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Blame it on the Belgians

Hilary Mantel, 25 June 1992

The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe 
by Charles Nicholl.
Cape, 413 pp., £19.99, June 1992, 0 224 03100 7
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... fuss. The inquest produced a tidy, emollient version, which the coroner accepted. It had been self-defence, said the two witnesses, whose names were Skeres and Poley. Marlowe and Frizer had quarrelled over the bill, or reckoning. Marlowe had picked up Frizer’s dagger and slashed at him, Frizer had wrested it away (presumably while the witnesses stood as ...

The Lady in the Back Seat

Thomas Jones: Robert Harris’s Alternative Realities, 15 November 2007

The Ghost 
by Robert Harris.
Hutchinson, 310 pp., £18.99, October 2007, 978 0 09 179626 6
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... Robert Harris’s first novel, Fatherland (1992), was a counterfactual historical thriller set in Nazi Germany in 1964. In the alternative reality of the book, Germany defeated the Soviet Union in the Caucasus in 1943, lured the Royal Navy to its destruction after learning that the British had cracked the Enigma code, and intimidated the United States into signing a peace treaty by successfully testing an atom bomb and launching an intercontinental V3 rocket across the Atlantic ...

Strawberries in December

Paul Laity: She Radicals, 30 March 2017

Rebel Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers and Radicals in Britain and the United States 
by Sheila Rowbotham.
Verso, 512 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 1 78478 588 8
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... Daniell wrote a pamphlet on The New Trade Unionism with a handsome Scottish radical called Robert Allan Nicol (a ‘Shelleyan type’), which, rather than discussing pickets, looked forward to ‘the union of the Souls of Mankind in a perfect Love’. Daniell had met Nicol when she was still married, during a trip to Edinburgh for medical treatment in ...

Boy-Crazy

Janet Sayers, 20 July 1995

Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst’s Search for Self-Understanding 
by Bernard Paris.
Yale, 270 pp., £22.50, November 1994, 0 300 05956 6
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... Paris, tells a different story, however: that of a woman who questioned her femininity through self-analysis. The account is woman-centred yet curiously devoid of women, as friends, colleagues or patients. Instead, it transpires, Horney made men her all. It was discrimination against her sex, she wrote as a teenager, that launched her into ...

Loose Woven

Peter Howarth: Edward Thomas’s contingencies, 4 August 2005

Collected Poems 
by Edward Thomas, edited by R. George Thomas.
Faber, 264 pp., £12.99, October 2004, 0 571 22260 9
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... write any poems until the autumn of 1914. Thinking over their genesis afterwards, his friend Robert Frost commented that ‘the decision he made in going into the army helped him make the other decision in form.’ This is both a simple material explanation and perhaps also a piece of soul-searching. Frost knew that the more Thomas believed he could ...

Spender’s Purges

Frank Kermode, 5 December 1985

Collected Poems 1928-1985 
by Stephen Spender.
Faber, 204 pp., £4.95, November 1985, 0 571 13666 4
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A Version of the Oedipus Trilogy of Sophocles 
by Stephen Spender.
Faber, 199 pp., £12.50, November 1985, 0 571 13834 9
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Journals 1939-1983 
by Stephen Spender, edited by John Goldsmith.
Faber, 510 pp., £15, November 1985, 0 571 13617 6
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... of dancing. Altogether the choruses are less richly rendered than they are in the translation by Robert Fagles, but the austerity is deliberate and this whole work is very cool and restrained. It results from an independent approach to Sophocles, and the introduction offers a personal reading of the plays which is both interesting and quite unlike the way ...

Docility Rampant

Margaret Anne Doody, 31 October 1996

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Romance Writings 
edited by Isobel Grundy.
Oxford, 276 pp., £14.50, August 1996, 0 19 812288 8
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... of some of her letters in the 19th century. But the real work of recuperation is the province of Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy. Montagu now fills a good deal of shelf space in any library. The term ‘romance writings’ used for the present publication is perhaps not altogether happy. What Grundy has found and presents are (with one exception) short ...

