Diary

John Burnside: Visits from the Night Hag, 27 September 2018

“... conviction that it would all be over soon. Almost inquisitively, I tried to move – my arm, my foot, my fingers. Remotely, under a kind of numbness, I could sense the energy I was exerting, but there was no movement. Again, I could hear, but I couldn’t see. My sons were with me (we had planned to watch a DVD) and I tried to summon up the power to speak ...”

‘I’m coming, my Tetsie!’

Freya Johnston: Samuel Johnson’s Shoes, 9 May 2019

Samuel Johnson 
edited by David Womersley.
Oxford, 1344 pp., £95, May 2018, 978 0 19 960951 2Show More
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“... the footnote he appended, in his 1765 edition of Shakespeare’s plays, to a passage in King John about shoes: – – – slippers, (which his nimble hasteHad falsely thrust upon contrary feet,) I know not how the commentators understand this important passage, which in Dr Warburton’s edition is marked as eminently beautiful, and, on the whole, not ...”

What was left out

Lawrence Rainey: Eliot’s Missing Letters, 3 December 2009

The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Vol. I: 1898-1922 
edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton.
Faber, 871 pp., £35, November 2009, 978 0 571 23509 4Show More
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“... that you had gone.’ He can’t write enough poetry to make anyone happy. To the publisher John Rodker, who wants to issue a volume of new poems, he confesses sheepishly: ‘I am sorry for the misunderstanding. I don’t think there is enough new stuff for more than 25 pages, but perhaps I shall have more by the end of June. I hope so.’ Elementary ...”

Not Terminal

Stephen Sedley, 8 May 2025

“... I discover, admitted to his French translator that he had never spent much time in Shropshire), John Clare, A.A. Milne, Shelley, Blake, Eliot (Macavity, not Prufrock) and – thanks to Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes’s Rattle Bag, and Geoffrey Grigson’s anthology Unrespectable Verse – a swarm of lesser-known poets.Among these has been Charles ...”

Memoriousness

E.S. Turner, 15 September 1988

Memories of Times Past 
by Louis Heren.
Hamish Hamilton, 313 pp., £15.95, July 1988, 0 241 12427 1Show More
Chances: An Autobiography 
by Mervyn Jones.
Verso, 311 pp., £14.95, September 1987, 0 86091 167 5Show More
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“... that the owners of the Times could have done more to restrain Dawson from his excesses; as it was, John Walter IV, co-proprietor with Lord Astor, complained when ‘our leader-writer’ proposed dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. His qualms were ‘airily’ brushed aside by Dawson. Half a century on, what of Rupert Murdoch? ‘Arguably,’ says Heren, ‘he ...”

‘Porter!’

Penelope Gilliatt, 19 May 1983

The Life of Katherine Anne Porter 
by Joan Givner.
Cape, 572 pp., £15, March 1983, 0 224 02093 5Show More
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“... items), ‘garrulousness of’ (the heroine: an odd thing to pick on in such an endless flat-foot of a book), ‘pearls by’, ‘work abandoned for diversions by’, followed antithetically by ‘working to point of collapse as habit of’. A little later, there is her sister, Mary Alice: ‘bulldog owned by’. This is a thorough book. The index is the ...”

On Thatcher

“... common lot’ more often the note), but since Mrs Thatcher has schooled half the nation to put its foot in the face of the other half it’s not so surprising if ‘youths’ put the boot in after office hours. No amount of moralistic afterthoughts by the home secretary is going to alter that. Meanwhile he should look round the table.Alan Bennett, 31 March ...”

Lady with the Iron Nose

Tom Shippey: Pagan Survival, 3 November 2022

Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe, an Investigation 
by Ronald Hutton.
Yale, 245 pp., £18.99, May, 978 0 300 26101 1Show More
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“... may be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon it. The wrong idea is the ‘widely held belief that the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe ...”

