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We are all Scots here

Linda Colley: Scotland and Empire, 12 December 2002

The Scottish Empire 
by Michael Fry.
Tuckwell/Birlinn, 580 pp., £16.99, November 2002, 9781841582597
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... and galleries; or the Empire gets reimagined as an indulgence merely of the English. Yet, as Michael Fry argues in this vast, contentious volume, alongside the Reformation, the Treaty of Union and the Enlightenment, Empire was ‘one of the great formative experiences’ in Scotland’s past. The Scottish Empire is a remarkable book that could probably ...

In Coleridge’s Bed

Ange Mlinko: Dead Poets Road Trip, 20 April 2017

Deaths of the Poets 
by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts.
Cape, 414 pp., £14.99, February 2017, 978 0 224 09754 3
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... Horace and Ovid threw down the gauntlet to oblivion: come and get me if you can. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and airports. They have now teamed up ...
Cross Channel 
by Julian Barnes.
Cape, 211 pp., £13.99, January 1996, 0 224 04301 3
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... to an ardent young village curé. With their godless language and habits, their heathen names (Bristol Joe, Streaky Bill and Straight-up Nobby), and their service of the false god Industry, they must be emissaries of that devil’s army the Saint-Simonians. In the final story, ‘Tunnel’, Barnes shows his hand more clearly about interpretation, implying ...

Return of the Native

Hugh Barnes, 7 March 1985

The Final Passage 
by Caryl Phillips.
Faber, 205 pp., £8.95, February 1985, 0 571 13437 8
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Merle, and Other Stories 
by Paule Marshall.
Virago, 210 pp., £9.95, February 1985, 0 86068 665 5
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Heaven and Earth 
by Frederic Raphael.
Cape, 310 pp., £8.95, February 1985, 0 224 02294 6
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The Tenth Man 
by Graham Greene.
Bodley Head, 157 pp., £6.95, March 1985, 9780370308319
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... nothing to declare but memories and aspirations. The West Indians who alighted at Southampton and Bristol, wives in cotton dresses, husbands in demob suits and trilbies, were items of unfinished history, dredged up from the bottom of the sea of progress. Perhaps their experience has still not been assimilated. It is appropriate that The Final Passage opens at ...

Against boiled cabbage

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Falling for Vivekananda, 2 February 2023

Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda 
by Ruth Harris.
Harvard, 560 pp., £34.95, October 2022, 978 0 674 24747 5
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... life, which caught the fancy of domestically minded British Protestants. Roy was staying with some Bristol Unitarians when he died of meningitis in 1833 (he was buried at Arnos Vale Cemetery). Keshub Chunder Sen, his most prominent successor, flirted at length with Unitarianism. He was also a sentimental monarchist who treasured his audience with Queen ...

Marvellous Money

Michael Wood: Eça de Queirós, 3 January 2008

The Maias: Episodes from Romantic Life 
by José Maria Eça de Queirós, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Dedalus, 714 pp., £15, March 2007, 978 1 903517 53 6
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... no doubt, wouldn’t have minded living – he wrote the novel while he was Portuguese consul in Bristol. Before that he had been consul in Havana and Newcastle. All five of the novels published in his life time – Cousin Bazílio, 1878, The Crime of Father Amaro, 1875, The Mandarin, 1880, The Relic, 1887, The Maias, 1888 – appeared while he was working ...

Blighted Plain

Jonathan Meades: Wiltshire’s Multitudes, 6 January 2022

The Buildings of England: Wiltshire 
by Julian Orbach, Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 828 pp., £45, June 2021, 978 0 300 25120 3
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... size (population pushing fifty thousand) which has no bypass. Thus traffic between Southampton and Bristol thunders down suburban roads when it is not at a standstill belching particulates into the atmosphere.The lack of a bypass is evidence of the parochial mismanagement, casual corruption and sharp practice that sully the city. The ‘ring road’ was ...

Locked and Barred

Robert Crawford: Elizabeth Jennings, 24 July 2003

New Collected Poems 
by Elizabeth Jennings.
Carcanet, 386 pp., £9.95, February 2002, 1 85754 559 1
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... Jennings, who died two years ago, wrote too many poems. She was careless about her output, sending Michael Schmidt, her editor at Carcanet, ‘sacks’ of manuscript work to sift through and make into a collection. Even he seems occasionally to have lost track. His sympathetic and shrewd introduction records that her own favourite among her poems was ...

Can Clegg be forgiven?

Ross McKibbin: 5 May, 2 June 2011

... their rights by raising council tax they can forget it – council taxes have been capped. Michael Gove’s ‘free schools’, by giving parents the right to set up their children’s schools and determine their character (unqualified teachers and all), will, it’s said, liberate them from the heavy hand of local government, while the NHS proposals ...

A Plumless Pudding

John Sutherland: The Great John Murray Archive Disaster, 18 March 2004

... loan’, at nearby UCL. The Penguin and Hamish Hamilton archives are, substantially, on loan at Bristol University library, in recognition of Allen Lane’s birthplace. In the 1970s Ian Fletcher and Jim Edwards at Reading University had the bright idea of offering publishers what was in effect curatorship in return for deposit. Reading took on the Macmillan ...

A New Kind of Being

Jenny Turner: Angela Carter, 3 November 2016

The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography 
by Edmund Gordon.
Chatto, 544 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 0 7011 8755 2
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... left behind were that it should be used in any way possible – short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the ...

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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... as chancellor of the University of Oxford, ranger of Snowdon Forest, or high steward of Windsor, Bristol, Reading, Abingdon, King’s Lynn, Great Yarmouth, Wallingford, Tewkesbury and St Albans – that he didn’t manage to visit Kenilworth once during the first three years he owned it. Despite the elaborate heraldry he had carved into the walls of the ...

The ‘R’ Word

Adam Smyth: For the Love of the Binding, 4 November 2021

Book Ownership in Stuart England 
by David Pearson.
Oxford, 352 pp., £69.99, January, 978 0 19 887012 8
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... his name, opened in 1653; and there were new town libraries in Ipswich (1599), Norwich (1608) and Bristol (1613). ‘Private libraries,’ Pearson writes, ‘were also the tributaries of the public ones,’ and you can often see the traces of these earlier lives in shelfmarks. Books classified by the Bodleian as ‘Wood’, for example, once belonged to the ...

Bumming and Booing

John Mullan: William Wordsworth, 5 April 2001

Wordsworth: A Life 
by Juliet Barker.
Viking, 971 pp., £25, October 2000, 9780670872138
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The Hidden Wordsworth 
by Kenneth Johnston.
Pimlico, 690 pp., £15, September 2000, 0 7126 6752 0
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Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s 
by David Bromwich.
Chicago, 186 pp., £9.50, April 2000, 0 226 07556 7
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... scholarly assessment’. It was about a year and a half before the speculation was scotched. Michael Durey, writing in the TLS, proved that ‘Mr Wordsworth’ was in fact the poet’s cousin Robinson Wordsworth, collector of customs at Harwich, who was being paid for expenses incurred in arresting and taking to London two men accused of treason. He also ...

Testing Woes

Jonathan Flint, 6 May 2021

... more certain someone is about Covid-19, the less you should trust them.’ The author, Bristol epidemiologist George Davey Smith, argued that there are ‘many rational people with scientific credentials making assertive public pronouncements on Covid-19 who seem to suggest there can be no legitimate grounds for disagreeing with them’. He had a ...

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