What’s Coming

David Edgar: J.M. Synge, 22 March 2001

Fool of the Family: A Life of J.M. Synge 
by W.J. McCormack.
Weidenfeld, 499 pp., £25, March 2000, 0 297 64612 5Show More
Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School 1991-2000 
edited by Nicholas Grene.
Lilliput, 220 pp., £29.95, July 2000, 1 901866 47 5Show More
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“... fell in love with their leading actresses, wrote their major works in six years and died young. More important, they both wrote plays about the impact on the present of the future; Ibsen’s great subject was the impact on the present of the past. In Chekhov’s first great play, The Seagull, the first three acts adumbrate hopes and ambitions that ...”

Diary

Rebecca Solnit: In the Day of the Postman, 29 August 2013

“... the vitality of Occupy for its long season seemed in part to come from the rapture of the American young at the unfamiliar emotional and political power of coexisting in public together, body and soul. I have reconnected via Facebook to old friends who might otherwise never have resurfaced, and followed grassroots politics and movements. And I’ve wasted ...”

Love in the Ruins

Nicolas Tredell, 8 October 1992

Out of the Rain 
by Glyn Maxwell.
Bloodaxe, 112 pp., £6.95, June 1992, 1 85224 193 4Show More
Body Politic 
by Tony Flynn.
Bloodaxe, 60 pp., £5.95, June 1992, 1 85224 129 2Show More
Red 
by Linda France.
Bloodaxe, 80 pp., £5.95, June 1992, 1 85224 178 0Show More
Red-Haired Android 
by Jeremy Reed.
Grafton, 280 pp., £7.99, July 1992, 9780586091845Show More
Leaf-Viewing 
by Peter Robinson, with an essay by Peter Swaab.
Robert Jones, 36 pp., £9.95, July 1992, 0 9514240 2 5Show More
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“... which descends upon a decadent town. The narrator is one of a group of sporting, drinking young hedonists who call to mind, variously, yuppies and lager louts, Essex Men and the Bright Young Things of Waugh and Huxley and Eliot and Scott Fitzgerald. The narrator describes the night of the flood, his glimpse of the ...”

Bert’s Needs

Patricia Beer, 25 March 1993

Lawrence’s Women: The Intimate Life of D.H. Lawrence 
by Elaine Feinstein.
HarperCollins, 275 pp., £18, January 1993, 0 00 215364 5Show More
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“... local girls with whom Bert – as he then was – became involved during his adolescence and young manhood were so homogeneous in their attitudes and fortunes that they provide a valuable chapter of social history. Jessie Chambers, Alice Dix, Louie Burrows, Agnes Holt, Helen Corke, and others who are less closely relevant, can, with regard to their ...”

Noisomeness

Keith Thomas: Smells of Hell, 16 July 2020

Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times 
by Robert Muchembled, translated by Susan Pickford.
Polity, 216 pp., £17.99, May, 978 1 5095 3677 1Show More
The Clean Body: A Modern History 
by Peter Ward.
McGill-Queen’s, 313 pp., £27.99, December 2019, 978 0 7735 5938 7Show More
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“... In a lawsuit brought in 1610 against the nuisance caused by a neighbour’s pigs, the great lawyer Edward Coke, employed in the defence, declared that ‘the building of the house for hogs was necessary for the sustenance of man and one ought not to have so delicate a nose that he cannot bear the smell of hogs.’ Later in the century, a religious writer ...”

She’s a tiger-cat!

Miranda Seymour: Birds’ claw omelettes with Vernon Lee, 22 January 2004

Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography 
by Vineta Colby.
Virginia, 387 pp., £32.50, May 2003, 0 8139 2158 9Show More
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“... at a time when their own volatile love affair was still in progress. A clever and confident young woman, she managed to remain friendly with Violet Paget while maintaining her own independence. Ottoline Morrell’s correspondence shows that she heard a good deal at Il Palmerino in 1899 about its owner’s recent and savage falling-out with Bernard ...”

Motoring

Frank Kermode: James Lees-Milne, 30 November 2000

Deep Romantic Chasm: Diaries 1979-81 
by James Lees-Milne, edited by Michael Bloch.
Murray, 276 pp., £22.50, October 2000, 0 7195 5608 2Show More
A Mingled Measure: Diaries 1953-72 
by James Lees-Milne.
Murray, 325 pp., £12.99, October 2000, 0 7195 5609 0Show More
Ancient as the Hills: Diaries 1973-74 
by James Lees-Milne.
Murray, 228 pp., £12.99, October 2000, 0 7195 6200 7Show More
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“... of their superior social status in the world; or provocative and combative and rude like Randolph, Edward Stanley, Nigel Birch and others’) and it seems he is unwilling even to be a gentleman. He notes that Somerset Maugham said that Kipling was ‘not quite a gent’. When Kipling said of somebody, ‘He’s a white man,’ Maugham thought: ‘How I ...”

