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Lyrics and Ironies

Christopher Ricks, 4 December 1986

The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony 
by D.J. Enright.
Oxford, 178 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 19 212253 3
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Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric 
by Donald Davie.
Cambridge, 76 pp., £15, September 1986, 0 521 32264 2
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... Freud must be very unsettling to necessitate such cushions. Enright’s poem ‘Anecdote from William IV Street’ – about a request for the works of Freud and for an artwork of Jesus Christ – succeeds in its succinct ruefulness, the melting sentiment (as Eliot said of Goldsmith) just held in check by the precision of the language. But when telling us ...

All my eye and Betty Martin

Roy Harris, 1 December 1983

A Dictionary of Mottoes 
by L.G. Pine.
Routledge, 303 pp., £9.95, October 1983, 9780710093394
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Newspeak: A Dictionary of Jargon 
by Jonathon Green.
Routledge, 263 pp., £9.95, October 1983, 0 7100 9685 2
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The Oxford Miniguide to English Usage 
by E.S.C. Weiner.
Oxford, 412 pp., £1.95, October 1983, 0 19 869127 0
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The Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English: Volume II 
by A.P. Cowrie, R. Mackin and I.R. McCaig.
Oxford, 685 pp., £12.50, October 1983, 0 19 431150 3
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A Dictionary of the Teenage Revolution and its Aftermath 
by Kenneth Hudson.
Macmillan, 203 pp., £12.95, October 1983, 0 333 28517 4
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A Dictionary of Catch-Phrases 
by Eric Partridge.
Routledge, 278 pp., £5.95, October 1983, 0 7100 9989 4
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... The ‘popular’ writers are people like Arnold Wesker, H.E. Bates, Kingsley Amis and William Golding. Needless to say, the idioms which the BBC, the newspapers and the ‘popular’ writers are free to indulge in are those which pass the cultural censorship which dictionary-makers themselves exercise. So there is no breaking out of the ...

Dropping Their Eggs

Patrick Wright: The history of bombing, 23 August 2001

A History of Bombing 
by Sven Lindqvist, translated by Linda Haverty Rugg.
Granta, 233 pp., £14.99, May 2001, 1 86207 415 1
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The Bomber War: Arthur Harris and the Allied Bomber Offensive 1939-45 
by Robin Niellands.
Murray, 448 pp., £25, February 2001, 0 7195 5637 6
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Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War 
by Frances FitzGerald.
Touchstone, 592 pp., $17, March 2001, 0 7432 0023 3
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... Mullah’ of Somaliland, who was bombed into submission within a week. Arthur (Bomber) Harris was a squadron leader in the Third Afghan war of 1919, and pioneered the strategy of ‘control without occupation’ in Iraq, which entailed sprinkling fire on straw-roofed huts: ‘within forty-five minutes,’ ...

All hail, sage lady

Andrew O’Hagan: ‘The Crown’, 15 December 2016

... naval officer striated with pride, it came to seem, if reports are true, like a life sentence. William Shawcross, in his expertly genuflecting biography of the queen mother, shows us a Duke of Edinburgh just after his wedding, a young man in love writing to his mother-in-law of the new unity he has just achieved and hopes will bless the future. ‘Lilibet ...

Madness and Method

Mark Philp, 3 April 1986

The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry Vol. I: People and Ideas, Vol. II: Institutions and Society 
edited by W.F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd.
Tavistock, 316 pp., £19.95, November 1985, 0 422 79430 9
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Madness, Morality and Medicine: A Study of the York Retreat 1796-1914 
by Anne Digby.
Cambridge, 323 pp., £27.50, October 1985, 0 521 26067 1
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... removal of the chains of lunatics at Bicêtre, and the establishment of the York Retreat by William Tuke, inaugurate the psychiatric enlightenment. The development of the asylum bears witness to the increasing ability to distinguish between the mad and the poor, idle and criminal classes, and to attempts by various reformers, notably the Tukes and John ...

Who now cares about Malinowski?

Robert Ackerman, 23 May 1996

After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888-1951 
by George Stocking.
Athlone, 570 pp., £50, January 1996, 0 485 30072 9
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... library with anything to say (in English) about sex. It also seemed a good idea to consult Marvin Harris, who had written a history of anthropology himself and who at that time taught the history course required of all entering graduate students. When I told him of my plans, he was appalled at my theoretical naivety and seemed to fear for my intellectual life ...

