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One of the Lads

Mary Beard, 18 June 1998

Hadrian: The Restless Emperor 
by Anthony Birley.
Routledge, 424 pp., £40, October 1997, 9780415165440
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... as the Emperor Claudius’ mother, the subject of Antonia Augusta: Portrait of a Great Roman Lady, not to mention Lepidus, the Tarnished Triumvir) have been put through the biographical machine under Routledge’s auspices. But it cannot have been mere commercial pressure that induced the immensely knowledgeable, careful and scholarly Birley to concoct ...

Ah, la vie!

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Lytton Strachey’s letters, 1 December 2005

The Letters of Lytton Strachey 
edited by Paul Levy.
Viking, 698 pp., £30, March 2005, 0 670 89112 6
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... suffering. (His hatred of the Victorians did not extend to the poet who sang the praises of ‘Our Lady of Pain’.) Though the publicity material for this volume calls attention to the ‘shocking’ evidence of sado-masochism in his last serious affair, with Roger Senhouse, Strachey’s bent for victimisation is apparent long before the cheerful allusions to ...

Les zombies, c’est vous

Thomas Jones: Zombies, 26 January 2012

Zone One 
by Colson Whitehead.
Harvill Secker, 259 pp., £14.99, October 2011, 978 1 84655 598 5
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... the muzzle of his assault rifle to the temple of Mr Chuckles or Her Most Exalted Highness the Lady Griselda, smiled for the birdie, and had Angela take a picture before he splattered their craniums.’ There can’t be many people who’ll read this without thinking of Private Lynndie England. ‘I’ve been getting questions about Abu Ghraib and 9/11 ...

Rumour Is Utterly Unfounded

Jenny Diski: Family Newspapers, 8 October 2009

Family Newspapers?: Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press 1918-78 
by Adrian Bingham.
Oxford, 298 pp., £55, February 2009, 978 0 19 927958 6
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... even today. The court and then the public learned that the marriage was unconsummated, but that Lady Russell had nevertheless given birth to a son and was shown to have had several lovers. The Daily Mirror had a photo of Lord John Russell ‘In Women’s Guise’ after evidence had been heard about his cross-dressing, and the Express (owned by the ...

A Smile at My Own Temerity

John Barrell: William Hogarth, 16 February 2017

William Hogarth: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings 
by Elizabeth Einberg.
Yale, 432 pp., £95, November 2016, 978 0 300 22174 9
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... of pleasant or indignant humour’. In 1978 Cecil Beaton attributes to the society philanthropist Lady Anne Tree ‘an oversize personality and character – rorty, Hogarthian and with exquisite understanding of character’, and in 2003 a writer in the Economist evokes a ‘Hogarthian throng of cheerful tradesmen and naughty ’prentice boys’. ‘March of ...

Eat your own misery

Tessa Hadley: Bette Howland’s Stories, 4 March 2021

‘Blue in Chicago’ and Other Stories 
by Bette Howland.
Picador, 329 pp., £12.99, July 2020, 978 1 5290 3582 7
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... warm and pretend to be busy. The financial pages are ‘in brisk demand’. One nicely-spoken old lady wears a fur coat pinned with diaper pins and gym shoes with no laces. The social history of Howland’s stories is focused on several generations of a single Jewish family. A long-dead great-grandmother from Romania wore gypsy scarves and earrings and read ...

Goodbye Glossies

Amy Larocca: Vogue World, 1 December 2022

A Visible Man 
by Edward Enninful.
Bloomsbury, 265 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 1 5266 4153 3
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... from that made by his predecessor, Alexandra Shulman, whose mother had co-authored a book called Lady Behave: A Guide to Modern Manners. Shulman writes in her memoir that she only needs to ‘put on a Chanel jacket and a pair of heels and immediately I can be seen … as somebody who, at some point, edited Vogue’.Vogue had, of course, played a huge part in ...

How not to be disgusting

Anne Hollander, 6 December 1990

Coco Chanel: A Biography 
by Axel Madsen.
Bloomsbury, 388 pp., £20, October 1990, 0 7475 0762 7
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... it had been important for their initial success that not only was she not an artist, she was not a lady. Instead she was a star, the very first in her field. As such, she has inspired several star-biographies, of which Madsen’s is the latest. The biographies of Chanel that were attempted during her lifetime had to be given up, because interviewing her proved ...

