Sam, Caroline, Janet, Stella, Len, Helen and Bob

Susan Pedersen: Mass Observation, 21 September 2017

Seven Lives from Mass Observation: Britain in the Late 20th Century 
by James Hinton.
Oxford, 207 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 0 19 878713 6
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... learning’) and then her engagement with various progressive causes that turned her ‘from Tory lady to socialist firebrand’ – an evolution that, remarkably, seems not to have troubled her husband. Janet’s life sounds a new register, with an abortion and a first child out of wedlock followed by a brief companionate marriage, a second child and a ...

Diary

Deborah Friedell: The Heart and the Fist, 24 May 2018

... She asked Sheena ‘when it first occurred to her that she could wind up as the nation’s first lady’; Sheena said she’d never thought about it before – ‘“Not until this very moment,” she says, blinking rapidly.’ The reporter didn’t believe her. Sheena joined Eric’s Mission for Missouri bus tour, usually holding their new ...

Going underground

Elaine Showalter, 12 May 1994

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes 
by Janet Malcolm.
Knopf, 208 pp., $23, April 1994, 0 679 43158 6
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... every paper burnt, and every letter unanswered’. Allusions to James – primarily Portrait of a Lady – and other classic novelists structure the text, and Malcolm, an inveterate mythologiser, also compares Plath to Medea and Medusa; Hughes to Adonis and Prometheus; and Olwyn to Cerberus and the Sphinx. Fairy tales get in there too, especially ...

About as Useful as a String Condom

Glen Newey: Bum Decade for the Royals, 23 January 2003

... of a Levantine grocer. In op-ed fable she presented the Windsor family’s lone human face, Avon Lady to the House of Atreus. This wasn’t so long ago, and the Royals’ supposed bounce back to public favour came as a shock to many in the commentariat. They need not have been surprised. Even in December 1997, at the supposed nadir of the Windsor clan’s ...

Flytings

Arnold Rattenbury: Hamish Henderson, 23 January 2003

Collected Poems and Songs 
by Hamish Henderson, edited by Raymond Ross.
Curly Snake, 163 pp., £9.99, March 2000, 1 902141 01 6
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... family. Always, on meeting, he wore a gentle smile that would have flattered a kind old lady, an effect curiously enhanced by his carefully trimmed moustache, less curiously by his lilting manner of speaking which seemed to sing at you – more musically, I always thought, than his singing voice – and all this at the very top of a ...

From Pandemonium

Elizabeth Cook: Poetry wrested from mud, 1 September 2005

The Poems and Plays of Isaac Rosenberg 
edited by Vivien Noakes.
Oxford, 427 pp., £90, August 2004, 0 19 818715 7
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... Than man can bear.’ To which the unsentimental Nubian replies: ‘None can exceed their limit, lady./You either bear or break.’ In the extraordinary poem ‘God Made Blind’, Rosenberg presents a stratagem of ‘God-gulling’: this is a way of cheating God by pretending that we have as much misery as we can bear (so God will lay off before it really is ...

Charging about in Brogues

Jenny Turner: Sarah Waters, 23 February 2006

The Night Watch 
by Sarah Waters.
Virago, 472 pp., £16.99, February 2006, 1 84408 246 6
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... loves watching her, and, just for fun, calls her ‘Colonel Barker’; perhaps she was ‘a lady pilot, a sergeant in the WAAF, something like that: one of those women, in other words, who’d charged about so happily during the war, and then got left over.’ As it happens, Kay spent the war working for the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service, pulling ...

‘I thirst for his blood’

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Henry James, 25 November 1999

Henry James: A Life in Letters 
edited by Philip Horne.
Penguin, 668 pp., £25, June 1999, 0 7139 9126 7
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A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art 
by Lyndall Gordon.
Chatto, 500 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6166 3
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... of tuberculosis at the age of 24 but was famously resurrected in the heroines of The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Wings of the Dove (1902), and the American writer, Constance Fenimore Woolson, James’s intermittent companion and occasional fellow lodger for over a decade, who apparently committed suicide by hurling herself from the window of her Venetian ...

