Diary

Christopher Prendergast: Piss where you like, 17 March 2005

... the tsar’s army and made his way hair-raisingly across Europe to end up in Liverpool. His wife, Elizabeth, no less enterprising, left Ukraine in search of work, also ending up in Liverpool, which is where they met and married. The plan was to emigrate to New York, going by way of Dublin, but when they got to Dublin they decided to settle there. I never knew ...

Maritime (1934-67)

Mick Imlah, 7 February 2002

... and she bore it royally. Winston’s flamboyant tribute to ‘the Queens’ (She and her sister Elizabeth): ‘Their service Hastened our haul to victory by a year!’ But dear, oh dear, when Cunard got her back, Her Korkoid floorings marred by a million boots, It also proved that certain servicemen Had carved their callow names on the panellings: ‘Harvey ...

Using the Heavens

John Bossy: Renaissance Astrology, 1 June 2000

Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer 
by Anthony Grafton.
Harvard, 284 pp., £21.95, February 2000, 0 674 09555 3
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... his almanacs to find out what line he should take between the poles of English politics, Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots? My natural bent is to think that he is chatting the man up: I do not find him saying such things in his official correspondence with Paris; nor do I find that on such grounds kings and councillors made their decisions about the ...

Blueshirt

Seamus Deane, 4 June 1981

Yeats, Ireland and Fascism 
by Elizabeth Cullingford.
Macmillan, 251 pp., £15, February 1981, 0 333 26199 2
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... wildness of On the Boiler as characteristic of his degraded or defeated intelligence. Now, with Elizabeth Cullingford’s book to aid us, we need no longer be guilty of such facile misreadings. The solid virtues of the book – its exactness of reference, its respect for chronology, its anxiety to provide a context for every text, its emphasis on the ...

Rigging and Bending

Simon Adams: James VI & I, 9 October 2003

The Cradle King: A Life of James VI & I 
by Alan Stewart.
Chatto, 438 pp., £20, February 2003, 0 7011 6984 2
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... the Scottish Crown. He was now dependent for petty cash on his annual ‘gratuity’ from Elizabeth I, and his future was effectively mortgaged on his succession to the English throne. James notoriously showed no interest in martial matters of any kind, with the exception of the few brief and almost bloodless campaigns against rebels in Scotland ...

If Goofy Could Talk

Frank Cioffi, 6 April 1995

When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals 
by Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy.
Cape, 268 pp., £14.99, September 1994, 0 224 03554 1
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The Hidden Life of Dogs 
by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.
Weidenfeld, 148 pp., £12.50, May 1994, 0 297 81461 3
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The Tribe of Tiger 
by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.
Weidenfeld, 240 pp., £12.99, October 1994, 0 297 81508 3
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... whales: ‘Perhaps whales sing sagas of great acts of sacrifice by whale cows of days gone by.’ Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who is a splendid storyteller and has some splendid stories to tell, also wishes to persuade us that we have underestimated the analogies between humans and animals and, because her accounts are so circumstantial, she often ...

Follow-the-Leader

Colm Tóibín: Bishop v. Lowell, 14 May 2009

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell 
edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton.
Faber, 875 pp., £40, November 2008, 978 0 571 24308 2
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... Lowell wrote the poem ‘Water’ about being on the coast of Maine in the summer of 1948 with Elizabeth Bishop; he put it first in his collection For the Union Dead, which he published in 1964. He sent Bishop a draft of the poem in March 1962, explaining that it was ‘more romantic and grey than the whole truth, for all has been sunny between us. Indeed ...

Like a Retired Madam

Rosemary Dinnage: Entranced!, 4 February 1999

Mesmerised: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain 
by Alison Winter.
Chicago, 464 pp., £23.95, December 1998, 0 226 90219 6
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... lower-class material. He had two star performers, teenage Irish maidservants called Jane and Elizabeth O’Key, who were in the hospital for hysteria and epilepsy. During their fits both tended to go into confused states in which they appeared to assume alternative personalities. Over months of demonstrations, it began to seem as though it was the ...

