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Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen: Suicide, 17 November 2016

Farewell to the World: A History of Suicide 
by Marzio Barbagli, translated by Lucinda Byatt.
Polity, 407 pp., £19.99, September 2015, 978 0 7456 6245 9
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... began to take their own lives in droves towards the middle of the 18th century – in 1759 Lady Montagu called it a ‘fashion’ – but this striking development certainly wasn’t caused by a lack of social integration, or by what George Cheyne, in a bestselling book of 1733, diagnosed as The English Malady, a melancholy he attributed to the effects ...

At Tate Britain

Tom Crewe: Burne-Jones, 24 January 2019

... Present in the Muppet Christmas Carol. His friend Mary Gaskell was sent drawings of ‘The Fat Lady’, who in her black dress resembles a monumental tadpole, wriggling on a sofa or wallowing in a hammock. But his talent for line is also evident across the paintings: in the thorny branches that weave tortuously through the Briar Rose series, or loop the ...

Under the Railway Line

Christian Davies: The Battle for Poland’s History, 9 May 2019

... One Sunday​ in October 2017, a crowd gathered outside Our Lady, Queen of Polish Martyrs church, in the eastern Warsaw neighbourhood of Grochów. They were there to see the unveiling of a commemorative plaque: ‘In Memory of the 200,000 Poles Murdered in Warsaw in the German Death Camp KL Warschau.’ Flanked by two soldiers, the plaque was sprinkled with holy water by a priest and then saluted by an army officer, who laid a wreath ...

The Head in the Shed

Gavin Francis: Reading Bones, 21 January 2021

Written in Bone: Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind 
by Sue Black.
Doubleday, 359 pp., £18.99, September 2020, 978 0 85752 690 8
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... small sloping eyes.’ Where there is humour, it’s often very dark. Black tells of an old lady murdered for her pension by her carer, who turned herself in to the police twenty years later. She told them where to find the torso and limbs, but confessed she’d kept the head wrapped in plastic in her potting shed. ‘Most cases end up with a ...

Diary

Rosa Lyster: Where water used to be, 2 April 2020

... by an indigenous mother) and ‘quenching the thirst of the bourgeoisie’ (represented by a pious lady).In Mexico City, everywhere is a place where water used to be. Almost nothing remains of the five lakes the original city was built on, although the memory of water is there in the names of the streets and the highways that were once canals. Twenty-two ...

The Duckworth School of Writers

Frank Kermode, 20 November 1980

Human Voices 
by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Collins, 177 pp., £5.25, September 1980, 0 00 222280 9
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Winter Garden 
by Beryl Bainbridge.
Duckworth, 157 pp., £5.95, October 1980, 0 7156 1495 9
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... unfailing wit and laconic accuracy: ‘The ground in front of the Metropole was being dug up by lady road-menders,’ and the like. Equally intrusive are a number of gnomic remarks, by no means as lucid as Mrs Fitzgerald’s obiter dicta, though no less confident: ‘love depended on the ability to like oneself and required an understanding of eternal ...

Unfortunate Ecgfrith

Tom Shippey: Mercian Kings, 8 May 2025

The Mercian Chronicles: King Offa and the Birth of the Anglo-Saxon State AD 630-918 
by Max Adams.
Head of Zeus, 448 pp., £25, February, 978 1 83893 325 8
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... for his wife and any children.On Æthelred’s death in 911, his wife Æthelflæd became ‘the Lady of the Mercians’, as Adams puts it, and the last independent ruler of Mercia. With her brother, King Edward of Wessex, she co-ordinated a campaign to reconquer Danish Mercia, and Edward’s son Æthelstan (called ‘the Victorious’ by the Vikings) at ...

Old Ladies

D.A.N. Jones, 20 August 1992

Dear Departed: A Memoir 
by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Maria Louise Ascher.
Aidan Ellis, 346 pp., £18, April 1992, 0 85628 186 7
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Anna, Soror 
by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Walter Kaiser.
Harvill, 256 pp., £7.99, May 1992, 0 00 271222 9
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That Mighty Sculptor, Time 
by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Walter Kaiser.
Aidan Ellis, 224 pp., £18, June 1992, 9780856281594
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Coming into the End Zone: A Memoir 
by Doris Grumbach.
Norton, 256 pp., £13.95, April 1992, 0 393 03009 1
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Anything Once 
by Joan Wyndham.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 178 pp., £15.95, March 1992, 9781856191296
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Within Tuscany 
by Matthew Spender.
Viking, 366 pp., £16.99, April 1992, 0 670 83836 5
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... 28: she has read a few advanced books and ‘has unjustly acquired a reputation for being a young lady with ideas’, declares Yourcenar. The author follows their engagement trip and honeymoon travels, through Central Europe, Italy and France, with an almost envious enjoyment. She seems to want to be ‘a member of the wedding’. Yourcenar knew her father ...

