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The Same Old Solotaire

Peter Wollen, 4 July 1996

‘Salome’ and ‘Under the Hill’ 
by Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley.
Creation, 123 pp., £7.95, April 1996, 1 871592 12 7
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Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque 
by Chris Snodgrass.
Oxford, 338 pp., £35, August 1995, 0 19 509062 4
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... of Wilde and Beardsley, including Beerbohm, Carpenter, Conrad, Dowson, Havelock Ellis, Hueffer, Shaw and Yeats. The Savoy fizzled to an end (commercially at least) when W.H. Smith’s refused to distribute it after issue Number 3, on account of an illustration to an article by Yeats. Yeats later recalled how ‘the bookseller’s manager, no doubt looking ...

Darkness and so on and on

Adam Mars-Jones: Kate Atkinson, 6 June 2013

Life after Life 
by Kate Atkinson.
Doubleday, 477 pp., £18.99, March 2013, 978 0 385 61867 0
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... isn’t the first fictional character to train for a supernaturally revealed task. The hero of John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, for instance, must master a particular basketball shot in order to fulfil his destiny by saving a group of children. It may be that the literary form best suited to dramatising forks in the road, paths taken and not ...

All in Slow Motion

Dani Garavelli: The Murder of Nikki Allan, 15 June 2023

... took place late on the second day, once Heron had already confessed to Detective Chief Inspector John Renwick and Detective Inspector Colin Dudley, who had taken over the questioning from lower-ranking officers. You can hear them steering Heron in the direction they want him to go. When he suggests he attacked Nikki with a ‘metal bar’, they make it clear ...

Love in a Dark Time

Colm Tóibín: Oscar Wilde, 19 April 2001

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde 
edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Fourth Estate, 1270 pp., £35, November 2000, 1 85702 781 7
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... Queensberry was in possession of compromising letters, Wilde met Frank Harris and George Bernard Shaw at the Café Royal. When Harris vehemently sought to persuade him to drop the case and leave the country and Shaw agreed, Wilde seemed to be coming around to their view. (‘You are sure to lose it,’ Harris told ...

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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... had been Modern; by the time of Pleasures of Architecture (1924), Functionalist. The Tragedy of John Ruskin (1928) retained the scorn and condescension but had, now, some sense of a Labour ethos. By the time of Left Review and The Big Firm she was hitching the proletarianisation of literature to a pretty crude economic determinism – an affair she would ...

The BBC on the Rack

James Butler, 19 March 2020

... vetted by MI5 (this didn’t end until the 1990s), its embrace of commercial structures under John Birt, director-general in the 1990s, and the shadier aspects of its foreign language broadcasting. Arguments about the relationship between the BBC and politics usually concentrate on its journalistic output, ignoring its cultural programming, but then the ...

Double-Barrelled Dolts

Ferdinand Mount: Mosley’s Lost Deposit, 6 July 2006

Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism 
by Stephen Dorril.
Viking, 717 pp., £30, April 2006, 0 670 86999 6
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Hurrah for the Blackshirts! Fascists and Fascism between the Wars 
by Martin Pugh.
Pimlico, 387 pp., £8.99, March 2006, 1 84413 087 8
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... lords such as Rothermere and Beaverbrook and writers such as Wyndham Lewis and George Bernard Shaw. As late as 1968, the lugubrious Cecil King, Rothermere’s nephew and then boss of the Mirror Group, planned to install Mosley as the head of a military-backed government, with Mountbatten as his second choice. For short-term tactical advantage, Mosley was ...

The Best Stuff

Ian Jack: David Astor, 2 June 2016

David Astor: A Life in Print 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 400 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 0 224 09090 2
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... through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to ...

Urning

Colm Tóibín: The revolutionary Edward Carpenter, 29 January 2009

Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love 
by Sheila Rowbotham.
Verso, 565 pp., £24.99, October 2008, 978 1 84467 295 0
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... and the old Empire to talk freely to mad old Indians. Change involved the right of George Bernard Shaw to say that the long lying-in-state of the dead queen was a danger to public health, and for the slow emergence of figures such as D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, who would dramatise in novels the end of restriction and the beginning of new possibilities for ...

Fugitive Crusoe

Tom Paulin: Daniel Defoe, 19 July 2001

Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions 
by Maximilian Novak.
Oxford, 756 pp., £30, April 2001, 0 19 812686 7
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Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe 
edited by W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank.
Pickering & Chatto, £595, December 2000, 1 85196 465 7
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... to shield him from the charge of being a closet republican, or a classical republican like John Toland. He believes in a ‘legal limited monarchy’, and has a humane idea of consensus and national unity within such an arrangement. He is an active, adept pragmatist, a revolutionary moderate. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe speaks of Crusoe’s ‘life of ...

I’m a Cahunian

Adam Mars-Jones: Claude Cahun, 2 August 2018

Never Anyone But You 
by Rupert Thomson.
Corsair, 340 pp., £18.99, June 2018, 978 1 4721 5350 0
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... the mask, another mask’ for a 2017 exhibition in which she responded to Cahun’s work. Jennifer Shaw starts her biography of the same year, Exist Otherwise, with the declaration: ‘Claude Cahun is my heroine. I have been thinking and writing about her work off and on for about twenty years. Her story is inspirational.’ Gavin James Bower, who describes ...

How many words does it take to make a mistake?

William Davies: Education, Education, Algorithm, 24 February 2022

... generation (born since 1995), Gen Z Explained, Robert Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw and Linda Woodhead find students sifting through online materials and module choices in search of whatever seems most ‘relevant’ to them personally, or to the task they happen to be engaged with at that moment.* This behaviour is both instinct and coping ...

When the Floods Came

James Meek: England’s Water, 31 July 2008

... no more’ and then in tiny letters ‘please’ and – back to big letters again – ‘mr shaw.’ This is a reference to Chris Shaw, Tewkesbury Borough Council’s director of planning. Pavey, an activist in the Severn and Avon Valley Combined Flood Group, a band of concerned citizens who believe that flooded ...

Who to Be

Colm Tóibín: Beckett’s Letters, 6 August 2009

The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-40 
edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck.
Cambridge, 782 pp., £30, February 2009, 978 0 521 86793 1
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... it had been rejected by several firms. Like Yeats and his brother the poet, and the playwrights Shaw, Synge and O’Casey, Beckett was a Dublin Protestant. The fact that he played no part in the development of the Abbey Theatre, and did not write about Ireland directly or suffer from patriotism or indulge in nationalism, and seemed in ways deracinated, a ...

Seductress Extraordinaire

Terry Castle: The vampiric Mercedes de Acosta, 24 June 2004

‘That Furious Lesbian’: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta 
by Robert Schanke.
Southern Illinois, 210 pp., £16.95, June 2004, 0 8093 2579 9
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Women in Turmoil: Six Plays 
by Mercedes de Acosta, edited by Robert Schanke.
Southern Illinois, 252 pp., £26.95, June 2003, 0 8093 2509 8
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... miserably when it was produced in New York in 1923 and it is easy to see why. In the era of Shaw, O’Neill and Strindberg, de Acosta still worked almost entirely – as if obliviously – in the obsolete vein of 19th-century melodrama. In the opening scene, when various foppish courtiers gossip about Simonetta – she is supposed to be the mistress of ...

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