Stubble and Breath

Linda Colley: Mother Germaine, 15 July 1999

The Whole Woman 
by Germaine Greer.
Doubleday, 351 pp., £16.99, March 1999, 0 385 60015 1
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Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew 
by Christine Wallace.
Cohen, 333 pp., £18.99, March 1999, 1 86066 120 3
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... She chose to come to Cambridge University, where she was much influenced by Muriel Bradbrook and Anne Barton. She wrote her PhD dissertation there on Shakespeare. She composed The Female Eunuch in intervals between taking tea with Lord Brooke at Warwick Castle. And she has lambasted and lived in this country for most of her subsequent life, residing now in a ...

‘Derek, please, not so fast’

Ferdinand Mount: Derek Jackson, 7 February 2008

As I Was Going to St Ives: A Life of Derek Jackson 
by Simon Courtauld.
Michael Russell, 192 pp., £17.50, October 2007, 978 0 85955 311 7
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... strong feeling of independence had been enhanced during his upbringing by the sense of power that money gives, and even in his development as a physicist he was largely self-taught: he had never done any research under or with anyone and probably had hardly ever been contradicted by anyone of his age.’ Yet Kuhn found him courteous and considerate ...

I must eat my creame

Clare Bucknell: Henry’s Fool, 4 July 2024

Fool: In Search of Henry VIII’s Closest Man 
by Peter K. Andersson.
Princeton, 210 pp., £22, September 2023, 978 0 691 25016 8
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... Lear give us the conceit of the fool’s ability – unique among courtiers – to speak truth to power without fear. ‘Kings do hate the truth,’ Erasmus observes in The Praise of Folly (1511). ‘But my fools … have a marvellous faculty of giving pleasure not only when they speak the truth but even when they utter open reproaches.’ Such fools tell the ...

Puellilia

Pat Rogers, 7 August 1986

Mothers of the Novel: One Hundred Good Women Writers before Jane Austen 
by Dale Spender.
Pandora, 357 pp., £12.95, May 1986, 0 86358 081 5
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Scribbling Sisters 
by Dale Spender and Lynne Spender.
Camden Press, 188 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 948491 00 0
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A Woman of No Character: An Autobiography of Mrs Manley 
by Fidelis Morgan.
Faber, 176 pp., £9.95, June 1986, 0 571 13934 5
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Cecilia 
by Fanny Burney.
Virago, 919 pp., £6.95, May 1986, 0 86068 775 9
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Millenium Hall 
by Sarah Scott.
Virago, 207 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 86068 780 5
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Marriage 
by Susan Ferrier.
Virago, 513 pp., £4.50, February 1986, 0 86068 765 1
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Belinda 
by Maria Edgeworth.
Pandora, 434 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 86358 074 2
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Self-Control 
by Mary Brunton.
Pandora, 437 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 9780863580840
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The Female Quixote: The Adventures of Arabella 
by Charlotte Lennox.
Pandora, 423 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 86358 080 7
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... of crushing banality: ‘The 17th century was a most exciting time, with its shifts in political power, and with its rise and fall of kings, there was, predictably enough, a rise and fall in the fortunes of many of the subjects.’ Again: ‘While the emerging middle class was in general looking more to reading as a source of information, enlightenment and ...

Brecht’s New Age

Margot Heinemann, 1 March 1984

Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches 
by John Willett.
Methuen, 274 pp., £12.50, February 1984, 0 413 50410 7
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Brecht: A Biography 
by Ronald Hayman.
Weidenfeld, 423 pp., £18.50, September 1983, 0 297 78198 7
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... information we have concerns leases, wills, marriage lines, property. His pillow-talk with Anne Hathaway, Emilia Lanier or Mr W. H., interesting as it may have been, was not recorded. If you want to discuss Shakespeare, you have to depend on reading and seeing his work. Not so with Brecht. Not only did he write a great deal of commentary himself. All ...

Desire Was Everywhere

Adam Shatz, 16 December 2010

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives 
by François Dosse, translated by Deborah Glassman.
Columbia, 651 pp., £26, August 2010, 978 0 231 14560 2
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... enthusiasms, Freud ran a close second to Marx. He attended Lacan’s seminars at Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital and went into analysis with him. In 1955 he began working at the La Borde clinic in the Loire Valley as a committed Lacanian.At La Borde, however, as Dosse reveals, Guattari’s thinking evolved away from Freudian ...

The Seducer

Ferdinand Mount: De Gaulle, 2 August 2018

A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle 
by Julian Jackson.
Allen Lane, 887 pp., £35, June 2018, 978 1 84614 351 9
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... He had been tried for treason in 1945, while General de Gaulle was still in his first spell of power. The hero of Verdun was sentenced to death by one vote, but the court asked for the sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment in view of the marshal’s great age, which was a relief to de Gaulle. Since then Pétain had been banged up on the Ile ...

