Garret’s Crusade

Roy Foster, 21 January 1982

“... Irish history has, however, come from post-Althusserian scholars like Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson,* and their work on the class dynamics of Unionism, as well as the nature of Southern nationalism, leads to very different conclusions: Struggles over the status of the North are no more automatically anti-imperialist than crimes against property ...”

Tang and Tone

Stephen Fender: The Federal Writer’s Project’s American epic, 18 March 2004

Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project 
by Jerrold Hirsch.
North Carolina, 293 pp., £16.50, November 2003, 0 8078 5489 1
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“... over the idea that every writer must be an artist of the first class,’ the director of the FWP, Henry G. Alsberg, said: I think we have invested art with this sort of sacrosanct, ivory-tower atmosphere too much. The craftsmen who worked on the cathedrals were anonymous . . . I think cheap books, less fuss about our sacred personalities, and more service to ...”

It’s queer how I’m lonely

Alan Hollinghurst: Ronald Firbank’s Century, 13 August 2026

“... with a very strong stylistic stamp, Firbank can easily be thought of as doing just one thing. Henry Green, who learned much from Firbank’s experiments, is another example, the impression solidified by the confusable gerunds of his titles, Living, Loving, Doting. But, like Green’s books, Firbank’s are in fact ...”

Diary

Marina Warner: Carmen Callil’s Causes, 15 December 2022

“... ways her genius as a publisher continued to lie in publicity and marketing – the recognisable green livery of the Virago Modern Classics showed her sense of aesthetics as well as her commercial acumen. To establish the new publishing house for writing by women, she drew together a band of collaborators: Harriet Spicer, Ruthie Petrie, Ursula Owen ...”

At the Barbican

John-Paul Stonard: ‘Postwar Modern’, 23 June 2022

“... the bedroom in which she poses. It’s eerie without being contrived, like a scene from a novel by Henry Green. Brandt’s formal attitude here is well matched by the cold intimacy of Freud’s portraits of Kitty Garman and Caroline Blackwood. But in other respects these crisp early Freuds seem the antithesis of the postwar style. Girl in a ...”

The Glamour of Glamour

James Wood, 19 November 1992

The Secret History 
by Donna Tartt.
Viking, 524 pp., £9.99, October 1992, 0 670 84854 9
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A Thousand Acres 
by Jane Smiley.
Flamingo, 371 pp., £5.99, October 1992, 0 00 654482 7
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“... Hampden, and is duly enchanted. ‘The sun was rising over mountains, and birches, and impossibly green meadows ... it was like a country from a dream.’ Richard wants to major in Classics, but he is told that the subject is in the hands of one professor, Julian Morrow, who has only five students. He decides to seek out Morrow, and the writing excitedly ...”

Excellent Enigmas

Christopher Reid, 24 January 1980

Lies and Secrets 
by John Fuller.
Secker, 70 pp., £3.50, October 1980, 0 436 16753 0
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Crossing 
by John Matthias.
Anvil, 125 pp., £3.25, October 1980, 0 85646 035 4
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Growing Up 
by Michael Horovitz.
Allison and Busby, 96 pp., £4.95, October 1980, 0 85031 232 9
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Report to the Working Party. Asylum. Otiose [preceded by] After 
by Anthony Barnett.
Nothing Doing, 121 pp., £4.80, August 1980, 0 901494 17 8
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“... Each footstep stirred A melancholy shriek from vines that trailed Up a cathedral’s height to the green mist, And drifting down were scattered veils of light. I do not doubt the benevolence of that Untrodden place. We lived. And were five years Upon the island, where every shape betrayed The trailing hem of nature. Nothing was asked, Nothing vouchsafed which ...”

