The Powyses

D.A.N. Jones, 7 August 1980

After My Fashion 
by John Cowper Powys.
Picador, 286 pp., £2.50, June 1980, 0 330 26049 9
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Weymouth Sands 
by John Cowper Powys.
Picador, 567 pp., £2.95, June 1980, 0 330 26050 2
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Recollections of the Powys Brothers 
edited by Belinda Humfrey.
Peter Owen, 288 pp., £9.95, May 1980, 0 7206 0547 4
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John Cowper Powys and David Jones: A Comparative Study 
by Jeremy Hooker.
Enitharmon, 54 pp., £3.75, April 1979, 0 901111 85 6
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The Hollowed-Out Elder Stalk 
by Roland Mathias.
Enitharmon, 158 pp., £4.85, May 1979, 0 901111 87 2
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John Cowper Powys and the Magical Quest 
by Morine Krissdottir.
Macdonald, 218 pp., £8.95, February 1980, 0 354 04492 3
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“... J. C. his meed of lectures, tutorials and research students. Nevertheless, the book-addicted young, the Colin Wilsons of our time, find John Cowper instantly available in the heart of London, at the Village Bookshop, hard by Piccadilly Circus, that alternative campus. There is here a bust of John Cowper, with large pictures of his photogenic face. There ...”

Aviators and Movie Stars

Patricia Lockwood: Carson McCullers, 19 October 2017

Stories, Plays and Other Writings 
by Carson McCullers.
Library of America, 672 pp., £33.99, January 2017, 978 1 59853 511 2
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“... with a random ballerina she saw one night on stage. Here is Reeves entangled with various young women; here he is falling in love with David Diamond, a composer who was a shadow figure in their marriage. I am thinking of a place called 7 Middagh Street, a fairytale brownstone in Brooklyn Heights whose back windows ...”

Warhol’s Respectability

Nicholas Penny, 19 March 1987

The Revenge of the Philistines 
by Hilton Kramer.
Secker, 445 pp., £12.50, July 1986, 0 436 23687 7
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Gilbert and George 
by Carter Ratcliff.
Thames and Hudson, 271 pp., £14.95, November 1986, 0 500 27443 6
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British Art in the 20th Century 
edited by Susan Compton.
Prestel-Verlag (Munich), 460 pp., £16.90, January 1987, 3 7913 0798 3
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“... In November of the following year he alerted his readers to the absence, in the art of David Hockney, of ‘the spiritual quest at the heart of modernism’. Several years later, in June 1981, he gave warning that the stained canvases of Morris Louis, the leading member of the ‘Washington Colour School’, did not represent the breakthrough that ...”

Rub gently out with stale bread

Adam Smyth: The Print Craze, 2 November 2017

The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking 1550-1820 
by Antony Griffiths.
British Museum, 560 pp., £60, August 2016, 978 0 7141 2695 1
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“... in 1837, John Constable grew increasingly preoccupied with printmaking and collaborated with the young engraver David Lucas to translate his oil sketches and paintings into 22 mezzotints, part of what would become known as English Landscape Scenery. Proofs survive, and are covered with the handwritten revisions and ...”

At the British Museum

Peter Campbell: Renaissance Drawings, 27 May 2010

“... of the total, unrepresentative and rarely in perfect condition. Titian’s ‘Portrait of a young woman in profile to the right’ (c.1510-15) By the 16th century, however, even preliminary drawings were prized for themselves and collected – two of those here are shown with the pen and wash frames Vasari put round them when he added them to his ...”

Sandinismo

Jonathan Steele, 19 December 1985

Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista 
by Omar Cabezas, translated by Kathleen Weaver.
Cape, 233 pp., £9.95, September 1985, 0 224 02814 6
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“... invokes the restorationist content of a movement whose leaders were, without exception, too young to have known Sandino as anything but a legend. Yet it is this basic element which the power-brokers of the Reagan Administration cannot understand. The core of Sandinismo is not an ‘imported’ ideology, but its exact opposite: resistance to ...”

In the Opposite Direction

David Blackbourn: Enzensberger, 25 March 2010

The Silences of Hammerstein 
by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, translated by Martin Chalmers.
Seagull, 465 pp., £20, 1 906497 22 2
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“... began life in Enzensberger’s Berlin apartment. Its members included his ex-wife, Dagrun, his young daughter and his brother Ulrich. It’s hard to imagine a more impeccably radical pedigree. Fast forward 40 years, and what we have looks like a journey from left to right. The critic of the Vietnam War has witnessed the Khmer Rouge and become a critic of ...”

