Tom Paulin is a poet and critic.
On the other hand 10/1/40 was a good day at least by January standards – a crisp cold clear day When Majors Reinberger and Hoenmanns allowed their Me109 a virtual fighter – no light transport plane made of cloth and string – allowed their sturdy all-weather plane to get blown across the Rhine and a chunk of Holland by an eastnortheast wind – not a wind a mere breeze of...
Mick Magennis was the only Ulsterman to win the VC in the last war. Though the population of Northern Ireland celebrated and rewarded his heroism, his community on the Falls Road in Belfast rejected him on his return, while the Unionist authorities begrudged his achievement and failed to honour it officially by making him a Freeman of the City of Belfast. He emigrated to England where he found comradeship among the Yorkshire miners – there is a plaque to his memory in Bradford Cathedral and a street named for him in Gosport. Although a statue to Magennis outside Belfast City Hall was recently unveiled, there is still resistance to honouring his name. BBC Northern Ireland has twice refused to commission a documentary film about him.
In the great quilted cento that is Moby-Dick, there is a passage which might be interpreted as Melville’s response to James Barry’s 1776 engraving The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. In the engraving Andrew Marvell is depicted with Milton, Locke and Algernon Sidney among the mourners at the bier of Britain’s traditional liberties. Across a pond the mourners can see a Neoclassical rotunda with an eagle-like phoenix raising its strong wings. Below the cupola the words LIBERT. AMERIC. are inscribed. It is a potent, and in England, where the Cork-born artist engraved it, a rare republican icon that celebrates the transplantation of radical English political ideology to the American shore. The engraving is reproduced on the dust-jacket of Marvell and Liberty, a collection of essays which, like David Norbrook’s recent Writing the English Republic, chimes with the discontent that a significant percentage of British people now feels about the monarchy.
From that state of chassis to those two poets – both theorists of chaos at Princeton – a name that goes with Einstein – from that apparently random state almost void almost without form though it doesn’t know it we might just start to draw drip or pour a kind of crooked trickled line – its grease or toil of grace could be glimpsed out on the Net strong wide deep...
This book is a sequence or collection of poems and other things concerning events in Europe in the period between the Treaty of Versailles and, broadly speaking, the Battle of Britain. Some of...
How they keep trying to bury Hazlitt, and how he keeps coming back. T.S. Eliot said he was guilty of ‘crimes against taste’. David Lodge made him a twee subject of nostalgic research...
Everybody knows – Paul Muldoon said it on the radio recently – that writing poetry can only get harder the more you keep at it. Against that is the belief, or perhaps the...
It is not very often that professional students of literature experience an invigorating shock of pleasure, surprise, illumination upon reading a work of criticism – perhaps because, like...
Adrian Room has garnered umpteen dedications, and some of them are of interest, but what is the point of unrolling them alphabetically as something purporting to be a dictionary? Abbott opens,...
‘Arnold and Eliot ensured that the magic of monarchy and superstition permeated English literary criticism and education like a syrupy drug ... ’ Yes, this is Tom Paulin speaking....
In the 1840s, according to Theodore Hoppen’s densely-packed and illuminating study of Irish political realities, ‘bored’ British ministers ‘grappled with the tedious but...
In ‘A Wave’, the title-poem of his new collection, John Ashbery says, among many other things: One idea is enough to organise a life and project it Into unusual but viable forms, but...
It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I have taken the full measure, or anything like it, of Middleton’s Carminalenia, an intensely difficult collection about as far removed from...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.