In the Front Row

Susan Pedersen: Loving Lloyd George, 25 January 2007

. . . If Love Were All: The Story of Frances Stevenson and David Lloyd George 
by John Campbell.
Cape, 557 pp., £25, June 2006, 0 224 07464 4Show More
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“... Liberal Party produced in such numbers. It’s also that so few real opportunities were open to a young woman with a head for politics in that era. There was the suffrage movement, of course, but the exalted martyrdom of the Pankhurst-led militants wouldn’t appeal to everyone, and a slightly older cabal of Newnham and Somerville graduates already had the ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

“... January. The alterations we have been having done are now pretty much finished, thanks to Max, a young Latvian who’s unsmiling but an excellent carpenter and Eugene, much jollier and from New Zealand who has supervised it all. Walking round the job this evening R. is shocked to discover in the bathroom above the bath a crudely made wooden cross. He takes ...”

You Muddy Fools

Dan Jacobson: In the months before his death Ian Hamilton talked about himself to Dan Jacobson, 14 January 2002

“... life he had had, what kind of person he was. You lose the pattern, losing a parent when you’re young. I also felt the wish to speak to him or in some way to have a relationship with him. And those poems probably come from an impulse of that sort, from the delayed pain or loss.Were you close to your siblings, not necessarily as a consequence of this, but ...”

Political Anatomy

Christopher Lawrence, 3 April 1986

The Black and white Medicine Show: How doctors serve and fail their customers 
by Donald Gould.
Hamish Hamilton, 278 pp., £10.95, June 1985, 9780241115404Show More
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“... poor patients call them ‘sir’. They gave extravagant dinners and patronised the arts: the young Henry Wood owed a good deal to the physician George Cathcart. If they were exceptionally well-connected like ‘Tommy’, Lord Horder, they bought their Rolls-Royces from former prime ministers. Where, historians are now asking, is the historical cunning ...”

Fortunes of War

Graham Hough, 6 November 1980

The Sum of Things 
by Olivia Manning.
Weidenfeld, 203 pp., £5.95, September 1980, 0 297 77816 1Show More
The Viceroy of Ouidah 
by Bruce Chatwin.
Cape, 155 pp., £5.95, October 1980, 0 224 01820 5Show More
The Sooting Party 
by Isabel Colegate.
Hamish Hamilton, 181 pp., £5.95, September 1980, 0 241 10473 4Show More
An Ancient Castle 
by Robert Graves.
Owen, 69 pp., £3.95, October 1980, 0 7206 0567 9Show More
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“... never is; and it was decisively exploded in The Battle Lost and Won, where the focus shifts to the young soldier Simon Boulderstone and the superb evocation of his experience of the Alamein offensive – a rare achievement of informed imagination. It is then we realise that the real subject is the war. Not its causes, or its purpose, not primarily its horrors ...”

Poe’s Woes

Julian Symons, 23 April 1992

Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance 
by Kenneth Silverman.
Weidenfeld, 564 pp., £25, March 1992, 9780297812531Show More
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“... the three years of life remaining to him was intermittently though unsuccessfully dunned by the young man he condemned as ‘destitute of honor & principle every day of his life has only served to confirm his debased nature’. In the years of journalistic hackwork that followed he fell out with almost every editor and proprietor who employed him, and ...”

Through the Grinder

Graham Coster, 8 February 1996

The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean 
by Paul Theroux.
Hamish Hamilton, 523 pp., £17.50, November 1995, 0 241 13504 4Show More
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“... Allie Fox is displaced from upstate New York to the Honduran jungle in The Mosquito Coast, or the young Jilly Farina goes on the road in an Airstream caravan in Millroy the Magician, that Theroux writes about travel as an existential test, lands people further away than they want to go, imagines the restless momentum that drives an obsession away from any ...”

On Thatcher

“... no end to her presumption: to the already notorious quotes one can add another culled by Hugo Young, who finds her measuring ‘my performance against that of other countries in the real world’.R.W. Johnson, 20 April 1989If​ you want to see the cutting edge of Thatcherism, go to Basingstoke. There, as we learn in Paul Hirst’s After Thatcher, the ...”
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