Thee, Thou, Twixt

Mark Ford: Walter de la Mare, 24 March 2022

Reading Walter de la Mare 
edited by William Wootten.
Faber, 320 pp., £14.99, June 2021, 978 0 571 34713 1
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... has not found much to say about de la Mare, although his illustrious admirers have ranged from Virginia Woolf to Derek Walcott, from Robert Frost to W.H. Auden, from Thomas Hardy to T.S. Eliot, not to speak of confrères such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Henry Newbolt. Ezra Pound, although savage in his denunciation of the use of idioms or ...

Sod off, readers

John Sutherland, 26 September 1991

Rude Words: A Discursive History of the London Library 
by John Wells.
Macmillan, 240 pp., £17.50, September 1991, 0 333 47519 4
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Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English 
by Geoffrey Hughes.
Blackwell, 283 pp., £16.95, August 1991, 0 631 16593 2
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... observes). It is still something of a gentleman’s library – at least, that is how it feels. Virginia Woolf did not dislike the London Library as much as Trinity College Library, whose male exclusivity provoked A Room of One’s Own. But she would not serve on the London Library Committee, feeling that they were ‘sniffy about women’ and hers ...

Another Mother

Frank Kermode, 13 May 1993

Morgan: A Biography of E.M. Forster 
by Nicola Beauman.
Hodder, 404 pp., £20, May 1993, 0 340 52530 4
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... people fail to recognise his greatness, and value him less than, say, James, Conrad, Lawrence or Virginia Woolf, is because they miss his depths, they cannot fathom them unless they present in a frontal, full-dress form.’ It is a matter for regret or possibly indignation that this sentence, absurd in almost every possible way, should have escaped the ...

Lost Jokes

Alan Bennett, 2 August 1984

... of ‘Speak for England, Arthur’, the play within the play. The memoirs of T.E. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf occur in the original script and the visit to the country house on the eve of the First War, but these are presented as the memories of Hugh and Moggie, the upper-class couple who sit out the Second World War in the basement of ...

Glimmerings

Peter Robb, 20 June 1985

Selected Letters of E.M. Forster: Vol. I: 1879-1920, Vol. II: 1921-1970 
edited by Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank.
Collins, 344 pp., £15.95, October 1983, 0 00 216718 2
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... was altogether different. ‘I imagine it is here that civilisation will expire,’ he writes to Virginia Woolf in 1916. Forster was little inclined to hold forth in generalities, but for him as for D.H. Lawrence (whose banned Rainbow he is defending in his last English letter before Alexandria) the destruction and dislocation of the war entailed a ...

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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... motive for producing books has worried almost everyone who has discussed Mrs Oliphant’s writing. Virginia Woolf cited her as an example of a woman who had ‘prostituted her culture’ in order to earn her living; an Edinburgh Reviewer pronounced that she had ‘deliberately reduced herself ... to a manufacturer of saleable literature’, and had no ...

The Manners of a Hog

Christopher Tayler: Buchan’s Banter, 20 February 2020

Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan 
by Ursula Buchan.
Bloomsbury, 479 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4088 7081 5
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... T.S. Eliot’s. In the 1890s his stories appeared in the Bodley Head quarterly The Yellow Book and Virginia Woolf later wrote cattily about his wife. A career as a minor modernist was there for the taking, but too close an association with late Victorian Balliol men meant that he had to settle for a life as a colonial ...

Puffed Wheat

James Wood: How serious is John Bayley?, 20 October 2005

The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature: Essays 1962-2002 
by John Bayley, selected by Leo Carey.
Duckworth, 677 pp., £25, March 2005, 0 7156 3312 0
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... like to admit; they would all agree, for instance, along with Leavis, to a marked suspicion of Virginia Woolf, for interestingly similar reasons. All three men tend to write journalism which, at least when it is stalking the common reader, functions at levels below their best intelligence. Carey quickly becomes coarse and crowd-pleasing; Eagleton ...

A Catholic Novel

David Lodge, 4 June 1981

... Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), C.P. Snow and Virginia Woolf. There are also allusions to other texts, such as William Golding’s Free Fall, and to literary schools and sub-genres: the Chester-Belloc style of essay writing is caricatured in Egbert Merrymarsh, and there is a postgraduate sherry-party ...

