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The Coldest Place on Earth

Liam McIlvanney: Colm Tóibín’s ‘Brooklyn’, 25 June 2009

Brooklyn 
by Colm Tóibín.
Viking, 252 pp., £17.99, April 2009, 978 0 670 91812 6
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... from the perspective of the sons and daughters, rather than that of the migrants themselves. From Henry Roth to Philip Roth, it’s the second or third generation whose experience shapes the fiction of immigration. Brooklyn is unusual in telling the story from the immigrant’s perspective, the more so since Tóibín’s protagonist is ...

Likeable Sage

Sheldon Rothblatt, 17 September 1981

Matthew Arnold: A Life 
by Park Honan.
Weidenfeld, 496 pp., £9.95, August 1981, 0 297 77824 2
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... Shortly after the death of the third, and in the midst of grief, he slipped down to Howell and James to buy his wife a sealskin coat. He lived a round life, spoke his mind, was spared no difficulty and took his losses. Why shouldn’t he sometimes complain? Indifferent, vain and unreliable as a boy, perpetually late to class at Rugby, Arnold worked ...

Adored Gazelle

Ferdinand Mount: Cherubino at Number Ten, 20 March 2008

Balfour: The Last Grandee 
by R.J.Q. Adams.
Murray, 479 pp., £30, November 2007, 978 0 7195 5424 7
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... Rayleigh, who became head of the Cavendish Laboratory and won the Nobel Prize for Physics, and Henry Sidgwick, the Cambridge philosopher who with his wife Eleanor Balfour founded Newnham College. In 1896, he joined his brothers-in-law, along with James Bryce, G.K. Chesterton, R.B. Haldane and Sir Oliver Lodge in founding ...

In Praise of Mess

Richard Poirier: Walt Whitman, 4 June 1998

With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. VIII: 11 February 1891-30 September 1891 
by Horace Traubel, edited by Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac.
Bentley, 624 pp., $99.50, November 1996, 0 9653415 8 5
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With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. IX: 11 February 1891-30 September 1891 
by Horace Traubel, edited by Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac.
Bentley, 624 pp., £99.50, November 1996, 0 9653415 9 3
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... and stylised composure; and Whitman’s composure finds its equal among American writers only in Henry James. With majestic aloofness, he likes, as he says early in Song of Myself, to be ‘both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it’. And like the games James plays in The Turn of the ...

Presidential Criticism

John Sutherland, 10 January 1991

Victorian Subjects 
by J. Hillis Miller.
Harvester, 330 pp., £30, December 1990, 0 7450 0820 8
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Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on 20th-Century Literature 
by J. Hillis Miller.
Harvester, 266 pp., £30, December 1990, 0 7450 0836 4
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... Mentation was all. This phase of Miller’s career was astonishingly productive. For him as for Henry James, Europe made literature discutable. Always fluent, Miller now erupted with articles, books, essays and reviews – almost always prefaced with genuflection to the European sages who had inspired him. Miller has retained two features in his work ...

Vibrating to the Chord of Queer

Elaine Showalter: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 6 March 2003

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity 
by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Duke, 216 pp., £14.95, March 2003, 0 8223 3015 6
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Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory 
edited by Stephen Barber and David Clark.
Routledge, 285 pp., £55, September 2002, 0 415 92818 4
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... about J.L. Austin, Judith Butler, Melanie Klein, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins, Foucault, Henry James and Proust. The book is framed by an ‘interlude, pedagogic’, an autobiographical essay on Sedgwick’s experience of fainting at an Aids protest early in her cancer treatment, and a concluding essay on the pedagogy of Buddhism and the ...

‘We would rather eat our cake than merely have it’

Rosemary Hill: Victorian men and women, 4 October 2001

A Circle of Sisters: Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin 
by Judith Flanders.
Penguin, 392 pp., £17.99, September 2001, 0 670 88673 4
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The Hated Wife: Carrie Kipling 1862-1939 
by Adam Nicolson.
Short Books, 96 pp., £4.99, May 2001, 0 571 20835 5
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Victorian Diaries: The Daily Lives of Victorian Men and Women 
edited by Heather Creaton.
Mitchell Beazley, 144 pp., £14.99, February 2001, 1 84000 359 6
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... to adulthood. There were two boys, on whom much hope and all the spare money were expended. Henry turned out the Branwell of the family, a drinker who went to America and was erased from family history. Frederic led a quiet life as a minister. It was the sisters who were exceptional and the four eldest, Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa, who made up ...

Head in an Iron Safe

David Trotter: Dickens’s Tricks, 17 December 2020

The Artful Dickens: Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist 
by John Mullan.
Bloomsbury, 428 pp., £16.99, October 2020, 978 1 4088 6681 8
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... full of as ifs.’ There are apparently 266 in Great Expectations alone. Where George Eliot and Henry James used analogy to guide interpretation of what a character might be thinking or feeling, in Dickens it is always a performance on the author’s part, a conjuring of unlikely associations (he was a gifted amateur magician). Mullan, however, rightly ...

