Uncuddly

Christopher Tayler: Muriel Spark’s Essays, 25 September 2014

The Golden Fleece: Essays 
by Muriel Spark, edited by Penelope Jardine.
Carcanet, 226 pp., £16.99, March 2014, 978 1 84777 251 0
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... out disputes at the Poetry Society. Neo-Georgian versifiers and poetry-fancying grandees like Field Marshal Wavell began to mobilise against her after she took control of the society’s magazine in 1947. Both then and during her subsequent explorations of freelance life with Derek Stanford, a boyfriend and collaborator who became one of her major ...

On His Trapeze

Michael Wood: Roland Barthes, 17 November 2016

Barthes: A Biography 
by Tiphaine Samoyault, translated by Andrew Brown.
Polity, 586 pp., £25, December 2016, 978 1 5095 0565 4
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... the master of a workshop, a master worker, a master artisan’. Italo Calvino said Barthes’s field was the science of the single object, the art of generalising where only the particular was in play. This was ‘the great thing that he – I do not say taught us, because one can neither teach nor learn this – but showed us is possible’. Louis-Jean ...

Shuffling off

John Sutherland, 18 April 1985

Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction 
by Garrett Stewart.
Harvard, 403 pp., £19.80, December 1984, 0 674 19428 4
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Forms of Feeling in Victorian Fiction 
by Barbara Hardy.
Owen, 215 pp., £12.50, January 1985, 9780720606119
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Language and Class in Victorian England 
by K.C. Phillipps.
Basil Blackwell in association with Deutsch, 190 pp., £19.50, November 1984, 0 631 13689 4
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... respectful attention to death and resurrection in the novelist’s work. Coincidentally, in 1982, Andrew Sanders’s Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist was published. Dickens was the subject of Garrett Stewart’s previous book, and is the main author discussed in Death Sentences. But his line is different from Sanders’s, who locates the Dickensian ...

Wide-Angled

Linda Colley: Global History, 26 September 2013

The French Revolution in Global Perspective 
edited by Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt and William Max Nelson.
Cornell, 240 pp., £16.50, April 2013, 978 0 8014 7868 0
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... argue that ‘scholarship on the French colonies, especially Saint-Domingue … has reframed the field of French revolutionary studies.’ Their declared aim is to encourage a ‘more capacious view’ of the revolution by demonstrating how it was shaped by ‘global factors’, and how French ‘republican political innovations emerged from international ...

Whose Property?

Paul Taylor: Big Medical Data, 8 February 2018

... confidence in the MMR vaccine in the aftermath of the alarm caused by the gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield’s suggestion that the vaccine was linked to autism. They searched an earlier version of the database now known as the Clinical Practice Research Datalink, and identified 1294 children diagnosed with autism or pervasive developmental disorder ...

Ecclefechan and the Stars

Robert Crawford, 21 January 1988

The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect 
by George Davie.
Polygon, 283 pp., £17.95, September 1986, 0 948275 18 9
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... their Glasgow and Edinburgh lecture rooms Smith and Blair were busy translating their audiences. Andrew Hook has drawn attention to the widespread use of Blair’s Rhetoric in the United States. By the early 1760s, the Scotsman William Small was teaching Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to Jefferson at William and Mary. By 1768 John Witherspoon from the Laigh ...

Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge

Linda Nochlin: The Surprising Boldness of Mary Cassatt, 15 April 1999

Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman 
edited by Judith Barter.
Abrams, 376 pp., £40, November 1998, 0 8109 4089 2
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Mary Cassatt: Painter of Modern Women 
by Griselda Pollock.
Thames and Hudson, 224 pp., £7.95, September 1998, 0 500 20317 2
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... range and variety of approaches represented by its different authors. Particularly illuminating is Andrew Walker’s essay devoted to Cassatt’s early years. Far from being a timid stay-at-home, her professional ambitions led her far afield in search of instruction and inspiration. She got what she could out of the ‘fusty, fudgy’ Pennsylvania Academy of ...

Visible Woman

James Shapiro: Sticking up for Shakespeare, 4 October 2007

Shakespeare’s Wife 
by Germaine Greer.
Bloomsbury, 406 pp., £20, September 2007, 978 0 7475 9019 4
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... in its closing couplet: ‘I hate, from hate away she threw,/And saved my life saying not you.’ Andrew Gurr was the first to point out that ‘hate away’ would have sounded to Elizabethans like ‘Hathaway’; Stephen Booth added that since the word ‘and’ was regularly pronounced ‘an’, Shakespeare may be hinting in the poem’s final line that ...

