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Semi-Happy

Michael Wood, 22 February 1996

James Whale: A Biography 
by Mark Gatiss.
Cassell, 182 pp., £12.99, July 1995, 0 304 32861 8
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... as well as of his ‘sordid death’. So is the mystery all about homophobia? The director Robert Aldrich thought so. ‘Jimmy Whale was the first guy who was blackballed because he refused to stay in the closet.’ Mark Gatiss has an interesting interpretation of what this means: not the flaunting of gayness but a settled homosexual relationship, the ...

Tea-Leafing

Duncan Campbell, 19 October 1995

The Autobiography of a Thief 
by Bruce Reynolds.
Bantam, 320 pp., £15.99, April 1995, 0 593 03779 0
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... to dissuade senior detectives from having a high profile. They were irritated with people like Robert ‘Fabian of the Yard’ Fabian claiming glory for what were essentially team efforts. The high-profile gumshoe was discouraged. Partly as a result of that, there have been few detective memoirs of any note since. While most crime fiction is written from ...

Mannequin-Maker

Patrick Parrinder, 5 October 1995

The Black Book 
by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Güneli Gün.
Faber, 400 pp., £14.99, July 1995, 0 571 16892 2
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... been held responsible for the principal strands of occultism and secret brotherhood in the West. Robert Graves, for example, asserted that Freemasonry began as a Sufi sect and that both the Templars and medieval practitioners of the ‘black arts’ such as Roger Bacon took their inspiration from Sufi doctrines encountered in Palestine and Moorish ...

A Dingy Start to the Day

Frank Kermode, 10 September 1992

Kingsley Amis: Modern Novelist 
by Dale Salwak.
Harvester, 302 pp., £24.99, April 1992, 0 7450 1096 2
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London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin 
by Rob Nixon.
Oxford, 229 pp., £27.50, May 1992, 0 19 506717 7
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... Not long ago I, too, was browsing in the Huntingdon files and found a large box of letters from Robert Conquest to Amis; the other side of the correspondence was missing, and what was there contained lots of limericks and few confessional items for the use of any future biographer of Conquest, possibly Salwak. It seemed somehow a slightly dingy way of ...

Stepchildren

Elspeth Barker, 9 April 1992

Stepsons 
by Robert Liddell.
Peter Owen, 228 pp., £14.95, February 1992, 0 7206 0853 8
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Farewell Sidonia 
by Erich Hackl.
Cape, 135 pp., £5.99, February 1992, 0 224 02901 0
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... The end-papers of Stepsons show that classic of nostalgia, a family long ago at tea in a summer garden. A laughing aunt clutches a terrier; ranged round the table are a baleful grandmother, an alert little girl, a father scarcely visible and two boys whose faces rend the heart. Gentle, vulnerable, unbearably tense, they are poised for flight. Opposite, as far off as possible, sits their enemy, the Scottish Gerwoman, the stepmother of this tragic autobiographical novel ...

Seven Veils and Umpteen Versions

Maria Tippett, 30 January 1992

Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle 
by Elaine Showalter.
Bloomsbury, 242 pp., £15.99, March 1991, 0 7475 0827 5
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Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing 
by Elaine Showalter.
Oxford, 193 pp., £22.50, September 1991, 0 19 812383 3
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... established icons such as Salome were given a homosexual sub-text. New icons, most notably Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde dealt with the myth of men’s double lives. This heralded the beginning of what Showalter calls the Gay Gothic. Finally ‘the masculine and homosocial “romance” of adventure and quest’ offered as a vehicle ...

Diary

Christopher Hadley: The Lake Taupo Stamp, 18 September 1997

... Taupo resurfaced. The auctioneers J. Robineau et Cie sold their Lot 391 to the American dealer Robert Lyman of New York State. It is unclear who he was acting for, although Norman Williams believes he was buying on behalf of a syndicate in Canada. The stamp was estimated at 50,000 frs; it sold for 110,000 frs or about £10,500. Two years later it finally ...

