David Nokes

David Nokes Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography in 1985. He is a senior lecturer in English at King’s College london.

Letter
‘It is a pleasure,’ writes Peter Wagner (Letters, 5 January), ‘perhaps even a pleasure tinged with eroticism, to pick up the gauntlet thrown down so forcefully by Dr Nokes’ This pleasure is entirely his. Dr Wagner has expressed his unhappiness with my review of his book Eros Revived not only in two letters printed here but also in a long personal letter of remonstrance. I find it difficult...

Enlightenment Erotica

David Nokes, 4 August 1988

Mary Fiddler, a fine blooming lass of 18, her – is like silk itself, and bubbles as white as snow; she is just in her prime, and fit for business, she is broke in this spring, by a well-known gentleman of the turf. Her movements are regular, her pace elegant, and her action is good: and when you mount her, she begins to f—k away to the tune of the ‘Dandy O’. Her price, 5s. ‘She riggles her a – e su’ cantily.’’

Pay me for it: Summoning Dr Johnson

Helen Deutsch, 9 February 2012

On Saturday, July 30, Dr Johnson and I took a sculler at the Temple-stairs, and set out for Greenwich. I asked him if he really thought a knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages an essential...

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Simplicity: What Jane Austen Read

Marilyn Butler, 5 March 1998

Do we need another Life of Jane Austen? Biographies of this writer come at regular intervals, confirming a rather dull story of Southern English family life. For the first century at least, the...

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Liveried

Frank Kermode, 11 May 1995

Like most biographies nowadays, David Nokes’s John Gay is very long, but unlike some of the others it is not much longer than it needed to be. Gay devoted so much of his attention to people...

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Was Swift a monster?

Denis Donoghue, 5 June 1986

The main problem for David Nokes or for any other biographer of Swift is that the agenda has already been prescribed. Within a few years of Swift’s death in 1745, questions were raised...

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