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The Henry James Show

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 7 January 1988

Henry James: A Life 
by Leon Edel.
Collins, 740 pp., £25, July 1987, 0 00 217870 2
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The Complete Notebooks of Henry James 
edited by Leon Edel and Lyall Powers.
Oxford, 662 pp., £25, March 1987, 0 19 503782 0
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... conforms to certain popular psychological assumptions of post-war America. Edel’s portrait of Mary James – the strong mother who inspires in her favourite son a lifelong fear of women and of passion – more closely resembles the overbearing Mom whose supposedly pernicious influence was so much debated in the 1950s than it does the rather contradictory ...

Last Night Fever

David Cannadine: The Proms, 6 September 2007

... an accolade bestowed in 1924, on the occasion of a special visit by King George V and Queen Mary towards the end of the season. The programme culminated, at the king’s request, with the Sea Songs (he found ‘Rule, Britannia!’ a ‘jolly fine tune’, infinitely to be preferred to ‘The Red Flag’). The BBC’s sponsorship and transmissions ...

Not a Pretty Sight

Jenny Diski: Who Are You Calling Ugly?, 24 January 2008

On Ugliness 
edited by Umberto Eco.
Harvill Secker, 455 pp., £30, October 2007, 978 1 84655 122 2
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... moved from the grand abstraction of the sublime, Eco writes, to the centre of the human soul, as Mary Shelley dreams up her pathetic monster. Ugliness was further relativised and humanised; it was searched for and discovered to be everywhere. The uncanny is a kind of ugliness very near to home. Dr Hyde emerges and the ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2014, 8 January 2015

... seem likely that this autumn we will be shooting The Lady in the Van. This is the story of Miss Mary Shepherd, the elderly eccentric who took up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death 15 years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being well will star in the film with Nicholas Hytner ...

Snakes and Leeches

Rosemary Hill: The Great Stink, 4 January 2018

One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli and the Great Stink of 1858 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Yale, 352 pp., £25, July 2017, 978 0 300 22726 0
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... on the left by one of the women in close-fitting riding habits who generally plied their trade in Hyde Park. As Ashton makes clear, the cliché of the Victorians as sexually ignorant and repressed is misguided. They may have thought differently about sex from their grandchildren but they didn’t think about it less, and in 1858, after the Divorce and ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Selling my hair on eBay, 6 January 2022

... sometimes astonishing. Said to be Headingley, I’d have thought this evening’s house was more Hyde Park, not far from Cumberland Road, where as a boy I used to go disastrously to Crusader Bible classes.12 September. The last few weeks I’ve been reading Rory Stewart’s Occupational Hazards, an account of his time serving in the coalition administration ...

Laertes has a daughter

Bee Wilson: The Redgraves, 6 June 2013

The Redgraves: A Family Epic 
by Donald Spoto.
Robson, 361 pp., £25, November 2012, 978 1 84954 394 1
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The House of Redgrave: The Lives of a Theatrical Dynasty 
by Tim Adler.
Aurum, 336 pp., £20, July 2012, 978 1 84513 623 9
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... the boy threw himself into the school plays at Clifton, excelling in female parts. As Lady Mary Lasenby in J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, the 15-year-old Michael wept plausible womanly tears. As the social-climbing Mrs Hardcastle in Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer he proved he could do comedy. But it was his Lady Macbeth that stood ...

Rosalind Mitchison on the history of Scotland

Rosalind Mitchison, 22 January 1981

Presbyteries and Profits: Calvinism and the Development of Capitalism in Scotland 1506-1707 
by Gordon Marshall.
Oxford, 406 pp., £18, September 1980, 0 19 827246 4
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The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689-1746 
by Bruce Lenman.
Eyre Methuen, 300 pp., £9.95, May 1980, 0 413 39650 9
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... than the study of a few dramatic episodes strongly coloured by royal personalities (the rule of Mary Queen of Scots, the Forty-Five), but also that the stream of Jacobite sentiment, intrigue and effort is more complex than has traditionally been allowed. Scottish Jacobite episodes have frequently been offered to the public either as stirring narrative or as ...

