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Laertes has a daughter

Bee Wilson: The Redgraves, 6 June 2013

The Redgraves: A Family Epic 
by Donald Spoto.
Robson, 361 pp., £25, November 2012, 978 1 84954 394 1
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The House of Redgrave: The Lives of a Theatrical Dynasty 
by Tim Adler.
Aurum, 336 pp., £20, July 2012, 978 1 84513 623 9
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... night with Michael before he went down to Plymouth’. But he chose to spend it instead with Noël Coward, with whom he was in the midst of a wild romance. The night Vanessa was born, when Larry announced a daughter to Laertes, Redgrave cried with joy and kissed everyone, as members of the cast crowded into his dressing room bearing flowers. He rang up the ...

These people are intolerable

Richard J. Evans: Hitler and Franco, 5 November 2015

Hitler’s Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War 
by Pierpaolo Barbieri.
Harvard, 349 pp., £22.95, April 2015, 978 0 674 72885 1
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... for nothing.’ The German foreign minister, Ribbentrop, denounced Franco as an ‘ungrateful coward’. Hitler told Mussolini at their next meeting that he would rather ‘have three teeth taken out’ than endure another nine hours of fruitless negotiations with Franco. Spain did send a number of workers and soldiers to help Germany, but as the war went ...

Petulance is not a tragic flaw

Rosemary Hill: Edward and Mrs Simpson, 30 July 2015

Princes at War: The British Royal Family’s Private Battle in the Second World War 
by Deborah Cadbury.
Bloomsbury, 407 pp., £25, April 2015, 978 1 4088 4524 0
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... than his elder brother, he was the good time who was had by all, including, it was said, Noël Coward and the Duchess of Argyll. Of their sister, Princess Mary, who married the Earl of Harewood in 1922, history has had little to say and disappointingly Cadbury has nothing to add. In her detailed account of the family’s responses to the abdication, the ...

Pessimism and Boys

Sheila Fitzpatrick: The diary of a Soviet schoolgirl, 6 May 2004

The Diary of a Soviet Schoolgirl 1932-37 
by Nina Lugovskaya, translated by Joanne Turnbull.
Glas, 215 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 9785717200653
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... have to deal with the country and its people so cruelly and arbitrarily . . . To call Nikolaev a coward! He went willingly to his death for what he believed in, he was better than all those so-called leaders of the working class put together.’ By the time she was 17, Nina’s long depression was lifting, she had some friends and a bit of a social life, she ...

How to Prepare for Debates

Hal Foster: Rasta for Dada, 22 October 2020

Last Loosening: A Handbook for the Con Artist and Those Aspiring to Become One 
by Walter Serner, translated by Mark Kanak.
Twisted Spoon Press, 189 pp., £15, July 2020, 978 80 86264 45 5
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At the Blue Monkey: 33 Outlandish Stories 
by Walter Serner, translated by Erik Butler.
Wakefield, 192 pp., £13.99, December 2019, 978 1 939663 46 7
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... fail. Try crying. ‘Men will be moved and women unspeakably flattered.’ In any case, ‘being a coward is often the best way to save your life.’ Don’t give up hope prematurely: ‘If you’re in the wrong, you still have a chance to win litigation. Even the likes of you.’ When you’re in a real jam, ‘go abroad since fewer obligations can be imposed ...

Diary

Lawrence Hogben: Sinking the ‘Bismarck’, 19 April 2001

... German surface raids on convoys. Hitler, who once said, ‘On land I am a hero but at sea I am a coward,’ withdrew all his large surface ships to home waters. To find, and to fight them again, Sheffield, as part of the Home Fleet, had to sail to Arctic and Norwegian waters.In retrospect, after such actions, junior naval officers always award marks to their ...

On Complaining

Elif Batuman: How to Stay Sane, 20 November 2008

Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida 
by Elisabeth Roudinesco, translated by William McCuaig.
Columbia, 184 pp., £15.50, November 2008, 978 0 231 14300 4
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... of being 11 years old in 1943. Too young to fight in the Resistance, old enough to feel like a coward, he is driven by historical anguish and self-loathing to a fatal hobby: the construction of an all-subsuming meta-conspiracy theory that involves everyone from the Knights Templar to the Cathars to the Third Reich to the Okhrana in a quest for subterranean ...

