My God, they stink!

Seamus Perry: Wyndham Lewis goes for it, 5 December 2024

The Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis: ‘Time and Western Man’ 
edited by Paul Edwards.
Oxford, 566 pp., £190, November 2023, 978 0 19 878583 5
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... title of Portrait of an Englishwoman might promise a helping hand; but then again maybe not: the lady has been replaced by an impossible pile of stacked and suspended slabs, a giant non-figure of fantastic reinforced concrete viewed from somewhere around her unseen feet. ‘THE ACTUAL HUMAN BODY BECOMES OF LESS IMPORTANCE EVERY DAY,’ Lewis wrote elsewhere ...

In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

Rebecca Solnit: Losing San Francisco, 8 February 2024

... themselves or send their children out to play on the street or sit on the train with the Black lady in the picture. In 2022, Andreessen and his wife inveighed against building multi-family housing in their swanky Peninsula hometown of Atherton – average annual income $539,000, median home price $7.9 million – with an email to city government that ...

I prefer my mare

Matthew Bevis: Hardy’s Bad Behaviour, 10 October 2024

Thomas Hardy: Selected Writings 
edited by Ralph Pite.
Oxford, 608 pp., £19.99, February 2024, 978 0 19 890486 1
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Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems 
edited by David Bromwich.
Yale, 456 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 0 300 09528 9
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Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy and Poetry 
by Mark Ford.
Oxford, 244 pp., £25, July 2023, 978 0 19 288680 4
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... Satires of Circumstance a wife tells her husband that she’s seen a vision of a pale, passionless lady who laid critical eyes on her; the husband says he’s seen nothing, before confessing to the reader that his ‘dead Love’ used to tell him, ‘with a small smile’, that she would come back posthumously ‘To any newer Love I might have found,/But show ...

Memoirs of a Pet Lamb

David Sylvester, 5 July 2001

... some years later, when I was about nine or ten. We had gone to a tea-shop on boat-race day where a lady had kindly asked whether I was Oxford or Cambridge. I had answered: ‘I’m a Jew.’A good deal of indoctrination must have gone into that. Did it come from reiteration by family that I was one of the chosen people? Did it come from explanation by nannies ...

Courage, mon amie

Terry Castle: Disquiet on the Western Front, 4 April 2002

... memorial volumes, regimental histories, military-souvenir websites – it is peculiar how many lady archivists you encounter. Some of these, it’s true, are part of husband and wife teams: the prolific Valmai Holt, for example, author, with her husband, of My Boy Jack? The Search for Kipling’s Only Son (1998). (John Kipling died in his first half-hour ...

Growing

Barbara Everett, 31 March 1988

... The practice is summarised in the mocking footnote we attach to Bradley: ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’ A similar topic, once much debated though now rarely reverted to, is: ‘How old, exactly, is Hamlet?’ The dimensions of the problem are these. The Prince is introduced to us as an undergraduate. But in the last phase of the tragedy, when ...

As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes

Jenny Turner: On Feminism, 15 December 2011

... this section] … She was actually coming out from a crowd rush after nearly fainting!’ writes a lady from West London. ‘In your typically misogynistic attempt at smearing these protesters,’ says a young man from Kuala Lumpur, ‘I have to hand it to you. This must be one of the coolest collections of photos I’ve seen from the day.’ Not so long ...

All change. This train is cancelled

Iain Sinclair: The Dome, 13 May 1999

... was the equivalent of John Major’s convenient toothache at the time of the shafting of Lady Thatcher. A leak here, a hint there, a little gentle self-outing and Mandy was out of the limelight, picking up the sympathy vote, at the very moment when the monster he had unleashed, and gloried in, was about to come spectacularly off the rails. When the ...

He, She, One, They, Ho, Hus, Hum, Ita

Amia Srinivasan: How Should I Refer to You?, 2 July 2020

What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He and She 
by Dennis Baron.
Liveright, 304 pp., £16.99, February 2020, 978 1 63149 604 2
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... church groups, educators, army officers, priests, economists and, in one case, ‘a Maryland lady sojourning in New Haven’.In the July 1864 issue of The Ladies’ Repository, a writer going by the name ‘Philologus’ recommends ve/vis/vim for its ability to secure ‘precision, perspicuity and brevity’ in communication, as was only appropriate for ...

Father! Father! Burning Bright

Alan Bennett, 9 December 1999

... of Midgley down the long corridor. ‘I’ll give you such a clatter when I get you home, young lady,’ Jean was saying. ‘He did save up.’ ‘Only a week,’ said the child. ‘When we get there,’ said Hartley, ‘we want to go in in twos. All together would be too much of a strain.’ ‘What’s he doing going to Barnard Castle?’ said Jean. ‘He ...

On a Chinese Mountain

Frank Kermode, 20 November 1986

The Royal Beasts 
by William Empson.
Chatto, 201 pp., £12.95, November 1986, 0 7011 3084 9
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Essays on Shakespeare 
by William Empson.
Cambridge, 246 pp., £25, May 1986, 0 521 25577 5
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... the anti-Bradleyanism of his Cambridge days, the time of L.C. Knights’s How many children had Lady Macbeth?, as well as against the more high-falutin criticism that poured out in his later years, the product of academic market pressures or perhaps a corrupt neo-Christianity. People had stopped understanding what poets actually do; Empson would ...

The Party in Government

Conor Gearty, 9 March 1995

... district auditor in January 1994 that ten councillors and officers, including the Council leader Lady Porter, should pay £21.25 million in surcharges. But of greater national significance was the effect that the poll tax had on the electoral register. It is now estimated that more than a million people failed to be counted by census enumerators in April ...

Havel’s Castle

J.P. Stern, 22 February 1990

... in Rome, of Princess Agnes (1205-1282), the daughter of yet another King Wenceslas. (An old lady whose house lies on the steep way to St Vitus’s Cathedral put a notice in her window: ‘Pilgrims are welcome to a night’s lodging, but I have only two beds, two eiderdowns and four blankets.’) This is the first Czech uprising fully supported by the ...

North and South

Raphael Samuel, 22 June 1995

Coming Back Brockens: A Year in a Mining Village 
by Mark Hudson.
Cape, 320 pp., £16.99, October 1994, 0 224 04170 3
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... as those of T. Dan Smith, in which all things were made anew. Through the Lawrence revival and the Lady Chatterley trial Northernness was associated with the cause of sexual frankness, the practice of post-Victorian morality, and the desacralisation of marriage. Socially, too, Northernness came to stand for a new and emancipatory openness. The scholarship boy ...

Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam

Seamus Heaney, 20 August 1981

... I was handed back the parcel I had sent to M. in the camp. ‘The addressee is dead,’ the young lady behind the counter informed me. It would be easy enough to establish the date on which the parcel was returned to me – it was the same day on which the newspapers published the long list of Government awards – the first ever – to Soviet writers. By ...