Studied Luxury

Margaret Anne Doody, 20 April 1995

No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton 
by Shari Benstock.
Hamish Hamilton, 546 pp., £20, October 1994, 0 241 13298 3
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Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life 
by Eleanor Dwight.
Harry Adams, 335 pp., $39.95, May 1994, 0 8109 3971 1
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... the social-financial Wharton and the artist for whose sake we are interested in the society lady with the formidable wealth. The reader of Benstock’s book may soon wish to go back to Lewis’s Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975). It was Lewis who first told us about Wharton’s affair with Fullerton and who printed the puzzling erotic text of ...

Masters

Christopher Ricks, 3 May 1984

Swift: The Man, His Works and the Age: Vol III. Dean Swift 
by Irvin Ehrenpreis.
Methuen, 1066 pp., £40, December 1983, 0 416 85400 1
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Swift’s Tory Politics 
by F.P. Lock.
Duckworth, 189 pp., £18, November 1983, 0 7156 1755 9
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Jonathan Swift: Political Writer 
by J.A. Downie.
Routledge, 391 pp., £25, March 1984, 0 7100 9645 3
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The Character of Swift’s Satire 
edited by Claude Rawson.
Associated University Presses, 343 pp., £22.50, April 1984, 0 87413 209 6
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... in other words, had gone through the curriculum laid down in “A Letter to a Very Young Lady” and had emerged with first-class honours.’ But this is no sneer; Ehrenpreis, an honourable professor, is not cadgingly crying down his line of work. He is aware that education is not the be-all and end-all, but it is at least a begin-all, of life. Much ...

Bonking with Berenson

Nicholas Penny, 17 September 1987

Bernard Berenson. Vol. II: The Making of a Legend 
by Ernest Samuels.
Harvard, 680 pp., £19.95, May 1987, 0 674 06779 7
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The Partnership: The Secret Association of Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen 
by Colin Simpson.
Bodley Head, 323 pp., £15, April 1987, 9780370305851
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... really meant. ‘I said just now that Signor Crespi’s portrait’ – a painting of a lady now in the National Gallery in London and agreed to be a Titian, but proposed by Berenson as a copy of a Giorgione – had a certain family resemblance to the one of the former Doetsch Collection. There, however, barring morphological details, the likeness ...

Stuck with Your Own Face

Bee Wilson: The Beauty Industry, 8 July 2010

Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry 
by Geoffrey Jones.
Oxford, 412 pp., £25, February 2010, 978 0 19 955649 6
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... for female beauty remained Margaret Lockwood, Hitchcock’s other early star (so good in The Lady Vanishes), whose top eyelids were sootily shadowed, mascara’d and lined, but whose lower lids remained untouched. Elsie’s eyeliner days were long behind her; her grooming consisted of Pond’s Cold Cream, a spritz of L’Air du Temps and a dab of Max ...

Merry Companies

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: The Golden Age of Dutch painting, 20 January 2005

Dutch 17th-century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution 
by Wayne Franits.
Yale, 328 pp., £45, June 2004, 0 300 10237 2
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... playing cards in an Outdoor Party by Esaias van de Velde. The precise message of Gerrit Dou’s Lady at Her Toilet might be difficult to articulate, but the mirror and open bird-cage suggest that we are looking at a commentary on vanity and desire – assuming, of course, that Dou meant us to recall both the vanitas associations of mirrors and the fact that ...

Astral Projection

Alison Light: The Case of the Croydon Poltergeist, 17 December 2020

The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story 
by Kate Summerscale.
Bloomsbury, 345 pp., £18.99, October, 978 1 4088 9545 0
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... institute. But going ‘up West’ to South Ken she enjoyed the attentions of doctors and their lady wives, barristers, broadcasters and scientists. The daughter of a plumber and gas-fitter, she had the Countess Nora eating out of her hand.Inevitably the scene darkens. More and more sittings; more elaborate and invasive tests of authenticity. Alma strips ...

Holding all the strings

Ian Gilmour, 27 July 1989

Macmillan. Vol. II: 1957-1986 
by Alistair Horne.
Macmillan, 741 pp., £18.95, June 1989, 0 333 49621 3
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... security. Because Ivanov, an attaché at the Soviet Embassy, had also been involved with the lady in the case, ergo in Labour’s view Profumo was a security risk. Mr Profumo was inexcusably at fault in lying about his association with Christine Keeler. But of all the lies that have been told in the House of Commons, Jack Profumo’s denial of any ...

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