Falling Stars

Alan Coren, 5 November 1981

Richard Burton 
by Paul Ferris.
Weidenfeld, 212 pp., £7.95, September 1981, 0 297 77966 4
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Peter Sellers 
by Alexander Walker.
Weidenfeld, 240 pp., £7.95, September 1981, 0 297 77965 6
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... about his hero: these include Claire Bloom, Alexander Cohen, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, Sir John Gielgud, Hugh Griffiths, Joseph Losey, James Mason, Vincente Minnelli, Mike Nichols, Rachel Roberts, Daphne Rye, Jean Simmons, and three of his wives, Sybil Christopher, Elizabeth Taylor and Susan Hunt. I particularly enjoyed the parenthesis Mr Ferris ...

At the Connaught

Robert Morley, 5 May 1983

An Orderly Man 
by Dirk Bogarde.
Chatto, 291 pp., £8.95, March 1983, 0 7011 2659 0
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... terror of the future, filled with anger, spleen and guilt, aware of swiftly approaching death.’ John Gielgud played Daddy and survived – which was more than the picture did. A plot like that would sink a battleship. That’s your opinion. What about the others? The Night Porter was about one of the inmates of Dachau or possibly Belsen. She falls in love ...

Travelling Hero

G.R. Wilson Knight, 19 February 1981

Coriolanus in Europe 
by David Daniell.
Athlone, 168 pp., £9.95, October 1980, 0 485 11192 6
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... past tense may be in order. As, ‘Romeo takes Juliet by the hand,’ but ‘at this performance John held Mary’s hand too long.’ It all depends on the context, but distinctions are not precisely observed, as though the author was not used to stage commentary. If he is not, the book is certainly a remarkable achievement. It even gains, as we are being ...

School for Love

Onora O’Neill, 21 May 1981

The Philosophy of Teaching 
by John Passmore.
Duckworth, 159 pp., £18, July 1980, 0 7156 1031 7
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... Nobody could be more aware than Professor Passmore of the hazards of writing on the philosophy of teaching. He notes disarmingly that ‘the chance of writing even a reasonably good book on any branch of the philosophy of education is statistically very low indeed. It is terribly difficult to write in a manner which is neither philosophy for philosophy’s sake with an occasional example from teaching, nor just a series of commonplace banalities ...

Maughamisms

Elizabeth Mavor, 18 July 1985

A Traveller in Romance 
by W. Somerset Maugham, edited by John Whitehead.
Muller, Blond and White, 275 pp., £12.95, November 1984, 0 85634 184 3
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... I’, declares a mysterious character in one of the short sketches that makes up this collection of fugitive pieces, ‘am a Traveller in Romance.’ It does not seem an apt title for Somerset Maugham, for apart from a passing whim to end his days at Angkor Wat, he strikes one as very little tinged with romance. He describes himself as ‘more inclined to look forward than to look back’, as having ‘always lived so much in the future’, and there was nothing romantic in the way he went about his writing ...

The Straight and the Bent

Elaine Showalter, 23 April 1992

Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault 
by Jonathan Dollimore.
Oxford, 388 pp., £35, August 1991, 0 19 811225 4
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Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories 
by Diana Fuss.
Routledge, 432 pp., £40, March 1992, 0 415 90236 3
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... these sexual liberators, and the romanticising of an innately revolutionary gay sensibility, as in John Rechy’s Sexual Outlaw, but he sees radical possibilities in the ‘transgressive reinscription’ of such writers as Wilde, Genet or Orton, who undermine dominant structures of gender and class even as they appropriate and mimic them. Although he makes ...

Lawful Charm

Donald Davie, 6 July 1995

Selected Poems 
by William Barnes, edited by Andrew Motion.
Penguin, 171 pp., £6.99, May 1994, 0 14 042379 6
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Selected Poems 
by William Barnes, read by Alan Chedzoy.
Canto, £6.99
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... our past. Rather than Burns, a better poet to set against Barnes is his English near-contemporary John Clare. No one, thank goodness, sells Clare to us as ‘Northamptonshire dialect-poet’; yet to their Clare: Selected Poems and Prose (1966), Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield appended a glossary of more than two hundred words and expressions. If ...

Athenian View

Michael Brock, 12 March 1992

Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930 
by Stefan Collini.
Oxford, 383 pp., £40, September 1991, 0 19 820173 7
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... such authority on the moral ambitions it represented. This branch-to-branch search is centred on John Stuart Mill, Henry Fawcett and Leslie Stephen. He then traces the change in style and tone which came as the academic profession and the public service spread their tentacles. He discusses three legal theorists who epitomised this transition – Henry ...

Sightbites

Jonathan Meades: Archigram’s Ghost, 21 May 2020

Archigram: The Book 
edited by Dennis Crompton.
Circa, 300 pp., £95, November 2018, 978 1 911422 04 4
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... original members worked for Taylor Woodrow, the construction giant that erected several of John Poulson’s designs (there was an architect who got his priorities right: he could grease a palm up to the elbow). They learned nothing from him.A wrongheaded hierarchy of realities grants primacy to a breezeblock over a painting of a breezeblock, to the ...

At the British Museum

Mary Wellesley: ‘Feminine Power’, 22 September 2022

... was cosmetically altered to suit the needs of Rossetti’s patron, Frederick Richards Leyland.In John Collier’s Lilith (1887), the demon goddess is standing up, but her eyes are averted. There is none of the sense of threat posed by Kiki Smith’s sculpture. Here is a more demure Lilith, all milky skin and long, thick auburn hair. She wears nothing but a ...

On Being Late

Andrew O’Hagan, 24 January 2019

... to do with what’s after-the-fact. He sees a whole rich tradition of lateness, and quotes from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which speaks of a decadent generation, passive and exhausted, seeking – this was the early 1830s – a new way out of the past. ‘The very etymology of lateness’, Hutchinson writes, has snuck ‘into Mill’s ...

Notes on the Election

David Runciman, 21 May 2015

... David Cameron is going to have a hellish time with the rebellious fringe of his own party, just as John Major did back then. But this is the wrong sort of mess. It is not compromise and accommodation in the name of defending politics against the forces of nature, technology and finance that threaten to destroy it. It is blackmail and veto power, with small ...

Short Cuts

Christian Lorentzen: Fact-checking, 5 April 2012

... assembly line, for example – were fictions. While Daisey is being reprimanded, a writer called John D’Agata has been promoting a book, Lifespan of a Fact (Norton, $17.95), about the way he changes or makes up the facts. D’Agata and David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010), are the leaders of a movement that believes the most ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Big Short’, 18 February 2016

The Big Short 
directed by Adam McKay.
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... the market appeals to them for all sorts of reasons. Meanwhile, two young fund managers (played by John Magaro and Finn Wittrock) who don’t have enough money to play in the big leagues pick up Vennett’s startling prospectus while they are waiting not to be welcomed by a large bank. They consult their guru, a trader who has left the financial world all ...