1086, 1886, 1986 and all that

John Dodgson, 22 May 1986

Domesday: 900 Years of England’s Norman Heritage 
edited by Kate Allen.
Millbank in association with the National Domesday Committee, 192 pp., £3, March 1986, 0 946171 49 1
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The Normans and the Norman Conquest 
by R. Allen Brown.
Boydell, 259 pp., £19.50, January 1985, 0 85115 427 1
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The Domesday Book: England’s Heritage, Then and Now 
edited by Thomas Hinde.
Hutchinson, 351 pp., £14.95, October 1985, 0 09 161830 4
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Domesday Heritage 
edited by Elizabeth Hallam.
Arrow, 95 pp., £3.95, February 1986, 0 09 945800 4
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Domesday Book through Nine Centuries 
by Elizabeth Hallam.
Thames and Hudson, 224 pp., £12.50, March 1986, 0 500 25097 9
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Domesday Book: A Reassessment 
edited by Peter Sawyer.
Arnold, 182 pp., £25, October 1985, 0 7131 6440 9
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... of 1986,’ and outlines a programme: presentation of the Domesday facsimile to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Courts of Justice (Her Majesty will not lack for Domesday Books by the end of the year); jousting in Regents Park and Norwich; Domesday weeks in London, Winchester, Norwich and other historic towns; traditional mayor-making ceremony in ...

Into Council Care

John Bayley, 6 July 1995

Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel 
by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle.
Macmillan, 208 pp., £35, December 1994, 0 333 60760 0
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... later work, to the older authorial convention of a time-free consciousness. As a pre-war writer Elizabeth Bowen made gestures towards the Modern but preferred her own pattern of individualities. She was not much of a theorist, though she liked to advance her ideas on fiction boldly and with a certain panache, in what she would have described as a ...

Associated Prigs

R.W. Johnson: Eleanor Rathbone, 8 July 2004

Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience 
by Susan Pedersen.
Yale, 469 pp., £25, March 2004, 0 300 10245 3
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... in the whole of England and Wales. At least as important, she formed a life-long friendship with Elizabeth Macadam, a strong, independent Scot who was to share her houses and be her main emotional support through life. Pedersen deals sensitively and well with this relationship as far as she is able – for both women went to extraordinary lengths to destroy ...

On the Dizzy Edge

Merve Emre: Helen Garner, 21 March 2019

Monkey Grip 
by Helen Garner.
Text, 333 pp., £14.99, January 2019, 978 1 925773 15 6
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The Children’s Bach 
by Helen Garner.
Text, 160 pp., £12.99, October 2018, 978 1 925773 04 0
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... can’t quite be realised and can’t quite be discarded. At Melbourne airport, Dexter runs into Elizabeth, an older version of Monkey Grip’s Nora, a woman who once ‘lay on his bed, in college, a whole Saturday afternoon waiting for him to come back because she wanted to fuck somebody and at the time there was no one else’. She appears to him now as ...

Each Scene for Itself

David Edgar: The Brecht Centenary, 4 March 1999

War Primer 
by Bertolt Brecht, edited by John Willett.
Libris, 170 pp., £35, February 1998, 1 870352 21 1
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Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches 
by John Willett.
Methuen, 320 pp., £12.99, February 1998, 0 413 72310 0
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Brecht and Method 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 184 pp., £19, November 1998, 1 85984 809 5
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... current Brechtology has a subject, it is Brecht’s relationship to that process. Elizabeth Wright’s Post-Modern Brecht (1989) sought simply to claim him as an embryonic Post-Modernist, on the superficially bizarre basis that the Marxist-Leninist playwright was ‘sceptical of what Lyotard called the great narrative, the great danger, the ...

I eat it up

Joanne O’Leary: Delmore Schwartz’s Decline, 21 November 2024

The Collected Poems 
by Delmore Schwartz, edited by Ben Mazer.
Farrar, Straus, 699 pp., £40, April 2024, 978 0 374 60430 1
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... to her affirming that other women are fatter than she is,’ Schwartz complained.He married Elizabeth Pollet, an aspiring novelist, in 1949. She was shy, which appealed to Schwartz. He said that her blonde hair and blue eyes reminded him of an ‘airline stewardess’. They had first met five years earlier and had had a brief affair that was scuppered ...

Rolling Back the Reformation

Eamon Duffy: Bloody Mary’s Church, 7 February 2008

... resistance, and pressed the device of painful public execution into service as a powerful tool, as Elizabeth, mutatis mutandis, would do against Catholics from the 1570s onwards. Mary’s regime was well aware of the potential of such executions to alienate public opinion, and Pole and his colleagues took considered and on the whole effective steps to justify ...