The Art of Being Found Out

Colm Tóibín: The need to be revealed, 20 March 2008

... much they know now; how little they knew before. What is astonishing is how close Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond have come to keeping their secret. If you trace Madame Merle’s emotional position in the novel rather than Isabel’s, the movement of her feeling is as interesting and as intense. It is close to that of Lady Gregory when she sent the sonnets to ...

Concierge

John Lanchester, 16 November 1995

Sons of Ezra: British Poets and Ezra Pound 
edited by Michael Alexander and James McGonigal.
Rodopi, 183 pp., $23.50, July 1995, 90 5183 840 9
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‘In Solitude, for Company’: W.H. Auden after 1940 
edited by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins.
Oxford, 338 pp., £40, November 1995, 0 19 818294 5
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Auden 
by Richard Davenport-Hines.
Heinemann, 406 pp., £20, October 1995, 0 434 17507 2
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Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman 
by Thekla Clark.
Faber, 130 pp., £12.99, October 1995, 0 571 17591 0
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... hampered, and that the resulting thoughts are often wrong ... he twitters like a curate in W.S. Gilbert, emitting a steady rivulet of the opaque distinctions suited to a spiritual director.’ This strikes me as about right, though Empson’s remarks should be qualified by the awareness that in Auden’s poetry the batty sententiousness is turned into ...

Hangchow Retrouvé

Emma Rothschild, 22 May 1980

... of lambs’ brains without mayonnaise, even if the mayonnaise requires paraffin oil, fat-free white cheese and carrot mousse? The English adaptation of Guérard’s book has been lightly bowdlerised for English sensibilities of vulgar English empiricism. Thus Guérard’s fruitier apothegms remain in French in the text. The symbol-spices are left out, as ...

Things

Karl Miller, 2 April 1987

The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories 
by Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert.
Oxford, 504 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 19 214163 5
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The Ghost Stories of M.R. James 
by Michael Cox.
Oxford, 224 pp., £12.45, November 1986, 9780192122551
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Supernatural Tales 
by Vernon Lee.
Peter Owen, 222 pp., £10.95, February 1987, 0 7206 0680 2
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The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural 
edited by Jack Sullivan.
Viking, 482 pp., £14.95, October 1986, 0 670 80902 0
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Ghostly Populations 
by Jack Matthews.
Johns Hopkins, 171 pp., £11.75, March 1987, 0 8018 3391 4
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... relates: ‘The thing itself, a wasted flicker of pallid movement, danced and gyrated in white flame before him.’ This thing – the invention of a writer whom Eliot admired – has to do with a hideous, eternally punishable, human sinfulness: ‘greedy loves and greedy hates’. Hamlet walks in the Supernatural Tales of Vernon Lee, alias Violet ...

Models and Props

Nicholas Penny: Caravaggio in the Studio, 10 August 2000

Caravaggio 
by Catherine Puglisi.
Phaidon, 448 pp., £24.95, May 2000, 0 7148 3966 3
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Caravaggio’s Secrets 
by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit.
MIT, 118 pp., £18.50, September 1998, 0 262 02449 7
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by Peter Robb.
Bloomsbury, 567 pp., £25, January 2000, 0 7475 4599 5
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Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History 
by Mieke Bal.
Chicago, 305 pp., £28.50, October 1999, 0 226 03556 5
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Doubting Thomas: A Novel About Caravaggio 
by Atle Naess, translated by Anne Born.
Owen, 159 pp., £14.95, June 2000, 0 7206 1082 6
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Caravaggio: A Life 
by Helen Langdon.
Pimlico, 447 pp., £15, November 1999, 9780712665827
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... a tense, silent moment in a comedy, made even more tense by the sharp contrasts between crisp white linen and black velvet, and by a dramatic diagonal of light on the plain wall behind them, which parallels the line of eye contact. Even the unsententious may be inclined to feel that some smart adage about blind youth is neatly embodied here, but Bersani ...

What’s not to like?

Stefan Collini: Ernest Gellner, 2 June 2011

Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography 
by John Hall.
Verso, 400 pp., £29.99, July 2010, 978 1 84467 602 6
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... thereof one must speak.’ The reception of the book shaped Gellner’s career in two ways. First, Gilbert Ryle, senior Oxford professor and editor of Mind, the leading trade journal, decided the book was unworthy of review. Bertrand Russell – whom Gollancz, ever the enterprising publisher, had persuaded to write a sympathetic preface – sent a letter to ...

