Strike at the Knee

Malcolm Gaskill: Italy, 1943, 8 February 2024

The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943 
by James Holland.
Bantam, 565 pp., £25, September 2023, 978 1 78763 668 2
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... A fortnight later, the Coldstreamers found themselves raked by gunfire near the summit of a wooded hill. Dazed by malaria, Lieutenant Christopher Bulteel witnessed men leaping from blazing fires; stick grenades being hurled from previously invisible trenches; and sickening scenes of hand-to-hand fighting. As Bulteel and his ...

Poor Dear, How She Figures!

Alan Hollinghurst: Forster and His Mother, 3 January 2013

The Journals and Diaries of E.M. Forster Volumes I-III 
edited by Philip Gardner.
Pickering and Chatto, 813 pp., £275, February 2011, 978 1 84893 114 5
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... 1923. It’s like Isherwood’s retrospective marvelling, as he sets off to America at the end of Christopher and His Kind, at the unknown future and the unknown life partner who await him: ‘He will be near you for many years without your meeting. But it would be no good if you did meet him now. At present, he is only four years old.’ Forster seems never ...

Wigging In

Matthew Bevis: On James Schuyler, 23 April 2026

A Day like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler 
by Nathan Kernan.
FSG, 503 pp., £30, September 2025, 978 0 374 28117 5
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... doily on a small plate.Tangerines.A day in February: heart-shaped cookies on St Valentine’s.Like Christopher, a discarded saint.A tough woman with black hair.‘I got to set my wig straight.’A gold and silver day begins to wane.A crescent moon.Ice on the window.Give my love to, oh, anybody.This is characteristic of Schuyler at his best, pitched somewhere ...

Diary

John Henry Jones: At Home with the Empsons, 17 August 1989

... in 1880, and set at an angle to the main road from Hampstead into town, on the corner of Hampstead Hill Gardens, one of those circuitous side-roads designed to fit buildings into an existing road network and acting as a short-cut to nowhere. The front is Victorian Gothic, in creeper-strangled red brick, with a pointed, many-faceted, slate-tiled roof which ...

Cheering us up

Ian Jack, 15 September 1988

In for a Penny: The Unauthorised Biography of Jeffrey Archer 
by Jonathan Mantle.
Hamish Hamilton, 264 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 241 12478 6
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... he turned up as a sports master and odd-job-man at a private crammer in Hampshire called Vicar’s Hill, run by a Mrs Brewer. Then, in 1961, came what can now be seen as his big break. Not for the first or the last time in his life, an older man was seduced by his combination of energy and deference. T.H. (‘Tim’) Cobb, the headmaster of a respectable ...

‘Someone you had to be a bit careful with’

David Sylvester: Gallery Rogues, 30 March 2000

Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser 
by Harriet Vyner.
Faber, 317 pp., £20, October 1999, 0 571 19627 6
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... Stella, Noland, Louis, Frankenthaler, Olitski, Poons; his Britons, Caro, Tucker, Latham, Hill, Hockney, Richard Smith, Bernard Cohen, Denny, Hodgkin, Ayres, Buckley, while his one European was Pol Bury. So Kasmin’s choice was focused on abstraction, with Hockney as the joker in the pack, where Fraser’s was wider, though with an emphasis on ...

Rough Trade

Steven Shapin: Robert Hooke, 6 March 2003

The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Strange and Inventive Life of Robert Hooke 1635-1703 
by Stephen Inwood.
Macmillan, 497 pp., £18.99, September 2002, 0 333 78286 0
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... its secretary); to his early activities as Boyle’s paid assistant; to his lucrative work with Christopher Wren as City Surveyor rebuilding London after the Great Fire; and to his independent career as one of England’s greatest architects and civil engineers, responsible for the new Bethlem madhouse, the Royal College of Physicians, the Fish Street ...

Full of Glory

John Mullan: The Inklings, 19 November 2015

The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings 
by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski.
Farrar, Straus, 644 pp., £11.20, June 2015, 978 0 374 15409 7
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... Oxford doctor Humphrey Havard, and a Dominican priest, Gervase Mathew. Tolkien inducted his son Christopher, later a lecturer in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English at Oxford, and the editor of his father’s copious Nachlass. His enduring achievement was to draw the maps for The Lord of the Rings. Then there was the ever present ‘Warnie’ – Lewis’s ...

Diary

Mark Ford: Love and Theft, 2 December 2004

... Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill; And that in autumn, when the grapes Made sharp air sharper by their smell These had a being, breathing frost; And least will guess that with our bones We left much more, left what still is The look of things, left what we felt At what we saw. The ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2019, 2 January 2020

... and Reformation 1453-1660 by Mary Hollings, which we used in our history classes under H.H. Hill. I imagine most of us remembered this quote and trotted it out in School Certificate a year or so later, and my only thought now is how wearisome it must have been for the examiner reading it again and again. I suppose the Landsknecht’s equivalent gesture ...

Life on Sark

Jonathan Parry: Life on Sark, 18 May 2023

... or bet on, likely looking champion competitors. Since 2014, an annual lawnmower race up Harbour Hill has allowed frustrated boy (and girl) racers to be petrolheads for the day.Last year’s sheep races raised £40,000 for a local charity that subsidises residents’ medical prescriptions to UK levels. There is no NHS on Sark: the island pays for a doctor to ...

On Not Being Sylvia Plath

Colm Tóibín: Thom Gunn on the Move, 13 September 2018

Selected Poems 
by Thom Gunn.
Faber, 336 pp., £16.99, July 2017, 978 0 571 32769 0
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... under great pressure.’ But what really made me sit up straight was his remark about Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Annunciations’, the last poem in the book: ‘I understand “Annunciations” only in the sense that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversations (i.e. they grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice), but without help I ...

Donald Mitchell remembers Hans Keller

Donald Mitchell, 3 September 1987

... did: ‘Wordless Functional Analysis’ ‘burst upon the world’ in 1957. These are the words of Christopher Wintle, in the Memorial Symposium on Keller in Music Analysis, and Wintle shrewdly remarks that ‘it was less the matter than the wordless manner of FA that excited greatest musical interest.’ I must confess to finding myself in difficulties with ...

Come and Stay

Arnold Rattenbury, 27 November 1997

England and the Octopus 
by Clough Williams-Ellis.
CPRE, 220 pp., £10.95, December 1996, 0 946044 50 3
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Clough Williams-Ellis: RIBA Drawings Monograph No 2 
by Richard Haslam.
Academy, 112 pp., £24.95, March 1996, 1 85490 430 2
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Clough Williams-Ellis: The Architect of Portmeirion 
by Jonah Jones.
Seren, 204 pp., £9.95, December 1996, 1 85411 166 3
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... hotchpotch of Bavarian vernacular, Cornish weatherboard, Jacobean, Regency, Strawberry Hill Gothic, Victorian Gothic’ – a list that could be much extended. Here, in Haslam, is a drawing of 1927 for Portmeirion’s comfortably demotic steeple-like ‘Bell Tower’: no nonsense about a ‘Campanile’, as it is now known. Indeed an earlier draft ...

The Party in Government

Conor Gearty, 9 March 1995

... minister when in office. John McGregor (afterwards Lord McGregor) has rejoined merchant bankers Hill Samuel since his departure from the Transport Department, where he was Secretary of State. Hill Samuel has advised the Government in many privatisations, including that of British Airways. During Mr McGregor’s tenure at ...