But the view is so lovely

Michael Wood: ‘Mr Wilder and Me’, 4 March 2021

Mr Wilder and Me 
by Jonathan Coe.
Viking, 245 pp., £16.99, November 2020, 978 0 241 45466 4
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... of her ‘two talents … two things that give me a reason to go on living … is required any more’. The two things are ‘writing music and bringing up children’. This is a little melodramatic, but she knows this. At one point she imagines it may be her ‘destiny … to be always alone’, yet she also sees this as a ‘tragic, self-dramatising ...

Who’s best?

Douglas Johnson, 27 September 1990

The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism: A Century of French Perception 
edited by Denis Lacorne, Jacques Rupnik and Marie-France Toinet, translated by Gerald Turner.
Macmillan, 258 pp., £35, August 1990, 0 333 49025 8
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... time these impressions change. In the campus bookshop he finds editions of Duns Scotus and Saint Thomas Aquinas (who, he says, have never been translated into French); in the library there are yards of shelving devoted to French literature. He likens America to 19th-century Britain in being at the same time innovatory and conservative. His Paris ...

Holy Terrors

Penelope Fitzgerald, 4 December 1986

‘Elizabeth’: The Author of ‘Elizabeth and her German Garden’ 
by Karen Usborne.
Bodley Head, 341 pp., £15, October 1986, 0 370 30887 5
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Alison Uttley: The Life of a Country Child 
by Denis Judd.
Joseph, 264 pp., £15.95, October 1986, 0 7181 2449 9
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Richmal Crompton: The Woman behind William 
by Mary Cadogan.
Allen and Unwin, 169 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 04 928054 6
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... of, and thought of herself, as a grande dame – inher case, of children’s literature, or, more specifically, of stories about ‘animals who behave like humans, and even mix with them on equal terms’. She hadn’t Beatrix Potter’s insight in these matters. In Beatrix Potter’s books there is a moment when, without explanation, the rabbit loses ...

Internal Combustion

David Trotter, 6 June 1996

The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. Vol. III: 1900-1910 
edited by Thomas Pinney.
Macmillan, 482 pp., £50, December 1995, 9780333637333
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... horses; but the car is a time-machine on which one can slide from one century to another at no more trouble than the pushing forward of a lever.’ The smoothness and audacity of the narrative transitions between ancient and modern in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910) may owe something to the stinking Lanchester: or, rather, to ...

Short Cuts

James Butler: Bellicose and Underinformed, 22 September 2022

... alone NHS dentists) are harder to come by. In June this year, 102,000 people waited more than twelve hours to be seen in A&E, and another 441,000 waited for between four and twelve hours. Social care budgets, which have remained below 2010 levels over the last decade, leave patients who should be discharged stranded in hospital – accounting ...

The Eng. Lit. Patient

Jeremy Noel-Tod: Andrew Motion, 11 September 2003

The Invention of Dr Cake 
by Andrew Motion.
Faber, 142 pp., £12.99, February 2003, 0 571 21631 5
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Public Property 
by Andrew Motion.
Faber, 112 pp., £6.99, May 2003, 0 571 21859 8
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... count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,’ as Humbert Humbert says in Lolita); Tabor is a more restricting instrument. Motion warns us that Tabor was a sometime imitator of Wordsworth with a poetic tone as ‘dry as biscuit’. And at moments he plausibly resembles a genuine Wordsworthian bore (the narrator of ‘The Thorn’, for example): ‘a ...

What’s the problem with critical art?

Hal Foster: Rancière’s Aesthetics, 10 October 2013

Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art 
by Jacques Rancière, translated by Zakir Paul.
Verso, 272 pp., £20, June 2013, 978 1 78168 089 6
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... applied arts was challenged. Art as a privileged category of its own was finally secured. Clearly, more is at stake in this account of the aesthetic regime than any local reading of modernist art as a passage from figuration to abstraction; the shift from the representative order, Rancière writes in The Future of the Image, ‘does not consist in painting ...