Joe, Jerry and Bomber Blair

Owen Hatherley: Jonathan Meades, 7 March 2013

Museum without Walls 
by Jonathan Meades.
Unbound, 446 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 908717 18 4
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... the passionate hater of Blair and Blairism who has a place in his heart for the Fabians and the white heat of technology; the enthusiast for Portsmouth’s Tricorn Centre (above), demolished in 2004, who dotes on Lutyens; the proud insulter of Islam who loves the multiculturalism of Birmingham; the critic of colonialism who relates the horrors of the Opium ...

Baffled at a Bookcase

Alan Bennett: My Libraries, 28 July 2011

... middle. There is actually another more modest library, neo-Gothic in style, and built by George Gilbert Scott in 1856. It’s over Exeter’s garden wall in the north-west corner of Radcliffe Square, but you can’t quite see that. This was where I worked, though it was possible if one was so inclined to get to study in the much more exclusive and ...

The World since 7 October

Adam Shatz, 24 July 2025

... a lot of fighting, and this stopped a lot of fighting’) when he welcomed Netanyahu to the White House on 6 July. The starvation and killing in Gaza grew still worse, but so long as Israel and Iran were at war, Palestinian suffering was off the front page.In the hallucinatory manner that is the signature of Trump’s foreign policy, all three parties ...

Women and the Novel

Marilyn Butler, 7 June 1984

Stanley and the Women 
by Kingsley Amis.
Hutchinson, 256 pp., £8.95, May 1984, 0 09 156240 6
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... they ... were ... mmmmad,’ he grated out in five loud sliced-off screeches, displaying his off-white teeth and looking far from sane himself. ‘If only ... they were ... off their heads. Then we could treat-’em, lock-’em-up, bung-’em-in-a-straitjacket, cut-’em-off-from-society. But they’re not. They’re not.’   He sprang up, came round ...

In the Multiverse

Jessica Olin: What Knox did next, 9 October 2025

Free: My Search for Meaning 
by Amanda Knox.
Headline, 283 pp., £22, March, 978 1 0354 2815 1
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The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox 
produced by K.J. Steinberg.
Disney+, August
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... her, who had been in prison far longer than she had, and who told her that ‘if a tame little white girl from the suburbs’ could be wrongly convicted, ‘maybe people would finally start paying attention.’ She began speaking publicly about her experience, criss-crossing the country ‘to tell my story, raise awareness, and help fundraise’ for local ...

Into the Underworld

Iain Sinclair: The Hackney Underworld, 22 January 2015

... made the Hole into a camera obscura with lid and lens. The collective painted the walls of the pit white, with gesso and gum. Those who came down the ladder into the earth cell, after their eyes adjusted to the absence of light, found the experience captivating. The world above appeared in phantom form, inverted, a ribbon of articulate shadows, trees like ...

The Person in the Phone Booth

David Trotter: Phone Booths, 28 January 2010

... to combine form and function, the K2, built out of cast iron to a neoclassical design by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and painted a glossy Post Office red all over, came into service in 1927. It was as much emblem as shelter: ventilation came from holes pierced through the top fascia in the shape of a crown. The smaller and more durable K6, also designed by ...

In a Spa Town

James Wood: ‘A Hero of Our Time’, 11 February 2010

A Hero of Our Time 
by Mikhail Lermontov, translated by Natasha Randall.
Penguin, 174 pp., £8.99, August 2009, 978 0 14 310563 3
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... dusty velvet frock coat, fastened only by its two lowest buttons, allowed a view of his blindingly white linen, indicating the habits of a proper gentleman … His gait was careless and lazy, but I noticed that he didn’t swing his arms – a clear signal of a certain secretiveness of character. However, these are my own comments, based on my own ...

I’m a Surfer

Steven Shapin: What’s the Genome Worth?, 20 March 2008

A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life 
by Craig Venter.
Allen Lane, 390 pp., £25, October 2007, 978 0 7139 9724 8
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... by technological possibilities. From the mid-1970s, Frederick Sanger at Cambridge and Walter Gilbert at Harvard had developed ways of working out the nucleotide sequence of particular genes – ‘reading their code’ – and at NINDS Venter adapted those methods, slow and laborious as they then were, to determine the sequence of the adrenaline ...