Astral Projection

Alison Light: The Case of the Croydon Poltergeist, 17 December 2020

The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story 
by Kate Summerscale.
Bloomsbury, 345 pp., £18.99, October, 978 1 4088 9545 0
Show More
Show More
... a wine glass escaped a locked cabinet in the kitchen and smashed; Alma’s teacup and saucer rose from her hands, the saucer splitting neatly in mid-air; a huge piece of coal in the grate careered across the living room and slammed into the wall. On an inside page the Sunday Pic featured a photograph of Alma, Les and Don – ‘occupants of the house of ...

The Suitcase

Frances Stonor Saunders, 30 July 2020

... been looking in the suitcase, I’ve been consulting other sources: my father’s younger brother, Peter, now a robust 86; family photographs; stamp albums; public records; other people’s suitcases; books; barely legible notes despatched to me by my mother, who has a macular hole and a keen memory and styles herself ‘Research Department’ – the kind of ...

Don’t Look Down

Nicholas Spice: Dull Britannia, 8 April 2010

Family Britain 1951-57 
by David Kynaston.
Bloomsbury, 776 pp., £25, November 2009, 978 0 7475 8385 1
Show More
Show More
... with a bottle of bright pink cough mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself. ‘Nobody ever flung it at me during the war that I was ...

Mother One, Mother Two

Jeremy Harding: A memoir, 31 March 2005

... We were all friends, I suppose. You may not remember Graham, but he was Maureen’s first husband, Peter and Jill’s father . . . you do, that’s good. They were Surrey people: they had a grand house in Caterham. Graham was a rich fellow, talented, energetic, generous; he’d made most of his money as a printer: he published the daily stock exchange ...

I am Prince Mishkin

Mark Ford, 23 April 1987

‘Howl’: Original Draft Facsimile 
by Allen Ginsberg, edited by Barry Miles.
Viking, 194 pp., £16.95, February 1987, 0 670 81599 3
Show More
White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985 
by Allen Ginsberg.
Viking, 89 pp., £10.95, February 1987, 0 670 81598 5
Show More
Show More
... spirit appeared in his room in East Harlem and declaimed ‘The Sunflower’ and ‘The Sick Rose’ in an unearthly voice. A lot of people thought he’d gone mad. As late as 1952 he was hoping a new analyst would ‘cure’ him of his homosexuality and help him integrate into society. But in 1954 he moved to San Francisco where he found a new type of ...

The New Narrative

John Kerrigan, 16 February 1984

The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse 
edited by Iona Opie and Peter Opie.
Oxford, 407 pp., £8.95, September 1983, 0 19 214131 7
Show More
Time’s Oriel 
by Kevin Crossley-Holland.
Hutchinson, 61 pp., £4.95, August 1983, 0 09 153291 4
Show More
On Gender and Writing 
edited by Michelene Wandor.
Pandora, 166 pp., £3.95, September 1983, 0 86358 021 1
Show More
Stone, Paper, Knife 
by Marge Piercy.
Pandora, 144 pp., £3.95, September 1983, 9780863580222
Show More
The Achievement of Ted Hughes 
edited by Keith Sagar.
Manchester, 377 pp., £27.50, March 1983, 0 7190 0939 1
Show More
Ted Hughes and Paul Muldoon 
Faber, £6.95, June 1983, 0 571 13090 9Show More
River 
by Ted Hughes and Peter Keen.
Faber, 128 pp., £10, September 1983, 0 571 13088 7
Show More
Quoof 
by Paul Muldoon.
Faber, 64 pp., £4, September 1983, 0 571 13117 4
Show More
Show More
... Certainly, to read a collection like The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, newly-edited by Iona and Peter Opie, is to be reminded of the powerful appeal that’s made in poetry by ‘the kind of story in which, you want to know what happens next’. The Opies’ choice is often cautious and occasionally perverse. In some respects, moreover, their book belongs ...

What does Fluffy think?

Amia Srinivasan: Pets with Benefits, 7 October 2021

Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia and Post-Human Love 
by Joanna Bourke.
Reaktion, 184 pp., £18, October 2020, 978 1 78914 310 2
Show More
Show More
... in farming communities reported experiencing orgasm as a result of animal contact, a number that rose to 65 per cent in some rural settings. In his study of American women in 1953, Kinsey found that just under 4 per cent had engaged in sexual activity with an animal since adolescence; almost all these cases involved dogs or cats. In 1974, the sexologist ...
... Others, sound at heart, were wearied by the struggle and simply hoped it would go away. As I rose from my sick bed, I was convinced that the Labour Party was past saving from within. The response to the Limehouse Declaration was immediate and overwhelming. It was as if a vast crowd of men and women had been assembling in silence to wait for the ...

