Kelpers

Claude Rawson, 17 June 1982

St Kilda’s Parliament 
by Douglas Dunn.
Faber, 87 pp., £3, September 1981, 0 571 11770 8
Show More
Airborn/Hijos del Aire 
by Octavio Paz and Charles Tomlinson.
Anvil, 29 pp., £1.25, April 1981, 0 85646 072 9
Show More
The Flood 
by Charles Tomlinson.
Oxford, 55 pp., £3.95, June 1981, 0 19 211944 3
Show More
Looking into the Deep End 
by David Sweetman.
Faber, 47 pp., £3, March 1981, 0 571 11730 9
Show More
Independence 
by Andrew Motion.
Salamander, 28 pp., £5, December 1981, 0 907540 05 8
Show More
Show More
... the same collection, about ‘An artist waiting in a country house’. The artist waits to see the lady, who had asked to see the man who painted the pictures. But he is kept waiting, as ‘minutes passed, unlived ... cinematic’, glimpsing the lady’s husband kissing her cheek outside the house. The ...

Best Beloved

Kevin Brownlow, 18 April 1985

Chaplin: His Life and Art 
by David Robinson.
Collins, 792 pp., £15, March 1985, 9780002163873
Show More
Show More
... in which Chaplin had lived in Kennington, and Sir Ralph Richardson had just unveiled it, an old lady stopped and muttered within my hearing: ‘They’ve got the wrong house.’ They had indeed. David Robinson points out that the Chaplin family lived next door. Many specialists have tended to doubt the veracity of Chaplin’s autobiography, claiming that ...

Diary

Andrew O’Hagan: Dr Macgregor’s Diagnosis, 3 March 2011

... craziness,’ Macgregor says. ‘Just think about it. Here we are in Kentish Town. A lady with the backing of the local newspaper wants a cancer drug, which she may need, but which costs £100,000. So we give it and treat her as well as we can. Then a lady in Tower Hamlets is turned down for the drug, because ...

Out of the jiffybag

Frank Kermode, 12 November 1987

For Love and Money: Writing, Reading, Travelling 1969-1987 
by Jonathan Raban.
Collins Harvill, 350 pp., £11.50, November 1987, 0 00 272279 8
Show More
Original Copy: Selected Reviews and Journalism 1969-1986 
by John Carey.
Faber, 278 pp., £9.95, August 1987, 0 571 14879 4
Show More
Show More
... with his ‘asinine high-pitched Bloomsbury voice’. One after another the nobs are scarified: Lady Diana Cooper, around whom ‘men of all ages flocked ... like gulls round a council tip,’ and who herself had ‘a talent for scavenging that would have done credit to a coyote’, Lady Mosley, Daphne Rae, Beatrice ...

Diary

Andrew Saint: Foscolo’s Grave, 20 September 2007

... is unclear, and their identity is uncertain. But their names are usually given as George and Lady Mary Hamilton. The daughter appears to have been Sophia St John Hamilton. Just then Foscolo was brushing up his English by reading Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, which he later translated into Italian. The Hamiltons’ dashing and accommodating ...

Two Poems

Alistair Elliot, 3 August 1995

... thirteenth century. This puts a new complexion on the fairy: not the misty bath-look of a country lady mysteriously slim, but the pale brown of a mysteriously plump, veiled woman of Damascus, in perpetual afternoon sewing, secluded from the dusty city. We wonder how her needlework found its way to this wall. In the coarse hands of some crusader? Did he come ...

Two Poems

John Hartley Williams, 7 September 2006

... this seriously. I am always taking it seriously out to the wheelie bin and dropping in the white lady in the grey underhose who as we speak is speeding southwards in a sealed railway compartment. Perhaps that is poetry? No, it’s love. Can you recall why you began to write? I was locked in a toilet with a jackdaw and a notebook and my mother was pounding on ...

Cheerful weather for the wedding

Ann Schlee, 20 August 1981

... so that we saw the great mass of upturned faces at one moment and at the next were peering through Lady Diana’s veil. Was she nervous today? Might we see a tear? Does the camera extend our perception? Or does it, by seeing what our naked eye can never see, confuse our relationship with the thing we look at? Is it the camera or our own fantasies about royalty ...

