A Little Pickle for the Husband

Michael Mason, 1 April 1999

Beeton's Book of Household Management 
by Isabella Beeton.
Southover, 1112 pp., £29.95, November 1998, 9781870962155
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... that she died of puerperal fever (her baby boy was one of two survivors from four births). Yet the power of Ward, Lock and Tyler’s phantom – a dim and disembodied entity, but vaguely middle-aged, matronly and strait-laced – still asserts itself. Those who have an urge to connect the life and the work sometimes make the mistake of looking up in the family ...

Street Wise

Pat Rogers, 3 October 1985

Hawksmoor 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Hamish Hamilton, 218 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 241 11664 3
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Paradise Postponed 
by John Mortimer.
Viking, 374 pp., £9.95, September 1985, 0 670 80094 5
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High Ground 
by John McGahern.
Faber, 156 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 571 13681 8
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... in the plot. Ackroyd’s double-track narrative switches between London in the period of the Queen Anne churches (say 1714 to 1715, though the building process is telescoped) and the city of today. Across the divide of idiom and landscape, there is a parallelism of event: murders committed in identical places – around the site of Hawksmoor churches, in ...

Malice! Malice!

Stephen Sedley: Thomas More’s Trial, 5 April 2012

Thomas More’s Trial by Jury 
edited by Henry Ansgar Kelly, Louis Karlin and Gerard Wegemer.
Boydell, 240 pp., £55, September 2011, 978 1 84383 629 2
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... against the papal refusal to sanction his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn was to dethrone the pope as head of the church in England. In this he had the counsel of the ruthless and crafty Thomas Cromwell. More had in 1529 accepted the chancellorship left vacant by the impeachment of his patron Cardinal Wolsey, on condition ...

Wiggle, Wiggle

Daniel Soar: Elena Ferrante, 21 September 2006

The Days of Abandonment 
by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein.
Europa, 189 pp., £7.99, May 2006, 1 933372 00 1
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... this pre-emptive embrace of male pornography is, she thinks, an alarming way of asserting female power. Their behaviour is determined by the men they think they are free from. In The Days of Abandonment, Ferrante has cut the shocked reaction and eradicated all ambivalence – there are no multiple perspectives, no daughters imagining fathers imagining wives ...

What Blair Threw Away

Ross McKibbin: Feckless, Irresponsible and Back in Power, 19 May 2005

... to Labour? Or in those seats with a high-minded middle class? Perhaps Oona King, Barbara Roche and Anne Campbell could ask him. (Indeed Oona King could ask herself what she thought was going to happen.) The prime minister’s self-indulgence should not be rewarded by another long spell in Downing Street. That is not the only thing to be said against his ...

Gotterdämmerung

Christopher Hitchens, 12 January 1995

... other sources – that British secret policemen did place themselves at the service of a foreign power in the attempt to destabilise an elected British government. Mr James Angleton may not have been – was not, in my opinion – as foul as the men of Dzerzhinsky Square. But the point of protesting about ‘moral equivalence’ is surely not to blur moral ...

Corbyn in the Media

Paul Myerscough, 22 October 2015

... were drowned out by a host of detractors, from within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband (whose razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve Coogan, Matthew D’Ancona, Betty ...

Sheeped

Julian Loose, 30 January 1992

The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World 
by Haruki Murakami, translated by Alfred Birnbaum.
Hamish Hamilton, 400 pp., £14.99, September 1991, 0 241 13144 8
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... a data mafia who swoop on opponents in fake taxis, trimming off their crania with the buzz of a power saw. Our hero begins his Alice-like plunge into wonderland through an ordinary-seeming closet in a downtown skyscraper, which opens to reveal a waterfall and the laboratory of the world’s greatest neurophysiologist, the Professor. Laundering the ...

My word, Miss Perkins

Jenny Diski: In the Typing Pool, 4 August 2005

Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture 
edited by Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell.
Ashgate, 168 pp., £40, January 2005, 0 7546 3804 9
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... a place for themselves in the world of employment that allowed them independence and a degree of power? Learning shorthand and typing was once a way for a young man to have an exciting career as a journalist, or, like Dickens and his shadow David Copperfield, to become a parliamentary reporter. When the First World War and the economics of differential wages ...

