Bardism

Tom Shippey: The Druids, 9 July 2009

Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain 
by Ronald Hutton.
Yale, 491 pp., £30, May 2009, 978 0 300 14485 7
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... of the soul, like the followers of Pythagoras, and they had what would now be identified as ‘green’ elements, worshipping not in stone temples but in sacred groves, their totem plants being oak and mistletoe, the latter harvested by druids in white robes wielding golden sickles. Lucan combines the horrific and naturist elements with a much admired ...

On Lawrence Joseph

Michael Hofmann, 19 March 2020

... from Midland’; ‘the Undersecretary for Imperial Affairs’; ‘but, first, back to Henry Ford’; ‘she quoted Pound’. A mirror to the species. Joseph has written five books of his stark and beautiful poems, from Shouting at No One (1983) to So Where Are We? (2017), and one strange book of prose, Lawyerland (1997), a sort of La Ronde for the ...

Emily of Fire & Violence

Paul Keegan: Eliot’s Letters, 22 October 2020

... at Harvard. The lecture included the following considerations (transcribed by his brother Henry):The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which yet you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. We want ...

In His Hot Head

Andrew O’Hagan: Robert Louis Stevenson, 17 February 2005

Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography 
by Claire Harman.
HarperCollins, 503 pp., £25, February 2005, 0 00 711321 8
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... as a spaniel’. To William Henley he was ‘more the spoiled child than it is possible to say’. Henry James loved his writing – and loved mincing around its shortcomings – but saw him as ‘an indispensable light’. To others he appeared like a wraith or a tramp or a bag of bones, a hollow-eyed, coughing wretch. ...

Dunbar’s Disappearance

Sally Mapstone: William Dunbar, 24 May 2001

The Poems of William Dunbar 
edited by Priscilla Bawcutt.
Association for Scottish Literary Studies, £70, May 1999, 0 948877 38 3
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... well have been in the entourage of the Scottish embassy which was conducting the negotiations with Henry VII that led to the marriage two years later of Princess Margaret Tudor to James IV. ‘London thow art of Towynys A per se’, an anonymous poem, is said in one surviving manuscript copy to have been delivered at a dinner held by the Lord Mayor during the ...

Yawning and Screaming

John Bayley, 5 February 1987

Jane Austen 
by Tony Tanner.
Macmillan, 291 pp., £20, November 1986, 0 333 32317 3
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... type of discussion. After many years of comfortable mindless enjoyment of Jane Austen, which even Henry James was inclined to endorse, the pendulum may now swing too far the other way, and the critic present us with an author who is interchangeable with any other modern novel-writing intellect. To suppose her covertly demonstrating, through and by means of ...

McTeague’s Tooth

David Trotter: Good Fetishism, 20 November 2003

A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature 
by Bill Brown.
Chicago, 245 pp., £22.50, April 2003, 0 226 07628 8
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... stand, than the table cost fifty years ago when new’. Novels began to fill up with commodities. Henry James marvelled at Balzac’s ‘mighty passion for things’; for Balzac, James said, ‘mise-en-scène’ is no less significant than ‘event’. In Balzac’s novels, moreover, the mise-en-scène is alive with point of view. If a room is empty, Balzac ...

The Unmaking of the President

Benjamin Barber, 7 October 1982

The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power 
by Garry Wills.
Atlantic/Little, Brown, 310 pp., $14.95, February 1982, 0 316 94385 1
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... to Harold Hayes’s soft-core liberal stronghold at Esquire, and from a Jesuit seminary to the Henry Luce Chair of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University? At its worst, however, Wills’s book is merely a tawdry broadside, returning with too much pleasure to scandals uncovered by others with too little caution. The pilgrim dips his ...

Received Accents

Peter Robinson, 20 February 1986

Collected Poems 
by Charles Tomlinson.
Oxford, 351 pp., £15, September 1985, 0 19 211974 5
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Selected and New Poems: 1939-84 
by J.C. Hall.
Secker, 87 pp., £3.95, September 1985, 0 436 19052 4
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Burning the knife: New and Selected Poems 
by Robin Magowan.
Scarecrow Press, 114 pp., £13.50, September 1985, 0 8108 1777 2
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Englishmen: A Poem 
by Christopher Hope.
Heinemann, 41 pp., £4.95, September 1985, 0 434 34661 6
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Selected Poems: 1954-1982 
by John Fuller.
Secker, 175 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 436 16754 9
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Writing Home 
by Hugo Williams.
Oxford, 70 pp., £3.95, September 1985, 0 19 211970 2
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... The Allotment’ returns from war to find that he must choose between ‘an England, profitlessly green’ and a landscape where           slag in lavafolds rolls beneath him. The first part of the poem seems to be spoken to the man in his allotment, but, immediately after remarking on a bitterness ‘rooted in your silence’, the second-person ...

Shriek of the Milkman

John Gallagher: London Hawking, 2 November 2023

Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London 
by Charlie Taverner.
Oxford, 256 pp., £30, January 2023, 978 0 19 284694 5
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... If you​ walk out of the front gate of Trinity College Dublin and across College Green, a sharp left will bring you up Church Lane and as far as the statue of a woman pushing a cart stacked with baskets. These days, you’re likely to see tourists queueing to have their photos taken with her. A relatively recent tendency to rub the statue has left her with a cleavage that’s buffed to a shine ...

Diary

Eric Korn: The Eye of the Traveller, 19 February 1987

... the conservationist is a threat to social ease. If Maslow is the pilgrim, his grail a flash of green feather, Shiva Naipaul, who died in 1985, aged forty, was the quintessential traveller, defining himself anew each trip. Unfinished Journey is necessarily and sadly what it calls itself.2 Himself an Indian without any Indianness, an island boy with ...

What can happen when you make contact in a MOO

John Sutherland: Crime and passion in a virtual world, 29 July 1999

My Tiny Life: Crime and Punishment in a Virtual World 
by Donald Dibbell.
Fourth Estate, 336 pp., £16.99, January 1999, 1 84115 058 4
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... and ‘atmosphere’ statements to back up dialogue and action, the player creates what Henry James called ‘solidity of specification’. A rich and diverse narrative (a ‘matrix’, as they like to think of it) is assembled. For many players the ‘role’ (especially in Social MOOs) represents the most exciting element of the game. A survey in ...

Modest House in the Judengasse

C.H. Sisson, 5 July 1984

Random Variables 
by Lord Rothschild.
Collins, 238 pp., £12.50, May 1984, 0 00 217334 4
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... to find the blue wings of Morpho cypris spread out before one. Then a few pages later there is the green and orange of Ornithoptera paradisea. This is, however, not a work of lepidopterology, except in the sense that it records that the author was ‘born into a family in which lepidopterology was a ruling passion’. Other illustrations suggest other ...

Happy Knack

Ian Sansom: Betjeman, 20 February 2003

John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love 
by Bevis Hillier.
Murray, 736 pp., £25, November 2002, 0 7195 5002 5
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... may have made him a less than exemplary father, although his daughter, Candida Lycett Green, clearly adored him – of his relationship with Cavendish, she has written, ‘I found the situation completely without conflict’ – and her excellent editions of Betjeman’s Letters make a necessary companion to Hillier. (Although, like ...

The Shock of the Pretty

James Meek: Seventy Hours with Don Draper, 9 April 2015

... wife and three children, arranged in perfect descending height order from left to right, husband Henry to little Bobby. The shot is framed by two trees; in the upper right corner, a group of smiling shoppers coming through the lot balances the family in the lower left. Tall, masculine Henry is exquisite in camel-hair ...