Diary

Fraser MacDonald: Balmorality, 16 November 2023

... and moss, rifles downwards, to share in the joke. For me, it was an education in the proximate power of the sovereign.Balmoral seems to transcend its own locality in these moments. Politicians who would not otherwise be interested in a pilgrimage to rural Scotland revere it as a mark of having arrived in other places that matter. The newly elected leader ...

Bordragings

John Kerrigan: Scotland’s Erasure, 10 October 2024

England’s Insular Imagining: The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland 
by Lorna Hutson.
Cambridge, 323 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 1 009 25357 4
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... drawing on classical iconography, Renaissance architecture, the curbing of magnate power and a consolidation of boundaries. These processes developed in Scotland as a result of James V’s residence in France, his French marriages and susceptibility to Gallic culture. The Scottish historian Roger Mason has said that the 1550s saw the ...

Trapped with an Incubus

Clair Wills: Shirley Hazzard, 21 September 2023

Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life 
by Brigitta Olubas.
Virago, 564 pp., £12.99, June, 978 0 349 01286 5
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... and contrasting an ironic private humanity with the petty vanities and great harm of established power. Their narrative frequently centred on the difficulty of being a moody, clever, thin-skinned – and occasionally alcoholic – literate man who commands the devotion of a comely, plucky, self-denying younger woman … In the characterisation of women, the ...

The pleasure of not being there

Peter Brooks, 18 November 1993

Benjamin Constant: A Biography 
by Dennis Wood.
Routledge, 321 pp., £40, June 1993, 0 415 01937 0
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Isabelle de Charrière (Belle de Zuylen): A Biography 
by C.P Courtney.
Voltaire Foundation, 810 pp., £49, August 1993, 0 7294 0439 0
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... in case de Staël’s vengeance should light on them. Meanwhile, he appealed to his generous aunt, Anne de Nassau, to write to de Staël, begging her to give him his freedom. ‘He has been weak enough to put up with that servitude out of consideration for the pain you claim to be suffering and your histrionic grief,’ Madame de Nassau wrote. It was a good ...

Tory History

Alan Ryan, 23 January 1986

English Society 1688-1832 
by J.C.D. Clark.
Cambridge, 439 pp., £30, November 1985, 0 521 30922 0
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Virtue, Commerce and History 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 321 pp., £25, November 1985, 0 521 25701 8
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... unideological, patronage-based one-party government. He agrees that between the death of Queen Anne and the accession of George III, the Tories had no share in government, and were systematically discriminated against in the distribution of local patronage. But where his opponents think 1688 was decisive, he does not; where they think the propertied ...

Winged Words

Tariq Ali: On Muhammad, 17 June 2021

Muhammad 
by Maxime Rodinson, translated by Anne Carter.
NYRB, 373 pp., £14.99, March 2021, 978 1 68137 492 5
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... Umayyad prince, Abd al Rahman, fled to a different peninsula on the edge of the Atlantic and took power in al-Andalus, the name given by the Arabs to the whole of Muslim Spain.The homage paid by Cervantes in Don Quixote to the heritage of Spanish Islam is seldom remarked on. (There isn’t a single reference to it in Harold Bloom’s weak, lazy introduction ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2009, 7 January 2010

... in the Independent of Picasso painting Guernica in 1937 in a collar and tie. 30 January. My friend Anne’s funeral and we are about to set off for the crematorium in the pouring rain when as we turn the car round a young pheasant skitters across the road. Nothing unusual in that except that this pheasant is pure white. I’m not given to a belief in signs or ...

Can we eat them?

Rivka Galchen: Knausgaard’s Escape, 24 January 2019

Autumn 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Ingvild Burkey.
Harvill Secker, 240 pp., £16.99, August 2017, 978 1 910701 63 8
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Winter 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Ingvild Burkey.
Harvill Secker, 272 pp., £16.99, November 2017, 978 1 910701 65 2
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Spring 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Ingvild Burkey.
Harvill Secker, 192 pp., £16.99, February 2018, 978 1 910701 67 6
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Summer 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Ingvild Burkey.
Harvill Secker, 416 pp., £16.99, June 2018, 978 1 910701 69 0
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... the bulldozer and the dinosaur was obvious to any child – but not the connection between the power of petrol and the mysterious beauty of the small trembling rainbow swirls in the many puddles of the 1970s.’ The curiously loose weave of Knausgaard’s prose allows it to return parts of the reader’s own life to them – maybe this is especially true ...