Refugees from the Past

James Meek: Jameson on Chandler, 5 January 2017

Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 87 pp., £12.99, July 2016, 978 1 78478 216 0
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... life in it to be ginger, and isn’t clean enough to be grey’.When Marlowe meets the journalist Anne Riordan, the nearest Chandler comes to creating a female character not entirely defined by her relationship to men, the first thing he says by way of conversation is to tell her what colour her hair is. ‘Your hair’s red,’ he says. ‘There are blondes ...

What did her neighbours say when Gabriel had gone?

Hilary Mantel: The Virgin and I, 9 April 2009

Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary 
by Miri Rubin.
Allen Lane, 533 pp., £30, February 2009, 978 0 7139 9818 4
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... Mary, little bright-necked one; get them, sun of women, from your son who has them in his power.’ Her worship has taken many forms, not just artistic and liturgical but acrobatic: a lay brother at the monastery of Clairvaux, who had joined not knowing the liturgy, offered his praises to Mary by walking about on his hands at night, while his brethren ...

Howl, Howl, Howl!

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Fanny Kemble, 22 May 2008

Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life 
by Deirdre David.
Pennsylvania, 347 pp., £26, June 2007, 978 0 8122 4023 8
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... death in 1878. Presumably, Kemble had no intention of publishing the ‘Answer of Frances Anne Butler to the Libel of Pierce Butler Praying for Divorce’, but this narrative, too, became public when the newspapers got hold of copies in the midst of the couple’s protracted divorce negotiations in 1848. The Butler marriage was one of those unions ...

Ink Blots, Pin Holes

Caroline Gonda: ‘Frankenstein’, 28 January 2010

The Original ‘Frankenstein’ 
by Mary Shelley, with Percy Shelley, edited by Charles Robinson.
Bodleian Library, 448 pp., £14.99, October 2009, 978 1 85124 396 9
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... of the story’. The burning question became not how or whether science can usurp the deity’s power of bestowing life on inanimate matter, but as Mary Shelley was so frequently asked, ‘how I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea’. Where the 1818 preface spoke dismissively of ‘a mere tale of spectres or ...

Song of Snogs

Colin Burrow: Catullus Bound, 2 December 2021

Catullus: Shibari Carmina 
by Isobel Williams.
Carcanet, 100 pp., £12.99, March, 978 1 80017 074 2
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... moves as though the whole thing were a martial art, so the activity inverts expectations about power relations even while seeming to make them pretty darn obvious.Williams has visited some discreet emporia in the UK that offer instruction in this art (apparently they treated her like the Queen Mother), and has made some excellent drawings of people tying ...

Entryism

Jacqueline Rose: ‘Specimen Days’, 22 September 2005

Specimen Days 
by Michael Cunningham.
Fourth Estate, 308 pp., £14.99, August 2005, 0 00 715605 7
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... can be a form of domination, and being lavish with one’s own values can be a cover for taking power. ‘As nature, inexorable, onward, resistless, impassive amid the threats and screams of disputants, so America,’ Whitman wrote to Emerson. ‘Let all defer.’ By starting in Whitman’s era, and ending in the distant future, Cunningham has made his ...

No Pork Salad

Edmund Gordon: On the Court, 26 June 2025

The Racket: On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation – and the Other 99 per Cent 
by Conor Niland.
Penguin, 294 pp., £10.99, May, 978 0 241 99807 6
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The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay 
by Christopher Clarey.
John Murray, 356 pp., £22, May, 978 1 3998 1150 7
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The Roger Federer Effect: Rivals, Friends, Fans and How the Maestro Changed Their Lives 
by Simon Cambers and Simon Graf.
Pitch, 287 pp., £14.99, January 2024, 978 1 80150 383 9
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Searching for Novak: The Man behind the Enigma 
by Mark Hodgkinson.
Cassell, 303 pp., £10.99, June, 978 1 78840 520 1
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... follow-through, is the most balletic stroke the sport has ever seen – but in an era dominated by power baseliners, some commentators thought it insufficiently muscular. In 2003, he claimed his first Wimbledon title, losing only a single set over the entire tournament. Two years later (when Niland was playing matches on the Futures tour with ‘literally ...

Why edit socially?

Marilyn Butler, 20 October 1994

Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, Vol. VII 
edited by Byron.
Oxford, 445 pp., £52.50, March 1993, 0 19 812328 0
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The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse 
edited by Jerome McGann.
Oxford, 832 pp., £25, April 1993, 0 19 214158 9
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... Radcliffe, Ann: Sévigné, Marie de; Seward, Anna; Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft; Staël-Holstein, Anne Louise Germaine, Baronne de Worldly, informed and informal, the index is a fitting finale to an edition which extends the range of information scholarly editions usually provide. It responds not only to the cosmopolitan spread of Byron’s ...