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Davie’s Rap

Neil Corcoran, 25 January 1990

Under Briggflatts: A History of Poetry in Great Britain 1960-1988 
by Donald Davie.
Carcanet, 261 pp., £18.95, October 1989, 0 85635 820 7
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Annunciations 
by Charles Tomlinson.
Oxford, 55 pp., £5.95, November 1989, 0 19 282680 8
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Possible Worlds 
by Peter Porter.
Oxford, 68 pp., £6.95, September 1989, 0 19 282660 3
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The boys who stole the funeral: A Novel Sequence 
by Les Murray.
Carcanet, 71 pp., £6.95, October 1989, 0 85635 845 2
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... take confirmation in it from the other books under review. Charles Tomlinson’s Annunciations and Peter Porter’s Possible Worlds share Renaissance Virgins for cover illustrations. Tomlinson’s is Lorenzo Lotto’s Annunciation, in which the angel has just leapt spectacularly over the balcony, terrifying the cat, to make his declaration to an overcome and ...

I’m not a happy poet

John Butt: Lorca, 1 April 1999

Lorca: A Dream of Life 
by Leslie Stainton.
Bloomsbury, 568 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 7475 4128 0
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... left-wing and tackled such subjects as the condition of Spanish women, sexual repression and gay love that excited audiences in his day and guarantee his interest for modern-day theorists. Nature favoured Lorca’s later reputation in other ways. He was endowed with a flirtatious, rather attractive homosexuality which, considering the time and the ...

Spinoza got it

Margaret Jacob: Radical Enlightenment, 8 November 2012

A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy 
by Jonathan Israel.
Princeton, 276 pp., £13.95, September 2011, 978 0 691 15260 8
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... of the Enlightenment dominated historical writing as late as the 1960s, and is best represented by Peter Gay’s two magisterial volumes published in 1966 and 1969. After Gay and Cassirer, two trends dominated Enlightenment history until Israel came on the scene. One situated the Enlightenment in a particular national ...

The pleasure of not being there

Peter Brooks, 18 November 1993

Benjamin Constant: A Biography 
by Dennis Wood.
Routledge, 321 pp., £40, June 1993, 0 415 01937 0
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Isabelle de Charrière (Belle de Zuylen): A Biography 
by C.P Courtney.
Voltaire Foundation, 810 pp., £49, August 1993, 0 7294 0439 0
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... meeting her composed some doggerel beginning: And yet just now a Utrecht lady’s charms Make my gay bosom beat with love’s alarms. Who could have thought to see young Cupid fly Through Belgia’s thick and suffocating sky? Boswell went so far as to write to Rousseau, asking his advice on a possible marriage to Belle, but the sage did not reply. Boswell ...

Tea or Eucharist?

Anthony Howard, 3 December 1992

The Faber Book of Church and Clergy 
edited by A.N. Wilson.
Faber, 304 pp., £17.50, November 1992, 0 571 16204 5
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High and Mitred: A Study of Prime Ministers as Bishop-Makers 1837-1977 
by Bernard Palmer.
SPCK, 350 pp., £20, October 1992, 0 281 04594 1
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... government, contemporary language into its services, the social gospel into its spiritual message. Peter Simple’s immortal creation, Dr Spacely-Trellis, the ‘go-ahead’ Bishop of Bevindon, personified the popular conception of the modern church leader – until real life played an unfair trick and produced Dr John Spong, the ultra-trendy Bishop of ...

Diary

John Barrell: On Allon White, 29 August 1991

... until he died in 1988 at the age of 37. He was the author of The Uses of Obscurity and (with Peter Stallybrass) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. A collection of fugitive pieces, Carnival, Hysteria and Writing, will be published by Oxford next year with an introduction by Stuart Hall, with whom Allon studied at the Birmingham Centre for ...

Supermax

John Bayley, 8 December 1988

The Letters of Max Beerbohm 1892-1956 
edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Murray, 244 pp., £16.95, August 1988, 0 7195 4537 4
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The Faber Book of Letters 
edited by Felix Pryor.
Faber, 319 pp., £12.95, October 1988, 0 571 15269 4
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... explanation could there be? Unfortunately, however, it is not true. Max, it appears, was neither gay nor Jewish. He might have been, and been just the same sort of chap, but as it happens he wasn’t. Biographers want to explain things too – often by an unconscious wish to identify themselves with their subjects. I have something in common with Joyce, and ...

