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Adam Mars-Jones: William Gaddis, 23 September 2021

The Recognitions 
by William Gaddis.
NYRB, 992 pp., £24, November 2020, 978 1 68137 466 6
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JR 
by William Gaddis.
NYRB, 784 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 68137 468 0
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... in those dancing footsteps, by building up party scenes out of scraps of dialogue:– So I said to her, you just go ahead and be pathological …– So I said to them when we got back to Florence, of course there’s no place I’d rather live than Siena if I had my analyst there with me …– So he ...

Unemployed

David Cannadine, 2 December 1982

Duchess: The Story of Wallis Warfield Windsor 
by Stephen Birmingham.
Macmillan, 287 pp., £8.95, October 1982, 0 333 34265 8
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The Duke of Windsor’s War 
by Michael Bloch.
Weidenfeld, 397 pp., £10.95, October 1982, 0 297 77947 8
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... his time as Prince of Wales, substantiated most of the criticisms levelled against him as King Edward VIII, and painted a pathetic picture of his later years as Duke of Windsor, the ‘weary, wayward, wandering ghost’, shuffling with rootless opulence from resort to resort, getting ‘more tanned and more tired’. The latest contribution from the legion ...

The great times they could have had

Paul Foot, 15 September 1988

Wallis: Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor 
by Charles Higham.
Sidgwick, 419 pp., £17.95, June 1988, 0 283 99627 7
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The Secret File of the Duke of Windsor 
by Michael Bloch.
Bantam, 326 pp., £14.95, August 1988, 9780593016671
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... Frances Donaldson, modestly omitting to refer to her own worthy, if rather pedestrian biography of Edward VIII, could not contain her indignation. ‘Nor am I alone in thinking it rather shocking,’ she boomed, ‘that Mr Higham was able to find a reputable British publisher for his book.’ Lady Donaldson doesn’t believe for a moment that either the Duke ...

Blood on the Block

Maurice Keen: Henry IV, 5 June 2008

The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-Made King 
by Ian Mortimer.
Vintage, 480 pp., £8.99, July 2008, 978 1 84413 529 5
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... good lord King Henry the Third’. On 13 October he was crowned king. The son of John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third son, Henry was certainly Richard’s nearest male heir in 1399; but the seven-year-old Edmund, Earl of March, grandson of Philippa, the daughter of Edward III’s second son, Lionel, had through the female ...

A feather! A very feather upon the face!

Amit Chaudhuri: India before Kipling, 6 January 2000

The Unforgiving Minute 
by Harry Ricketts.
Chatto, 434 pp., £25, January 1999, 0 7011 3744 4
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... and Indian, novel, Durgeshnandini. These writers, and others, were, to paraphrase what Pound once said about Tagore, singing India into existence. The Renaissance, by reconfiguring the Western and the local, was providing, for Indians, a reinterpretation of what it meant to be Indian. Tagore himself was born four years before Kipling; and if Kipling made a ...

Mutual Friend

Richard Altick, 22 December 1983

Lewis and Lewis 
by John Juxon.
Collins, 320 pp., £10.95, May 1983, 0 00 216476 0
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... figure of them all, the Prince of Wales, who became Lewis’s personal friend. The future King Edward sought legal advice from him in connection with, among other embarrassments to the cherished image of royalty as the seat of virtue, the sticky Mordaunt divorce case, in which the Prince was forced to testify, and the Tranby Croft cheating-at-baccarat ...

Wash out your ears

Adam Shatz: Messiaen’s Ecstasies, 20 February 2025

Olivier Messiaen: A Critical Biography 
by Robert Sholl.
Reaktion, 255 pp., £25, May 2024, 978 1 78914 865 7
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Messiaen in Context 
edited by Robert Sholl.
Cambridge, 348 pp., £95, November 2023, 978 1 108 48791 7
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... beliefs on listeners. ‘My work is addressed to all who believe – and also to all others,’ he said. It inspires awe and wonder rather than piety, and it is often playful. With the exception of his late opera Saint François d’Assise, there’s nothing obviously Catholic about it, if you leave aside the texts he wrote to accompany it; nor does it have ...

