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Fit and Few

Donald Davie, 3 May 1984

The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry 
by David Trotter.
Macmillan, 272 pp., £20, March 1984, 0 333 30632 5
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... Wordsworth’s beggars and village idiots, Matthew Arnold’s Carthusian monks and gypsies, the young Auden’s ‘airman’, Lionel Johnson’s and T.S. Eliot’s vanquished Kings – the investigation is seen to be fascinating and instructive. But already with Wordsworth and consistently thereafter the test that the poet administers to his readers is less ...

Glee

Gabriele Annan, 7 September 1995

1920 Diary 
by Isaac Babel, edited by Carol Avins, translated by H.T. Willetts.
Yale, 126 pp., £14.95, June 1995, 0 300 05966 3
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Collected Stories 
by Isaac Babel, translated by David McDuff.
Penguin, 364 pp., £6.99, June 1995, 0 14 018462 7
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... good-bye dead men. The tsaddik’s face, his nickel-rimmed pince-nez.   ‘Where are you from young man?’   ‘From Odessa.’   ‘How is life there?’   ‘People live.’   ‘And here it’s a horror.’ More has probably been written about Babel’s Jewishness than about any other aspect of him. He served under a Christian nom de ...

Blush, grandeur, blush

Norma Clarke: One of the first bluestockings, 16 December 2004

Hannah More: The First Victorian 
by Anne Stott.
Oxford, 384 pp., £20, September 2004, 0 19 927488 6
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... Prevalent among Women of Rank and Fortune, along with Hints towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess, which was written for Princess Charlotte, were addressed to and dutifully read by the highest in the land. Her message was directed at a ruling class that had felt the ground shaking under it. Democracy was anathema to More, who wanted to ...

Dye the Steak Blue

Lidija Haas: Shirley Jackson, 19 August 2010

Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories 
edited by Joyce Carol Oates.
Library of America, 827 pp., $35, May 2010, 978 1 59853 072 8
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... the war living in Manhattan on not much, and started publishing in magazines. In 1945, with one young child and another on the way, they moved to Vermont so that Stanley could teach at Bennington and the two of them could write. They chose not to live near the campus, but settled in North Bennington instead, where they seem to have been treated with some ...

They rudely stare about

Tobias Gregory: Thomas Browne, 4 July 2013

‘Religio Medici’ and ‘Urne-Buriall’ 
by Thomas Browne, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff.
NYRB, 170 pp., £7.99, September 2012, 978 1 59017 488 3
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... It is still often proposed that religion and science need not conflict. Stephen Jay Gould held that they occupy ‘non-overlapping magisteria’: science deals with questions of fact, religion with questions of value and meaning. This is wishful thinking, because religions base themselves on factual claims. The god Yahweh promised the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants; Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from golden plates received from the angel Moroni; Jesus of Nazareth is seated at the right hand of the Father, and will return to judge the living and the dead ...

Move Your Head and the Picture Changes

Jenny Turner: Helen DeWitt, 11 September 2008

Your Name Here 
by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff.
helendewitt.com, 580 pp., £8, May 2008
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... since it’s an authorship made up of two people, the challenge is to discover how, like Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Don Gately and Hal Incandenza, they might ever be brought together at all.) In 2000, DeWitt published a first novel called The Last Samurai; it sold a hundred thousand copies in English, was translated into ten languages and turns up on various ...

Englamouring the humdrum

Rosemary Ashton, 23 November 1989

Arguing with the past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney 
by Gillian Beer.
Routledge, 206 pp., £25, August 1989, 0 415 02607 5
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Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays 
edited by Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor.
Cambridge, 306 pp., £35, July 1989, 0 521 35383 1
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... of the substance which constitutes the wave. In her essay on Virginia Woolf, Hume and Leslie Stephen, Beer comes close to Bloom’s idea of literary ‘fathers’ when she discusses the importance of Hume, through Woolf’s own father’s work on him, for the characterisation of Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. As she points out, Hume’s description of ...