Outbreaks of Poets

Robert Crawford, 15 June 2023

The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture 
by Clare Bucknell.
Head of Zeus, 344 pp., £27.99, February, 978 1 80024 144 2
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... to hear a little more about the women who edited British poetry anthologies: Janet Adam Smith, Anne Ridler and Helen Gardner. Who were the first British female anthologists? Why didn’t they have the success of American anthologists such as Amy Lowell and Harriet Monroe?Allingham claimed in the preface to Nightingale Valley that poetry had the ...

Doing it with the in-laws

Francis Gooding, 12 September 2024

Forbidden Fruit: An Anthropologist Looks at Incest 
by Maurice Godelier, translated by Nora Scott.
Verso, 100 pp., £9.99, September 2023, 978 1 80429 234 1
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... book, and after being discharged he dictated the first version of this one to his assistant, Anne-Sylvie Malbrancke.The basic facts of the matter are straightforward, and everyone understands them well. You are not supposed to have sex or procreate with certain immediate family members. Typically the list includes your parents, your children and your ...

Make ’em bleed

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘The War for Gloria’, 27 January 2022

The War for Gloria 
by Atticus Lish.
Knopf, 464 pp., $28, September 2021, 978 1 5247 3232 5
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... tang of the hot dog and pizza concession under the hot yellow lights.’‘One’, the Princess Anne pronoun, is a rare visitor to contemporary literary prose, not only because of its air of neutral authority – it’s just the sort of thing that makes the editorial blue pencil itch. By disowning subjectivity it more or less disqualifies itself, yet ...

A Dreame of Passion

Barbara Everett: Shakespeare’s Most Peculiar Play, 2 January 2003

... pursue Like Rats that ravyn down their proper Bane, A thirsty evill, and when we drinke, we die. Anne Barton has remarked, slightly bitterly, that ‘much of the action takes place in a prison’: and certainly the shadow of bars is all a workable set really requires. The prison is a real place, city-like, full of all the ‘great doers of our trade’ in ...

Fielding in the dock

Claude Rawson, 5 April 1990

Henry Fielding: A Life 
by Martin Battestin and Ruthe Battestin.
Routledge, 738 pp., £29.50, October 1989, 0 415 01438 7
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New Essays 
by Henry Fielding, edited by Martin Battestin.
Virginia, 604 pp., $50, November 1989, 0 8139 1221 0
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The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding. The True Patriot, and Related Writings 
edited by W.B. Coley.
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An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings 
edited by Malvin Zirker.
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The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register Office 
by Henry Fielding, edited by Bertrand Goldgar.
Oxford, 446 pp., £50, December 1988, 0 19 818511 1
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Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels of Henry Fielding and the Feminist Debate 1700-1750 
by Angela Smallwood.
Harvester, 230 pp., £35, March 1989, 0 7108 0639 6
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... non-patrician. Fielding’s antipathy was partly conditioned by a dislike of the veristic power of Richardson’s novel: its pretence of ‘to the Moment’ narration by a participant in the thick of the action, its particularity of specification, and its thrusting of its readers into an intimacy with the narrative which Fielding seems to have ...

Boomster and the Quack

Stefan Collini: How to Get on in the Literary World, 2 November 2006

Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 
by Philip Waller.
Oxford, 1181 pp., £85, April 2006, 0 19 820677 1
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... publishers, who thereby risked less on each individual title. The system gave considerable power to the buyers for Mudie’s and Smith’s, who in turn feared offending or disappointing their largely conventional upper and middle-class clientele. As usual with such rigged markets, the whole system was invisibly underpinned by shared social assumptions ...

Endocannibals

Adam Mars-Jones: Paul Theroux, 25 January 2018

Mother Land 
by Paul Theroux.
Hamish Hamilton, 509 pp., £20, November 2017, 978 0 241 14498 5
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... of sociology, and drama favours a stage without too much human clutter. Veronica, the narrator of Anne Enright’s The Gathering, somewhere in the middle of a tribe of 12 (seventh from the top, fifth from the bottom), suggests there’s a certain uniformity about the large family: ‘There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered ...