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The Candidate of Beauty

Alexander Stille: D’Annunzio and the Pursuit of Glory, 2 July 1998

Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel 
by John Woodhouse.
Oxford, 420 pp., £25, February 1998, 0 19 815945 5
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... of a fine new biography, Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel. Perhaps immodestly, its author, John Woodhouse, who teaches Italian at Oxford, says in his Preface: ‘This is the first fully documented biography of Gabriele D’Annunzio in any language, and, within the limits of reason, given the bizarre nature of D’Annunzio’s career, the first ...

Time of the Red-Man

Mark Ford: James Fenimore Cooper, 25 September 2008

James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years 
by Wayne Franklin.
Yale, 708 pp., £25, July 2008, 978 0 300 10805 7
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... of a ‘new world-epoch’, but the death of an old one: Natty is in his seventies, and Indian John, as Chingachgook is called by the residents of Templeton, a frontier settlement based on the Cooperstown of the novelist’s childhood, is a sad shadow of the Mohican warrior he once was, especially in the Christmas tavern scene in which he partakes a little ...

Good for Nothing

James Morone: America’s ‘base cupidity’, 19 May 2005

Born Losers: A History of Failure in America 
by Scott Sandage.
Harvard, 362 pp., £22.95, February 2005, 9780674015104
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... argued the apologist George Fitzhugh, would be better off if we enslaved them all, for then their masters would have some incentive to clothe them, feed them and see them through hard times. Abraham Lincoln came up with a famous rejoinder when he insisted that working for wages was only a temporary condition. Among us, he said, nobody with talent languishes ...

Our Way of Proceeding

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Jesuit Methods, 22 February 2024

The Jesuits: A History 
by Markus Friedrich, translated by John Noël Dillon.
Princeton, 854 pp., £22, October 2023, 978 0 691 22620 0
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... the Society’s history in more than six hundred pages, ably translated from German by John Noël Dillon. Markus Friedrich’s volume could be described as relentless, but its barrage of information is a trustworthy basis from which to begin to understand one of the most remarkable products of Counter-Reformation energy. The Jesuits have always ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: On Meeting the Creatives, 22 February 1996

... as if it were an abracadabra. Only give us the wand, the hungry hotshots cry, and we’ll be masters of the universe. At one point the super-suits are even prepared to sit manipulating the ends of a metre of rope to learn from a French funambulist how to make a clove hitch knot that unties, if you do it right, as if by magic. They’ve paid their ...

Dun and Gum

Nicholas Jose: Murray Bail, 16 July 1998

Eucalyptus 
by Murray Bail.
Harvill, 264 pp., £12.99, July 1998, 1 86046 494 7
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... to join Proust and Kafka, Michel Tournier and Thomas Bernhard on Bail’s shelf of severe masters – is the big daddy rabbit-killer; Bail and his minimalist contemporaries are something of a mopping-up operation. The anxiety here is that of being the last guest at the wake of Modernism, and so Bail is compelled to return, parodically, obsessively, to ...

The Art of Self-Defeat

Noël Annan, 19 July 1984

Faces of Philip: A Memoir of Philip Toynbee 
by Jessica Mitford.
Heinemann, 175 pp., £9.95, July 1984, 0 434 46802 9
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... of ‘Good old Toyners’: later he was fined a pound by the Party. The Cambridge of John Cornford would have regarded such frivolity as monstrous.) He was consistently irresponsible and enjoyed, rather than feared, the thunderbolts that followed. In Brussels in 1945 he used to dress up as a padre in battle-dress and dog-collar: but Miss Mitford ...