Ruling Imbecilities

Andrew Roberts, 7 November 1991

The Enemy’s Country: Words, Contexture and Other Circumstances of Language 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 153 pp., £19.95, August 1991, 0 19 811216 5
Show More
Show More
... others, Eric Griffiths. In an essay included in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (1985, edited by Peter Robinson), Griffiths expressed reservations about Hill’s ‘unsteady reliance on religious metaphors’ in his critical writings. In Hill’s essay ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement” ’ in particular, the idea that poetic language may escape ...

A Sad and Gory Land

Claudia Johnson, 23 February 1995

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? 
by Lorrie Moore.
Faber, 148 pp., £14.99, November 1994, 0 571 17310 1
Show More
Show More
... Cinderella, Bo Peep and Berie sneak off for a smoke in the alley between Hickory Dickory Dock and Peter Pumpkin Eater’s Pumpkin. Neither children nor adults, they are about to learn that story-land is a sad and gory land, and they deride the credulity of children who think otherwise. To the little girl who keeps stroking her glitter and asking for the ...

At Home in the Huntington

John Sutherland: The Isherwood Archive, 10 June 1999

... diaries to be published and promised that they would be ‘frank’. The world’s press rose to the bait, expecting another instalment of Hollywood-Babylon: ‘Private Lives of Stars Laid Bare in Diaries,’ the Telegraph forecast. Prudently, Isherwood had destroyed the journals that would have interested posterity most: the record of his life ...

Diary

Ian Hamilton: Francis Hope, and Tom and Vic, 15 March 1984

... of T. S. Eliot’s first marriage, to Vivien Haigh-Wood, and I had been pretty well put off it by Peter Redgrove’s letter to the TLS: ‘if Eliot’s diagnosis of the ills of our civilisation in prose and poetry had its root in his own sexual distress and inability in his prime to form a personal relationship with the feminine, then we have a right to ...

Salons

William Thomas, 16 October 1980

Holland House 
by Leslie Mitchell.
Duckworth, 320 pp., £18, May 1980, 9780715611166
Show More
Genius in the Drawing-Room 
edited by Peter Quennell.
Weidenfeld, 188 pp., £8.50, May 1980, 9780297777700
Show More
Show More
... and a stenographer was hired to record the conversation. But Hutch was a little drunk when he rose to speak, and the stenographer was not used to his vocabulary or odd juxtapositions. The resulting typescript was a disjointed jumble of ideas about sex, men, women, Wobblies, revolution, love, art, democracy and anarchism that lurched between sharp insights ...

Lessons for Civil Servants

David Marquand, 21 August 1980

The Secret Constitution 
by Brian Sedgemore.
Hodder, 256 pp., £7.95, July 1980, 0 340 24649 9
Show More
The Civil Servants 
by Peter Kellner and Lord Crowther-Hunt.
Macdonald/Jane’s, 352 pp., £9.95, July 1980, 0 354 04487 7
Show More
Show More
... between himself and Mr Callaghan’s chief whip, Michael Cocks, in the course of which Cocks rose from his chair and looked around the room: There were three doors off it – one into the large Whips’ Office, one into the office of one of his advisers, and one into the corridor to get out. He then secured all three doors. Looking around I could see ...

Peaches from Our Tree

R.W. Davies, 7 September 1995

Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 1925-1936 
edited by Lars Lih, Oleg Naumov and Oleg Khlevniuk.
Yale, 276 pp., £16.95, May 1995, 0 300 06211 7
Show More
Pisma I.V. Stalina V.M. Molotovu, 1925-1936: Sbornik Dokumentov 
compiled by L. Kosheleva, V. Lelchuk, V. Naumov, O. Naumov and L. Rogovaya.
Rossiya Molodaya, 303 pp., May 1995, 5 86646 071 8
Show More
Iosif Stalin v Obyatiyakh Semi: Iz Lichnogo Arkhiva 
compiled by Yu. G. Murin.
Rodina, 222 pp., July 1993, 5 7330 0043 0
Show More
Show More
... work which is offered to him is automatically deprived of the right to receive benefit’ (has Peter Lilley read these letters?). What of the international aspects of Stalin’s Communism? In his Foreword to the English-language edition, Robert Tucker, the American biographer of Stalin, argues that the letters ‘bear out the proposition ... that Stalin ...