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Uncle William

E.S. Turner, 13 June 1991

The Passing of Barchester: A Real-Life Version of Trollop 
by Clive Dewey.
Hambledon, 199 pp., £14.95, April 1991, 1 85285 039 6
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... is entitled ‘Marriages to Clergymen as a Means of Extending Connection: The Five Daughters of James Tschudi Broadwood’. The Broadwoods were wealthy piano-makers who intermarried with the Lyalls; all five daughters in question did their bit to remove the stigma of trade by surrendering themselves to the clergy (or did they just happen to come across five ...

The Stansgate Tapes

John Turner, 8 December 1994

Years of Hope: Diaries, Papers and Letters, 1940-62 
by Tony Benn, edited by Ruth Winstone.
Hutchinson, 442 pp., £25, September 1994, 0 09 178534 0
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... the Macmillan family, though not quite as rich), and young Anthony (known at this point as James) grew up amid commercial and political affluence. He was sent to Westminster, where he was ‘miserable’, and which is recorded in these pages largely as a venue for scarlet fever and a host for the Air Training Corps. Much is made of Benn’s academic ...

Memoriousness

E.S. Turner, 15 September 1988

Memories of Times Past 
by Louis Heren.
Hamish Hamilton, 313 pp., £15.95, July 1988, 0 241 12427 1
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Chances: An Autobiography 
by Mervyn Jones.
Verso, 311 pp., £14.95, September 1987, 0 86091 167 5
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... who has been credited with starting the Russo-Japanese war, and the stone-deaf old Etonian James Bourchier, who ‘successfully combined the roles of Times correspondent and founding father of modern Bulgaria’ (he was eventually sacked not for organising Balkan alliances but for being late with his copy and then over-filing). When Heren began his ...

Walking on Eyeballs

E.S. Turner: The history of gout, 7 January 1999

Gout: The Patrician Malady 
by Roy Porter and G.S. Rousseau.
Yale, 393 pp., £25, September 1998, 0 300 07386 0
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... jokes was Punch (which, by the way, was not founded by Thackeray). The jacket of the book features James Gillray’s cauchemar study of a black devil clawing at a vastly swollen big toe. This could stand as a symbol of the 18th century, which saw, as the authors put it, ‘the high noon of gout’. Roy Porter, who teaches at the Wellcome Institute in ...

Paddling in the Gravy

E.S. Turner: Bath’s panderer-in-chief, 21 July 2005

The Imaginary Autocrat: Beau Nash and the Invention of Bath 
by John Eglin.
Profile, 292 pp., £20, May 2005, 1 86197 302 0
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... of the century, according to Phyllis Hembry’s The English Spa 1560-1815, the subscribers to James Marshall’s library in Bath’s Milsom Street included two princes of the blood, five dukes, four duchesses, seven earls, four countesses and 43 knights. It is pleasing to imagine John Wesley returning to town and finding all these potentially libertine ...

Internet-Enabled

Nick Richardson: Stalking James Lasdun, 25 April 2013

Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked 
by James Lasdun.
Cape, 224 pp., £14.99, February 2013, 978 0 224 09662 1
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... In September 2011, the LRB published a Diary by James Lasdun about learning to fire a gun. A few weeks later we received an email from his stalker. It read: ‘His writing is boring and doesn’t sell. Stop publishing that hairy-nosed Jewish wanna-be-Protestant bore of a boar. His wife’s cunt smells of dead rabbits ...

Diners-out

E.S. Turner, 3 July 1986

Augustus Hare: Victorian Gentleman 
by Malcolm Barnes.
Allen and Unwin, 240 pp., £20, May 1986, 9780049201002
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Midway on the Waves 
by James Lees-Milne.
Faber, 248 pp., £10.95, October 1985, 0 571 13723 7
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... like that at the Villa Mauresque. The book should have a special piquancy for those familiar with James Lees-Milne’s sparkling volumes about the years he spent flitting round stately homes during and after World War Two, making the most of such high life as was going. The most recent volume is Midway on the Waves; the others, all with titles lifted or ...