One word says to its mate

Claire Harman: W.S. Graham, 4 October 2001

The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters of W.S. Graham 
edited by Michael Snow and Margaret Snow.
Carcanet, 401 pp., £12.95, November 1999, 1 85754 445 5
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... about reviewers etc’, as Graham lets slip with pride in a letter to the poet and editor William Montgomerie. Even mild patronage from Thomas was enough to encourage Graham to dedicate himself, romantically, impractically and single-mindedly, to writing poetry. With the exception of a short period of teaching in 1942-43 and a disastrous spell as an ...

Delightful to be Robbed

E.S. Turner: Stand and deliver, 9 May 2002

Outlaws and Highwaymen: The Cult of the Robber in England from the Middle Ages to the 19th century 
by Gillian Spraggs.
Pimlico, 372 pp., £12.50, November 2001, 0 7126 6479 3
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... judge robbed by the brothers was said to have ‘sold the laws as if they were oxen or cows’. In William Langland’s Piers Plowman is a reference to ‘Folvilles’ laws’, under which men were entitled to ‘ride and recover’ by force from wicked men what had been unlawfully acquired. Piers Plowman also contains references to that ‘deeply obscure ...

For the Sake of the Dollars

Lynne Vallone: The original Siamese twins, 12 September 2019

Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History 
by Yunte Huang.
Liveright, 416 pp., £11.99, May 2019, 978 1 63149 545 8
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... Chang and Eng were unmoved. Their response, taken as dictation by their former manager Charles Harris, was: ‘let Mrs C. look into her own heart and they feel confident she will discover that the great loving & liking was not for their own sakes – but for the sake of the said Dollars.’ By 1839, with more than $10,000 in savings, the twins decided to ...

How They Brought the Good News

Colin Kidd: Britain’s Napoleonic Wars, 20 November 2014

In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815 
by Jenny Uglow.
Faber, 739 pp., £25, November 2014, 978 0 571 26952 5
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... he only needed control of the Channel for six hours to effect an invasion of England. After all, William of Orange had managed it in the autumn of 1688; and Bonnie Prince Charlie had got as far south as Derby with his ragamuffin army in December 1745. The notion of an impregnable island fortress was less convincing when 1688 and 1745 remained fresh in the ...

Italianizzati

Hugh Honour, 13 November 1997

A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701-1800 
compiled by John Ingamells.
Yale, 1070 pp., £50, May 1997, 0 300 07165 5
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... is limited and it is hardly a complaint to say that some significant details could be added. A Mr Harris, for instance, about whom nothing is known save that he married the daughter of a British consul in Naples, is included, and it could have been mentioned that for want of an Anglican clergyman the ceremony was conducted by none other than the great German ...

Bypass Variegated

Rosemary Hill: Osbert Lancaster, 21 January 2016

Osbert Lancaster’s Cartoons, Columns and Curlicues: ‘Pillar to Post’, ‘Homes Sweet Homes’, ‘Drayneflete Revealed’ 
by Osbert Lancaster.
Pimpernel, 304 pp., £40, October 2015, 978 1 910258 37 8
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... by the fact that St Ronan’s, Worthing was a spectacularly sporty school. The headmaster, Stanley Harris, had captained England at football and was also a distinguished cricketer and rugby player. Lancaster, an only child who had lost his father two years earlier at the Battle of the Somme, proved himself as the terms came and went to be uniformly hopeless at ...

The Great US Election Disaster

Hal Foster, 30 November 2000

... it was not televised. (For those keeping track of our dynastic democracy, Richard was father to William, the Gore campaign head, and to Richard II, the current Chicago Mayor.) One pants-down scene was captured live on election night when George W. received a call from brother Jeb, Governor of Florida, soon after CNN had projected Florida for Gore. The ...

Junk Mail

Jeremy Harding, 23 September 1993

The Letters of William Burroughs, 1949-1959 
edited by Oliver Harris.
Picador, 472 pp., £17.50, August 1993, 0 330 33074 8
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... If a certain stoicism was required to get through William Burroughs’s disgusting novel, Naked Lunch, there are fewer problems with his mail. Indeed, the only danger is over-indulgence, for this stuff slides easily off the end of the fork. The letters here were written between 1945 and 1959. They begin with Burroughs at his family home in St Louis, from which he moves smartly through a series of addresses in the US ...

Memories of Lindsay Anderson

Alan Bennett, 20 July 2000

... so not expecting anyone else to either. The great loves of his life map out his career: Richard Harris (This Sporting Life), Albert Finney (Billy Liar), Malcolm McDowell (If ...) and Frank Grimes. None of them seems to have come across (if that, indeed, was what he wanted). They were all incorrigibly male and not all were over-blessed with ...

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