The Prisoner

Michael Wood, 10 June 1993

Genet 
by Edmund White.
Chatto, 820 pp., £25, June 1993, 9780701133979
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... not a single corner where I could preserve the feeling I was innocent. I recognised I was the coward, the traitor, the thief, the faggot that they saw in me ... I became abject. Slowly I grew accustomed to this condition. I admitted it with tranquillity. The scorn people felt for me changed into hatred: I’d succeeded. And yet what agonies I’d ...

Dog Days

Stan Smith, 11 January 1990

Plays and Other Dramatic Writings by W.H. Auden, 1928-1938 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Faber, 680 pp., £25, July 1989, 0 571 15115 9
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... It is the source of Fascism’s charm as much as of the film star’s glamour, giving ‘to the coward now his hour of power’. In the Westland lunatic asylum, everything the broadcast voice of the Leader promises is given a positive charge by the prefix ‘Westland’. In the Nineveh hotel, a singer gives a positive value to every noun by prefixing the ...

Everybody’s Friend

D.A.N. Jones, 15 July 1982

William Cobbett: The Poor Man’s Friend 
by George Spater.
Cambridge, 318 pp., £15, March 1982, 0 521 22216 8
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... own good, but retired from his attacking position (sometimes ungracefully, so that he was called coward) when dangerous mutiny seemed likely. He was such a good friend to the public that we wonder whether he had any private friends, any private life. George Spater quotes from some notes made by Cobbett’s son, James, who was projecting a biography but found ...

Late Deceiver

Robert Blake, 17 September 1981

Anthony Eden 
by David Carlton.
Allen Lane, 528 pp., £20, August 1981, 0 7139 0829 7
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... Eden as a lightweight either because of his mannerisms – the ‘My Dear’ which echoed Noel Coward and annoyed Dean Acheson – or because of the striking good looks which prompted jealous Italian journalists to dub him ‘Lord Eyelashes’. But everyone to some extent reflects the social usages of his time and place, and if it is true that most ...

Gielgud’s Achievements

Alan Bennett, 20 December 1979

An Actor and his Time 
by John Gielgud.
Sidgwick, 253 pp., £8.95
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... as saying that Gielgud’s production of The Merchant of Venice at the Old Vic ‘made Maugham and Coward seem like two Nonconformist parsons from the Midlands’. It must have been an exciting time to be in the theatre and some of Wardle’s best pages are about the early days of Motley. They had taken as a studio Chippendale’s old workshop behind St ...

People shouldn’t be fat

Zachary Leader, 3 October 1996

Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu 
by Simon Callow.
Cape, 640 pp., £20, March 1995, 0 224 03852 4
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Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles 
by David Thomson.
Little, Brown, 460 pp., £20, September 1996, 0 316 91437 1
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... puts it, ‘Falstaff is more than just the good man ... he is a drunk, a liar, a braggart, a coward, a bad influence and a thoroughgoing failure ... Falstaff was the Welles who owed money all over the world, who had abandoned and exploited associates, who had lied, tricked and feasted away the years.’ In other words, he was a mess; like Welles ...

Motherblame

Anna Vaux: Motherhood, 21 May 1998

Bad Mothers: The Politics of Blame in 20th-Century America 
edited by Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky.
New York, 416 pp., £16, April 1998, 0 8147 5119 9
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Madonna and Child: Towards a New Politics of Motherhood 
by Melissa Benn.
Cape, 288 pp., £12.99, January 1998, 0 224 03821 4
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... the pacifist mother whose pathological attachment to her son was turning him into an emasculated coward, thus hastening moral disintegration and heading the nation into ruin’. The second edition of Wylie’s Generation of Vipers was published at the height of McCarthyism, and described motherhood and Communism as similarly dangerous forces. The spotlight ...

Diary

William Carter: The Case of the Missing Barrels, 14 December 2017

... rarely appeared in the office and never visited the oilfields. He was arrogant, incompetent and a coward. I asked several of the interviewees about the theft of trucks by the employee and got a story very different from the one given by the country manager. They told me that in the middle of the fighting, the employee, rather than let the assets of a company ...

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