Teeter-Totters

Jeremy Harding: Teeter-Tottering on the Border, 20 April 2017

Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the US-Mexico Boundary 
by Ronald Rael.
California, 184 pp., £24.95, May 2017, 978 0 520 28394 7Show More
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“... a former Kentucky Derby runner stabled in Pirtleville, in Arizona. As the day drew nearer, a foot-and-mouth outbreak made it impossible for either horse to be brought across the border. In those days the border fence at Douglas was not much higher than a sheep fence, and so the race went ahead in the autumn of 1958, with Relámpago running in Mexico and ...”

23153.8; 19897.7; 15635

Adam Smyth: The Stationers’ Company, 27 August 2015

The Stationers’ Company and The Printers of London: 1501-57 
by Peter Blayney.
Cambridge, 2 vols, 1238 pp., £150, November 2013, 978 1 107 03501 0Show More
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“... after for just long enough. You have probably never heard of Anthony Scoloker, or Ursyn Mylner, or John Gybkin or Lodowick Harbard, but Blayney reveals probably as much as it is humanly possible to know of their teeming world. When John Warwick died in York in 1542, his inventory listed not only one cow and six silver ...”

Bumming and Booing

John Mullan: William Wordsworth, 5 April 2001

Wordsworth: A Life 
by Juliet Barker.
Viking, 971 pp., £25, October 2000, 9780670872138Show More
The Hidden Wordsworth 
by Kenneth Johnston.
Pimlico, 690 pp., £15, September 2000, 0 7126 6752 0Show More
Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s 
by David Bromwich.
Chicago, 186 pp., £9.50, April 2000, 0 226 07556 7Show More
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“... I remember being woken to the rightness of their hyperbole when I found them misquoted in Paul Foot’s Red Shelley, where they become, even in ‘corrected’ editions, Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive And to be young was very heaven. Gone is the intoxicated youthful illogic, by which even ‘bliss’ can be trumped. That ‘And’ as we turn into ...”

Lunch with Mussolini

Thomas Jones: Ferrari Speeds Ahead, 14 August 2025

Enzo Ferrari: The Definitive Biography of an Icon 
by Luca Dal Monte.
Cassell, 520 pp., £12.99, February 2025, 978 1 78840 475 4Show More
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“... in a Ferrari, and he’s an inch taller than me. Enzo Ferrari himself was well over six foot.) I ducked down and settled in. The instructor in the passenger seat, also wearing a helmet, shook my hand and introduced himself as Paolo.He talked me through the controls: keep your left foot well away from the ...”

On the Coalition

LRB Contributors, 10 June 2010

“... Stalinist stalwart of the CPGB, later authoritarian and ever-loyal Blairite home secretary, John Reid. An hour later, as I’m leaving, the following conversation takes place: Reid: Halloo. Me: Glad you jumped ship in time? Reid: I left after Blair resigned. Last three years and Broon a total disaster. Me: I agree. But you think Blair would have ...”

Introversion Has Its Limits

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Essayism’, 8 March 2018

Essayism 
by Brian Dillon.
Fitzcarraldo, 138 pp., £10.99, June 2017, 978 1 910695 41 8Show More
Sound: Stories of Hearing Lost and Found 
by Bella Bathurst.
Wellcome, 224 pp., £8.99, February 2018, 978 1 78125 776 0Show More
Proxies: A Memoir in Twenty-Four Attempts 
by Brian Blanchfield.
Picador, 181 pp., £9.99, August 2017, 978 1 5098 4785 3Show More
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“... morning. His horse stumbled. He was killed. She knew it before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he ran downstairs the day they buried him, the beauty of the great lady standing by the window to see the hearse depart, nor, when he came back again, how the curtain, heavy, mid-Victorian, plush perhaps, was all crushed together where ...”

Opprobrious Epithets

Katrina Navickas: The Peterloo Massacre, 20 December 2018

Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre 
by Jacqueline Riding.
Head of Zeus, 386 pp., £25, October 2018, 978 1 78669 583 3Show More
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“... Field. Actors wore the military regalia of the 15th regiment of hussars and the 13th regiment of foot; there was a wood-panelled room, like the one from which the Manchester magistrates had looked out over the crowd. I walked away from the hustings to gauge whether it would be possible to hear a speaker from five hundred yards. As an exercise in historical ...”
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