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A Great Big Silly Goose

Seamus Perry: Characteristically Spenderish, 21 May 2020

Poems Written Abroad: The Lilly Library Manuscript 
by Stephen Spender.
Indiana, 112 pp., £27.99, July 2019, 978 0 253 04167 8
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... and shortly afterwards he did. Spender told the story of this first interview over and over again: John Sutherland, his biographer, calculates that he repeated it at least six times in print and uncountable times in lectures and talks and interviews, as well as in conversation. Spender would come to resent Auden’s tendency always to think of him as he had ...

His Own Dark Mind

Clare Bucknell: Rescuing Lord Byron, 30 November 2023

Byron and the Poetics of Adversity 
by Jerome McGann.
Cambridge, 214 pp., £19.99, December 2022, 978 1 009 23295 1
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Reading Byron: Poems – Life – Politics 
by Bernard Beatty.
Liverpool, 266 pp., £90, January, 978 1 80085 462 8
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Byron’s ‘Don Juan’: The Liberal Epic of the 19th Century 
by Richard Cronin.
Cambridge, 248 pp., £85, June, 978 1 009 36623 6
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... fare. It was true that Don Juan was little understood ‘just now’. His once loyal publisher, John Murray, had backed out after the first five cantos, and the leading periodicals of the time refused on principle to review any of its instalments. (‘We knew not any severity of criticism which could reach the faults or purify the taste of Don Juan,’ the ...

Good History

Christopher Hill, 5 March 1981

After the Reformation: Essays in Honour of J.H. Hexter 
edited by Barbara Malament.
Manchester, 363 pp., £17.95, December 1980, 0 7190 0805 0
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Puritans and Adventurers 
by T.H. Breen.
Oxford, 270 pp., £10, October 1980, 0 19 502728 0
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On History 
by Fernand Braudel, translated by Sarah Matthews.
Weidenfeld, 226 pp., £10.95, January 1981, 0 297 77880 3
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Sociology and History 
by Peter Burke.
Allen and Unwin, 116 pp., £6.95, August 1980, 0 19 502728 0
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... a group of Parisian nominalists of whom the most radical was Jacques Almain, the most significant John Mair (1467-1550) – a Scot who taught Knox and Buchanan long before the Protestant Reformation. John Pocock is so dazzling in ‘Authority and Property: the Question of Liberal Origins’ that one has to rub one’s eyes ...

Mushrooms

Michael Dobson: How to Be a Favourite, 5 October 2006

Literature and Favouritism in Early Modern England 
by Curtis Perry.
Cambridge, 328 pp., £50, February 2006, 0 521 85405 9
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... even from the bench), but, dissatisfied even with the enormous hall and galleries added by John of Gaunt in the 14th century, he then built what was in effect a whole new Tudor palace within the medieval walls. This entire section of the castle, together with a state-of-the-art garden installed at a speed which would do credit to any television ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1995, 4 January 1996

... Smith Institute for the Criminally Insane, banging the same drum in the Independent. Not long ago John Bird and John Fortune did a sketch about the privatisation of air. These days it scarcely seems unthinkable. 28 February. There have been football riots in Bruges, where Chelsea have been playing, with, responsible for ...

I thought you were incredible

Bee Wilson: Elizabeth Taylor’s Magic, 16 November 2023

Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon 
by Kate Andersen Brower.
HarperCollins, 495 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 0 00 843582 0
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... Grit and Glamour of an Icon’. She has interviewed more than 250 people, starting with the late John Warner (Taylor’s penultimate husband, a Republican senator) and her book reads like an extended feature for Vanity Fair. We learn that Bob Dylan adored her in Raintree County and that David Lynch kissed her after the 1987 Oscars (she was a fan of Blue ...

The University Poem

Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Dmitri Nabokov: ‘The University Poem’, 7 June 2012

... come and gone like shadows – Jim, the soccer star, had vanished, And Joe, the pensive one, and John, of calculus the gloomy hero … She flirted and procrastinated, toyed superficially with love, but in her heart awaited more. 16 Inevitably comes the day; He’s leaving, the ethereal friend: the bill is paid, exams are done with, the tennis racket in its ...

Anxious Pleasures

James Wood: Thomas Hardy, 4 January 2007

Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 486 pp., £25, October 2006, 0 670 91512 2
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... fire advances along the log Of the tree we felled, Which bloomed and bore striped apples by the peck Till its last hour of bearing knelled. Proust accused Flaubert of not creating even one great metaphor, which is palpably unfair, but Hardy’s work has scores of them, a flowing stipend of brilliance. Yet while one is always aware of Flaubert aesthetically ...

Writing about Shakespeare

Frank Kermode, 9 December 1999

... he that sets his foot upon her back. The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on, And doves will peck in safeguard of their brood. You feel he only stops because he has run out of animal comparisons. It took a while for this manner to change. King John, a bit later, has some intensities of a sort not to be found in its ...

A Million Shades of Red

Adam Mars-Jones: Growing Up Gay, 8 September 2022

Young Mungo 
by Douglas Stuart.
Picador, 391 pp., £16.99, April, 978 1 5290 6876 4
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... if it was sourced from Mothercare.When Mungo and James have their first kiss, little more than a peck on the lips in the open air, it’s described as being ‘like hot buttered toast when you were starving. It was that good.’ The young men in the Wolfgang Tillmans photograph on the book’s cover look as if they’re eating a three-course meal off each ...

Do Anything, Say Anything

James Meek: On the New TV, 4 January 2024

Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television 
by Peter Biskind.
Allen Lane, 383 pp., £25, November, 978 0 241 44390 3
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... the cinematography or the design.It was the beginning of the off-network TV tsunami that John Landgraf, the head of FX, calls peak TV. By 2022, he estimates that there were 559 scripted original shows on American television. HBO followed The Sopranos with Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, Entourage, True Blood, Boardwalk ...

Reasons for Liking Tolkien

Jenny Turner: The Hobbit Habit, 15 November 2001

... Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), his influential study of elitism in 20th-century literature, John Carey writes about the ‘duplicity’ of Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel supposedly about love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written ...

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