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False Brought up of Nought

Thomas Penn: Henry VII’s Men on the Make, 27 July 2017

Henry VII’s New Men and the Making of Tudor England 
by Steven Gunn.
Oxford, 393 pp., £60, August 2016, 978 0 19 965983 8
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... extrajudicial methods of government, and anxious to secure the smooth succession of his young son as well as their own place in the new regime, they needed scapegoats onto whom to ‘shift the noise’ of Henry VII’s ‘tyrannies’, as one contemporary chronicler put it, ‘for to satisfy and appease the people’. Empson and Dudley were top of ...

Only Sleeping

Anne Barton: Variations on Elizabeth I, 10 July 2003

England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy 
by Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson.
Oxford, 348 pp., £19.99, November 2002, 0 19 818377 1
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... feeling pessimistic about the outlook for the case. Even the fact that during her early years the young woman in question was becoming fluent in three languages besides her own, and reading assiduously and learning to write letters in an exquisite italic hand, scarcely counterbalances the accumulation of woes, or suggests that the sufferer might go on to ...

What’s the big idea?

Jonathan Parry: The Origins of Our Decline, 30 November 2017

The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914 
by Simon Heffer.
Random House, 912 pp., £30, September 2017, 978 1 84794 742 0
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... knew he had a squeaky voice, but several other on-field heroes – A.E. Stoddart, William Scotton, Arthur Shrewsbury – killed themselves after their careers ended, unable to cope with the loss of fame and/or money. Audiences demanded swagger in music too, forcing that poor ambitious provincial Edward Elgar to respond with ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. It was ...

Echo is a fangirl

Ange Mlinko, 3 December 2020

Time Lived, without Its Flow 
by Denise Riley.
Picador, 85 pp., £9.99, October 2019, 978 1 5290 1710 6
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Selected Poems: 1976-2016 
by Denise Riley.
Picador, 210 pp., £14.99, October 2019, 978 1 5290 1712 0
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... Looks’: ‘it’s not right to flare and quiver at some fictive “worldly boredom of the young”/through middle-aged hormonal pride of Madame, one must bleed, it’s necessary …/Mop mop georgette.’ God spare us the magnanimity of poets comfortable in their own skin:The writer/properly should be the last person that the reader or the listener ...

Euripides Unbound

Robert Cioffi, 26 September 2024

... through their rubbish. At the end of the 19th century, two Oxford academics, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, set off for the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus in search of Greek texts written on papyrus. Over six seasons, assisted by scores of local workmen, they excavated thousands of papyri from the city’s rubbish mounds and transported them to ...

How the sanity of poets can be edited away

Arnold Rattenbury: The Sanity of Ivor Gurney, 14 October 1999

‘Severn and Somme’ and ‘War’s Embers’ 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by R.K.R. Thornton.
Carcanet, 152 pp., £7.95, September 1997, 1 85754 348 3
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80 Poems or So 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by George Walter and R.K.R. Thornton.
Carcanet, 148 pp., £9.95, January 1997, 1 85754 344 0
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... there after demobilisation, in 1919, to resume his part in a quartet of friendship with Howells, Arthur Benjamin and Arthur Bliss. His siblings had also to contend with his burgeoning fame, which they did not understand: two published volumes of poetry (1917 and 1919); much performance and publication of music ...

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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... German authors who are a little in love with the English, more particularly a certain kind of young Englishman of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely reciprocated by English authors, goes back at least to the time of Herder and ...

On the Salieri Express

John Sutherland, 24 September 1992

Doctor Criminale 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Secker, 343 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 436 20115 1
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The Promise of Light 
by Paul Watkins.
Faber, 217 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 571 16715 2
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The Absolution Game 
by Paul Sayer.
Constable, 204 pp., £13.99, June 1992, 0 09 471460 6
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The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman 
by Louis de Bernières.
Secker, 388 pp., £14.99, August 1992, 0 436 20114 3
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Written on the Body 
by Jeanette Winterson.
Cape, 190 pp., £13.99, September 1992, 0 224 03587 8
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... a good deal.’ In form, Doctor Criminale is an old-fashioned quest novel. Francis Jay, a young British journalist – trained in deconstruction and cultural politics at Sussex – is left high and dry when his paper (evidently the ill-fated Sunday Correspondent) folds. Following a disastrous Booker ceremony at which he comports himself on camera ...