Outside the text

Marilyn Butler, 19 December 1985

The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory 
by Jerome McGann.
Oxford, 352 pp., £19.50, May 1985, 0 19 811730 2
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The Politics of Language: 1791-1819 
by Olivia Smith.
Oxford, 269 pp., £19.50, December 1984, 0 19 812817 7
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... it was largely won in scholars’ libraries, and it took years to get. The historical critic Edward Said has recently reflected of Eliot and the New Critics, now so widely reviled for conservatism and élitism, that in one respect at least they were populists when they began: they argued that you didn’t need scholarly or philological ...

The Art of Being Found Out

Colm Tóibín: The need to be revealed, 20 March 2008

... nose, and often both simultaneously. According to Lady Gregory’s diaries, Sir William had said to her during the Egyptian visit: ‘You and Wilfrid talk more nonsense than any two people settling the affairs of the world.’ In his diary Blunt wrote: ‘I have remodelled Lady Gregory’s 12 sonnets, which I heard from her a day or two ago she would ...

Purgatory be damned

Diarmaid MacCulloch: The Dissolution of the Monasteries, 17 July 2008

The Last Office: 1539 and the Dissolution of a Monastery 
by Geoffrey Moorhouse.
Weidenfeld, 283 pp., £25, March 2008, 978 0 297 85089 2
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... was forced to set out to find a new career in spring 1540. And still no official statement had said that monasteries were bad things. The preamble to a second Act of Parliament in 1539 merely noted without much comment that there did not seem to be many monasteries around any more (I paraphrase), and that it was therefore important to confirm that the ...

Jeremy Harding goes to Beirut to meet the novelist Elias Khoury

Jeremy Harding: ‘Before everything else, a writer of stories’, 16 November 2006

... how little had been published by Lebanese about the conflicts they’d experienced. Lebanon, he said much later, was ‘an oral society’ which had failed to commit its history to paper. Little Mountain, set during the mid-1970s in the thick of civil war, was his signal that the time had come to keep a written record. Khoury returned to Beirut in 1973 and ...

Scribblers and Assassins

Charles Nicholl: The Crimes of Thomas Drury, 31 October 2002

... atheistic opinions, while the second reports the words of another man, Richard Cholmeley, who is said to have been converted, or ‘persuaded’, to atheism by Marlowe. I have spent rather longer than I might have wished puzzling over these documents and the circumstances of their composition. They are mere bits of thumb-stained paper but they have the ...

State-Sponsored Counter-Terror

Karl Miller, 8 May 1986

Parliamentary Debates: Hansard, Vol. 95, No 94 
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... This has been an exceptionally serious debate,’ said Denis Healey on Wednesday 16 April, in contributing to the principal occasion on which the House of Commons gave its mind to the American air strike on Tripoli and Ben Ghazi, two days before, and to the Prime Minister’s decision – with the minimum of Cabinet consultation – to play the part of an ally by sanctioning the use for that purpose of bases in Britain ...

Politics First

Jose Harris, 19 April 1984

The Chartists 
by Dorothy Thompson.
Temple Smith, 399 pp., £19.50, February 1984, 0 85117 229 6
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Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History 1832-1982 
by Gareth Stedman Jones.
Cambridge, 260 pp., £22.50, January 1984, 0 521 25648 8
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Class Power and State Power 
by Ralph Miliband.
Verso, 310 pp., £18.50, March 1984, 0 86091 073 3
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... of Chartism as a movement greater than the sum of its parts has, however, never wholly died out. Edward Thompson concluded his The Making of the English Working Class in 1963 by nominating the Chartists as heirs of that new, nation-wide working-class identity which he believed had been forged by the exclusion of the propertyless from the Reform Act of ...

Rough Wooing

Tom Shippey: Queen Matilda, 17 November 2011

Matilda: Queen of the Conqueror 
by Tracy Borman.
Cape, 297 pp., £20, September 2011, 978 0 224 09055 1
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... Stafford’s Queen Emma and Queen Edith (1997), which brackets Emma with her successor, wife of Edward ‘the Confessor’. Stafford’s earlier Queens, Concubines and Dowagers (1983) took a broader view, as does Lisa Hilton’s Queens Consort: England’s Medieval Queens (2008). If one were to pick out another powerful ruler too often forgotten, one might ...

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