Off-Beat

Iain Sinclair, 6 June 1996

... His love of ‘blending his shit with the beauty of the Romantics’. ‘Blake, Shelley, Keats, Byron ... goody gumdrops.’ The Europe of the old gods is a lost, parallel culture. On opium Corso made an extraordinary collage of Paris – featured in the Whitney show – the same domes, in different sizes, piled on top of each other. ‘Ten Sacré ...

With a Da bin ich!

Seamus Perry: Properly Lawrentian, 9 September 2021

Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence 
by Frances Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 488 pp., £25, May 2021, 978 1 4088 9362 3
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... don’t pretend that I quite understand/My own meaning when I would be very fine,’ Byron said. There is good sense in the proposition that literary works often turn out different to what their originators thought they intended. That is, after all, only to say of writing what is true of any human action: intentions are a lot more complicated and ...

Talking about Leonidas

Alexander Clapp, 9 June 2022

The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe  
by Mark Mazower.
Allen Lane, 574 pp., £30, November 2021, 978 0 241 00410 4
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... with the story of the philhellenes rather than with the Greeks themselves. But for Mazower, Byron and the others are almost a sideshow to what was happening in Greek villages and ports and encampments. The narration of the conflict presents certain challenges: the Greek Revolution produced no Napoleon or Garibaldi, no figure on whom its fortunes ...

Think outside the bun

Colin Burrow: Quote Me!, 8 September 2022

The New Yale Book of Quotations 
edited by Fred R. Shapiro.
Yale, 1136 pp., £35, October 2021, 978 0 300 20597 8
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... through the running titles to the 1979 edition says it all: Browning Bunyan Burke Burns Butler Byron … and seventy pages of quotations from Shakespeare – though not, of course, any of the scurrilous apocryphal stuff like Manningham’s story about his sexual conquests. Later editions of the Oxford Dictionary belatedly got with the programme. They began ...

Are we there yet?

Seamus Perry: Tennyson, 20 January 2011

The Major Works 
by Alfred Tennyson, edited by Adam Roberts.
Oxford, 626 pp., £10.99, August 2009, 978 0 19 957276 2
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... toes up,/“It’s such a pity Wystan never grows up,”’ he complained in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’. Leavis wasn’t the only one who thought this way about Auden, but he was always the most damningly outspoken about Auden’s ‘very green immaturity’, and he thought something similar about Tennyson. Keats was good: in ‘To Autumn’, Leavis ...

Memories We Get to Keep

James Meek: James Salter’s Apotheosis, 20 June 2013

All That Is 
by James Salter.
Picador, 290 pp., £18.99, May 2013, 978 1 4472 3824 9
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Collected Stories 
by James Salter.
Picador, 303 pp., £18.99, May 2013, 978 1 4472 3938 3
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... In his introduction to a revised 1997 edition of the novel, he concluded: It was said of Lord Byron that he was more proud of his Norman ancestors who had accompanied William the Conqueror in the invasion of England than of having written famed works. The name de Burun, not yet Anglicised, was inscribed in the Domesday book. Looking back, I feel a pride ...

The Adulteress Wife

Toril Moi: Beauvoir Misrepresented, 11 February 2010

The Second Sex 
by Simone de Beauvoir and Constance Borde, translated by Sheila Malovany-Chevallier.
Cape, 822 pp., £30, November 2009, 978 0 224 07859 7
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... of labour based on sex’; Bachofen’s ‘mother right’ becomes ‘maternal right’; and Byron’s epigram, ‘Man’s love is of his life a thing apart; ’Tis woman’s whole existence,’ loses all its wit on the round trip from English to French and back again: ‘Byron rightly said that love is merely an ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: My Olympics, 30 August 2012

... his incarceration, he still manages something of the flavour of Mark Rylance as ‘Rooster’ Byron in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. There is, he believes, an English Arcadia, between industrial dereliction and the willow beds, marshlands and reservoirs of the Lower Lea Valley. The opposition Wells personifies comes from love of place. He told me that ...

