Tousy-Mousy

Anne Barton: Mary Shelley, 8 February 2001

Mary Shelley 
by Miranda Seymour.
Murray, 665 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 7195 5711 9
Show More
Mary Shelley in Her Times 
edited by Betty Bennett and Stuart Curran.
Johns Hopkins, 311 pp., £33, September 2000, 0 8018 6334 1
Show More
Mary Shelley's Fictions 
edited by Michael Eberle-Sinatra.
Palgrave, 250 pp., £40, August 2000, 0 333 77106 0
Show More
Show More
... shedding some members and adding others, before finally disintegrating when Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822. Shortly thereafter, Byron and Trelawny embarked for Greece, Mary Shelley’s troubled and troubling step-sister Claire Clairmont departed to become a governess in Russia, and in 1823 Mary and her last surviving ...

On Philip Terry

Colin Burrow, 13 July 2017

... Sonnet 50 (in which Shakespeare grumbles about his horse) becomes: ‘Don’t talk to me about Raymond Queneau,/I’ve had it up to here with French theory./Since Althusser died/I spend my days on eBay.’The delights of eBay have presumably worn off, since Terry in his latest volume follows in the footsteps of Queneau, mathematician, poet and founder ...

How does he come to be mine?

Tim Parks: Dickens’s Children, 8 August 2013

Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens 
by Robert Gottlieb.
Farrar, Straus, 239 pp., £16.99, December 2012, 978 0 374 29880 7
Show More
Show More
... Dickens and electrify the novel’s domestic atmosphere. In that sense the scene is true to what Raymond Williams called the unified ‘structure of feeling’ in Dickens’s work. Having expelled his wife from his worthy home, Dickens didn’t go to his son Charley’s wedding because he was marrying the daughter of an ex-publisher who had been ...

Knives, Wounds, Bows

John Bayley, 2 April 1987

Randall Jarrell’s Letters 
edited by Mary Jarrell.
Faber, 540 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 571 13829 2
Show More
The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore 
edited by Patricia Willis.
Faber, 723 pp., £30, January 1987, 0 571 14788 7
Show More
Show More
... by the boundless optimism of these pieces, muted and delicate as they are. Praising William Carlos Williams especially as ‘not a repeater of things secondhand’, she quotes Pound’s verdict that there could be an ‘age of awakening in America’ which would ‘overshadow the quattrocento’, since ‘our opportunity is greater than Leonardo’s’ and ...

Presidential Criticism

John Sutherland, 10 January 1991

Victorian Subjects 
by J. Hillis Miller.
Harvester, 330 pp., £30, December 1990, 0 7450 0820 8
Show More
Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on 20th-Century Literature 
by J. Hillis Miller.
Harvester, 266 pp., £30, December 1990, 0 7450 0836 4
Show More
Show More
... on my conception of what literary criticism might be of my reading, around 1953, first of Marcel Raymond, and then soon after, of Georges Poulet, Albert Béguin, Jean Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard, Jean Starobinski and Gaston Bachelard, I am reminded of a passage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Marcel Raymond I read first ...

Diary

Perry Anderson: On E.P. Thompson, 21 October 1993

... I was not alone in failing to see this. A few years earlier, Edward had published a review of Raymond Williams’s Long Revolution in NLR, which was more temperate in tone than his treatment of Tom Nairn and myself, but more wounding in effect. One of his charges was that Raymond had become half-absorbed, in manner ...

What is the burglar after?

T.J. Clark: Painting the Poem, 6 October 2022

... poetry attaining to the condition (the concreteness) of the visual – I think of William Carlos Williams – find that when it comes to writing about the images they admire most the task ends up destroying their parti pris. ‘No ideas but in things’ is the war cry. Bruegel is chef de file. But the best poem in ...

Mother! Oh God! Mother!

Jenny Diski: ‘Psycho’, 7 January 2010

‘Psycho’ in the Shower: The History of Cinema’s Most Famous Scene 
by Philip Skerry.
Continuum, 316 pp., £12.99, June 2009, 978 0 8264 2769 4
Show More
Show More
... course, if the book were actually limited to the shower scene, however long it is (Skerry berates Raymond Durgnat, Hitchcock and Leigh for claiming it to be 70 or 78 shots long), it would be nonsensically lacking in context and a very short book. There is considerable padding. As it is, Skerry’s claim that ‘in one bold and brilliant stroke, Hitchcock had ...