F for Felon

Roy Porter, 4 April 2002

Policing and Punishment in London 1660-1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror 
by J.M. Beattie.
Oxford, 491 pp., £48, July 2001, 0 19 820867 7
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... necessarily involved negotiated compromises: because it needed legitimacy, it had to possess a power not primarily coercive but consensual. To sustain hegemonic authority, the law had to be (more or less) accepted by the man in the street – anyone likely to be robbed or mugged and any potential juryman. After all, nobodies as well as nobs had their stuff ...

Criminal Elastic

Susannah Clapp, 5 February 1987

Margaret Oliphant: A Critical Biography 
by Merryn Williams.
Macmillan, 217 pp., £27.50, October 1986, 0 333 37647 1
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Chronicles of Carlingford: The Perpetual Curate 
by Mrs Oliphant.
Virago, 540 pp., £4.50, February 1987, 0 86068 786 4
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Chronicles of Carlingford: Salem Chapel 
by Mrs Oliphant.
Virago, 461 pp., £3.95, August 1986, 0 86068 723 6
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Chronicles of Carlingford: The Rector 
by Mrs Oliphant.
Virago, 192 pp., £3.50, August 1986, 0 86068 728 7
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... half a dozen essays a year to Blackwood’s Magazine, delivering on Bunsen, Savonarola, Queen Anne, Marco Polo and Jesus Christ. Her fluency brought her compliments on her ‘industry’ in which she detected ‘a delightful superiority’: she was a connoisseur of condescensions. It also brought her undisguised insults. Stung by Mrs Oliphant’s review ...

Being a benandante

Anthony Pagden, 2 February 1984

The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the 16th and 17th Centuries 
by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi.
Routledge, 209 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 7100 9507 4
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... Benandanti in 1964, and has now been skilfully, even elegantly translated into English by John and Anne Tedeschi. Night Battles follows the fortunes of the benandanti through a series of Inquisition trials from 1575, when they first appear in the records, until 1676, when both they and the witches had ceased to be of much interest to the Church authorities. In ...

Gobsmacked

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare, 16 July 1998

Lyric Wonder: Rhetoric and Wit in Renaissance English Poetry 
by James Biester.
Cornell, 226 pp., £31.50, May 1997, 0 8014 3313 4
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Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvellous 
by Peter Platt.
Nebraska, 271 pp., £42.75, January 1998, 0 8032 3714 6
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Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder 
by T.G. Bishop.
Cambridge, 222 pp., £32.50, January 1996, 0 521 55086 6
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The Genius of Shakespeare 
by Jonathan Bate.
Picador, 386 pp., £20, September 1997, 0 330 35317 9
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... and friars emerge from hiding places to resolve each plot’, he seems to be talking about Anne Radcliffe or Matthew Lewis rather than Shakespeare, and readers of Bishop’s study may be similarly surprised to learn that ‘the figure of the Virgin Mother’ is ‘Shakespeare’s deepest presider over the scene of reunion’. It would be a ...

Hats One Dreamed about

Tessa Hadley: Rereading Bowen, 20 February 2020

Collected Stories 
by Elizabeth Bowen.
Everyman, 904 pp., £18.99, October 2019, 978 1 84159 392 0
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... section I’d been sustained by the endless seeming supply of Swallows and Amazons and Anne of Green Gables. And I liked the woodcuts by Joan Hassall used on each Bowen volume, which – though I still like them very much – I can now see are a few shades more sentimental and simplifying than the words inside. (Bowen in a 1968 letter to William ...

I adore your moustache

James Wolcott: Styron’s Letters, 24 January 2013

Selected Letters of William Styron 
edited by Rose Styron and R. Blakeslee Gilpin.
Random House, 643 pp., £24.99, December 2012, 978 1 4000 6806 7
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... William Styron and his wife, Rose (respected worldwide as a human rights activist), had drawing power as party hosts, the cultural cachet to net composers, playwrights, directors, ratfink fabulists and a former president’s daughter to toast the holidays and air out their egos. Such dos were among the last hurrahs of the postwar literary era dominated by ...