The Shape of Absence

Hilary Mantel: The Bondwoman’s Narrative, 8 August 2002

The Bondwoman’s Narrative: A Novel 
by Hannah Crafts, edited by Henry Louis Gates.
Virago, 338 pp., £10.99, May 2002, 1 86049 013 1
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... been important to Hannah: he owned the works of Walter Scott, Gulliver’s Travels, two volumes of Byron, the Brontës’ novels, The Beauties of Shakespeare Regularly Selected from Each Play, several of Dickens’s works, the letters of Burns and Gray, and a volume called Whom to Marry and How to Get Married! or, The Adventures of a Lady in Search of a Good ...

Unliterary, Unpolished, Unromantic

Charles Nicholl: ‘The Merchant of Prato’, 8 February 2018

The Merchant of Prato: Daily Life in a Medieval Italian City 
by Iris Origo.
Penguin, 400 pp., £10.99, May 2017, 978 0 241 29392 8
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... skills on a Life of the Romantic philosopher-poet Giacomo Leopardi and a short study of Byron’s daughter Allegra, both issued in 1935. The latter was published by Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, which led to her meeting with Virginia Woolf, whose diaries describe her as ‘tremulous’, ‘honest-eyed’ and very glamorous: ‘I like her bird of ...

A Ripple of the Polonaise

Perry Anderson: Work of the Nineties, 25 November 1999

History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the Nineties 
by Timothy Garton Ash.
Allen Lane, 441 pp., £20, June 1999, 0 7139 9323 5
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... Danube basin were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile ...

Like a Dog

Elizabeth Lowry: J.M. Coetzee, 14 October 1999

Disgrace 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Secker, 220 pp., £14.99, July 1999, 0 436 20489 4
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The Lives of Animals 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Princeton, 127 pp., £12.50, May 1999, 0 691 00443 9
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... through the motions of teaching them, Lurie toys with the idea of writing a chamber opera about Byron’s love affair with the 19-year-old Teresa Guiccioli, which the poet began in Italy in 1819 after being ostracised in England for his scandalous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta. Lurie, too, has Byronic good looks and a Byronic sexual ...

Sweet Sin

J.P. Stern, 5 August 1982

Marbot 
by Wolfgang Hildesheimer.
Suhrkamp, 326 pp., May 1981, 3 518 03205 4
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... several Weimar worthies, Giacomo Leopardi’s letters from Venice and the correspondence of Lord Byron’s circle in Pisa, including Teresa Guiccioli (with whom Andrew had a brief affair), have enabled Hildesheimer to make the book before us a definitive life, leaving relatively few factual gaps in the record. Motivation and the tremor within, on the other ...

Pamela

Alan Brien, 5 December 1985

Orson Welles 
by Barbara Leaming.
Weidenfeld, 562 pp., £14.95, October 1985, 0 297 78476 5
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The Making of ‘Citizen Kane’ 
by Robert Carringer.
Murray, 180 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 7195 4248 0
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Spike Milligan 
by Pauline Scudamore.
Granada, 318 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 246 12275 7
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Nancy Mitford 
by Selina Hastings.
Hamish Hamilton, 274 pp., £12.50, October 1985, 0 241 11684 8
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Rebel: The Short Life of Esmond Romilly 
by Kevin Ingram.
Weidenfeld, 252 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 297 78707 1
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The Mitford Family Album 
by Sophia Murphy.
Sidgwick, 160 pp., £12.95, November 1985, 0 283 99115 1
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... less American in the world. ‘I’m sure God will send them to a different place from ONE & Lord Byron,’ she writes in a letter. When faced with the inconsistency of having some American friends, she protests: ‘But they live in Europe and have chosen freedom.’ Nevertheless, she deplores their presence there, always asking each other where they come ...

These Staggering Questions

Clive James, 3 April 1980

Critical Understanding 
by Wayne Booth.
Chicago, 400 pp., £14, September 1979, 0 226 06554 5
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... since pig Latin. It can make any idiot sound unfathomable. ‘When a man talks of system,’ said Byron, ‘his case is hopeless.’ To the extent that they are systems, critical modes or methods are aberrations. They are usually ways for mediocrities to make themselves sound interesting. Occasionally a first-rate critic is to be found promoting a mode or ...