Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Bainbridge, Beryl (Vol. 131) - Dennis Drabelle (review date 10 April 1994)

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Dennis Drabelle (review date 10 April 1994)

SOURCE: “In a Cold Climate,” in Washington Post Book World, April 10, 1994, p. 7.

[In the following review, Drabelle offers favorable assessment of The Birthday Boys.]

Fifteen years ago an iconoclast struck what may be the most telling blow to an English reputation since Lytton Strachey took aim at his Eminent Victorians. The aggressor was journalist Roland Huntford. The target was Robert Falcon Scott, Scott of the Antarctic, the very incarnation of English heroism in a lost cause, whose last written words—scribbled feebly in 1912 as he and his two surviving comrades lay tentbound and starving after coming in second to the South Pole expedition led by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen—included this self-serving tribute: “I do not think human beings ever came through such a month as we have come through.”

In his book Scott and Amundsen, Huntford demonstrated that the...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Colin Thubron (review date 23 September 1984)
   2. David Punter (essay date 1985)
   3. Suzon Forscey (review date 12 January 1986)
   4. Richard Ingrams (review date 22 August 1987)
   5. Nicci Gerrard (review date 5 January 1990)
   6. Francine Prose (review date July 1991)
   7. Nancy Engbretsen Schaumburger (review date Fall 1991)
   8. Francis Spufford (review date 20 December 1991)
   9. Andro Linklater (review date 4 January 1992)
   10. Michael Cross (review date 11 April 1992)
   11. Elisabeth Wennö (essay date 1993)
   12. Dennis Drabelle (review date 10 April 1994)
   13. Gary Krist (review date 17 April 1994)
   14. Michael D. Schaffer (review date 9 June 1994)
   15. Amy Gamerman (review date 13 July 1994)
   16. Judith Freeman (review date 7 August 1994)
   17. Alex Clark (review date 6 January 1995)
   18. Judy Cooke (review date 13 September 1996)
   19. Jane Gardam (review date 14 September 1996)
   20. John Updike (review date 14 October 1996)
   21. Karen Heller (review date 22 November 1996)
   22. Susan Heeger (review date 24 November 1996)
   23. Kate Saunders (review date 1 May 1998)
   24. Daniel M. Murtaugh (review date 6 November 1998)
   25. Francine Prose (review date 29 November 1998)
   26. John Gallagher (review date 7 December 1998)
   27. Gail Pool (review date January 1999)
   28. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (review date 5 August 1999)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. John Updike