Odd Union

David Cannadine, 20 October 1994

Mrs Jordan’s Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 415 pp., £18, October 1994, 0 670 84159 5
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... early 20th-century lives, her correspondence with the Duke of Clarence was edited and published by Arthur Aspinall, and in 1965 Brian Forthergill produced a lengthy and appreciative study of Mrs Jordan as an actress. Why, then, has Claire Tomalin, a biographer who excels in the recovery of the lives of lost women, sought to tell again a story which has already ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: Hairdressing, 2 March 2000

... expands into a social drama of heartache and struggle equal to the torments and terrors of Arthur Miller or David Mamet’s salesmen. As Zdatny explains and Long complains, hairdressers were at the bottom of a hierarchy of fashion, helpless in the face of the couturiers of the great fashion houses who kept their models’ hair short and simple so as ...

Signora Zabaggy

Michael Rose, 2 August 1984

All Visitors Ashore 
by C.K. Stead.
Harvill, 150 pp., £8.95, July 1984, 0 00 271009 9
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A Trick of the Light 
by Sebastian Faulks.
Bodley Head, 204 pp., £7.95, July 1984, 0 370 30589 2
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Dividing Lines 
by Victor Sage.
Chatto, 166 pp., £8.95, July 1984, 0 7011 2811 9
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... associated, interchangeable motifs. The stories themselves are of no great importance except for young Skidmore, whose world is steadily depopulated as the year goes by. The reader’s pleasures are other and various. One of them is the intertextual chase. Here, for instance, Stead simultaneously parodies Robbe-Grillet’s degree-zero text and, by putting ...

Sick mother be damned

P.N. Furbank, 6 March 1986

Bernard Shaw’s Collected Letters. Vol. III: 1911-1925 
edited by Dan Laurence.
Bodley Head, 989 pp., £25, May 1985, 0 370 30203 6
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... and yet not cause offence. He aims in life for the same perilous liberty as, in a letter to the young actor Esmé Percy (15 March 1913), he ascribes to certain of the roles in his plays – ‘those very dangerous parts of mine, which consist of saying things which are unpardonable if uttered by unprivileged persons’. The present batch of letters is ...

Holocaust Art

Robert Taubman, 10 January 1983

Schindler’s Ark 
by Thomas Keneally.
Hodder, 432 pp., £7.95, October 1982, 0 340 27838 2
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... camps had moved on to mass extermination. Such information about this as got out – for instance, Arthur Koestler’s description in Horizon of early experiments with gas – was not readily believed by readers who were by then in the middle of a war. There was plenty of evidence in the end, as the Allies occupied the camps: even so, much of the truth was ...

Many-Modelled

Ian Hamilton, 20 June 1996

Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life 
by Max Saunders.
Oxford, 632 pp., £35, February 1996, 0 19 211789 0
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... in his tense partnership with Conrad – and, in his late thirties, had much to offer the aspiring young. But neither the old guard nor les jeunes quite saw him as ‘the real right thing’. Conrad made use of him but never really thought that he belonged in the big league. James, if pressed, would have called him slapdash, unreliable, too vulgarly worried ...

A Preference for Strenuous Ghosts

Michael Kammen: Theodore Roosevelt, 6 June 2002

Theodore Rex 
by Edmund Morris.
HarperCollins, 772 pp., £25, March 2002, 0 00 217708 0
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... his wedding and had been in the British Embassies at Berlin, Constantinople and St Petersburg, and Arthur Hamilton Lee, a Tory MP. According to Morris, ‘their urbane, literate reports’ kept Roosevelt up to date ‘with court affairs and privileged gossip’. As members of the ‘secret du roi’ – TR’s intimate and reliable circle of friends ...

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