Yawning and Screaming

John Bayley, 5 February 1987

Jane Austen 
by Tony Tanner.
Macmillan, 291 pp., £20, November 1986, 0 333 32317 3
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... type of discussion. After many years of comfortable mindless enjoyment of Jane Austen, which even Henry James was inclined to endorse, the pendulum may now swing too far the other way, and the critic present us with an author who is interchangeable with any other modern novel-writing intellect. To suppose her covertly demonstrating, through and by means ...

Wounds

Stephen Fender, 23 June 1988

Hemingway 
by Kenneth Lynn.
Simon and Schuster, 702 pp., £16, September 1987, 0 671 65482 9
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The Faces of Hemingway: Intimate Portraits of Ernest Hemingway by those who knew him 
by Denis Brian.
Grafton, 356 pp., £14.95, May 1988, 0 246 13326 0
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... it, is not ‘a haunted Nick Adams, or a crippled Jake Barnes, or a hollowed-out Frederic Henry, but an overbearing know-it-all named Ernest Hemingway’. Max Eastman said Hemingway had false hair on his chest. Gertrude Stein, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, called his courage into question. Of course, there was a lot to debunk – and ...

All in pawn

Richard Altick, 19 June 1986

The Common Writer: Life in 19th-century Grub Street 
by Nigel Cross.
Cambridge, 265 pp., £25, September 1985, 0 521 24564 8
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... and last dying speeches of executed criminals for the street trade described in the pages of Henry Mayhew. Between these occupants of the darkest literary limbo and the comparatively prosperous and established writers of serial fiction and ‘think pieces’ for middle-class magazines and reviews lay the large underclass of book-writers who are the ...

Against the Same-Old Same-Old

Seamus Perry: The Brownings, 3 November 2016

The Brownings’ Correspondence, Vol 21 
edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Joseph Phelan, Edward Hagan and Rhian Williams.
Wedgestone, 432 pp., $110, April 2014, 978 0 911459 38 8
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The Brownings’ Correspondence, Vol 22 
edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Joseph Phelan, Edward Hagan and Rhian Williams.
Wedgestone, 430 pp., $110, June 2015, 978 0 911459 39 5
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Robert Browning 
edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan.
Oxford, 904 pp., £95, December 2014, 978 0 19 959942 4
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Browning Studies: Being Select Papers by Members of the Browning Society 
edited by Edward Berdoe.
Routledge, 348 pp., £30, August 2015, 978 1 138 02488 5
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... poems close like that, as though slipping out of poetry and back into the life that preceded it. Henry James​ , who was fascinated by Browning, spoke in an obituary piece about ‘the bristling surface of his actuality’: stylistically, the poetry is full of bristles, musically rough and jagged, full of dashes and exclamation marks, syntactically ...

Water on the Brain

Dinah Birch: Spurious Ghosts, 30 November 2023

‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’ and Other Stories 
by Vernon Lee, edited by Aaron Worth.
Oxford, 352 pp., £7.99, September 2022, 978 0 19 883754 1
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... music and literature. She was influenced by the work of Walter Pater, and by her friendships with Henry James, Robert Browning and John Singer Sargent. But she was never swayed to the extent that she relinquished her intellectual independence. An atheist and materialist, she had no time for contemporary flirtations with the occult. In 1885 she attended a ...

Frock Consciousness

Rosemary Hill: Fashion and frocks, 20 January 2000

The Penguin Book of 20th-Century Fashion Writing 
edited by Judith Watt.
Viking, 360 pp., £20, November 1999, 0 670 88215 1
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Twentieth-Century Fashion 
by Valerie Mendes and Amy de la Haye.
Thames and Hudson, 288 pp., £8.95, November 1999, 0 500 20321 0
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A Century of Fashion 
by François Baudot.
Thames and Hudson, 400 pp., £19.95, November 1999, 0 500 28178 5
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The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860-1914 
by Christopher Breward.
Manchester, 278 pp., £45, September 1999, 0 7190 4799 4
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Black in Fashion 
by Valerie Mendes.
Victoria & Albert Museum, 144 pp., £35, October 1999, 1 85177 278 2
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... Tide, making brilliant cartoon-like use of clothes. Her description of an artistic party in Little James Street is worth a chapter of sociohistorical analysis of the interwar garçonne: ‘Emma – in green sacque that looks exactly like démodé window-curtain, sandals and varnished toe-nails ... Am struck by presence of many pairs of horn-rimmed spectacles ...

Reasons

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 1 April 1983

A Treatise on Social Theory. Vol. I: The Methodology of Social Theory 
by W.G. Runciman.
Cambridge, 350 pp., £25, March 1983, 0 521 24906 6
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... or indeed anyone else, he has that faith in time and reason which Macaulay once confessed to James Mill. He shares the Whiggish benevolence that united Macaulay, the Evangelical, and Mill, the Utilitarian, more than their one dispute divided them. And in addition to also displaying a command of large parts of human time and space, Runciman approvingly ...

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