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Eclipse of Europe

Brian Bond, 3 June 1982

End of the Affair: The Collapse of the Anglo-French Alliance 1939-40 
by Eleanor Gates.
Allen and Unwin, 630 pp., £15, February 1982, 0 04 940063 0
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The Strategy of Phoney War: Britain, Sweden and the Iron Ore Question 1939-1940 
by Thomas Munch-Petersen.
Militärhistoriska Forlaget, 296 pp., £8, October 1981, 91 85266 17 5
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... scholars such as John C. Cairns, Philip Bankwitz, Telford Taylor and Robert O. Paxton. Eleanor M. Gates might modestly disclaim inclusion in such distinguished company. But she has produced a splendid book which is both instructive and moving. She is not much interested in the military operations per se, but ...

Flavourless Bacon

Irina Dumitrescu: The Wife of Bath, 10 August 2023

The Wife of Bath: A Biography 
by Marion Turner.
Princeton, 320 pp., £20, January, 978 0 691 20601 1
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The Wife of Willesden 
by Zadie Smith.
Hamish Hamilton, 109 pp., £7.99, November 2021, 978 0 241 47196 8
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The Good Wife of Bath 
by Karen Brooks.
William Morrow, 541 pp., £9.99, March 2022, 978 0 06 314283 1
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... printing and selling ‘a Disorderly ballad of the wife of Bathe’ in which Alysoun knocks on the gates of heaven and upbraids the various biblical figures who try to keep her out – Adam, Solomon, Mary Magdalene – for their own sinfulness, until Jesus finally shows mercy and lets her in. In Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), John Dryden rendered ‘The ...

Raised Eyebrows

Eleanor Birne: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 5 October 2006

Half of a Yellow Sun 
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Fourth Estate, 433 pp., £14.99, August 2006, 0 00 720027 7
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... never seen anything like the streets that appeared after they went past the university gates, streets so smooth and tarred that he itched to lay his cheek down on them.’ After his first meal at his new master’s house he turns on the tap in the kitchen, then turns it off then on again, ‘laughing at the magic of the running water and the ...

Angela and the Beast

Patricia Craig, 5 December 1985

Black Venus 
by Angela Carter.
Chatto, 121 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 7011 3964 1
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Come unto these yellow sands 
by Angela Carter.
Bloodaxe, 158 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 906427 66 5
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Mainland 
by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.
Hamish Hamilton, 285 pp., £9.95, October 1985, 0 241 11643 0
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The Accidental Tourist 
by Anne Tyler.
Chatto, 355 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 7011 2986 7
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Arrows of Longing 
by Virginia Moriconi.
Duckworth, 252 pp., £9.95, October 1985, 9780715620694
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... Her mind refuses admittance to that word: affair ... ‘You are not a sexual affair,’ Eleanor tells it. It rattles its bones at her. It makes motions as if it were washing its hands. Eleanor, who’s given to holding conversations with her dead mother and grandmother, attributing to the two of them a poor view ...

Men with Saffron Smiles

Eleanor Birne: Arundhati Roy, 27 July 2017

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness 
by Arundhati Roy.
Hamish Hamilton, 445 pp., £18.99, June 2017, 978 0 241 30397 9
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... inside: ‘He entered that ordinary, broken-down home as though he were walking through the gates of paradise.’ At the age of 15, he moves in and becomes Anjum, living ‘in the Khwabgah with her patched-together body and her partially realised dreams’. ‘Partially realised’ is the point: there is freedom among the hijras but they are both ...

Mr Dug-out and His Lady

Helen McCarthy: Woman’s Kingdom, 19 November 2020

Endell Street: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran World War One’s Most Remarkable Military Hospital 
by Wendy Moore.
Atlantic, 376 pp., £17.99, April, 978 1 78649 584 6
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... war work but with no prior medical training. Some were collected by chauffeurs at the hospital gates and went for tea at Harrods on their days off. One Australian soldier, who was sent to Endell Street after being injured at Gallipoli, called the Women’s Hospital Corps the ‘What Ho’ Corps. The nurses, by contrast, were more likely to be trained ...

A Girl Called Retina

Tom Crewe: You’ll like it when you get there, 13 August 2020

British Summer Time Begins: The School Summer Holidays, 1930-80 
by Ysenda Maxtone Graham.
Little, Brown, 352 pp., £18.99, July 2020, 978 1 4087 1055 5
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... holidays, ‘the vast stretch of untimetabled time that begins as soon as you emerge through the gates on a July morning, and goes on until the moment in September when you return, two shoe sizes larger and somehow changed’. It starts with the waning of the summer term and the long-awaited mass breakout – Phoebe Fortescue says that on her last day at St ...

Loafing with the Sissies

Colm Tóibín: The Trials of Andy Warhol, 10 September 2020

Warhol: A Life as Art 
by Blake Gopnik.
Allen Lane, 931 pp., £35, March, 978 0 241 00338 1
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... coat and a Jaguar … I was happy to see a down-and-out artist finally make a buck.’ The dealer Eleanor Ward also noticed the change: ‘Suddenly, I discovered that everyone had very good, nice, new teeth.’The work Warhol was doing for shop windows didn’t immediately generate the same kudos. But it would, with very little adaptation. ‘What almost ...

Old Verities

Brian Harrison, 19 June 1986

The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832-1867 
by Catherine Gallagher.
Chicago, 320 pp., £23.25, September 1985, 0 226 27932 4
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Victorian Prison Lives: English Prison Biography 1830-1914 
by Philip Priestley.
Methuen, 311 pp., £14.85, October 1985, 0 416 34770 3
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The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers and Vivisection in Edwardian England 
by Coral Lansbury.
University of Wisconsin Press, 212 pp., £23.50, November 1985, 0 299 10250 5
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‘Orator’ Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism 
by John Belchem.
Oxford, 304 pp., £25, October 1985, 0 19 822759 0
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... efficacy of individual attack’ is the quality Mary Stocks assigns to that very late Victorian, Eleanor Rathbone, and what Rathbone said of her father applied not only to herself but to many of her father’s contemporaries: ‘anything that savoured of irony and cynicism was repulsive to him.’ It was an outlook that owed much to Nonconformist and ...

The Groom Stripped Bare by His Suitor

Jeremy Harding: John Lennon, 4 January 2001

Lennon Remembers 
by Jann Wenner.
Verso, 151 pp., £20, October 2000, 1 85984 600 9
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... the issue is mediation, a lack of feeling or veracity in the fanciful little narratives – ‘Eleanor Rigby’ comes to mind – that stormed up the charts but had nothing to do with the business of speaking one’s mind and singing one’s soul. From this morass of trivia, apparently, the new, discerning Lennon rescues his best songs, his ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

... went on all day to get the plane up again: dry stone walls were taken down, trees felled and gates widened, and the plane was stripped out and refuelled. If it was a miracle that the plane had got down it was even more so that it got up again, taking off in the late afternoon and just clearing the trees at the end of the field. A plane crash might have ...

Life Pushed Aside

Clair Wills: The Last Asylums, 18 November 2021

... as much freedom as they could handle. In 1948 the hospital became an international showcase when Eleanor Roosevelt visited and extolled the benefits of its progressive regime, compared to the grim conditions inside state asylums in the US.About 24 minutes into the film my mother appears. She is lying on the grass outside one of the wards reading a book. She ...

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