Holy Terrors

Penelope Fitzgerald, 4 December 1986

‘Elizabeth’: The Author of ‘Elizabeth and her German Garden’ 
by Karen Usborne.
Bodley Head, 341 pp., £15, October 1986, 0 370 30887 5
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Alison Uttley: The Life of a Country Child 
by Denis Judd.
Joseph, 264 pp., £15.95, October 1986, 0 7181 2449 9
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Richmal Crompton: The Woman behind William 
by Mary Cadogan.
Allen and Unwin, 169 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 04 928054 6
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“... The Country Child, both for adult readers, she brought ‘the whole of my childhood, eternal and green’ to a very large number of readers. ‘The figures of my mother and father come alive and talk gravely to one another.’ Even Little Grey Rabbit and Milkman Hedgehog, she insists, are Late Victorian rustics. In a foreword to the later editions, she wrote ...”

At Pallant House

Rosemary Hill: On Dora Carrington, 3 April 2025

“... of brilliance’, as the Slade’s inspiring and famously bad-tempered drawing master, Henry Tonks, called it – caught the moment when the academic rigour of the life class was beginning to be infused with stirrings of the new. Carrington entered the school in the year of Fry’s exhibition, around the same time as Gertler, Nevinson and the Nash ...”

On Brandon Som

Stephanie Burt, 1 June 2023

“... Luto means ‘mourning’, but also gestures to Shakespeare and Fletcher’s song from Henry VIII: ‘Orpheus with his lute made trees/…/Bow themselves when he did sing.’ Such poems allow patterns of pattern-making to overlap and inform one another, from butchers’ precision to woodcuts to singing to scribal practice. ‘My father’s cuts ...”

His Eyes, Her Voice

Ange Mlinko: ‘Greek Lessons’, 10 August 2023

Greek Lessons 
by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won.
Hamish Hamilton, 146 pp., £16.99, April, 978 0 241 60027 6
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“... flights of fancy become tedious, I slowly walk up the path that leads to the mountain. The pale green trees undulate as a single mass, their flowers a riot of unbelievably beautiful colours.By contrast, the woman prefers to walk around Seoul at night, among shadows and LED lights, passing dive bars and canals, crossing rubbish-strewn underpasses and ...”

One’s Self-Washed Drawers

Rosemary Hill: Ida John, 29 June 2017

The Good Bohemian: The Letters of Ida John 
edited by Rebecca John and Michael Holroyd.
Bloomsbury, 352 pp., £25, May 2017, 978 1 4088 7362 5
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“... John and his sister Gwen. They had come to London to study under the irascible but inspiring Henry Tonks and soon attracted a group of talented students around them. ‘Those Johns you know have a hold that never ceases,’ Ida wrote to a friend. She stayed for six years, working hard to be an artist and making friendships that lasted all her life. Among ...”

Manly Love

John Bayley, 28 January 1993

Walt Whitman: From Moon to Starry Night 
by Philip Callow.
Allison and Busby, 394 pp., £19.99, October 1992, 0 85031 908 0
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The Double Life of Stephen Crane 
by Christopher Benfey.
Deutsch, 294 pp., £17.99, February 1993, 0 233 98820 3
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“... of animation on everything the poet saw and put into words. In a sense it was much the same for Henry James, that other great equivocator of the American literary scene, and always a great admirer of Whitman. James’s prose, even the late prose, is paradoxically as physical as Leaves of Grass, and in the same way. A kind of sublimation was involved in both ...”

Diary

Carol Singh: While Britain Burns, 21 November 1985

“... on time I don’t linger to admire the scenery. Every time I go past the fountain, near where Henry Royce’s statue used to stand, I mutter and tick away to myself: ‘Fkin bastids fkin bastids fkin bastids’. I saw that on a wall once and it seems to express something inchoate and furious. The Council came and took away the statue, which had always ...”

Dancing Senator

Pat Rogers, 7 November 1985

Memoirs of King George II: Vols I, II and III 
by Horace Walpole, edited by John Brooke.
Yale, 248 pp., £65, June 1985, 0 300 03197 1
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“... So, too, the elaborate parallels and contrasts: Robert Walpole and Bolingbroke, Walpole and Henry Pelham, and, pervasively, Pitt against Newcastle. Behind this lies an ancient literary decorum: when Brooke observes, ‘Walpole’s correspondence is a record of his friendships; his memoirs and journals, of his hatreds,’ he points to the Ciceronian ...”