Ruck in the Carpet

Glen Newey: Political Morality, 9 July 2009

Philosophy and Real Politics 
by Raymond Geuss.
Princeton, 116 pp., £11.95, October 2008, 978 0 691 13788 9
Show More
Show More
... but ideology. Philosophy and Real Politics continues a critique of political philosophy which Raymond Geuss has been developing for several years, notably in his History and Illusion in Politics and Outside Ethics. Geuss is a Cambridge philosopher with extensive interests in the history of political thought: it might be imagined that he would straddle the ...

Narco Polo

Iain Sinclair, 23 January 1997

Mr Nice: An Autobiography 
by Howard Marks.
Secker, 466 pp., £16.99, September 1996, 0 436 20305 7
Show More
Pulp Election: The Booker Prize Fix 
by Carmen St Keeldare.
Bluedove, 225 pp., £12.99, September 1996, 0 9528298 0 0
Show More
Show More
... Master of Balliol. The interestingly named Fanny Hill was also involved, at this period, with Raymond Carr, Warden of St Antony’s College, which Marks describes as the ‘CIA’s Oxford annexe’. The property that the postgraduate Marks rented in Leckford Road had previously been occupied by an American draft-decliner and notorious non-inhaler, William ...

Fog has no memory

Jonathan Meades: Postwar Colour(lessness), 19 July 2018

The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Postwar Britain 
by Lynda Nead.
Yale, 416 pp., £35, October 2017, 978 0 300 21460 4
Show More
Show More
... see everything through the reductionist lenses of colour and colourlessness. She leans heavily on Raymond Williams’s notion of a ‘structure of feeling’ which supposedly defines the ‘particular and characteristic colour of a period’. What Williams intended by ‘colour’ was ever-changing mood, constant only ...

Lights by the Ton

John Sturrock: Jean Echenoz, 18 June 1998

Lake 
by Jean Echenoz, translated by Guido Waldman.
Harvill, 122 pp., £8.99, June 1998, 1 86046 449 1
Show More
Un An 
by Jean Echenoz.
Minuit, 111 pp., frs 65, September 1997, 2 7073 1587 7
Show More
Show More
... and older, ludic tradition in French fiction, whose virtuoso among the moderns was the wonderful Raymond Queneau. This tradition, alas, has a habit of going mysteriously lame when it is asked to travel, as if the intellectual comedy at which France can be so good were written exclusively for the natives and disqualified by its triviality elsewhere, for ...

Just a Diphthong Away

Ange Mlinko: Gary Lutz, 7 May 2020

The Complete Gary Lutz 
by Gary Lutz.
Tyrant, 500 pp., £15, December 2019, 978 1 7335359 1 5
Show More
Show More
... and some, like Lutz, cult figures, who came of age in the late 1970s and 1980s, including Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Barry Hannah, Diane Williams and Mary Robison.One of the best accounts of Lish’s influence is in David Leavitt’s roman à clef Martin Bauman; Or, a Sure Thing. He appears in the first paragraph ...

Natural-Born Biddies

Ruby Hamilton: Celia Dale’s Nastiness, 15 August 2024

Sheep’s Clothing 
by Celia Dale.
Daunt, 306 pp., £9.99, September 2023, 978 1 914198 60 1
Show More
A Helping Hand 
by Celia Dale.
Daunt, 260 pp., £9.99, September 2022, 978 1 914198 33 5
Show More
A Spring of Love 
by Celia Dale.
Daunt, 359 pp., £9.99, September, 978 1 914198 94 6
Show More
Show More
... and perky little houses’ for ‘mean and perky little souls’, as Clough Williams-Ellis had it in 1928. ‘Mean and perky’, in that order, may describe Maisie and Josh Evans, Dale’s couple who hatch a scheme to take in ‘dear old souls’ as ‘paying guests’ in their spare room, before tricking them into altering their wills ...

Quickening, or How to Plot an Abortion

Clair Wills: The Abortion Plot, 16 March 2023

... the scholarship pupil plot in Britain and Ireland. John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams: they were all born between the end of the First World War and the early 1930s, and published their stories of class alienation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a bit late, too, for the middle-class unmarried motherhood plot: Lynne ...