Venisti tandem

Denis Donoghue, 7 February 1985

Selected Poems 
by Tony Harrison.
Viking, 204 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 670 80040 6
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Palladas: Poems 
by Tony Harrison.
Anvil, 47 pp., £2.95, October 1984, 9780856461279
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Men and Women 
by Frederick Seidel.
Chatto, 70 pp., £4.95, October 1984, 0 7011 2868 2
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Dangerous play: Poems 1974-1984 
by Andrew Motion.
Salamander, 110 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 0 907540 56 2
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Mister Punch 
by David Harsent.
Oxford, 70 pp., £4.50, October 1984, 0 19 211966 4
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An Umbrella from Piccadilly 
by Jaroslav Seifert and Ewald Osers.
London Magazine Editions, 80 pp., £5, November 1984, 0 904388 75 1
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... a poem about the best room in the house, reserved for deaths and Christmas, by alluding to two masters: ‘My mind moves upon silence and Aeneid VI.’ In Yeats’s ‘Long-Legged Fly’ mastery is possible – Caesar, Helen of Troy, Michelangelo – because the mind can accept its conditions by sequestering itself within them: Like a long-legged fly upon ...

Diary

Clive James, 20 May 1982

... it. What else can it engender except hate? One day the blacks will find a way to end it Their masters will not spot until too late. Meanwhile the sole good reason to defend it Somebody should be brave enough to state: With all of the appropriate delights Top-level cricket is reserved for whites. You must be white to wear the proper cap And have a ...

Solid and Fleeting

David Sylvester, 17 December 1992

... as a setting for sculpture are the consequences of a single-minded pursuit by its main architect, John Russell Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or thing that enters ...

Porringers and Pitkins

Keith Thomas: The Early Modern Household, 5 July 2018

A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500-1700 
by Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson.
Yale, 311 pp., £40, October 2017, 978 0 300 19501 9
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... architecture. It was completed after his death (in 1852) by another architectural historian, John Henry Parker, who also drew on it for Our English Home: Its Early History and Progress (1860). Despite this encouraging start, the emergence in the later 19th and early 20th centuries of modern history as a university subject did nothing to advance the study ...

A Row of Shaws

Terry Eagleton: That Bastard Shaw, 21 June 2018

Judging Shaw 
by Fintan O’Toole.
Royal Irish Academy, 381 pp., £28, October 2017, 978 1 908997 15 9
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... around his waist. ‘Like Dylan or Bowie,’ O’Toole remarks, ‘he was one of the great masters of self-invention, a nobody who captured the zeitgeist.’ In fact, Shaw and Bob Dylan are the only two people to have won both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize. Like Wilde, he was his own most precious creation. Churchill called him ‘the greatest living ...

Hail, Muse!

Seamus Perry: Byron v. Shelley, 6 February 2003

The Making of the Poets: Byron and Shelley in Their Time 
by Ian Gilmour.
Chatto, 410 pp., £25, June 2002, 0 7011 7110 3
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Byron and Romanticism 
by Jerome McGann.
Cambridge, 321 pp., £47.50, August 2002, 0 521 80958 4
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... precedence. ‘His Lordship affected more aristocracy than befitted his years or the occasion,’ John Galt thought, and Hazlitt agreed: ‘He may affect the principles of equality, but he resumes his privilege of peerage, upon occasion.’ Gilmour is nearer the mark to see in Byron’s touchiness and bumptiousness not the toff reverting to type, but rather a ...

Overdoing the Synge-song

Terry Eagleton: Sebastian Barry, 22 September 2011

On Canaan’s Side 
by Sebastian Barry.
Faber, 256 pp., £16.99, August 2011, 978 0 571 22653 5
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... Colm Tóibín is too costive with words, Barry is too spendthrift. In contemporary Irish fiction, John Banville strikes just the right balance between opulence and discipline. Even so, Barry’s verbal extravagance makes for an intriguing, typically Irish tension between bleakness of content and richness of form, a contrast equally notable in Synge, Joyce and ...

Fanfaronade

Will Self: James Ellroy, 2 December 2010

The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women 
by James Ellroy.
Heinemann, 203 pp., £16.99, September 2010, 978 0 434 02064 5
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... addicts – he has recourse to magical thought is that obsession and compulsion are his puppet-masters, twisting him unwillingly this way and that, forcing him to perform actions that can be justified only by recourse to esoteric motivation. In one bravura passage – and, however repugnant the underlying sentiments, he cannot be faulted for his ability to ...

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