Apologising

James Wood, 24 August 1995

The Burning Library: Writings on Art, Politics, Sexuality 1969-93 
by Edmund White.
Picador, 385 pp., £20, May 1995, 0 330 33883 8
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Skinned Alive 
by Edmund White.
Chatto, 262 pp., £12.99, March 1995, 0 7011 6175 2
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... inherent in the concept of a canon must be jettisoned.’ It is how he is able, in a piece about Robert Mapplethorpe, to argue that ‘passion, like art, is always irresponsible, useless, an end in itself, regulated by its own impulses and nothing else’ and to propose in another that the best gay writing should be a combination of confession, reportage and ...

Living on Apple Crumble

August Kleinzahler: James Schuyler, 17 November 2005

Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951-91 
edited by William Corbett.
Turtle Point, 470 pp., £13.99, May 2005, 1 885586 30 2
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... John Myers, who was described by James Merrill as ‘an ageless, hulking Irishman with the self-image of a pixie’. They certainly didn’t consider themselves a ‘school’, but they were smart and talented, as were the painters associated with the gallery: William de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane ...

Do Not Scribble

Amanda Vickery: Letter-Writing, 4 November 2010

The Pen and the People: English Letter-Writers 1660-1800 
by Susan Whyman.
Oxford, 400 pp., £30, October 2009, 978 0 19 953244 5
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Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters 
by Dena Goodman.
Cornell, 408 pp., £24.50, June 2009, 978 0 8014 7545 0
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... return. The demands of courtship were changed irrevocably by the rise of letter-writing. As Robert Darnton has argued, ‘living cannot be distinguished from reading, nor loving from the writing of love letters.’ Today, extramarital affairs are most likely to be discovered by reading a partner’s emails or texts. In fact, having an affair and using ...

No False Modesty

Rosemary Hill: Edith Sitwell, 20 October 2011

Edith Sitwell: Avant-Garde Poet, English Genius 
by Richard Greene.
Virago, 532 pp., £25, March 2011, 978 1 86049 967 8
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... an unprepossessing child and the elaborate carapace of later years shielded a permanently bruised self-image. In her fifties, while being fêted on a tour in America, she remarked to an acquaintance: ‘I can’t stand myself. I’m so ugly.’ Her father’s attempts to improve her looks with back braces, nose pegs and a strict regime that prevented her from ...

Todd Almighty

Peter Medawar, 16 February 1984

A Time to Remember: The Autobiography of a Chemist 
by Alexander Todd.
Cambridge, 257 pp., £15, November 1983, 0 521 25593 7
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... him as an ambitious and hard-working man who went to work at the age of 13 and from then on was self-taught by attendance at night classes (none of them concerned with science). His father and mother worked their way up in the world ‘into what might be called the lower middle class’ by sheer hard work and resolved at whatever cost to themselves to ...

In Camden

Inigo Thomas, 5 December 2024

... new flats to be built on the square’s old bomb site. In his monograph on Auerbach from 1990, Robert Hughes writes that ‘the flavour of Camden Town recalls a fact of Sickert’s work which applies to Auerbach’s today: its attachment to the common-and-garden, to the compost of life.’ Compost? That word implies fertility and regeneration, but ...

Sex in the head

Roy Porter, 7 July 1988

The History of Sexuality. Vol. III: The Care of Self 
by Michel Foucault, translated by Robert Hurley.
Allen Lane, 279 pp., £17.95, April 1988, 0 7139 9002 3
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... emancipatory framework, presupposing a dialectics of drives, repression and liberation. Sex was self-evidently a good thing, nature’s path to pleasure, individual fulfilment and biological fitness. But, such vulgar Freudian histories contended, Western civilisation – indeed, civilisation per se – had chosen to repress it. Why? To some extent, from ...

Heavenly Cities

Daniel Aaron, 10 October 1991

The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities 
by Richard Sennett.
Faber, 266 pp., £17.50, June 1991, 0 571 16192 8
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... an ‘enlarged forum for experience and exploration’ where the young could be enticed from their self-preoccupations by exposure to varieties of otherness, and in so doing effect their passage from adolescence to adulthood. The unzoned and permeable ‘survival community’ Sennett sketched in 1970 was intended to show how an ‘integration of ...

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