Picasso and Cubism

Gabriel Josipovici, 16 July 1981

Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective 
edited by William Rubin.
Thames and Hudson, 464 pp., £10.95, July 1980, 0 500 23310 1
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Picasso: His Life and Work 
by Roland Penrose.
Granada, 517 pp., £9.99, May 1981, 0 7139 1420 3
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Portrait of Picasso 
by Roland Penrose.
Thames and Hudson, 128 pp., £3.95, June 1981, 0 500 27226 3
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Viva Picasso: A Centennial Celebration, 1881-1981 
by Donald Duncan.
Allen Lane, 152 pp., £12.95, May 1981, 0 7139 1420 3
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Picasso: The Cubist Years, 1907-1916 
by Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet.
Thames and Hudson, 376 pp., £60, October 1979, 9780500091340
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Picasso’s Guernica: The Labyrinth of Vision 
by Frank Russell.
Thames and Hudson, 334 pp., £12.50, April 1980, 0 500 23298 9
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... with the possibility of dispersal and destruction: a fact seized upon with great intensity by both Virginia Woolf and Francis Bacon, and explicitly seen by Walter Benjamin as the essence of the Modernist revolution, an insight which makes Benjamin, even today, Modernism’s most profound theorist. Unlike Braque, Picasso always needed to violate his own ...

I must divorce!

Toril Moi: On Vigdis Hjorth, 6 February 2025

If Only 
by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund.
Verso, 343 pp., £12.99, September 2024, 978 1 83976 888 0
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... Busk’), about Busk’s love affair with a writer called Vilde Winther (a deliberate allusion to Virginia Woolf). Linneberg’s novel, which – unsurprisingly – is rather more sympathetic to its hero, presents Vilde/Ida as an admirable but neurotic, unpredictable creature, whom the narrator can neither control nor fully understand. Hjorth ...

Heart, Head, Life, Fate

Steven Shapin: Talk to the hand, 19 March 2026

Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine and Magic 
by Alison Bashford.
Chicago, 446 pp., £25, December 2025, 978 0 226 83115 2
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... intellectuals – their many devotees included William Gladstone, Joseph and Austen Chamberlain, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. (A hand-reader pronounced Wilde’s head line ‘very strongly marked, showing extraordinary brain power and profound scholarship’.) The high-end chirologists advertised distinctions between what they ...

Not for Horrid Profs

Colin Burrow: Kermode’s Shakespeare, 1 June 2000

Shakespeare's Language 
by Frank Kermode.
Allen Lane, 324 pp., £20, April 2000, 0 7139 9378 2
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... of this chronological argument are reflections on the ways in which ‘the little language’ (as Virginia Woolf called it) of each play works. Shakespeare’s mature dramas are underwritten by ‘matrices’ of repeating words and themes (here Kermode draws on Empson’s Structure of Complex Words): ‘In these echoing words and themes, these ...

The Thing

Michael Wood: Versions of Proust, 6 January 2005

In Search of Lost Time: Vol. I: The Way by Swann’s 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Lydia Davis.
Penguin, 496 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 0 14 118031 5
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In Search of Lost Time: Vol.II: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by James Grieve.
Penguin, 576 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 0 14 118032 3
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In Search of Lost Time: Vol. III: The Guermantes Way 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Mark Treharne.
Penguin, 640 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 0 14 118033 1
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In Search of Lost Time: Vol. IV: Sodom and Gomorrah 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by John Sturrock.
Penguin, 576 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 9780141180342
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In Search of Lost Time: Vol. V: ‘The Prisoner’ and ‘The Fugitive’ 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Carol Clark and Peter Collier.
Penguin, 720 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 0 14 118035 8
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In Search of Lost Time: Vol. VI: Finding Time Again 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Ian Patterson.
Penguin, 400 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 0 14 118036 6
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The Proust Project 
edited by André Aciman.
Farrar, Straus, 224 pp., $25, November 2004, 0 374 23832 4
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... thing’ is Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust, and I assume the faint pastiche of Virginia Woolf in Hazzard’s language is a homage to the era: the translation appeared between 1922 and 1930. Scott Moncrieff died in 1930, and the last volume was translated by Andreas Mayor. The whole work was substantially revised by Terence Kilmartin ...

Pink and Bare

Bee Wilson: Nicole Kidman, 8 February 2007

Nicole Kidman 
by David Thomson.
Bloomsbury, 311 pp., £18.99, September 2006, 0 7475 7710 2
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... Moulin Rouge, no The Others, no accepting an Oscar for her maudlin act with a prosthetic nose as Virginia Woolf in The Hours. By portraying a starlet so cleverly, Kidman acted her way out of any assumption that she herself was nothing but a starlet. By projecting Suzanne’s wickedness with such fun, she eliminated the suspicion, engendered by her ...