Sausages and Cigarillos

Michael Hofmann: Sebastian Barry, 7 September 2023

Old God’s Time 
by Sebastian Barry.
Faber, 261 pp., £18.99, February, 978 0 571 33277 9
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... uninterested, but with a strange surge of reluctance and even dread – deep deep down’. ‘He more or less laughed, not a full laugh, a sort of dampened chuckle.’ ‘He dragged off his coat as if it were a mental hindrance and let it drop to the floor.’ From this oddly encumbered, shy, somehow reinhibited manner – as though he were impersonating a ...

Sheets

Robert Bernard Martin, 4 April 1985

The Collected Letters of William Morris. Vol. I: 1848-1880 
edited by Norman Kelvin.
Princeton, 626 pp., £50.30, April 1984, 0 691 06501 2
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... Scawen Blunt wrote in his diary, ‘He is the most wonderful man I have known,’ then added more equivocally: ‘unique in this, that he had no thought for anything or person, including himself, but only for the work he had in hand.’ This handsome new edition of Morris’s letters does not entirely answer our natural question of how a man so often ...

Wives, Queens, Distant Princesses

John Bayley, 23 October 1986

The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
by Molly Lefebure.
Gollancz, 287 pp., £15.95, July 1986, 0 575 03871 3
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Jane Welsh Carlyle 
by Virginia Surtees.
Michael Russell, 294 pp., £12.95, September 1986, 0 85955 134 2
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... radical chic would have been much the same as his, but we might have the impression that it was a more settled part of her life-style and her way of facing society. Both made considerable social efforts, anxious to charm, particularly prospective employers and men in the media. Signs of strain in the marriage? Rather conspicuously absent, except for young ...

I scribble, you write

Tessa Hadley: Women Reading, 26 September 2013

The Woman Reader 
by Belinda Jack.
Yale, 330 pp., £9.99, August 2013, 978 0 300 19720 4
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Curious Subjects 
by Hilary Schor.
Oxford, 271 pp., £41.99, January 2013, 978 0 19 992809 5
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... the saints in Latin in tenth-century Saxony? Hrotsvit hopes that ‘the Giver of my talent all the more be justly praised through me, the more limited the female intellect is believed to be.’ No doubt the self-deprecation is mostly literary convention, but it feels a long way from crushing flint with teeth. And what do ...

Delightful to be Robbed

E.S. Turner: Stand and deliver, 9 May 2002

Outlaws and Highwaymen: The Cult of the Robber in England from the Middle Ages to the 19th century 
by Gillian Spraggs.
Pimlico, 372 pp., £12.50, November 2001, 0 7126 6479 3
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... up in six years 3266 devotees of thuggee, hanged 412 and imprisoned or transported hundreds more, extinguishing a centuries-old cult. The method of this religious fraternity had been to ingratiate themselves with travellers, strangle them suddenly with a scarf, then rob and bury them. By contrast, the English highwayman behaved, or tried to behave, like ...

Enter Hamilton

Eric Foner, 6 October 2016

American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 
by Alan Taylor.
Norton, 704 pp., £30, November 2016, 978 0 393 08281 4
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... anti-immigrant Know-Nothings of the 1850s, white supremacist politicians of the Jim Crow era, and more recent hucksters and demagogues including Joe McCarthy and George Wallace. Not to mention more respectable types such as Richard Nixon, whose ‘Southern strategy’ offered a blueprint for mobilising white resentment over ...

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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... great length, only a year later. De Morgan lived to be 88 and wrote seven novels, as well as two more which were completed by another hand and published posthumously. They were mostly long books, and the first four came out at annual intervals, for de Morgan seems to have found fiction very easy after all that arduous tiling. He was writing at a time when ...

Damn all

Scott Malcomson, 23 September 1993

Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America 
by Robert Hughes.
Oxford, 224 pp., £12.95, June 1993, 0 19 507676 1
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... and bulimic vulgarity got the genius it deserved,’ only to write a little later, apropos of Thomas McEvilley’s remark that ‘somehow the age demanded’ Schnabel: ‘the notion that the man is an emanation of the Zeitgeist no doubt matches the artist’s fantasies about himself.’ It also, of course, matches what Hughes has just said about him. I ...