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Only Sleeping

Anne Barton: Variations on Elizabeth I, 10 July 2003

England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy 
by Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson.
Oxford, 348 pp., £19.99, November 2002, 0 19 818377 1
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... to accept the golden ball of discord now resolved as a tribute from Diana, her tutelary goddess. Philip Sidney in The Lady of May, the little entertainment he staged in 1578 at Leicester’s park and gardens of Wanstead, went so far as to impose an unscripted speaking part on the Queen, presumably without warning, forcing her to adjudicate between two ...

So this is how it works

Elaine Blair: Ben Lerner, 19 February 2015

10:04 
by Ben Lerner.
Granta, 244 pp., £14.99, January 2015, 978 1 84708 891 8
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... doesn’t know if Alex will get pregnant, he doesn’t know exactly how he’s going to expand his short story into a novel – Ben leaves the complications behind for a prestigious five-week writer’s residency in Marfa, Texas. He brings only one book with him, his Library of America edition of Whitman’s collected writing, because he’s going to be ...

Who’s the big one?

Irina Aleksander: Gary Shteyngart, 22 May 2014

Little Failure: A Memoir 
by Gary Shteyngart.
Hamish Hamilton, 368 pp., £16.99, February 2014, 978 0 241 14665 1
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... out on the internet. You were ranked thirty, and David Remnick was eight positions ahead of you. Philip Gourevitch was ranked number eleven. They are both ahead of you.’ Nina, pulling her son aside during the same dinner: ‘It seems like you don’t really know me.’ Semyon, again to Shteyngart’s wife: ‘When I was young, I kill sheep. Girls ...

C (for Crisis)

Eric Hobsbawm: The 1930s, 6 August 2009

The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars 
by Richard Overy.
Allen Lane, 522 pp., £25, May 2009, 978 0 7139 9563 3
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... and their intellectual representations even less so. How can they be compared or contrasted? In short, what are historians to make of the new field? The specific mood Overy looks into is the sense of crisis and fear, ‘a presentiment of impending disaster’, the prospect of the end of civilisation, that, in his view, characterised Britain between the ...

No one hates him more

Joshua Cohen: Franzen on Kraus, 7 November 2013

The Kraus Project 
by Jonathan Franzen.
Fourth Estate, 318 pp., £18.99, October 2013, 978 0 00 751743 5
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... press’ – by which he meant the secular Die Zukunft – for outing Prince Philip Friedrich Alexander of Eulenburg-Hertefeld as a homosexual. For Kraus, all Germanophone media were a cabal, in which Jewish editors on the left displayed a pathetic sense of solidarity with their co-religionists, and Jewish editors on the right sought a ...

Gaslight and Fog

John Pemble: Sherlock Holmes, 26 January 2012

The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England 
by Haia Shpayer-Makov.
Oxford, 429 pp., £30, September 2011, 978 0 19 957740 8
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... in 1887, no one took much notice. But when Arthur Conan Doyle repackaged Holmes and Watson in short stories for the Strand Magazine, the trifle improvised for pin money by a struggling young doctor soon turned into an apotheosis that bemused, enriched and finally exasperated him. He tried to exorcise the incubus by killing Holmes off, but resurrected him ...

My Guru

Edward Said: Elegy for Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, 13 December 2001

... simultaneously expresses defeat and triumph, abjection and attainment, resignation and resolve. In short, it was a version of Palestine, lived in all its complexity by one of the finest Palestinians of our time. Ibrahim – a relentlessly articulate man – will be remembered less for his writing, which was relatively sparse, than for his ability to organise ...

How to Serve Coffee

Rory Stewart: Aleppan Manners, 16 February 2017

Aleppo Observed: Ottoman Syria through the Eyes of Two Scottish Doctors, Alexander and Patrick Russell 
by Maurits H. van den Boogert.
Arcadian Library, 254 pp., £120, September 2015, 978 0 19 958856 5
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... garden, which he has hired for a drinking party. Extracts from all these accounts are printed by Philip Mansel in his stylish and affectionate history of Aleppo alongside those of later Victorian visitors, who are focused on an eternal round of consular picnics and drinking parties, punctuated by sardonic observations on the ersatz taste and slovenliness of ...

