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Not Cricket

Peter Phillips: On Charles Villiers Stanford, 6 February 2025

Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician 
by Jeremy Dibble.
Boydell, 701 pp., £70, April 2024, 978 1 78327 795 7
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... was so recognised until the run ended with William McKie, knighted after he had conducted at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953.The person to whom most credit should go for moderating this traditional prejudice and opening the door to a new era of composition was an Irishman. Stanford was born in Dublin in 1852 ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Bennett’s Dissection, 1 January 2009

... I’d take the blighters by surprise. ‘Here we are. Fat Pig One and Fat Pig Two.’ Said by my mother when she and my father were sitting on the sofa in front of the fire. ‘They have one of them dogs that’s never got its snitch out of its backside.’ My father. 11 January. To Cambridge, where I talk to students about my medical history. It’s part ...

Who Lives and Who Dies

Paul Farmer: Who survives?, 5 February 2015

... arena of healthcare financing. All told, the price of my care was about twice my widowed mother’s annual salary as a grocery store cashier. How was it paid, given that in 1988 she, like all but one of her six children, was a student? By the private health insurance provided to students at Harvard. It covered most of the bills, though I was hounded ...

His Own Prophet

Michael Hofmann: Read Robert Lowell!, 11 September 2003

Collected Poems 
by Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter.
Faber, 1186 pp., £40, July 2003, 0 571 16340 8
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... at the girls’ school where Lowell was a boy) and the ‘Menninger’ read by his frustrated mother. Other words, less weighted and strategic, call and echo through the collection: ‘yellow’, ‘mustard’, ‘azure’, ‘golf’, ‘anchor’, ‘magnolia’, ‘old-fashioned’, ‘ostrich’, ‘elephant’, ‘hierarchic’ and ...

Unnatural Rebellion

Malcolm Gaskill: ‘Witches’, 2 November 2017

The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present 
by Ronald Hutton.
Yale, 360 pp., £25, August 2017, 978 0 300 22904 2
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... axes and homemade guns entered the village of Fiyawena looking for a woman called Mifila, the mother of two young children. Six months earlier she and three other women had been accused of using witchcraft to cause a measles epidemic. The suspects had been put on ‘death row’ by their fellow villagers, but were rescued by Enga’s deputy police ...

His Peach Stone

Christopher Tayler: J.G. Farrell, 2 December 2010

J.G. Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries 
edited by Lavinia Greacen.
Cork, 464 pp., €19.95, September 2010, 978 1 85918 476 9
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... to be a novel dealing with the Irish War of Independence of 1919-21, which his Irish Protestant mother had childhood memories of, and which he was reading up on in a public library on 53rd Street, ‘scarcely adding to my feeble conception of how the thing should be’. According to his biographer Lavinia Greacen, he was also working on three short ...

Were you a tome?

Matthew Bevis: Edward Lear, 14 December 2017

Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense 
by Jenny Uglow.
Faber, 608 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 571 26954 9
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... for the rest of his life. When he was four, his father defaulted on the stock exchange and his mother left Lear to the care of his eldest sister, Ann. His sense of rejection began early, and he dated the start of his prolonged periods of depression (‘the morbids’) to the age of six. Then, just before his tenth birthday, his cousin Frederick Harding ...

Making It

Melissa Benn: New Feminism?, 5 February 1998

Different for Girls: How Culture Creates Women 
by Joan Smith.
Chatto, 176 pp., £10.99, September 1997, 9780701165123
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The New Feminism 
by Natasha Walter.
Little, Brown, 278 pp., £17.50, January 1998, 0 316 88234 8
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A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States 
by Sheila Rowbotham.
Penguin, 752 pp., £20, June 1997, 0 670 87420 5
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... and allies of Saffy, the teenage daughter in Absolutely Fabulous, looking down her nose at her mother’s immaturity. One can see many of these elements in the recent work of Naomi Wolf, probably the most famous of the new feminists. Now married to a Clinton speech-writer and very much in caring-Democrat mould, Wolf began her career on prime-time TV. She ...