Conrad’s Complaint

Frank Kermode, 17 November 1983

The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Vol. I: 1861-1897 
edited by Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies.
Cambridge, 446 pp., £19.50, September 1983, 0 521 24216 9
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... is that Conrad, consciously or not, is engaged in preliminary writing exercises. Here is the young Korzeniowski fitting his aristocratic scorn of the mob into English idioms; he is saying that the failure of the Tories to achieve a majority at the General Election of 1885 was a consequence of Joseph Chamberlain’s Third Reform Bill. The newly ...

Diary

A.J.P. Taylor: Hungarians and Falklanders, 17 February 1983

... Parliament, a topic on which I do not judge. However, there can be no doubt that the Crown of St Stephen, now happily restored to Hungary, is the oldest regalia in Europe. It has a steady stream of Hungarian visitors. No state in Eastern Europe and few in Western Europe has a continuous history to compare with the Hungarian. The treatment of historians and ...

Escaping from Belfast

V.S. Pritchett, 5 February 1981

Green Avenue: The Life and Writings of Forrest Reid 1875-1947 
by Brian Taylor.
Cambridge, 218 pp., £12.50, October 1980, 0 521 22801 8
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... inquiry, but there was a kind of genius in his truthful portraits of boys as the wary or daring young animal grows up. His present biographer mentions that Reid’s small feet had high insteps, which – to me, at any rate – suggests someone capable of springing into some other air. I had not noticed his feet, nor did I know that this lonely and engaging ...

Book Reviewing

Stefan Collini: On the ‘TLS’, 5 November 2020

... passages in the paper’s long history. In 1905, Richmond invited the 23-year-old Miss A.V. Stephen to review for it. She quickly revealed herself to be the kind of young contributor editors dream of unearthing. She readily took on whatever she was asked to do, writing fifty pieces in the next three years, and her ...

At the V&A

Gazelle Mba: Africa Fashion, 1 December 2022

... Rachidi Bissiriou, Sanlé Sory and Seydou Keïta. In one photograph (by Keïta), we see a dandyish young man with a shaved head, large square black glasses and a smart white suit. He is holding a flower and half smiling. It’s a tragi-comic romantic image: is he dressed up for a particular person, or is this self-fashioning a case of art for art’s sake? In ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1996, 2 January 1997

... must have seemed bright, and when things did alter it was practically overnight. 10 February. When Stephen Fry took off last year I came in for one or two of the jobs he’d been contracted to do, notably a couple of voice-overs for children’s cartoons. Telephoned by the same company last week I agree to do another in a Posy Simmons animated film about a pig ...

In the Workshop

Tom Paulin: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 22 January 1998

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 672 pp., £23.50, December 1997, 0 674 63712 7
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Shakespeare's Sonnets 
edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones.
Arden, 503 pp., £7.99, September 1997, 1 903436 57 5
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... in a slightly different pattern the o sounds in windows/open/south in the second line. The two young women are shadows now, but in saying so Yeats brings back his earlier line which blazed its light behind their silky young bodies. Then in the very last line of the poem – ‘Bid me strike a match and blow’ – he ...

Canterbury Tale

Charles Nicholl, 8 December 1988

Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury 
by William Urry, edited by Andrew Butcher.
Faber, 184 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 0 571 14566 3
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John Weever 
by E.A.J. Honigmann.
Manchester, 134 pp., £27.50, April 1987, 0 7190 2217 7
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Rare Sir William Davenant 
by Mary Edmond.
Manchester, 264 pp., £27.50, July 1987, 9780719022869
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... respectively of a Norwich saddler and a Stratford glover. Even here in Canterbury there were other young writers growing up: John Lyly, son of Peter Lyly, clerk to the consistorial court; and Stephen Gosson, a joiner’s son. We have here a miniature blueprint for late Elizabethan theatrical tastes: Marlowe the ...

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