Utterly in Awe

Jenny Turner: Lynn Barber, 5 June 2014

A Curious Career 
by Lynn Barber.
Bloomsbury, 224 pp., £16.99, May 2014, 978 1 4088 3719 1
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... writers and artists, but the one that posterity will really value is her interview with ‘Sir James Savile’ for the IoS, on the occasion of his belated knighthood, 22 July 1990. ‘People were terribly shocked when I asked [him] if it was true that he liked little girls … Of course he denied it. But at least by posing the question I’d alerted ...

Killing Stripes

Christopher Turner: Suits, 1 June 2017

Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress 
by Anne Hollander.
Bloomsbury, reissue, 158 pp., £19.99, August 2016, 978 1 4742 5065 8
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The Suit: Form, Function and Style 
by Christopher Breward.
Reaktion, 240 pp., £18, May 2016, 978 1 78023 523 3
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... metallic brocades with which their heraldic costumes were decorated. Charles Dickens, Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand Duke Sergei of Russia’s reads ...

Grand Gestures

Janette Turner Hospital, 25 May 1995

A River Town 
by Thomas Keneally.
Sceptre, 330 pp., £15.99, March 1995, 9780340610930
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... desperate, a wild child, a cynical and alarmingly intelligent all-seeing observer. Only in Henry James does one encounter another such riveting portrait of cursed innocence, and Keneally’s Lucy is a more vibrantly warm flesh-and-blood waif than any of the little lost souls in James. Think what you will of the republic ...

Gap-osis

E.S. Turner, 6 April 1995

Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty 
by Robert Friedel.
Norton, 288 pp., £16.95, February 1995, 0 393 03599 9
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... pairs of eyes with dotted lines running to sartorial horrors helped to drive home the message. James Thurber was suborned to lend a hand, but his hippo-shaped woman afflicted by ‘gap-osis’ in the midriff looks scarcely the sort to worry about personal grooming or to spend good money on a mechanical contrivance in order to keep her man. Britain was ...
Noël Coward: A Biography 
by Philip Hoare.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 605 pp., £25, November 1995, 1 85619 265 2
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... as authoritative, rather than authorised. An authorised biography was to have been written by James Pope-Hennessy, who had gathered much material before he came to his violent end. Hoare received the ‘approval and co-operation’ of the Coward estate. Over the years other hands had tried to pluck away the veils from the Coward legend. We read how ...

Tucked in and under

Jenny Turner: Tim Parks, 30 September 1999

Destiny 
by Tim Parks.
Secker, 249 pp., £15.99, September 1999, 0 436 22088 1
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... people exist independently of your projections of them, that you get in the superficially similar James Kelman. It’s a bit static and solipsistic. One reason for this might be that Parks writes so much. The going-on-and-on problem – writing stuff that looks like nice prose, but doesn’t really mean much – does tend to happen when you work to ...

Stormy Weather

E.S. Turner, 18 July 1996

Passchendaele: The Untold Story 
by Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson.
Yale, 237 pp., £19.95, May 1996, 0 300 06692 9
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... general pleading with Haig to halt the battle.’ The official history by Brigadier-General Sir James Edmonds says that Gough and Plumer at one time indicated they would ‘welcome a closing down of the campaign’, but the authors say they can trace no record of any meeting at which such views were expressed. What will continue to mystify the lay reader is ...

Supermax

John Bayley, 8 December 1988

The Letters of Max Beerbohm 1892-1956 
edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Murray, 244 pp., £16.95, August 1988, 0 7195 4537 4
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The Faber Book of Letters 
edited by Felix Pryor.
Faber, 319 pp., £12.95, October 1988, 0 571 15269 4
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... tried to get him better treated in prison. But his letters to their great mutual friend Reggie Turner suggest quite a different view of the trial from the one Ellmann presents. It was not a cathartic and humbling metamorphosis for the poor victim but a smart triumph quite in his usual style. ‘Oscar has been quite superb. His speech about the Love that ...

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