Cheering us up

Ian Jack, 15 September 1988

In for a Penny: The Unauthorised Biography of Jeffrey Archer 
by Jonathan Mantle.
Hamish Hamilton, 264 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 241 12478 6
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... investigator, therefore, needs to be a Heinrich Schliemann in the cuttings libraries, as well as a Philip Marlowe of the Army List and old postal directories. Archer’s father presents the first difficulty. Mantle tells us that he died in Weston-super-Mare in 1955, when Archer was 15: but who was he and what did he do? Newspaper interviews with Archer offer a ...

Gielgud’s Achievements

Alan Bennett, 20 December 1979

An Actor and his Time 
by John Gielgud.
Sidgwick, 253 pp., £8.95
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... Sereville, an extremely pretty girl. ‘At rehearsal Mlle Sereville was dressed in a very short skirt and her stockings were rolled below her knees like a footballer’s, showing a considerable expanse of thigh.’ Sounding unaccountably like Ralph Lynn in an Aldwych farce, Gielgud ventured to remark to Hicks: ‘I say, sir, that’s a remarkably ...

No Bananas Today

Rachel Nolan: Mario Vargas Llosa, 2 December 2021

Harsh Times 
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Adrian Nathan West.
Faber, 288 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 0 571 36565 4
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... no intelligence assets in Guatemala’s army, trade unions, government or Communist Party – in short, it didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on in the country. Lacking local knowledge, it drew parallels with Russia, Eastern Europe, China and Korea, portraying events ‘as part of a global pattern of communist activity’. An unredacted part of ...

A Bit Like Gulliver

Stephanie Burt: Seamus Heaney’s Seamus Heaney, 11 June 2009

Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney 
by Dennis O’Driscoll.
Faber, 524 pp., £22.50, November 2008, 978 0 571 24252 8
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The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney 
edited by Bernard O’Donoghue.
Cambridge, 239 pp., £45, December 2008, 978 0 521 54755 0
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... and then at Queen’s; his literary life with Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Michael and Edna Longley, Philip Hobsbaum, and the workshop that Hobsbaum convened, the Group; and the grisly metamorphoses of Northern Irish public life, from simmering inequality and half-suppressed resentment into the worst of the Troubles. Each of these developments affected ...

A Pound a Glimpse

Daniel Smith: Epilepsy, 16 November 2017

A Smell of Burning: The Story of Epilepsy 
by Colin Grant.
Cape, 242 pp., £16.99, August 2016, 978 0 224 10182 0
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The End of Epilepsy? A History of the Modern Era of Epilepsy, 1860-2010 
by Dieter Schmidt and Simon Shorvon.
Oxford, 208 pp., £39.99, September 2016, 978 0 19 872590 9
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... police found him walking in the road without his shoes. And he describes moments of absence – short-lived, blank-eyed lapses of awareness. He also describes the grand mal seizure that killed Christopher at the age of 39. The final seizure was no different in kind from its predecessors. The coroner listed the cause of death as Sudden Unexplained Death in ...

Casuistries of Peace and War

Perry Anderson: The assumptions the Bush Administration and its critics share, 6 March 2003

... practical exponent and the major intellectual theorist of a war on Iraq, Kenneth Pollack and Philip Bobbitt, are former ornaments of the Clinton regime. But as substantial policy contrasts tend to dwindle in Western political systems, symbolic differences of style and image can easily acquire, in compensation, a hysterical rigidity. The Kulturkampf ...

Grand Old Sod

Paul Driver: William Walton, 12 December 2002

The Selected Letters of William Walton 
edited by Malcolm Hayes.
Faber, 526 pp., £30, January 2002, 0 571 20105 9
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William Walton: Muse of Fire 
by Stephen Lloyd.
Boydell, 332 pp., £45, June 2001, 9780851158037
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William Walton, the Romantic Loner: A Centenary Portrait Album 
by Humphrey Burton and Maureen Murray.
Oxford, 182 pp., £25, January 2002, 0 19 816235 9
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... prototype of his numerous orchestral ‘openers’ in which a rapid succession of diverting if short-winded ideas pass by in a jogging continuum, and Siesta (1926) – a gentler, small-orchestral variant of this plan – are more original conceptions, and in some ways represent the most telling part of his legacy. But there is one totally spontaneous and ...

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