Shtum

John Lanchester: Alastair Campbell’s Diaries, 16 August 2007

The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries 
edited by Alastair Campbell and Richard Stott.
Hutchinson, 794 pp., £25, July 2007, 978 0 09 179629 7
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... also described himself flirting with Blair. Some men have that effect on other men; it’s not a gay thing exactly, but it’s not the opposite of a gay thing, and there is something faintly homoerotic about the governmental milieu described here, full of dark-haired men shouting at each other, TB and AC and PM and GB all ...

I am a severed head

Colin Burrow: Iris Murdoch’s Incompatibilities, 11 August 2016

‘The Sea, the Sea’; ‘A Severed Head’ 
by Iris Murdoch.
Everyman, 680 pp., £14.99, March 2016, 978 1 84159 370 8
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... And being fair to Murdoch is quite hard at the moment. She has received a sympathetic biography by Peter Conradi, which may be too kind to her, and a sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she ...

Nom de Boom

Ian Penman: Arthur Russell's Benediction, 15 August 2024

Travels over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life 
by Richard King.
Faber, 296 pp., £30, April, 978 0 571 37966 8
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... nowhere, but emerged in very specific economic conditions. Russell’s friend and fellow musician Peter Gordon recalls the mutual support that sustained their circle of friends in late-1970s New York: ‘We used to joke that the same $50 got passed back and forth between us. There was no dividing line between money and the community.’ New York had a ...

The Body in the Library Is Never Our Own

Ian Patterson: On Ngaio Marsh, 5 November 2020

... the school in Dulwich that her father attended. Although not an amateur like Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey or Allingham’s Albert Campion, Inspector Alleyn is quietly well-connected, a younger son who went to Eton and Oxford and then entered the diplomatic service, but left because he couldn’t stick the terms of the Paris Peace Conference; his concern ...

Do Anything, Say Anything

James Meek: On the New TV, 4 January 2024

Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television 
by Peter Biskind.
Allen Lane, 383 pp., £25, November, 978 0 241 44390 3
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... Iread​ Peter Biskind’s book about the New Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, long ago. Apart from scraps of celebrity anecdote, what I remember of it now is something more diffuse, a mood associated with the mysterious figures of the producers: an impression of flared trousers and shirts with the two top buttons undone, collar points two feet apart, of tanned white skin, gold, nice teeth, the smell of tobacco and aftershave and deodorant, of men outwardly confident, hungry, vain, bullying, concupiscent and covetous, but also charming, garrulous, fascinating, prone to infatuations with strangers and their stories, flitting from one intense interest to another, even as they held on stubbornly to ideas for years until the money and the creatives could be married and a film born ...

My Feet Are Cut Off

Barbara Newman: Lives of the Saints, 3 December 2009

Gilte Legende Vol. I 
edited by Richard Hamer and Vida Russell.
Early English Text Society (Oxford), 496 pp., £65, November 2006, 0 19 920577 9
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Gilte Legende Vol. II 
edited by Richard Hamer and Vida Russell.
Early English Text Society (Oxford), 1036 pp., £65, August 2007, 978 0 19 923439 4
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... in these pains … as one who has found great treasures.’ After her breasts are cut off, St Peter heals them (over her protests) so that she can survive to face new torments. A kind of double vision is required of the spectator: where pagan kings and their minions see only unbearable pain, martyrs experience the invisible power of God. Their legends ...

Our chaps will deal with them

E.S. Turner: The Great Flap of 1940, 8 August 2002

Dad’s Army: The Story of a Classic Television Show 
by Graham McCann.
Fourth Estate, 304 pp., £7.99, August 2002, 1 84115 309 5
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... a 15-year-old, adds wire cheese-cutters and sharpened bicycle chains to the list. ‘In Essex,’ Peter Fleming says in Invasion 1940, ‘an unexpected windfall made possible the formation of a cutlass platoon, 24 strong, under the command of a former naval rating.’ He also tells how ‘four dozen rusty Lee Enfields, relics of some forgotten tableau or ...

Mushroom Cameo

Rosemary Hill: Noël Coward’s Third Act, 29 June 2023

Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 634 pp., £30, March 2023, 978 1 4746 1280 7
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... a younger man is ruined when he falls in love with the fiancée of Florence’s cocaine-addicted gay son, Nicky. The dramatic tension is enhanced by Coward’s need to evade the censor’s blue pencil (a threat until the 1968 Theatres Act) so that, as Soden puts it, unspeakable attractions ‘shiver beneath the dialogue’. The original audience would have ...

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