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At the Movies

Michael Wood: Agnès Varda, 5 November 2009

... here.’ Of course we understand her metaphorically, even if we wouldn’t put it past the bag-lady character she plays at various moments in this work to set up house inside some forgotten foyer. At one point she films a protest march, many young people carrying signs urgently calling out for change. Varda herself suddenly appears on the sidelines, a ...

Wall Furniture

Nicholas Penny: Dickens and Anti-Art, 24 May 2012

... of high society romance that Kate Nickleby is obliged to read to the languid Mrs Witterly mentions Lady Flabella’s ‘mouchoir of finest cambric, edged with richest lace, and emblazoned at the four corners with the Flabella crest’, the ‘golden salver’ on which she receives a billet-doux and the ‘silken damask, the hue of Italy’s ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: A Looking-Glass Land of Sorts, 23 February 1995

... nor do I roll up my sleeves and just get on with it like a plucky little householder, mother and lady novelist probably ought to. Instead, I pack my laptop into its snappy black case, leave housekeeping money on the kitchen table, give what I hope is an affirmative hug to the daughter, commend her well-being to her father, and bugger off for a fortnight to a ...

Samuel’s Slave

Caroline Moorehead, 15 May 1980

Lover on the Nile 
by Richard Hall.
Collins, 254 pp., £7.95, February 1980, 9780002164719
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Nellie: Letters from Africa 
by Elspeth Huxley.
Weidenfeld, 326 pp., £8.95, March 1980, 0 297 77706 8
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Black Country Girl in Red China 
by Esther Cheo Ying.
Hutchinson, 191 pp., £5.95, January 1980, 9780091390808
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... to Khartoum, and thence God only knows where, in search of the sources of the Nile.’ The future Lady Baker’s first home in Africa was a thatch and wood hut on the banks of the Atbara, where Florence laid out a piece of chintz and placed on it her brushes, her scent and a mirror. It is at this point that the extraordinariness of this little-known story ...

Our Soft-Shelled Condition

Katha Pollitt: Corsets, 14 November 2002

The Corset: A Cultural History 
by Valerie Steele.
Yale, 204 pp., £29.95, September 2001, 0 300 09071 4
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Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset 
by Leigh Summers.
Berg, 302 pp., £15.99, October 2001, 9781859735107
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... beings came back into circulation. At the same time it produced the smooth, sleek silhouette of a lady, at once reinforcing existing ideas of class (women were visibly either ladies or not) and undermining them. The corset market itself was minutely graded, from expensive models adorned with rich laces and ribbons for the well-off, to plain ones made of stout ...

‘Two in Torquay’

Alan Bennett: A short play, 10 July 2003

... I am. (Pause) MR MORTIMER: Alone today? MISS PLUNKETT: I beg your pardon? MR MORTIMER: No ‘boss lady’? MISS PLUNKETT: Lying down. We had a walk on to the clock tower. She overdid it. She often overdoes it. Are you two acquainted? MR MORTIMER: One nods. We smile. A fellow guest. She is a handsome woman. MISS PLUNKETT: Yes. ‘Very good for her age’ is a ...

M for Merlin

Helen Cooper: Chrétien de Troyes, 25 November 1999

Perceval: The Story of the Grail 
by Chrétien de Troyes, translated by Burton Raffel.
Yale, 307 pp., £22.50, March 1999, 0 300 07586 3
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... Birds sang in their own Sweet language, and the world was joyful. And the son of the widowed lady Living alone in the Barren Forest rose, and quickly Saddled his hunting horse . . . In these lines we are introduced to the hero of Chrétien de Troyes’s last romance, written late in the 12th century. He is a youth brought up in the forest, without any ...

Haleking

John Bossy: Simon Forman, 22 February 2001

The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman 
by Barbara Howard Traister.
Chicago, 260 pp., £19, February 2001, 0 226 81140 9
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Dr Simon Forman: A Most Notorious Physician 
by Judith Cook.
Chatto, 228 pp., £18.99, January 2001, 0 7011 6899 4
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... body. Rowse had come upon Forman in the investigation of his candidate for Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, a promising one if such a person is required: the Court musician Emilia Bassano, Emilia Lanier once married, who consulted him as to whether her husband would get a knighthood and she become a real lady. She did ...

Pillors of Fier

Frank Kermode: Anthony Burgess, 11 July 2002

Nothing like the Sun: reissue 
by Anthony Burgess.
Allison and Busby, 234 pp., £7.99, January 2002, 0 7490 0512 2
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... pen’ (Sonnet 78), Torquato Tasso. Candidates for the doubtful honour of being the Dark Lady are discussed (so far as the list went in 1970) and a slight preference is registered for Mary Fitton, who had a good run for many years but, when investigated, turned out to have a fair complexion, her hair merely brown. But there is no definite ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1999, 20 January 2000

... still wearing the long duster coats she had worn in 1920 and Queen Mary looked like an Edwardian lady all her life: dying in the Fifties, she still dressed as she had in 1910. Look at Ford Madox Brown’s Work: only the middle and upper classes are dressed in a contemporary way; the workmen, the flower-seller and the poorer characters are dressed in what ...

Two Poems

Clive Wilmer, 5 June 1986

... Fixed in the mind, they burn For things to be in peace. Invocation Unanswering voice, Sustainer, Lady or Lord: I have no choice But to attend Your silent word. I think again Of the first poet Of our tongue: Abandoning The sweet, profane Intoxication Of plucked string And exploit sung. At your command He sang creation. He had withdrawn To where His silence ...

Wire

Robin Robertson, 8 September 2011

... her nectary. * The dead jack-rabbit has dried flat as wood, like a Texas cricket bat. * I find Our Lady of Guadalupe out there, watching through the wire. * Only the eagle moves in this heat, shimmering in the blue thermals. * Covering my tracks I have tied mesquite branches to the horse’s tail. * These are just fences and the fences are burning. This is ...

Cash Point

R.F. Langley, 3 June 2004

... can’t be so far away.’ Bring me that fellow called Hay. Uncork a bottle of smoke. Help the old lady out of the bush. Hee haw, when the cart has passed and straws still glint on some snags in the hedge. Close your eyes and make a mum with your mouth shut. Just so. Now look. The stanza is a born dancer, out on the green. Tongs and bones in your good ear. The ...

A Turn of Events

Frank Kermode, 14 November 1996

Reality and Dreams 
by Muriel Spark.
Constable, 160 pp., £14.95, September 1996, 0 09 469670 5
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... She had no real part in his plot and outside it is irritatingly redundant. Meanwhile the leading lady of the film falls ‘commercially but genuinely in love with Tom’. The film having been successfully finished, he thinks up another, set in Roman Britain, with the same leading lady and even a small part for the tiresome ...

Lots to Digest

Gabriele Annan, 3 August 1995

Red Earth and Pouring Rain 
by Vikram Chandra.
Faber, 520 pp., £15.99, June 1995, 0 571 17455 8
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... her sons Sikander (the Indian for Alexander) and Chotta; they both become soldiers. The other lady calls hers Sanjay, and he becomes a poet – and the monkey with the typewriter in his next incarnation. This crude synopsis of a tiny part of the story gives an idea of its complication and improbability, but none of its fascination, charm, and sheer ...

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