Ruined by men

Anthony Thwaite, 1 September 1988

The Truth about Lorin Jones 
by Alison Lurie.
Joseph, 294 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 7181 3095 2
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Latecomers 
by Anita Brookner.
Cape, 248 pp., £10.95, August 1988, 0 224 02554 6
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Where the rivers meet 
by John Wain.
Hutchinson, 563 pp., £12.95, June 1988, 9780091736170
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About the Body 
by Christopher Burns.
Secker, 193 pp., £10.95, August 1988, 0 436 09784 2
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Stories 
by Elizabeth Jolley.
Viking, 312 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 670 82113 6
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... dubious people who effortlessly make their mark and hold people in thrall, producing Comus at Oxford and then swiftly going up the mummers’ ladder (‘Then he got a part in a film on Channel Four. The part was small, but at one point he was required to take off his shirt’). At times I felt I was reading a cosmopolitan, if not actually louche, Barbara ...

Nemesis

David Marquand, 22 January 1981

Change and Fortune 
by Douglas Jay.
Hutchinson, 515 pp., £16, June 1980, 0 09 139530 5
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Life and Labour 
by Michael Stewart.
Sidgwick, 288 pp., £12.50, November 1980, 0 283 98686 7
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... light on the reasons for its fall. Michael Stewart and Douglas Jay were both awarded Firsts at Oxford in the Twenties, entered Labour politics in the Thirties, held junior office in the Attlee Government in the Forties, supported Gaitskell in the battles of the Fifties and were appointed to Wilson’s Cabinet in the Sixties. Both served their country and ...

Seven Days

R.W. Johnson, 4 July 1985

The Pick of Paul Johnson: An Anthology 
Harrap, 277 pp., £9.95, May 1985, 0 245 54246 9Show More
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... belongs to one of the most influential generational groups in recent British history – the Oxford student cohort of the immediate post-war period who clambered aboard the great Labour surge of 1945-51. This cohort was the exact British analogue of the bright young New Dealers from the American Ivy League campuses so tellingly depicted by Mary McCarthy ...

Fine Chances

Michael Wood, 5 June 1986

Literary Criticism 
by Henry James, edited by Leon Edel.
Cambridge, 1500 pp., £30, July 1985, 0 521 30100 9
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Henry James: The Writer and his Work 
by Tony Tanner.
Massachusetts, 142 pp., £16.95, November 1985, 0 87023 492 7
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... nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools – no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class – no Epsom nor Ascot!’ Of course James was speaking of America in the 1830s, the world the young Hawthorne looked out on, and he was ...

Lamb’s Tails

Christopher Driver, 19 June 1986

All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present 
by Stephen Mennell.
Blackwell, 380 pp., £14.95, October 1985, 0 631 13244 9
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Curye on Inglysch: English Culinary Manuscripts of the 14th Century including ‘The Forme of Cury’ 
edited by Constance Hieatt and Sharon Butler.
Oxford, for the Early English Text Society, 224 pp., £6.50, April 1985, 0 19 722409 1
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The English Cookbook 
by Victor Gordon.
Cape, 304 pp., £12.50, November 1985, 0 224 02300 4
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... than the rule: early redbrick university departments striving to differentiate themselves from Oxford and Cambridge; or the English gentry, who, as Lord Stockton has reminded us, taught their genteel imitators that it was bad form to notice the manna that came to dinner. In other times and places, both hunger and plenty have proved stimulating sauces for ...

Priests’ Lib

C.H. Sisson, 2 December 1982

Some day I’ll find you: An Autobiography 
by H.A. Williams.
Mitchell Beazley, 383 pp., £7.95, October 1982, 0 85533 448 7
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... however, in the end made the best of it and said that at least he should do it properly and go to Oxford. There was a Christmas party for local children at which Mother, unable to ‘trust her French to give a religious discourse’, instead ‘stood silent and still like a tableau vivant of Britannia, except that, instead of holding a trident, her arm ...

Feet on the mantelpiece

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 21 August 1980

The Victorians and Ancient Greece 
by Richard Jenkyns.
Blackwell, 386 pp., £15, June 1980, 0 631 10991 9
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... the ancient universities, and the institution of the Tripos at Cambridge and the Honour Schools at Oxford had the effect of increasing substantially the numbers of those able to read Greek texts. Learned work continued for some time to be done in the 18th-century tradition: that is true of the brilliant specialised textual critics of Greek drama and of the ...

