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Wouldn’t you like to be normal?

Lucie Elven: Janet Frame’s Place, 8 May 2025

The Edge of the Alphabet 
by Janet Frame.
Fitzcarraldo, 296 pp., £12.99, August 2024, 978 1 80427 118 6
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... university ‘in my spare time’ and had a ‘pash’ on her psychology teacher, the 24-year-old John Money. In Frame’s probationary year teaching at Arthur Street School, she stiffened, avoiding the staff teas. This is where her autobiography and King’s retelling, based on interviews, diverge, but in both she swallows a packet of aspirin, and wakes the ...

Underparts

Nicholas Spice, 6 November 1986

Roger’s Version 
by John Updike.
Deutsch, 316 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 233 97988 3
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The Voyeur 
by Alberto Moravia, translated by Tim Parks.
Secker, 186 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 436 28721 8
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Dvorak in Love 
by Josef Skvorecky, translated by Paul Wilson.
Chatto, 322 pp., £10.95, September 1986, 0 7011 2994 8
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Moments of Reprieve 
by Primo Levi, translated by Ruth Feldman.
Joseph, 172 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 7181 2726 9
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... Readers of John Updike’s previous novel, The Witches of Eastwick, will not have forgotten Darryl Van Horne’s bottom: how, at the end of a game of tennis, Darryl dropped his shorts and thrust his hairy rump into his partner’s face, demanding that she kiss it, which she did. In Roger’s Version the roles are reversed ...

No Longer Merely the Man Who Ate His Boots

Thomas Jones: The Northwest Passage, 27 May 2010

Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage 
by Glyn Williams.
Allen Lane, 440 pp., £25, October 2009, 978 1 84614 138 6
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Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation 
by Andrew Lambert.
Faber, 428 pp., £20, July 2009, 978 0 571 23160 7
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... it runs north into Baffin Bay. In 1585, on returning from his first voyage to find the passage, John Davis wrote to Francis Walsingham that ‘the northwest passage is a matter nothing doubtful.’ Thirty years later, William Baffin wrote to one of his financial backers that ‘there is no passage nor hope of passage.’ Baffin did see a lot of whales ...

Scarlet Woman

Michael Young, 1 September 1988

East End 1888: A Year in a London Borough among the Labouring Poor 
by William Fishman.
Duckworth, 343 pp., £18.95, June 1988, 0 7156 2174 2
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... Spitalfields. This is where people can go for relief if they are starving or homeless. The casual ward is the last refuge for people who are not in the House for good. On admittance, the hungry man, after being forced to strip naked and wash in a common bath, is locked up in a tiny cell with no furniture, where he is given the regulation supper of ½ lb of ...

Lacanian Jesuit

David Wootton: Michel de Certeau, 4 October 2001

The Possession at Loudun 
by Michel de Certeau, translated by Michael Smith.
Chicago, 251 pp., £27, August 2000, 0 226 10034 0
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The Certeau Reader 
edited by Graham Ward.
Blackwell, 320 pp., £60, November 1999, 0 631 21278 7
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Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist 
by Ian Buchanan.
Sage, 143 pp., £50, July 2000, 0 7619 5897 5
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... writing against the background of McCarthyism, told it in The Devils of Loudun (1952), which John Whiting turned into a play, The Devils (1961), which was itself the basis for Ken Russell’s 1971 film of the same name. There is also a more recent account, Robert Rapley’s A Case of Witchcraft (1998). Michel de Certeau’s Possession at Loudun, first ...

A Degenerate Assemblage

Anthony Grafton: Bibliomania, 13 April 2023

Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America 
by Denise Gigante.
Yale, 378 pp., £25, January 2023, 978 0 300 24848 7
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... value even to more obscure items such as the Irish writer Thomas Amory’s picaresque Life of John Buncle and The Triumphs of God’s Revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sin of Murder, a popular collection of tales of murder and revenge by the 17th-century Exeter merchant whom Coleridge called ‘honest Murthereo-Maniacal ...

Nohow, Worstward, Withersoever

Patrick Parrinder, 9 November 1989

Stirrings Still 
by Samuel Beckett.
Calder, 25 pp., £1,000, March 1989, 0 7145 4142 7
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Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho 
by Samuel Beckett.
Calder, 128 pp., £10.95, February 1989, 0 7145 4111 7
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‘Make sense who may’: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works 
edited by Robin Davis and Lance Butler.
Smythe, 175 pp., £16, March 1989, 0 86140 286 3
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... magnificent services to Beckett’s readers over the years one would not begrudge the publisher, John Calder (‘I finally arrived at Dover last Sunday with TV cameras waiting for me, the precious copies in my car,’ he confided in the Guardian when Stirrings Still was printed there), his moment of glory.Stirrings Still, in three parts, uses the now classic ...