Walkers in the Ruined City

Anthony Grafton: History in Ruins, 6 May 2021

The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture 
by Susan Stewart.
Chicago, 378 pp., £23, June, 978 0 226 79220 0
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The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps 
by Jessica Maier.
Chicago, 199 pp., £25, October 2020, 978 0 226 59145 2
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... both life and harm’. Collapsing temples regularly appeared near one virgin in particular – Mary – in paintings of the Nativity: ‘Pagan ruins stand as mute, humiliated witnesses to Christian accomplishments.’Rome was the capital of the antiquarians’ country, and what historians now awkwardly call the early modern period, from the 15th to the ...

Always the Same Dream

Ferdinand Mount: Princess Margaret, 4 January 2018

Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 423 pp., £16.99, September 2017, 978 0 00 820361 0
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... eggs’) and ‘placement’ (should be ‘place à table’). She detested her grandmother, Queen Mary, who had deluged her with presents, and claimed that she suffered from an inferiority complex because she had been born only a serene, not a royal highness.At first nights, she seldom fails to tell the producer or director how much she loathed the show. To ...

Scotch Urchins

Denton Fox, 22 May 1986

Alexander Montgomerie 
by R.D.S. Jack.
Scottish Academic Press, 140 pp., £4.50, June 1985, 0 7073 0367 2
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Letters of King James VI and I 
edited by G.P.V. Akrigg.
California, 546 pp., £32.75, November 1984, 0 520 04707 9
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The Concise Scots Dictionary 
by Mairi Robinson.
Aberdeen University Press, 819 pp., £17.50, August 1985, 0 08 028491 4
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... sonnet to his lawyer: A Baxters bird, a bluiter beggar borne, Ane ill heud huirsone, lyk a barkit hyde, A saulles suinger, seuintie tymes mensuorne, A peltrie pultron poysond vp with pryde ... And a number of the poems have good bits, so that it is possible, by judicious quotation, to make Montgomerie appear better than he is. But there is nothing that is of ...

Burke and Smith

Karl Miller, 16 October 1980

Sydney Smith 
by Alan Bell.
Oxford, 250 pp., £9.95, October 1980, 0 19 812050 8
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Burke and Hare 
by Owen Dudley Edwards.
Polygon, 300 pp., £7.95, August 1980, 0 904919 27 7
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... Combe Floreys: ‘I believe the parallelogram between Oxford Street, Piccadilly, Regent Street and Hyde Park, encloses more intelligence and human ability, to say nothing of wealth and beauty, than the world has ever collected in such a space before.’ As for the London slums, he favoured an entrance fee for St Paul’s in order to exclude ‘the worst ...

Chelseafication

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, 22 September 2022

Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher 
by John Davis.
Princeton, 588 pp., £30, March, 978 0 691 22052 9
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... released with tips on what you could actually do on the Sabbath. The people looked old-fashioned; Mary Quant recalled that women ‘wore stiletto heels and corsets. They had no bottoms … but seats. They didn’t have nipples but great appendages of bosom and none of these things fitted together: the bosom came into the room first and the woman would ...

Clarissa and Louisa

Karl Miller, 7 November 1985

Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady 
by Samuel Richardson, edited with an introduction by Angus Ross.
Viking, 1533 pp., £19.95, August 1985, 0 670 80829 6
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Memoire of Frances, Lady Douglas 
by Lady Louisa Stuart, edited by Jill Rubenstein.
Scottish Academic Press, 106 pp., £9.50, August 1985, 0 7073 0358 3
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... fiction ‘a thousand traits worth very great attention’, and that her maternal grandmother Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ‘despised’ this ‘strange fellow’, no doubt for reasons of class among others, but read him eagerly, sobbed over him, and thought the Harlowe family of the first two tomes of Clarissa ‘very resembling to my maiden ...

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