I only want the OM

Christopher Tayler: Somerset Maugham, 1 September 2005

Somerset Maugham: A Life 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Vintage, 411 pp., £12, April 2005, 1 4000 3052 8
Show More
Show More
... allow Meyers to dwell on his previous subjects: he has already tackled Orwell, Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Edmund Wilson, among many others. But his obsessive cross-referencing also seems aimed at elevating Maugham by association. Meyers dismisses his weaker efforts, and even quotes some of the lines that drew fire. (From Great ...

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
Show More
Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems 
edited by David Bromwich.
Yale, 456 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 0 300 09528 9
Show More
Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy and Poetry 
by Mark Ford.
Oxford, 244 pp., £25, July 2023, 978 0 19 288680 4
Show More
Show More
... little unhinged at times’). Yet aberration was something he appeared to need from her. D.H. Lawrence observed that characters in Hardy’s novels don’t tend to ‘develop’; instead they ‘explode … bursting suddenly out of bud … out of a … tight, hide-bound cabbage state into something quite madly personal’. The madly personal in Emma ...

Pavilion of Heaven

Ferdinand Mount: Adventures of Raffles, 2 April 2026

Raffles, Gentleman Thief 
by E.W. Hornung.
Penguin, 304 pp., £10.99, January, 978 0 241 79022 9
Show More
Writers in Whites: How a Group of Literary Cricketers Changed English Culture 
by Ollie Randall.
Fairfield, 288 pp., £22, May, 978 1 915237 74 3
Show More
Show More
... him ‘that little worm’. Eliot declared that ‘no truce is possible with such people.’ D.H. Lawrence called him ‘a suburban rat’ (for the modernists, ‘suburban’ was always the ultimate insult). In New Verse, Geoffrey Grigson set out to discredit for ever the middlebrow world of letters. By 1940, the job was done, according to George Orwell: back ...

Call me Ahab

Jeremy Harding: Moby-Dick, 31 October 2002

Moby-Dick, or, The Whale 
by Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker.
Northwestern, 573 pp., £14.95, September 2001, 0 8101 1911 0
Show More
Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in 
by C.L.R. James.
New England, 245 pp., £17.95, July 2001, 9781584650942
Show More
Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival 
by Clare Spark.
Kent State, 744 pp., £46.50, May 2001, 0 87338 674 4
Show More
Lucchesi and the Whale 
by Frank Lentricchia.
Duke, 104 pp., £14.50, February 2001, 9780822326540
Show More
Show More
... with the rest. Several, towing their druggs, will make easy pickings for other whaling ships. D.H. Lawrence thought this ‘the most stupendous chapter’ in the book, and quoted at length from the aquarium scenes, stressing the ‘submarine bridal chambers’ within the nursery. Always eager to spell things out (‘amazing monsters . . . in rut’), ...

Our Hero

C.H. Sisson, 25 January 1990

Richard Aldington: A Biography 
by Charles Doyle.
Macmillan, 379 pp., £19.95, November 1989, 0 333 46487 7
Show More
Show More
... read this book. Aldington was born in 1892; that makes him younger than Eliot by four years, than Lawrence and Pound by seven, and than Wyndham Lewis by ten years. Herbert Read was a year his junior. These are all figures with whom he had more or less close connections at one time or another, so the relativities are worth bearing in mind. Aldington’s father ...

Kafka at Las Vegas

Alan Bennett, 23 July 1987

... one he could have shared with several contemporaries, Proust, Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence among them). When he was dying of TB of the larynx he was fetching up a good deal of phlegm. ‘I think,’ he said (and the joke is more poignant for being so physically painful to make), ‘I think I deserve the Nobel Prize for sputum.’ Nothing if ...

Ways to Be Pretentious

Ian Penman, 5 May 2016

M Train 
by Patti Smith.
Bloomsbury, 253 pp., £18.99, October 2015, 978 1 4088 6768 6
Show More
Collected Lyrics 1970-2015 
by Patti Smith.
Bloomsbury, 303 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 1 4088 6300 8
Show More
Show More
... the labour of creation. Most readers probably glide over this sort of old-school Nietzsche/D.H. Lawrence boilerplate without it really registering, but there’s no question Smith herself takes it seriously, always did. There have been clinches with Catholicism, Buddhism, paganism, you name it, but Art is the one thing Smith has never stopped ...

Two Giant Brothers

Amit Chaudhuri: Tagore’s Modernism, 20 April 2006

Selected Poems 
by Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri.
Oxford India, 449 pp., £23.99, April 2004, 0 19 566867 7
Show More
Show More
... compulsion to dominate and colonise nature. It’s a conclusion remarkably similar to the one D.H. Lawrence reaches in Etruscan Places. Lawrence’s metaphors for coloniser and colonised are the Romans and the Etruscans respectively: the former’s civilisation is marked by territorial conquest and the domination of ...

That’s what Wystan says

Seamus Perry, 10 May 2018

Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography 
by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 912 pp., £27.95, May 2017, 978 0 691 17249 1
Show More
Show More
... at all, but as neurosis, emotional repression, the inability to love: there is much more D.H. Lawrence and Blake in them than there is Mr Marx. And of course a lot of Freud, mostly not in particulars but in the diffusely Freudian cast of mind – the ‘climate of opinion’, in Auden’s famous phrase – which, contemplating the whole range of human ...

Isn’t that . . . female?

Patricia Lockwood: My Dame Antonia, 20 June 2024

Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories 
by A.S. Byatt.
Vintage, 444 pp., £9.99, November 2023, 978 1 5291 1299 3
Show More
Show More
... Byatt’s mother, Kathleen – drop books into the rubbish bin. I have to think a lot about D.H. Lawrence for some reason; I have to rebut the idea that there are no accidents in novels. It is pertinent, then, that I had no education. Byatt was freed into hers and also enclosed by it. You are inside its sensual pleasures. Yes, you will sometimes feel ...

Make mine a Worcester Sauce

John Bayley, 23 June 1994

Richard Hughes 
by Richard Perceval Graves.
Deutsch, 491 pp., £20, May 1994, 0 233 98843 2
Show More
Show More
... literary ‘Englishness’. Four possible candidates, varying in attainments, would be T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Peter Fleming (perhaps both Flemings) and Richard Hughes. It makes no difference that Lawrence was half-Irish, the Flemings mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or father figure of ...

In the Hyacinth Garden

Richard Poirier: ‘But oh – Vivienne!’, 3 April 2003

Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot 
by Carole Seymour-Jones.
Constable, 702 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 1 84119 636 3
Show More
Show More
... well as emotional bond: Wittgenstein, who had repudiated Russell’s work in philosophy, and D.H. Lawrence, who had become contemptuous both of his writing and of his character. In helping the Eliots, Russell needed to believe in his purity of purpose. He wanted especially to believe that he was in this case acting in a manner uncontaminated by public ...

Yeats, Auden, Eliot: 1939, 1940, 1941

Colm Tóibín, 22 January 2026

... named the gift as the liberating source of identity and power.’ Auden thought that D.H. Lawrence owed ‘his influence for good and evil to his gift’, but that Matthew Arnold had ‘thrust his gift in prison till it died’. According to Mendelson, ‘almost everything [Auden] wrote in 1939 was an attempt to clarify his mixed feelings about the ...

That was the year that was

Tariq Ali, 24 May 2018

... the first thing was just to read, non-stop, books that were never available in Pakistan: D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Isaac Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy, Trotsky himself, other Bolshevik leaders, many others. So for me Oxford was very liberating and on many fronts. When I came to Britain, it was obvious that the United States had taken over the function ...