Enisled

John Sutherland: Matthew Arnold, 19 March 1998

A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold 
by Ian Hamilton.
Bloomsbury, 241 pp., £17.99, March 1998, 0 7475 3671 6
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... drudgery as an inspector of elementary schools?’ Ian Hamilton, the author of a fine biography of Robert Lowell, has made himself a connoisseur of the pitfalls of biography since the frustrations of his search for J.D. Salinger. In Keepers of the Flame (1992) he surveyed the legal and practical impediments: the prophylactic bonfire, the deathbed ...
... and still enjoying the fruits of despotism. The most recent victim of his political guile was Robert Gelbard, the American envoy to the former Yugoslavia. The primary goal of American policy in the Balkans at present is to secure a withdrawal of US ground troops from Bosnia at the earliest possible date. The prospect of a more stable Bosnia was given an ...

Kafka’s Dog

P.N. Furbank, 13 November 1997

The Treasure Chest 
by Johann Peter Hebel, translated by John Hibberd.
Libris/Penguin, 175 pp., £19.95, May 1995, 0 14 044639 7
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... Alemannische Gedichte, which became very famous, earning him the reputation of a sort of German Robert Burns. Goethe admired the poems greatly, and Jean Paul declared he never tired of reading them. Thus when he took on the editorship of the Rheinländische Hausfreund he was already known as a writer; and soon the almanac was being read, and items being ...

A Nony Mouse

Ange Mlinko: The ‘Batrachomyomachia’, 16 July 2020

‘The Battle between the Frogs and the Mice’: A Tiny Homeric Epic 
by A.E. Stallings.
Paul Dry, 109 pp., £19.99, October 2019, 978 1 58988 142 6
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Like 
by A.E. Stallings.
Farrar, Straus, 160 pp., £9.99, October 2019, 978 0 374 53868 2
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... are fond are perhaps too blithely rinsed off. Children betray their mothers. I thought of Robert Frost, in a poem like ‘Design’, sidling up to the reader before shivving him with ‘design of darkness to appal’. Much of Stallings’s work can seem like light verse that suddenly appals: solid, foundational stanzas that chat directly with ...

Blighted Plain

Jonathan Meades: Wiltshire’s Multitudes, 6 January 2022

The Buildings of England: Wiltshire 
by Julian Orbach, Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 828 pp., £45, June 2021, 978 0 300 25120 3
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... were then part of Team 4; and the first hyperbolic paraboloid roof in Britain, created in 1957 by Robert Townsend for the Wilton Royal carpet factory. Townsend’s own house in the otherwise benighted village of Durrington is extant and retains its freshness. Orbach considers it ‘the most interesting house of its period in the county’. The ...

Short Cuts

Richard J. Evans: Rewritten History, 2 December 2021

... We won’t allow people to censor our past,’ Robert Jenrick, then communities secretary, said in January. ‘It is our privilege in this country to have inherited a deep, rich, fascinating and yes, often complex, past. We are mature enough as a society to understand that and to seek to pass it on, warts and all ...

Bug-Affairs

Hugh Pennington: Bedbugs!, 6 January 2011

... to infect them. Southall’s worries about the role of ships in transporting bedbugs persisted. Robert Usinger, the author of the monumental Monograph of Cimicidae (the family to which the bedbug belongs), saw a thriving colony of the tropical bedbug, Cimex hemipterus, on a liner sailing from Hong Kong to San Francisco. But local transport is just as much ...

Weeding in the Nude

Ange Mlinko: Edna St Vincent Millay, 26 May 2022

Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St Vincent Millay 
edited by Daniel Mark Epstein.
Yale, 390 pp., £28, March, 978 0 300 24568 4
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... morning, lying there with a broken neck.Millay rose to fame while still in her twenties. She beat Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens for the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Although she became a proselytiser in her last decade, devoted to progressive causes to which she fitted her verses (‘not poems, posters,’ she admitted), she was still in demand for lectures and ...

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