Call Her Daisy-Ray

John Sturrock: Accents and Attitudes, 11 September 2003

Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol 
by Lynda Mugglestone.
Oxford, 354 pp., £35, February 2003, 0 19 925061 8
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... mattered, D.H. Lawrence. ‘I don’t in the least want to turn you out of your hut,’ says Lady Chatterley to the gamekeeper. ‘It’s your ladyship’s own ‘ut,’ replies her rough trade, demonstrating by a single apostrophe that real men have no business aping their betters. The movement towards standardisation took off in the second half of the ...

Punk Counterpunk

Bee Wilson, 20 November 2014

Vivienne Westwood 
by Vivienne Westwood and Ian Kelly.
Picador, 463 pp., £25, September 2014, 978 1 4472 5412 6
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... facial similarity between the two: how can the woman who helped invent punk look so like the Iron Lady? But for Westwood herself, it wasn’t a stretch. All she had to do was ‘put a little doubt’ in her eyes and she looked just like Thatcher. It’s worth dwelling on the implications of this statement: the real Vivienne Westwood looks like a less ...

I met murder on the way

Colin Kidd: Castlereagh, 24 May 2012

Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny 
by John Bew.
Quercus, 722 pp., £25, September 2011, 978 0 85738 186 6
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... Thereafter, Castlereagh spent a year at Cambridge. Like his father, he married an Anglican, Lady Amelia Hobart, the daughter of the Earl of Buckinghamshire, and worshipped in the Anglican Church. Despite this, Bew shows, he was influenced by the Presbyterian Enlightenment of 18th-century Scotland and its Ulster outposts. The young politician was happily ...

Never Mainline

Jenny Diski: Keith Richards, 16 December 2010

Life 
by Keith Richards, with James Fox.
Weidenfeld, 564 pp., £20, October 2010, 978 0 297 85439 5
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... as an old man forgetting that hip talk has changed somewhat since 1968 (equivalent to the 1960 Lady Chatterley moment: ‘Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?’). He knows that feminists were dismayed by their lyrics: ‘We always like to piss them off. Where would you be without us?’ As a matter of fact, he was doing us bitches a ...

Five Possible Ways to Kill a State

Neal Ascherson: Vanished Kingdoms, 15 December 2011

Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe 
by Norman Davies.
Allen Lane, 830 pp., £30, October 2011, 978 1 84614 338 0
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... closely connected than to any Plantagenets or Stuarts. ‘Most of their subjects do not know that Lady Diana Spencer (1961-97) was the very first person of primarily English descent who ever came near the British throne in the whole of its 300-year history.’ His view, anyway, is that old ‘Ukania’ is rapidly veering towards history’s landfill. ‘That ...

Pavements Like Jelly

Jeremy Harding: Paris Under Water, 28 January 2010

Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 
by Jeffrey Jackson.
Palgrave, 262 pp., £20, January 2010, 978 0 230 61706 3
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Paris Inondé 1910 
Galerie des Bibliothèques, Paris, until 28 March 2010Show More
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... approaching from a distance, ‘as in this street in Paris’, with ‘a dog and a well-dressed lady standing upright next to a melancholic gentleman’. The way the city had been overwhelmed by the river may well have seemed charming, though only because of the scenes on offer. The sight of the boulevard St Germain transformed at its northern end into a ...

No False Modesty

Rosemary Hill: Edith Sitwell, 20 October 2011

Edith Sitwell: Avant-Garde Poet, English Genius 
by Richard Greene.
Virago, 532 pp., £25, March 2011, 978 1 86049 967 8
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... visit was that Lawrence used some details of the family and the estate for his work in progress, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, causing another of Sitwell’s abrupt reversals of opinion. She decided that Lawrence’s poetry was not as she had thought ‘beautiful’ and ‘moving’ and that he himself looked like ‘a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some ...