied predators, chief among which have been other human beings,’ the sort involved in ‘war, plunder, enslavement, tax farming’.
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Oedipus Schmoedipus

Michele Hanson on Ian Dishart Suttie, The Origins of Love and Hate

Eighty years ago Ian Suttie, a Scottish psychiatrist, wrote The Origins of Love and Hate, in which he fiercely criticized Freud’s theories. Freud saw human beings as ‘isolates wrestling with their instincts’, Suttie saw them as dreading isolation, ‘striving from the first to relate to [the] mother, and [their] future mental health turning on the success or failure of this first relationship’. Love was social rather than sexual in its biological function, thought Suttie, and was derived from a ‘self-preservation instinct rather than the genital appetite’.
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The Trouble with Sefton

Michele Hanson on Howard Jacobson, Coming from Behind

Several years ago I described my mother’s and aunties’ interior decor as Hove Jewish Baroque Rococo and thought myself rather amusing. Then I read Howard Jacobson’s Coming from Behind. His description was far more impressive: ‘contemporary provincial Jewish Rococo’. Again and again I found myself identifying like mad with Mr J’s Protagonist Sefton Goldberg, English teacher in a West Midlands polytechnic. Sefton knew the furnishings, Sefton was not good enough in any sphere, he was not up to scratch physically, he was envious, guilty, sweaty and hairy, just like me, although I am a girl. How comforting it is to know that one is not suffering alone.
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Stinks and Germs

Michele Hanson on Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

Last year I was invited to join a friend’s book group. I plodded through the book they’d chosen that week – a particularly ghastly and badly written effort by some minor celebrity – and naturally expressed my distaste at their meeting. Why had they chosen such rubbish? I thought book groups were meant to stretch the mind. And so they suggested, as I thought myself so clever, that I should choose their next book.
20081201102018 Daniel Macklin - Michele Hanson on Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love; Love in a Cold Climate

Shrieks and Floods

Michele Hanson on The Pursuit of Love; Love in a Cold Climate

It’s been hard to avoid the Mitfords recently. A collected edition of the letters of Jessica (‘Decca’) was published in 2006. The following year another collection, this time of the letters exchanged between all six sisters, appeared. And this autumn we’ve been treated to the correspondence between the youngest sister, Debo, now Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, and Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor.
20060601150929 ‘Something nasty in the woodshed’ by Mark Handley: Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

Poste-Freudian Therapy

Michele Hanson on Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

It is generally thought that Stella Gibbons was mocking Mary Webb’s Precious Bane when she wrote Cold Comfort Farm, but she was probably having a pop at all those purveyors of country hardship, sex, doom and slop, Hardy and Lawrence included. One can easily tire of the lush, dripping, thrusting, tragic, moist, fecund countryside, and long for a brisk young woman from the tough pavements of town like Flora Poste to come along and tidy things up a bit . . .

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