Invidious Trumpet

Thomas Keymer: Find the Printer, 9 September 2021

The Paper Chase: The Printer, the Spymaster and the Hunt for the Rebel Pamphleteers 
by Joseph Hone.
Chatto, 251 pp., £18.99, November 2020, 978 1 78474 306 2
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... was eventually banished in the 1720s for his part in a Jacobite plot. Some signs pointed to the Oxford milieu of Henry Sacheverell, a virtuoso of paranoia who a few years later was impeached by the Commons for his incendiary sermon The Perils of False Brethren, Both in Church and State (1709). As charismatic on the page as in life, Sacheverell practised a ...

At which Englishman’s speech does English terminate?

Henry Hitchings: The ‘OED’, 7 March 2013

Words of the World: A Global History of the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ 
by Sarah Ogilvie.
Cambridge, 241 pp., £17.99, November 2012, 978 1 107 60569 5
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... the name of a Malay condiment, or kuruma, a Japanese word for a rickshaw? Burchfield arrived in Oxford from New Zealand in 1949 and died in 2004. A medievalist, his specialist subject was originally the Ormulum, a long 12th-century poem. When appointed in 1957 to edit a single-volume supplement to the OED, he was expected to bring coverage up to date, which ...
Thomas Hodgkin: Letters from Africa, 1947-56 
edited by Elizabeth Hodgkin and Michael Wolfers.
Haan, 224 pp., £18.95, October 2000, 9781874209881
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... 27 days away. Hodgkin, inevitably, finds that the town’s Muslim elite reminds him of ‘any Oxford (male) Senior Common Room. Highly civilised donnish characters, whose life seems to be spent almost entirely in food and prayer, and remembrance of things past.’ When he chances on a black lawyer violently opposed to Nkrumah, the man is ‘obviously a ...

An Avuncular Request

Eric Winter, 27 May 1993

... He is to be companion to a lady among Leavisites and read to her my book of Larkin poems; old Oxford toad is staid enough but, even he, there is a risk, if seen through high windows, might be a bit shocking to some new blue-stocking. He should be skilled, this eunuch chap, in making tea and toast, and keeping hot the water bot. He will, in ...

After the Woolwich

Frank Kermode, 7 February 1991

Spanner and Pen: Post-War Memoirs 
by Roy Fuller.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 190 pp., £16.95, February 1991, 1 85619 040 4
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... stop there and called for a continuation, ‘all about the Woolwich, the Arts Council, the BBC and Oxford, with incidental observations on the conduct of the young, the remembered follies of youth, the tiresome defects of old age, and so forth’. Mr Fuller, apparently deaf to this plea, merely gestured finality by publishing the three books in a single ...

Major and Minor

Frank Kermode, 6 June 1985

The Oxford Companion to English Literature 
edited by Margaret Drabble.
Oxford, 1155 pp., £15, April 1985, 0 19 866130 4
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... The Oxford Companion to – or Bumper Book of – English Literature was first published in 1932 and updated in three subsequent editions and many reprints. It has now been extensively re-edited by Margaret Drabble, aided by an impressive list of experts. The original editor, Sir Paul Harvey, explained that his intention was to be useful to ordinary everyday readers ...

Diary

A.J.P. Taylor: Magdalen College Portraits, 3 May 1984

... but otherwise unharmed. I resolved on a more ambitious venture: nothing less than a journey to Oxford when I drove part of the way myself. The journey had an unexpected purpose. Some years earlier a professional portrait painter, June Mendoza, had asked me to sit for my portrait. After it was finished she offered it to Magdalen College, which, being taken ...

A Perfect Eel

Elaine Showalter: ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’, 21 June 2012

Lady Audley’s Secret 
by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, edited by Lyn Pykett.
Oxford, 448 pp., £9.99, January 2012, 978 0 19 957703 3
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... in the consequences of the divorce reform act of 1857; in ‘monogamous countries’, the Oxford philosophy professor Henry Mansel noted in a review of 24 sensation novels in an 1863 issue of the Quarterly Review, the obsession with bigamy served as ‘a vehicle of mysterious interest or poetic justice’. Few of the novels Mansel reviewed are still ...