Special Status

R.J. Berry, 21 February 1985

Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology 
HMSO, 103 pp., £6.40Show More
Human Procreation: Ethical Aspects of the New Techniques 
Oxford, 91 pp., £3.95, December 1984, 0 19 857608 0Show More
The Redundant Male 
by Jeremy Cherfas and John Gribbin.
Bodley Head, 197 pp., £9.95, May 1984, 9780370305233
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Begotten of Made? Human Procreation and Medical Technique 
by Oliver O’Donovan.
Oxford, 88 pp., £2.50, June 1984, 0 19 826678 2
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... to prevent the child being removed from the hospital where it was born; the child was made a ward of court, and then entrusted to the care of the couple who had ‘commissioned’ it in the first place. The Minister of Health promised a ‘fair wind’ for any Private Member’s Bill that would ban surrogate motherhood. As Nature (10 January ...

Protestant Guilt

Tom Paulin, 9 April 1992

Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being 
by Ted Hughes.
Faber, 517 pp., £18.99, March 1992, 0 571 16604 0
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... Jesuit academic which ought to be better-known, Shakespeare’s Religious Background by Peter Mil-ward, Hughes probes Shakespeare’s Catholicism. Following Milward, he notes that his mother’s family, the Ardens, were strongly Catholic, and that the head of the Warwickshire branch, Edward Arden, was first implicated in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth ...

In the Circus

William Wootten: Low-Pressure Poetry, 3 August 2006

The Collected Poems 
by Kenneth Koch.
Knopf, 761 pp., £40, November 2005, 1 4000 4499 5
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... interests. At Harvard, he studied under Delmore Schwartz. More important, he became friends with John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, like-minded fellow students. On graduation Koch moved to New York, where he lived downstairs from the painter Jane Freilicher, became acquainted with the New York art scene, and liked to stare out of the window at passing trains ...

What’s at Stake in Venezuela?

Greg Grandin, 7 February 2019

... second had to do with Latin American efforts, by the Argentine jurist Carlos Calvo and others, to ward off Europe’s attempts to collect debt by force and, occasionally, as in Mexico in the 1860s, sending in troops. The third was the shadow of a territorially aggrandising United States, speeding across North America like a whirligig, into Mexico and then the ...

Emvowelled

Thomas Keymer: Muddy Texts, 25 January 2024

Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early 18th-Century Literature 
by Abigail Williams.
Princeton, 328 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 0 691 17068 8
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... density of satirical allusion. He also admitted to missing the play of intertextuality in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, a satire shot through with innuendo and obfuscation: ‘I did not understand that the Scene of Locket and Peachum’s quarrels was an imitation of one between Brutus and Cassius till I was told it.’ Nothing approached the ...

Cocoa, sir?

Ian Jack: The Royal Navy, 2 January 2003

Sober Men and True: Sailor Lives in the Royal Navy 1900-45 
by Christopher McKee.
Harvard, 285 pp., £19.95, May 2002, 0 674 00736 0
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Rule Britannia: The Victorian and Edwardian Navy 
by Peter Padfield.
Pimlico, 246 pp., £12.50, August 2002, 0 7126 6834 9
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... ships, heaving seas, the swivelling turrets of six-inch guns; our island’s story, often with John Mills. And yet, for all its links with history, its invocation of Drake and Nelson, the grip of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist ...

Heart-Stopping

Ian Hamilton, 25 January 1996

Not Playing for Celtic: Another Paradise Lost 
by David Bennie.
Mainstream, 221 pp., £12.99, October 1995, 1 85158 757 8
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Achieving the Goal 
by David Platt.
Richard Cohen, 244 pp., £12.99, October 1995, 1 86066 017 7
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Captain’s Log: The Gary McAllister Story 
by Gary McAllister and Graham Clark.
Mainstream, 192 pp., £14.99, October 1995, 9781851587902
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Blue Grit: The John Brown Story 
by John Brown and Derek Watson.
Mainstream, 176 pp., £14.99, November 1995, 1 85158 822 1
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Kicking and Screaming: An Oral History of Football in England 
by Rogan Taylor and Andrew Ward.
Robson, 370 pp., £16.95, October 1995, 0 86051 912 0
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A Passion for the Game: Real Lives in Football 
by Tom Watt.
Mainstream, 316 pp., £14.99, October 1995, 1 85158 714 4
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... called Not Playing for Celtic: Another Paradise Lost, and, yes, the paradise in question is indeed John Milton’s – or Big John’s (as he is called here):    Beating Airdrie in this year’s final has hardly sent warning shock-waves reverberating around the football giants of Europe, but having witnessed the ...

Rebellion

C.K. Stead, 7 May 1981

I passed this way 
by Sylvia Ashton-Warner.
Virago, 499 pp., £12, October 1980, 0 86068 160 2
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Spinster 
by Sylvia Ashton-Warner.
Virago, 269 pp., £2.95, October 1980, 0 86068 161 0
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Teacher 
by Sylvia Ashton-Warner.
Virago, 224 pp., £2.95, October 1980, 0 86068 162 9
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... infant pupils were failing to progress in reading because the imported books (usually Janet and John) bore no relation to their lives and emotions. She discovered that for each child there were certain key words related to their day-to-day lives and to their feelings. Find one of his or her key words and the child who had taken three weeks to learn and ...

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