The Satoshi Affair

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 June 2016

... to me and it was as if he was dropping a sugar lump into my tea. He typed the words, ‘Here I am, Andrew,’ and rested his fingers. ‘This gives us that little block there,’ he said, before verifying the signature. He looked sheepish and resigned in his blue checked shirt. ‘Welcome to the bit I was hoping to bury,’ he said. He leaned back and I ...

Pavilion of Heaven

Ferdinand Mount: Adventures of Raffles, 2 April 2026

Raffles, Gentleman Thief 
by E.W. Hornung.
Penguin, 304 pp., £10.99, January, 978 0 241 79022 9
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Writers in Whites: How a Group of Literary Cricketers Changed English Culture 
by Ollie Randall.
Fairfield, 288 pp., £22, May, 978 1 915237 74 3
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... biographer, does emphasise that there is no documentary proof of the link, and both he and Andrew Lycett in his Life of Conan Doyle agree that this was ‘a brave act of solidarity on Willie’s part’. That’s an understatement. It was on the day of Oscar Hornung’s birth, 24 March 1895, that Frank Harris met Wilde at the Café Royal and advised ...

More or Less Gay-Specific

David Halperin, 23 May 1996

Homos 
by Leo Bersani.
Harvard, 208 pp., £15.95, April 1995, 0 674 40619 2
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... we need them to do. Hence we suffer from an irresolvable and protracted definitional crisis in the field of sexuality, a crisis which students of lesbian and gay studies, or ‘queer theory’, have sought to explore. This problematising approach to questions of sexual definition is what Leo Bersani vehemently rejects in his elegant and infuriating new ...

All about the Outcome

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Labour Infighting, 7 November 2024

The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain and Their Many Enemies 
by Andy Beckett.
Allen Lane, 540 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 0 241 39422 9
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A Woman like Me 
by Diane Abbott.
Viking, 311 pp., £25, September 2024, 978 0 241 53641 4
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Keir Starmer: The Biography 
by Tom Baldwin.
William Collins, 448 pp., £16.99, October 2024, 978 0 00 873964 5
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... to replace him as the member for Holborn and St Pancras. He was a political unknown in a crowded field, facing past and present leaders of Camden Council as well as a popular local doctor. He drank ‘literally hundreds’ of coffees with local members and was, in his own words, ‘ruthlessly focused’ on their concerns. His speech at the selection meeting ...

Alas! Deceived

Alan Bennett: Larkin the Librarian, 25 March 1993

Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life 
by Andrew Motion.
Faber, 570 pp., £20, April 1993, 0 571 15174 4
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... of course, not hers. Eva died in 1977 aged 91, after which the poems more or less stopped coming. Andrew Motion thinks this is no coincidence.Larkin pinpointed 63 as his probable departure date because that was when his father went, turned by his mother into ‘the sort of closed, reserved man who would die of some thing internal’. Sydney Larkin was the ...

A Positive Future

David Simpson: Ernst Cassirer, 26 March 2009

Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture 
by Edward Skidelsky.
Princeton, 288 pp., £24.95, January 2009, 978 0 691 13134 4
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The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer 
edited by Jeffrey Andrew Barash.
Chicago, 223 pp., £26.50, January 2009, 978 0 226 03686 1
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... positivists nor with the Heideggerian, existentialist tradition which between them carved up the field of 20th-century philosophy, as they arguably continue to do. Neither had any patience with the turn to culture, and that is the turn Cassirer chose to take. There isn’t much flesh and blood on the figure of Cassirer that emerges from these books. I find ...

Weasel, Magpie, Crow

Mark Ford: Edward Thomas, 1 January 2009

Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems 
edited by Edna Longley.
Bloodaxe, 335 pp., £12, June 2008, 978 1 85224 746 1
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... down to rest in the boughs of a fallen elm, and learns from the ploughman working in the adjacent field that the tree was brought down by a blizzard on the very day his mate on the farm died in the trenches:          ‘The second day In France they killed him. It was back in March, The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if He had stayed ...