Do Not Scribble

Amanda Vickery: Letter-Writing, 4 November 2010

The Pen and the People: English Letter-Writers 1660-1800 
by Susan Whyman.
Oxford, 400 pp., £30, October 2009, 978 0 19 953244 5
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Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters 
by Dena Goodman.
Cornell, 408 pp., £24.50, June 2009, 978 0 8014 7545 0
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... Romantic creativity than an inescapable chore. Goodman’s study is a cultural history of the ‘lady of letters’. From 1660, French cultural theorists drew a distinction between letters and other kinds of writing, linking the former to ladies of birth. ‘Whereas all writing had previously been considered primarily a male occupation, letter-writing now ...

Günter Grass’s Uniqueness

J.P. Stern, 5 February 1981

... Monastery blazed in the name of St Francis, who had loved fire and sung hymns to it. Our Lady Street burned for Father and Son at once. Needless to say the Lumber Market, Coal Market and Haymarket burned to the ground. In Baker Street the ovens burned, and the bread and rolls with them. In Milk Pitcher Street the milk boiled over. Only the West ...

Birditis

Ian Penman: The Obsession with Charlie Parker, 23 January 2014

Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker 
by Gary Giddins.
Minnesota, revised edition, 195 pp., £15, October 2013, 978 0 8166 9041 1
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Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker 
by Stanley Crouch.
Harper, 365 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 06 200559 5
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Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker 
by Chuck Haddix.
Illinois, 188 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 252 03791 7
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... published in 1989 and officially attributed to ‘Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe’ (see also Lady Sings the Blues by ‘Billie Holiday with William Duffy’). Depending on mood, ethnicity, ideology, drug of choice, an oral biography can strike the reader as an authentic reproduction of voice, in all its self-contradictory rhythm and curl – or ...

Adieu, madame

Terry Castle: Sarah Bernhardt, 4 November 2010

Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt 
by Robert Gottlieb.
Yale, 233 pp., £18.99, October 2010, 978 0 300 14127 6
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... to market her own image on a truly international scale. She was a self-brander – like Madonna or Lady Gaga – avant la lettre. Painters and sculptors and designers flocked to her. Canny advertisers – especially in America – clamoured to use her picture on trade cards and soap packaging. Virtually every other ‘vintage’ postcard or trade card now to ...

The Last Years of Edward Kelley, Alchemist to the Emperor

Charles Nicholl: Edward Kelly, 19 April 2001

... and his chambers shall be full of modesty and comfort; I will bring the east wind over him as a lady of comfort, and she shall sit upon his castles in triumph.’ Here is an edited transcript of Kelley in full flight, in front of the ‘shew-stone’ at the lodgings he shared with Dee in Prague near the Bethlehem Chapel: E.K.: I see a garland of white ...

Tickle and Flutter

Terry Castle: Maude Hutchins’s Revenge, 3 July 2008

... Toklas’s oldest friends, the alluring Bobsy Goodspeed: ‘a good-looking, silly-clever Evanston lady, wife of the foremost trustee and lover of the wife of the president of the University of Chicago’. If the description of Bobsy is accurate, the liaison would have been a hair-raising frolic indeed: Bobsy was president of the Arts Club of Chicago and her ...

You are not Cruikshank

David Bromwich: Gillray’s Mischief, 21 September 2023

James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire 
by Tim Clayton.
Yale, 400 pp., £50, November 2022, 978 1 913107 32 1
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Uproar! Satire, Scandal and Printmakers in Georgian London 
by Alice Loxton.
Icon, 397 pp., £25, March, 978 1 78578 954 0
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Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps and Spectres 
by Joseph Monteyne.
Toronto, 301 pp., £49.99, June 2022, 978 1 4875 2774 7
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... a smaller scale, he could always do one-off travesties – things like his send-up of Reynolds’s Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces. Gillray’s parody was called La Belle Assemblée. In place of the gracious solitary aristocrat, multiple ladies are muscling into line for the sacrifice; among them, as Loxton puts it, ‘the rotund, overstuffed Mrs ...

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