No Shortage of Cousins

David Trotter: Bowenology, 12 August 2021

Selected Stories 
by Elizabeth Bowen, edited by Tessa Hadley.
Vintage, 320 pp., £14.99, April 2021, 978 1 78487 715 6
Show More
The Hotel 
by Elizabeth Bowen.
Anchor, 256 pp., $16, August 2020, 978 0 593 08065 8
Show More
Friends and Relations 
by Elizabeth Bowen.
Anchor, 224 pp., $16, August 2020, 978 0 593 08067 2
Show More
Show More
... supply of aunts and uncles. Nothing could have done more to convince us that the formidable Lady Waters will play a decisive role in the lives of the protagonists of To the North (1932) than the genealogical flourish with which she is introduced: ‘Lady Waters had had no children by either marriage. Her first had ...

Pamela

Alan Brien, 5 December 1985

Orson Welles 
by Barbara Leaming.
Weidenfeld, 562 pp., £14.95, October 1985, 0 297 78476 5
Show More
The Making of ‘Citizen Kane’ 
by Robert Carringer.
Murray, 180 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 7195 4248 0
Show More
Spike Milligan 
by Pauline Scudamore.
Granada, 318 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 246 12275 7
Show More
Nancy Mitford 
by Selina Hastings.
Hamish Hamilton, 274 pp., £12.50, October 1985, 0 241 11684 8
Show More
Rebel: The Short Life of Esmond Romilly 
by Kevin Ingram.
Weidenfeld, 252 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 297 78707 1
Show More
The Mitford Family Album 
by Sophia Murphy.
Sidgwick, 160 pp., £12.95, November 1985, 0 283 99115 1
Show More
Show More
... Charles Chaplin. Orson’s view was that he had first thought of the comedy about the French lady-killer Landru, a modern Bluebeard, which in 1947 became Monsieur Verdoux. He had already described its essence in 1941: There is one tableau, and it is the key to the whole film. There is Chaplin, dapper and blithe, clipping the hedges, making his hands and ...

Then place my purboil’d Head upon a Stake

Colin Burrow: British and Irish poetry, 7 January 1999

Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse 1625-1660 
edited by Peter Davidson.
Oxford, 716 pp., £75, July 1998, 0 19 818441 7
Show More
Show More
... in posies for readers to sniff and to pluck. Consider this delicious morsel of anonymity, ‘On a Lady Sleeping’, plucked by Peter Davidson from BL MS Add. 25,707: Calmely as the mornings soft teares shedd Upon some rose or Violet bedd May your slumbers fall upon you All your thoughts sit easy on you Gently rocking heart and eyes With their tuneful ...

Yeats and Violence

Michael Wood: On ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, 14 August 2008

... says, the old Ascendancy in Ireland. Elsewhere Yeats borrows a phrase from the poem to talk about Lady Gregory, who is said to be ‘indifferent to praise or blame’, a quality attributed to the law that was one of the pretty toys ‘we’ had when young. But then their youth in this sense goes back a while, at least to the 18th century, as Foster ...

Sexist

John Bayley, 10 December 1987

John Keats 
by John Barnard.
Cambridge, 172 pp., £22.50, March 1987, 0 521 26691 2
Show More
Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare 
by R.S. White.
Athlone, 250 pp., £25, March 1987, 0 485 11298 1
Show More
Show More
... but explicit and cynical, and went on about how he would have been ashamed to leave a young lady in the virgin state he found her; and instead of the magic of those ages long ago in which his lovers fled away into the storm, he announced that in the concluding lines of the poem he wished to ‘leave on the reader a sense of pettish ...

Besieged by Female Writers

John Pemble: Trollope’s Late Style, 3 November 2016

Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form 
by Frederik Van Dam.
Edinburgh, 180 pp., £70, January 2016, 978 0 7486 9955 1
Show More
Show More
... his ‘saving grace of coarseness’ by introducing female characters who bend or break the rules (Lady Mason in Orley Farm, Lady Glencora in the Palliser sequence, Lizzie Eustace in The Eustace Diamonds, Mrs Hurtle in The Way We Live Now), and male ones who enjoy gambling or field sports and whose talk is ribald, even lewd ...

On Gertrude Beasley

Elisabeth Ladenson, 21 October 2021

... the timing of its publication – between the scandals of Ulysses in 1922 and the appearance of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Well of Loneliness in 1928 – meant that My First Thirty Years inevitably attracted the attention of censors in Britain and America. In November 1925 Janet Flanner’s Paris dispatch for the New Yorker discussed the brouhaha ...