Old, Old, Old, Old, Old

John Kerrigan: Late Yeats, 3 March 2005

W.B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. II: The Arch-Poet 1915-39 
by Roy Foster.
Oxford, 822 pp., £16.99, March 2005, 0 19 280609 2
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... worked. As he told Sean O’Casey, when rejecting The Silver Tassie for performance at the Abbey, Shakespeare did not fill Hamlet and Lear with his own beliefs, but gave those characters a life that allowed them to educate him. It is crucial, in other words, to triangulate biographical data with the polarities of meaning in the play. Once the Old Man’s son ...

The Hard Zone

Andrew O’Hagan: At the Republican National Convention, 1 August 2024

... to compare him with another artist, who would it be?’‘It would be Picasso,’ he said. ‘Or Shakespeare, who’s a bit of a poet. People who defined a new movement in their time.’The New York Times ended a few days of self-suppression with a summation of the Trump lobby’s atmospherics. ‘For Donald J. Trump’s most ardent supporters,’ it ...

Hooted from the Stage

Susan Eilenberg: Living with Keats, 25 January 2024

Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph 
by Lucasta Miller.
Vintage, 357 pp., £12.99, April 2023, 978 1 5291 1090 6
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Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse 
by Anahid Nersessian.
Verso, 136 pp., £12.99, November 2022, 978 1 80429 034 7
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... have these three nights sat up with him from the apprehension of his dying,’ he wrote to William Haslam two days before the end. ‘Dr Clark has prepared me for it – but I shall be but little able to bear it – even this my horrible situation I cannot bear to cease by the loss of him.’Severn meant no harm in packaging those five months with ...

West End Vice

Alan Hollinghurst: Queer London, 8 May 2025

Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1945-59 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 445 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 0 241 37060 5
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Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960-67 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 416 pp., £30, September 2024, 978 0 241 68370 5
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... the dining room: Confidential Chats with Boys (1911) by the American physician and sex-pamphleteer William Lee Howard. Dr Howard urged teenage boys to ‘sleep on the floor, anywhere: go without sleeping’ rather than share a bed with another boy or a man. And if it couldn’t be avoided, ‘keep awake with your eyes on something you can hit him with. At the ...

While Statues Sleep

Thomas Laqueur, 18 June 2020

Learning from the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil 
by Susan Neiman.
Allen Lane, 415 pp., £20, August 2019, 978 0 241 26286 3
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... was somehow the cause of the war.’Neiman mentions the so-called Dunning School, named after William Dunning, a professor at Columbia at the turn of the 20th century, who, with his followers, disparaged the efforts made during the Reconstruction to establish the civil and economic rights (forty acres and a mule) of former slaves and gave intellectual ...

Writing Absurdity

Adam Shatz: Chester Himes, 26 April 2018

Chester B. Himes: A Biography 
by Lawrence P. Jackson.
Norton, 606 pp., £25, July 2017, 978 0 393 06389 9
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... Joseph had taken a job at Branch Normal, a school for blacks at which Chester was introduced to Shakespeare and Chaucer. One day, in front of an audience of parents and students, Joseph Jr, the middle son, gave a chemistry presentation: a gunpowder demonstration in which he mixed ground saltpeter, ground charcoal and ground glass. Chester was supposed to ...

My Girls: A Memoir

August Kleinzahler: Parents, lovers and a poetic punch-up, 19 August 2004

... some seventy feet at the Great Falls of Paterson. There’s a nice picture of it on the cover of William Carlos Williams’s book-length poem Paterson. The river makes its way through traprock and sandstone to the level plain of the city, continues north to Hawthorne, then doubles back on itself and begins its southerly flow to Newark Bay, about twenty-five ...

You Muddy Fools

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

... then, blow me down, if he didn’t suddenly become Tom Clark objectivist, and start writing like William Carlos Williams. He went back to America and began writing objectivist poems dribbling down the page. I thought this is awful, a talent lost. Things were cropping up all over the place that one didn’t seem to able to do anything to prevent.You had an ...

Is it OK to have a child?

Meehan Crist, 5 March 2020

... population growth’. The lead author of both the 2017 and 2019 reports, an ecologist named William Ripple, told Business Insider that ‘if an individual is concerned about climate change, three things to consider include: one, reducing the use of fossil fuels; two, eating mostly a plant-based diet; and three, having fewer ...

The Ground Hostess

Francis Wyndham, 1 April 1983

... go on talking for hours but, alas, I’ve got to fly ... I’m meeting someone at the NFT – the William Wellman retrospective – it’s terribly late and I’ve got the tickets ... ’ Such interruptions as these continued to be a daily occurrence throughout a period of several weeks, during which I was indeed able to think about the memoir at regular ...

Palestinianism

Adam Shatz, 6 May 2021

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said 
by Timothy Brennan.
Bloomsbury, 437 pp., £20, March 2021, 978 1 5266 1465 0
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... against the concealment and silence that the loss of Palestine had imposed, and that his father, William Said, had accepted, leaving behind not only the family’s past in Jerusalem but also his Arab name, Wadie. After 1967, Said embraced the Palestinian struggle – an act of ‘affiliation’, as he put it, a commitment based on belief, rather than ...
... The relevant passage was an account of a conversation between Gladstone’s home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, and a police chief. While Clarke was being moved from prison to prison, Harcourt had refused to countenance the idea that he and the others were political prisoners and insisted that they be treated as common felons. (Harcourt generally took a ...