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...  Henry James​ ’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...

Dismantling the class war

Paul Addison, 25 July 1991

The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950. Vol I.: Regions and Communities 
edited by F.M.L. Thompson.
Cambridge, 608 pp., June 1990, 0 521 25788 3
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The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950. Vol II.: People and Their Environment 
edited by F.M.L. Thompson.
Cambridge, 392 pp., June 1990, 0 521 25789 1
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The Temper of the Times: British Society since World War Two 
by Bill Williamson.
Blackwell, 308 pp., £30, August 1990, 0 631 15919 3
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... the regular churchgoing of the middle classes was more than a matter of outward convention. As James Obelkevich observes in the chapter on religion, ‘the deep and genuine religious commitment evident in this and other classes in Victorian society should not be underestimated.’ Michael Thompson’s chapter, at the beginning of Volume One, is a tour de ...

Bevan’s Boy

R.W. Johnson, 24 March 1994

Michael Foot 
by Mervyn Jones.
Gollancz, 570 pp., £20, March 1994, 0 575 05197 3
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... all his life – Hampden, Swift, Hazlitt, Cobden, Bright, Mill, Gladstone, Wilberforce and Charles James Fox. There was, in time, one great socialist addition to the pantheon, Aneurin Bevan. It followed that politics was mainly about two things: standing up for moral principle and making wonderful speeches. Any idea that it was also about perks and patronage ...

Verdi’s Views

John Rosselli, 29 October 1987

Verdi: A Life in the Theatre 
by Charles Osborne.
Weidenfeld, 360 pp., £18, June 1987, 0 297 79117 6
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... Arrigo Boito, librettist of Otello and Falstaff, have thrown much light on his working methods: James Hepokoski’s excellent guides to the two creations of Verdi’s old age owe much to this source.* Others, like his voluminous correspondence with his publisher (not yet in print as a whole, but available to scholars) tell us a good deal about the progress ...

Fixing it for heredity

Raymond Fancher, 9 November 1989

The Burt Affair 
by Robert Joynson.
Routledge, 347 pp., £25, August 1989, 9780415010399
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... own first report, and that remains a classic today. At Chicago in the Thirties, Horatio Newman, Frank Freeman and Karl Holzinger laboriously collected a sample of 19 separated twin pairs, and reported detailed findings in their 1937 book, Twins: A Study of Heredity and Environment. This study used several pioneering tests and techniques that have long since ...

Bloom’s Giant Forms

Mark Edmundson, 1 June 1989

Ruin the sacred truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present 
by Harold Bloom.
Harvard, 204 pp., £15.95, February 1989, 0 674 78027 2
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Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics 
by Peter de Bolla.
Routledge, 155 pp., £25, October 1988, 0 415 00899 9
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... of the standing critical wisdom. Many of his former antagonists have now moved to what William James thought of as the third phase in the assimilation of a threatening new idea. First they said it was absurd, then that it was peripheral, now they want to claim it as their own creation. So Bloom has in a sense won his battle. In doing so, he may have ...

Toad-Kisser

Peter Campbell, 7 May 1987

Joseph Banks: A Life 
by Patrick O’Brian.
Collins Harvill, 328 pp., £15, April 1987, 0 00 217350 6
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... Oxford months. Young Banks has the virtues of a hero in an old-fashioned school story. Frank, sometimes impulsive, not bearing grudges, a good friend (but too long-suffering to be a good judge of character), physically strong, unsnobbish and cheerful. To such a man natural history, in its robust adolescence, had much to offer. Rarity did not then ...

The Real Thing

Jenni Quilter, 21 April 2016

Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter 
by Cathy Curtis.
Oxford, 432 pp., £20.99, April 2015, 978 0 19 939450 0
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... The Persian Jacket, off the wall of the gallery and back with him to MoMA. (Her close friend Frank O’Hara, working at the museum’s front desk, was there to see Grace’s official entry into the museum; the painting fitted into the cab, but not through the revolving doors, and had to be taken in through a side entrance.) She was the first of her ...

Nutty Professors

Hal Foster: ‘Lingua Franca’, 8 May 2003

Quick Studies: The Best of ‘Lingua Franca’ 
edited by Alexander Star.
Farrar, Straus, 514 pp., $18, September 2002, 0 374 52863 2
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... it is so much cut-and-paste soup. In the final article in this section the political scientist James Miller asks ‘Is Bad Writing Necessary?’ This is essentially a comparison of Orwell and Adorno as models of criticism, and you can guess who wins. But in fact no one does: the opposition serves neither, since the intellectual difficulty of Adorno is ...

‘We would rather eat our cake than merely have it’

Rosemary Hill: Victorian men and women, 4 October 2001

A Circle of Sisters: Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin 
by Judith Flanders.
Penguin, 392 pp., £17.99, September 2001, 0 670 88673 4
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The Hated Wife: Carrie Kipling 1862-1939 
by Adam Nicolson.
Short Books, 96 pp., £4.99, May 2001, 0 571 20835 5
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Victorian Diaries: The Daily Lives of Victorian Men and Women 
edited by Heather Creaton.
Mitchell Beazley, 144 pp., £14.99, February 2001, 1 84000 359 6
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... Frank Doubleday, the American publisher and friend of Rudyard and Carrie Kipling, once arrived at their house in Sussex to find Rudyard in a sweat in front of the hall fireplace shovelling a pile of his manuscripts into the flames. It was a horrifying sight, especially to a publisher. ‘For heaven’s sake, Rud, what are you doing?’ Doubleday asked ...

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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... beneath it, breathless, cloying and rhapsodic. He can overdo the Synge-song. The playwright Frank McGuinness has remarked that Barry writes like an angel, and there can indeed be something too ethereal and impalpable about his language, as in ‘she has entered her fold of silence like a star accused by the dawn light,’ which is entrancingly ...

Little Philadelphias

Ange Mlinko: Imagism, 25 March 2010

The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists 
by Helen Carr.
Cape, 982 pp., £30, May 2009, 978 0 224 04030 3
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... in ‘an extravagant, eye-catching green robe, bought for him, in Tunis she thought, by his Aunt Frank on his first transatlantic trip’. Elective affinity was everything. As Williams said of Pound: ‘It took just one look and I knew it was it.’ Their relationship had a note of comedy in it: ‘He was impressed with his own poetry,’ Williams ...

Marvellous Boys

Mark Ford, 9 September 1993

The Ern Malley Affair 
by Michael Heyward.
Faber, 278 pp., £15, August 1993, 0 571 16781 0
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... complete works were concocted in a single afternoon and evening by two young Australian poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, as part of a plot to expose the obscurantism and meaninglessness of what passed for poetry under the aegis of Modernism. The Malley oeuvre was composed, they were later to reveal, with the aid of a chance collection of books ...

Can an eyeball have lovers?

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Emerson’s Scepticism, 26 September 2024

Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson 
by James Marcus.
Princeton, 328 pp., £25, April, 978 0 691 25433 3
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... Emerson wanted readers to stumble over the Latinism that punctuates this numbed passage. James Marcus tells us that it is a botanical term for the part of a plant that is easily shed as it develops. His zingy, empathetic portrait of Emerson grounds our understanding of his writing – perhaps even his wisdom – in his experience of loss. It often ...

The Health Transformation Army

James Meek: What can the WHO do?, 2 July 2020

... the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, were to blame for the severity of the pandemic. ‘We must be frank about one of the primary reasons this outbreak spun out of control,’ Azar said.There was a failure by this organisation to obtain the information that the world needed, and that failure cost many lives … In an apparent attempt to conceal this ...

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