Added Fashion Value

David A. Bell: Capitalism’s Rosy Dawn, 7 October 2021

Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in 18th-Century France 
by William H. Sewell Jr.
Chicago, 412 pp., £28, April, 978 0 226 77046 8
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“... perhaps, although Sewell skips too quickly over the horrors of the Lyon silk district, where young women from the countryside worked their fingers to the bone and gave up their children to likely death at the hands of overburdened wet nurses. But in addition, as Sewell himself notes, France owed much of its economic growth not to these silk works but to ...”

In bed with the Surrealists

David Sylvester, 6 January 1994

Investigating Sex: Surrealist Research 1928-1932 
edited by José Pierre, translated by Malcolm Imrie.
Verso, 215 pp., £17.95, November 1992, 0 86091 378 3
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“... artist: they were mates, muses, molls.* These discussions, then, essentially give the opinions of young male writers. French writers. The artists – or indeed Buñuel – would have made things more cosmopolitan, as all but two of them were foreigners; the one who did take part regularly was French.The first discussion is between eight members of the group ...”

The Last War of Religion

David Armitage, 9 June 1994

The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World 
by J.C.D. Clark.
Cambridge, 404 pp., £35, October 1993, 0 521 44510 8
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The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Anti-Federalist Speeches, Articles and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification. Vol. I 
edited by Bernard Bailyn.
Library of America, 1214 pp., $35, July 1993, 0 940450 42 9
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“... of the established Church and Government’. Most intransigent of all, perhaps, was the choleric young English Tory Ambrose Serle, who spent two years in Revolutionary America as secretary to Lord Howe in 1776-8. He was appalled beyond measure at what he found there. ‘Religion is an Honor to man, if it be true Religion and truly used,’ he wrote in his ...”

Zest

David Reynolds: The Real Mrs Miniver, 25 April 2002

TheReal Mrs Miniver 
by Ysenda Maxtone Graham.
Murray, 314 pp., £17.99, November 2001, 0 7195 5541 8
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Mrs Miniver 
by Jan Struther.
Virago, 153 pp., £7.99, November 2001, 1 85381 090 8
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“... which ended with her slapping him across the face. The tautness of the final film was due to the young William Wyler, who arrived on the set as director in September 1941. Under his aegis, the male characters faded into the background – earlier scripts had envisaged scenes of Clem and Vin at Dunkirk – while the women of the village moved ...”

Of the Mule Breed

David Bromwich: Robert Southey, 21 May 1998

Robert Southey: A Life 
by Mark Storey.
Oxford, 405 pp., £25, April 1997, 0 19 811246 7
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“... of scenery.’ Only a few months earlier, he had received an unsettling visit in Keswick from a young poet and disciple, Percy Shelley. The Revolt of Islam would draw on Southey’s Oriental experiments, and right down to Demogorgon’s song in Prometheus Unbound, cadences from his poems and Coleridge’s of the 1790s would acquire a second life more ...”

Social Workers

David Cannadine, 5 October 1995

Royal Bounty: The Making of a Welfare Monarchy 
by Frank Prochaska.
Yale, 352 pp., £19.95, October 1995, 0 300 06453 5
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“... unimpressed, and regarded philanthropic work as an inadequate training in royal statecraft for the young and wayward Prince of Wales. But since Victoria would not let him read state papers, or go to Ireland as Viceroy, doing good was just about the only thing left for him – apart from doing bad. And like Queen Adelaide, but in a significantly different ...”

Enlightenment Erotica

David Nokes, 4 August 1988

Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America 
by Peter Wagner.
Secker, 498 pp., £30, March 1988, 0 436 56051 8
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’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorised Sexuality during the Enlightenment 
edited by Robert Purks Maccubin.
Cambridge, 260 pp., £25, March 1988, 0 521 34539 1
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The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature 
edited by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown.
Methuen, 320 pp., £28, February 1988, 0 416 01631 6
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“... O’. Her price, 5s. ‘She riggles her a—e su’ cantily.’ The description of this prime young filly, taken from the Edinburgh publication A Genuine List of Sporting Ladies (c. 1770) is typical of many entries from whores’ directories included by Peter Wagner in Eros Revived. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, published regularly between 1760 ...”
The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes: Vols I-II 
edited by Thomas Hobbes and Noel Malcolm.
Oxford, 592 pp., £60, September 1994, 0 19 824065 1
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“... have seen, in my room, noble ladies who have husbands but who also have the pox; pretty girls and young widows, who played fair with me, but who were in any case pregnant; and many other worthy people, who, however, I decided were spies.’ By the end of his life du Verdus was clearly given to fits of lunacy (he himself describes paralysis and amnesia, and ...”