Untouched by Eliot

Denis Donoghue: Jon Stallworthy, 4 March 1999

Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems 
by Jon Stallworthy.
Carcanet, 247 pp., £14.95, September 1998, 1 85754 163 4
Show More
Show More
... The best of them is ‘The Girl from Zlot,’ a modern narrative that retains the metres of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ – ‘Four grey walls, and four grey towers’ – and catches some of Tennyson’s ...

Blather

Frank Cioffi, 22 June 2000

The Rumour: A Cultural History 
by Hans-Joachim Neubauer, translated by Christian Braun.
Free Association, 201 pp., £16.95, November 1999, 1 85343 472 8
Show More
Show More
... the meat is human flesh. The reason they raided the apartment was that the letter the young lady was asked to deliver contained only one sentence: ‘This is the last one I am sending you today.’ The dissemination of this rumour has meagre ideological value, and the motive for its transmission is largely its tellability. This may be why in some ...

Momentous Conjuncture

Geoffrey Best: Dracula in Churchill’s toyshop, 18 March 2004

Prof: The Life of Frederick Lindemann 
by Adrian Fort.
Cape, 374 pp., £18.99, October 2003, 0 224 06317 0
Show More
Show More
... made there) and had come to feel some Remains-of-the-Day-like affection for one of his supporters, Lady Elizabeth Lindsay. Nothing came of it. She died of pneumonia early in 1937, and the Prof never loved again. Back on the committee, he seems to have behaved better, even being bracketed with Tizard in R.V. Jones’s account of the completion of the radar ...

What Works

Michael Friedman: The embarrassing cousin, 31 March 2005

The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity 
by Raymond Knapp.
Princeton, 361 pp., £22.95, December 2004, 0 691 11864 7
Show More
Show More
... theme means that he avoids musicals that have almost nothing to say about America: My Fair Lady, The Lion King (which trumped the aggressively American Ragtime in both critical and financial success), Oliver! and almost all Sondheim’s early musicals, which attack the form without having any real American content. And as part of the same problem he ...

Those rooms had life

Sameer Rahim: The Yacoubian Building, 10 May 2007

The Yacoubian Building 
by Alaa al-Aswany, translated by Humphrey Davies.
Fourth Estate, 255 pp., £14.99, February 2007, 978 0 00 724361 7
Show More
Show More
... plays a prominent role, he has siphoned off millions of dollars from these deals. The first lady, Susan Mubarak, heads around a hundred charities, some of which, the report alleges, are little more than fronts for money laundering: each charity might receive as much as $5 million a year, but the money isn’t properly accounted for. According to the ...

Assertrix

Elizabeth Spelman: Mary Wollstonecraft, 19 February 2004

Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination 
by Barbara Taylor.
Cambridge, 331 pp., £45, March 2003, 0 521 66144 7
Show More
Show More
... for which she strives’ (Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime). Bearded Lady meets Twinkling Satellite: it’s probably happening right now, in the corner of a bookstore recently opened near ...

Pregnant with Monsters

Terry Eagleton: Schopenhauer makes a stir, 4 December 2025

Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist 
by David Bather Woods.
Chicago, 294 pp., £24, November, 978 0 226 82976 0
Show More
Show More
... up and threw her violently to the floor, causing her permanent damage. He regarded feminism as ‘lady-nonsense’ and was in favour of polygamy. His mother told him that he was irritating, overbearing and insignificant, which makes you wonder what his enemies thought of him. He was also a full-blown irrationalist, for whom reason was merely a blunt ...

Insouciance

Anne Hollander: Wild Lee Miller, 20 July 2006

Lee Miller 
by Carolyn Burke.
Bloomsbury, 426 pp., £12.99, March 2006, 0 7475 8793 0
Show More
Show More
... as an appendix.Slowly she transmuted herself into an unstable compound of rakishly hospitable Lady Bountiful in the country (Picasso’s visit was a great success, as he seemed to enliven the whole farm and environs; Miller herself never blended with the local pastimes and persons, never took walks except to the nearby pub) and dignified Mrs Ronald ...

It’s Mister Softee

Namara Smith: In Love with Roth, 19 July 2018

Asymmetry 
by Lisa Halliday.
Granta, 275 pp., £14.99, March 2018, 978 1 78378 360 1
Show More
Show More
... In​  The Portrait of a Lady, Mrs Touchett describes finding Isabel Archer ‘sitting in a dreary room on a rainy day, reading a heavy book and boring herself to death’. She adds, defending herself, ‘You may say I shouldn’t have enlightened her – I should have let her alone. There’s a good deal in that, but I acted conscientiously; I thought she was meant for something better ...

Each of us is a snowball

Susannah Clapp: Squares are best, 22 October 2020

Square Haunting 
by Francesca Wade.
Faber, 422 pp., £20, January 2020, 978 0 571 33065 2
Show More
Show More
... silks that don’t look too dusty. David Piper called it ‘the only existing humane portrait of a Lady Don’ and Harrison was pleased, thinking she looked ‘like a distinguished prize-fighter who has had a vision and collapsed under it’. Wade’s account of her life is in tune with the pugilism: a persuasive depiction of skirmish, idealism and ...

Rejoice in Your Legs

Jonathan Parry: Being Barbara Bodichon, 1 August 2024

Trailblazer: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, the First Feminist to Change Our World 
by Jane Robinson.
Doubleday, 397 pp., £25, February, 978 0 85752 777 6
Show More
Show More
... from Low Latitudes. Impulsia had joined the fad for Egyptian travel and enjoyed an English lady’s usual adventures with camels, pyramids and cunning Orientals. Finally, she fell for the charms of a French aristocrat, Monsieur de Rataplan, and a sequel was promised that would detail the adventures of the lovestruck pair. It never materialised, for ...

Laundering Britain’s Past

Marilyn Butler, 12 September 1991

The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 
by Paul Johnson.
Weidenfeld, 1095 pp., £25, September 1991, 0 297 81207 6
Show More
Show More
... of Vienna in 1815. Britain’s Lord Castlereagh, the future suicide, was remembered at home by Lady Morgan for ‘his cloudless smile ... his untunable voice and passion for singing all the songs in The Beggar’s Opera’. In Vienna he behaved like the Ulster Protestant he was, staying in with his wife and household on a Sunday to sing hymns to a ...

Closed Material

Nicholas Phillips, 17 April 2014

... to challenge or rebut it effectively, and the others agreed that this was generally the position. Lady Hale and Lord Brown, however, appeared to accept, at least on one reading of their judgments, that if the closed material was so cogent that it appeared incapable of rebuttal, Article 6 could be satisfied even if the suspect had no knowledge of the nature of ...
... were notable for riding cock-horses and having no clothes on (or perhaps that was some other fine lady), and very little suggested that a bohemian life might be there for the having. I had some hope of a café that was disapproved of by the grown-ups, but events overtook me. I hadn’t really understood how much my desired life depended on going to ...

Does one flare or cling?

Alice Spawls, 5 May 2016

‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style 
by Robin Muir.
National Portrait Gallery, 304 pp., £40, February 2016, 978 1 85514 561 0
Show More
‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style 
National Portrait GalleryShow More
Show More
... Actresses and society women were the first models; more risks could be taken with the actresses. Lady Diana Cooper and Viscountess Maidstone were photographed in contemplation and pearls, but Helen Lyons was captured backlit in a diaphanous white lace dress: as risqué and demure as Diana with the sun behind her legs. Muir has brought the original prints ...