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 ...

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 ...

Diary

Jeremy Harding: My ’68, 19 July 2018

... archive, now online, is a gory mish-mash of psychedelia, drugs, the occult, squatting, flower power, music, libertarian sexual politics – softly pornographic while staunchly pro-gay, with a smattering of second-wave feminism – and a contempt for the establishment that occasionally strays into serious politics. IT had been quicker to respond to ‘les ...

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 ...

Paths to Restitution

Jeremy Harding: Leopold’s Legacy, 5 June 2025

... province of Katanga. The prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was deposed after only three months in power. Four months later he was assassinated by a scratch firing squad overseen by former Belgian colonial police officers. In 2001, a Belgian parliamentary committee concluded that the government of the day ‘bore a moral responsibility’ for Lumumba’s ...

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 ...

Yuk’s Last Laugh

Tim Parks: Flaubert, 15 December 2016

Flaubert 
by Michel Winock, translated by Nicholas Elliott.
Harvard, 528 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 0 674 73795 2
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... there was nothing false or laughable in him. At 27, Achille-Cléophas had married the 18-year-old Anne-Justine-Caroline and immediately produced a son, Achille, who, as his name foretold, was to follow in his father’s footsteps. After Achille, however, there were three children who all died shortly after birth, so that Gustave was born eight years after his ...

A sewer runs through it

Alastair Logan, 4 November 1993

... judges, saw fit to ponder for one moment what effect that had on their chances of a fair trial. Anne Maguire and her family, including 13-year-old Patrick, entered the dock in the Old Bailey on trial for possession of explosives after the massive publicity that attended the Guildford bombings trial, which had finished not long before. The media had made ...

Ashes

Nicholas Spice, 19 December 1985

The Assault 
by Harry Mulisch, translated by Claire Nicolas White.
Collins Harvill, 204 pp., £8.95, November 1985, 0 00 271011 0
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All Our Yesterdays 
by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Angus Davidson.
Carcanet, 300 pp., £9.95, March 1985, 0 85635 593 3
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Family Sayings 
by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by D.M. Low.
Carcanet, 181 pp., £7.95, May 1984, 0 85635 504 6
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The Little Virtues 
by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Dick Davis.
110 pp., £6.95, June 1985, 0 85635 553 4
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Strange Loop 
by Amanda Prantera.
Cape, 175 pp., £8.50, June 1984, 0 224 02210 5
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The Cabalist 
by Amanda Prantera.
Cape, 184 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 224 02326 8
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... left him. For many people, the story which has come to represent all such stories is the story of Anne Frank, whose ordeal in hiding in Amsterdam was mocked by a fate that decreed she should be discovered and transported within a few months of liberation. Harry Mulisch treats the plight of the Dutch Jews, and of Jews everywhere at that time, with his own kind ...

I, Lowborn Cur

Colin Burrow: Literary Names, 22 November 2012

Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature 
by Alastair Fowler.
Oxford, 283 pp., £19.99, September 2012, 978 0 19 959222 7
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... of the New Comedy of Menander. But comic dramatists also often seem to have been attracted to what Anne Barton has called Cratylic names – those which appear to endorse the view of Plato’s Cratylus that there is an intrinsic relationship between name and nature. Aristophanes has Dicaeopolis (‘just city’) and Lysistrata (‘disbander of ...

The Readyest Way to Hell

Clare Bucknell: The Exhausting Earl of Rochester, 26 December 2024

Rochester and the Pursuit of Pleasure 
by Larry D. Carver.
Manchester, 260 pp., £85, June 2024, 978 1 5261 7367 6
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... kinder things about his worst enemy. ‘To write a lampoon on oneself is not exactly unique,’ Anne Barton has pointed out; ‘it is, however, fundamentally paradoxical.’ Love suggests that ‘To the Post Boy’ may have been a pre-emptive strike on Rochester’s part, an attempt to silence his enemies ‘by flaunting a brilliance in invective they had ...

Enemy Language

Sarah Resnick: Ágota Kristóf’s Secrets, 23 April 2026

I Don’t Care 
by Ágota Kristóf, translated by Chris Andrews.
Penguin, 96 pp., £10.99, August 2025, 978 0 241 77405 2
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... sick labourers were gassed at a work camp and, after the fascist Arrow Cross party came to power in late 1944, thousands of Jewish forced labourers were brought in to build fortifications along the border with Austria, many of whom ended up shot and buried in mass graves. It’s not that Kristóf was unaware of the war, or didn’t feel its ...

Ten-Foot Chopsticks

James Meek: The North-East Transition, 4 December 2025

... China had already taken the wheel). The company, Britishvolt, collapsed just after Labour won power in 2024, but the Starmer government has pursued the link between green jobs, economic growth and votes in the same gung-ho spirit as Johnson, Democrats in the US and mainstream parties in the EU. The transition from fossil fuels to zero-carbon energy needs ...

Does one flare or cling?

Alice Spawls, 5 May 2016

‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style 
by Robin Muir.
National Portrait Gallery, 304 pp., £40, February 2016, 978 1 85514 561 0
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‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style 
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... during the war). Colour printing had always been emblematic of Vogue’s modernity and spending power – Nast insisted on full colour covers from the very beginning – and ‘Vogue’ 100’s small darkroom of slides show the luminosity and saturation that were now possible; the hues are as rich as any Boucher. More portable cameras made travel possible ...