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Rather Break than Bend

Clare Jackson: The Winter Queen, 26 May 2022

Elizabeth Stuart: Queen of Hearts 
by Nadine Akkerman.
Oxford, 581 pp., £20, December 2021, 978 0 19 966830 4
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... youngest daughter, Sophia, Electress of Hanover, who stood to succeed her second cousin Queen Anne. In the end, Anne outlived Sophia by a couple of months, whereupon Elizabeth’s grandson Georg Ludwig became Britain’s first Hanoverian monarch, George I, in 1714.Akkerman is well-placed to write a Life of Elizabeth ...

Risky Business

Elaine Showalter, 22 September 1994

Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography 
by Linda Wagner-Martin.
Rutgers, 201 pp., $22.95, July 1994, 0 8135 2092 4
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... recalls only books on Helen Keller, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Duchess of Windsor. Rose credits Anne Frank’s diary, published in English in 1952, with the transformation of women’s autobiography; Heilbrun and Wagner-Martin agree that Nancy Milford’s study of Zelda Fitzgerald in 1970, coinciding with the early years of the women’s ...

At Manchester Art Gallery

Inigo Thomas: Annie Swynnerton, 27 September 2018

... RA, ‘but true art needs no incentive; its work is its own reward.’ Annie Swynnerton was born Anne Louisa Robinson in Manchester in 1844, one of the four daughters of a legal clerk and his wife. She went to Manchester Art School in 1871, as did her sisters Emily and Julia, where they were all prize-winning students, though frustrated by the scope of the ...

Collect your divvies

Ferdinand Mount: Safe as the Bank of England, 15 June 2023

Virtuous Bankers: A Day in the Life of the 18th-Century Bank of England 
by Anne Murphy.
Princeton, 275 pp., £30, May, 978 0 691 19474 5
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... to reinforce the reputation of ‘the Palladium of public credit’. It is at this point that Anne Murphy takes her bird’s eye view of a day in the life of the bank. In her acknowledgments she expresses some apprehension about having plumped for this approach, but she need not have worried. This is a model of economic history, acute, profound and ...

What Blair Threw Away

Ross McKibbin: Feckless, Irresponsible and Back in Power, 19 May 2005

... leader. In reply to the argument that in 1931 Ramsay MacDonald had to think of the nation, A.J.P. Taylor once said that he shouldn’t have been thinking of the country, he should have been thinking of the Labour Party. Blair, too, should have been thinking of the Labour Party. What on earth did he imagine was going to happen in those seats where the Muslim ...

Diary

Marina Warner: Carmen Callil’s Causes, 15 December 2022

... exhumed and gave a new lease of life to writers such as Rebecca West, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Comyns and Antonia White. White’s Frost in May, another study of the horrors of convent life, was one of Virago’s first notable successes when it was reissued in 1978. Other writers she championed had truly been forgotten: on Desert Island ...

Perfect Light

Jenny Diski, 9 July 1992

Diana: Her True Story 
by Andrew Morton.
Michael O’Mara, 165 pp., £14.99, June 1992, 1 85479 191 5
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Shared Lives 
by Lyndall Gordon.
Bloomsbury, 285 pp., £16.99, April 1992, 0 7475 1164 0
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Antonia White: Diaries 1958-1979 
edited by Susan Chitty.
Constable, 352 pp., £19.95, May 1992, 0 09 470660 3
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... each other, and I recognised the not-quite-extraterrestrial, dumpy, middle-aged forms of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton panting their way up the hill. The glow was not, of course, from their outward perfection, nor their inner beauty and wisdom, but the result of years and years of attention from precision-ground lenses and high-wattage lights being ...

Lost in Beauty

Michael Newton: Montgomery Clift, 7 October 2010

The Passion of Montgomery Clift 
by Amy Lawrence.
California, 333 pp., £16.95, May 2010, 978 0 520 26047 4
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... version of Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), Clift lets the women take centre-stage; it’s Elizabeth Taylor’s film, then Katharine Hepburn’s. Here, as in Freud, he’s a ‘listener’. Of all the early films, it’s in the last, Vittorio De Sica’s excellent (though butchered) Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953) that Clift takes the greatest ...

Inside Mr Shepherd

James Wood: In conversation with Jane Austen, 4 November 2004

Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation 
by Bharat Tandon.
Anthem, 303 pp., £45, March 2003, 1 84331 101 1
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Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style 
by D.A. Miller.
Princeton, 108 pp., £12.95, September 2003, 0 691 09075 0
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... about the ideological price of that harmony. Do Emma and Mr Knightley, Elizabeth and Darcy, Anne and Captain Wentworth, Fanny and Edmund, represent ideal or merely idealised marriages? Do Austen’s novels foreclose their own vitality by choosing the safety of proper settlements? Are romance and marriage at odds ...

Meg, Jo, Beth and Me

Elaine Showalter, 23 March 1995

Little Women 
directed by Gillian Armstrong.
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... Solt wrote Mervyn LeRoy’s 1949 remake, with June Allyson as Jo, Janet Leigh as Meg, Elizabeth Taylor as Amy and Margaret O’Brien as Beth. Peter Lawford played a glamorous Laurie – indeed, the screenplay describes Laurie as looking ‘not unlike our idea of Edgar Allan Poe’. Armstrong’s Little Women is the most British and Pickwickian of the movie ...

From culture to couture

Penelope Gilliatt, 21 February 1985

The ‘Vogue’ Bedside Book 
edited by Josephine Ross.
Hutchinson, 256 pp., £9.95, October 1984, 0 09 158520 1
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The Art of Zandra Rhodes 
by Anne Knight and Zandra Rhodes.
Cape, 240 pp., £18, November 1984, 0 395 37940 7
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... represented in this book is – and very funny about women’s insistence on the human; Elizabeth Taylor on Ivy Compton-Burnett (1951), remarking that her heroine’s bi-nominal titles can make reading a solicitor on ‘Landlords and Tenants’ an exciting prospect. Infected as one is bound to be by the style of a writer that one admires enough to write ...

Elegant Extracts

Leah Price: Anthologies, 3 February 2000

The Oxford Book of English Verse 
edited by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 690 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 19 214182 1
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The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume One 
edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt.
Norton, 2974 pp., £22.50, December 1999, 0 393 97487 1
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The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume Two 
edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt.
Norton, 2963 pp., £22.50, February 2000, 9780393974911
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume One 
edited by David Damrosch.
Longman, 2963 pp., $53, July 1999, 0 321 01173 2
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume Two 
edited by David Damrosch.
Longman, 2982 pp., $53, July 1999, 0 321 01174 0
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Night & Horses & The Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature 
edited by Robert Irwin.
Allen Lane, 480 pp., £25, September 1999, 0 7139 9153 4
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News that Stays News: The 20th Century in Poems 
edited by Simon Rae.
Faber, 189 pp., £9.99, October 1999, 0 571 20060 5
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Time’s Tidings: Greeting the 21st Century 
by Carol Ann Duffy.
Anvil, 157 pp., £7.95, November 1999, 0 85646 313 2
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Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the 20th Century in Poetry 
edited by Peter Forbes.
Penguin, 640 pp., £12.99, February 1999, 9780140588996
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... provenance’, but never quite decides what it does seek to be. Judicious selections from Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet extend the anthology’s reach beyond what Ricks terms ‘our precious stones from Land’s End to John o’Groats, leave alone the emerald of Ireland’. On the other hand, the editorial policy ...

Mandela: Death of a Politician

Stephen W. Smith: Mandela, the Politician, 9 January 2014

... opinion, which has now canonised Mandela, would be outraged were a ‘warlord’ such as Charles Taylor not brought to justice, though Taylor gave up power in 2003 when he left Monrovia for exile in Nigeria. In 2006, when the former Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano negotiated with Joseph Kony for his peaceful ...

Reduced to Ashes and Rubbage

Jessie Childs: Civil War Traumas, 3 January 2019

Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil Wars 
edited by David Appleby and Andrew Hopper.
Manchester, 247 pp., £80, July 2018, 978 1 5261 2480 7
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... onwards, they are downplayed. I would guess that more people know the date of the execution of Anne Boleyn than of Charles I. Writers found events hard to comprehend at the time. ‘Whosoever will be curious to read the future story of this intricate Warre,’ the royalist pamphleteer James Howell wrote in 1644, ‘will find himself much stagger’d, and ...

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