It’s me you gotta make happy

Andrea Brady: John Wieners, 29 July 2021

Yours Presently: The Selected Letters of John Wieners 
edited by Michael Seth Stewart.
New Mexico, 333 pp., £60, December 2020, 978 0 8263 6204 9
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... at the Cambridge Poets’ Theatre – O’Hara was acting in John Ashbery’s The Compromise, or Queen of Caribou, and Wieners was stage manager. Wieners remembered a night with O’Hara and Jack Spicer in his ‘dreadful room infested with roaches … while I read my poetry in the humid summer evening of Beacon Hill, the ...

Identity Parade

Linda Colley, 25 February 1993

People and Places: Country House Donors and the National Trust 
by James Lees-Milne.
Murray, 232 pp., £19.99, October 1992, 0 7195 5145 5
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The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 
by Michael Dobson.
Oxford, 266 pp., £30, October 1992, 0 19 811233 5
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Myths of the English 
edited by Roy Porter.
Polity, 280 pp., £39.50, October 1992, 0 7456 0844 2
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Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States 
by Stephen Daniels.
Polity, 257 pp., £39.50, November 1992, 0 7456 0450 1
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... more practising Catholics than practising Anglicans in Britain, more Moslems than Methodists. The Mother of Parliaments, too, has lost some of her prestige and much of her power, and seems to many now to be inequitably elected. Finally and transparently, success has become elusive. The Empire has gone. There are unlikely to be any more attractive and ...

Snap among the Witherlings

Michael Hofmann: Wallace Stevens, 22 September 2016

The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens 
by Paul Mariani.
Simon and Schuster, 512 pp., £23, May 2016, 978 1 4516 2437 3
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... tending at times to bombast. This is ‘To the One of Fictive Music’, from Harmonium:Sister and mother and diviner love,And of the sisterhood of the living deadMost near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom,And of the fragrant mothers the most dearAnd queen, and of diviner love the ...

Bobbery

James Wood: Pushkin’s Leave-Taking, 20 February 2003

Pushkin: A Biography 
by T.J. Binyon.
HarperCollins, 731 pp., £30, September 2002, 0 00 215084 0
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... all his early reading was in that language. His social background was much less traditional. His mother, known in Petersburg as ‘the beautiful Creole’, was the granddaughter of a black slave, traditionally thought to have been a captured Ethiopian, though Binyon, with customary care, thinks Cameroon the likelier origin. He was a gift for Peter the ...

Those Brogues

Marina Warner, 6 October 2016

... known as ‘Plum’ after his father the cricketer, came back at long last from the war, my mother was already in London. She had arrived a few months before from Bari, her home town in southern Italy, flying in on one of the first passenger flights to land in the newly demilitarised airport at Heathrow, and making her own way with her small belongings ...

The Last Years of Edward Kelley, Alchemist to the Emperor

Charles Nicholl: Edward Kelly, 19 April 2001

... village of Mortlake, near London, in early March 1582. Dee, then in his mid-fifties, was the Queen’s chief consultant on all matters occult. He was renowned as a mathematician, physician, astrologer, geographer and, in the popular parlance, a ‘conjuror’. His visitor was, at this point, an altogether more shadowy ...

Heart-Squasher

Julian Barnes: A Portrait of Lucian Freud, 5 December 2013

Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud 
by Martin Gayford.
Thames and Hudson, 248 pp., £12.95, March 2012, 978 0 500 28971 6
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Breakfast with Lucian: A Portrait of the Artist 
by Geordie Greig.
Cape, 260 pp., £25, October 2013, 978 0 224 09685 0
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... nature and essence, whether he is painting the naked young or the fully clothed octogenarian Queen of England. As for Freud’s many self-portraits, it is less their gleefully depicted decay that is striking than their self-celebration, their implicit stance of artist as hero. The worst is The Painter Surprised by a ...

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