Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Bainbridge, Beryl (Vol. 131) - Michael Cross (review date 11 April 1992)

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Michael Cross (review date 11 April 1992)

SOURCE: A review of The Birthday Boys, in New Scientist, April 11, 1992, p. 43.

[In the following review, Cross offers tempered assessment of The Birthday Boys.]

Well into the 1960s, my schoolmasters solemnly taught that Amundsen—he merited neither rank nor Christian name—beat Captain Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole only by the most dastardly trickery.

Luckily, no era set itself up for debunking quite as much as the final decades of the British Empire. By the 1970s, the line “I am just going outside and may be some time,” had launched a thousand comic sketches. In 1979, Roland Huntford's Scott and Amundsen (later republished as The Last Place On Earth) completed the job by portraying Scott as a self-deluding romantic whose incompetence cost lives.

Beryl Bainbridge leans heavily on Huntford and the more veiled criticism of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's...

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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