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Hogged

E.S. Turner, 22 January 1998

Shipwrecks of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Eras 
by Terence Grocott.
Chatham, 430 pp., £30, November 1997, 1 86176 030 2
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... Chronicle, the Annual Register and two West Country newspapers, with an occasional glance at James Fenimore Cooper’s history of the US Navy. The craft involved range from men-of-war and merchantmen to schooners, jollyboats and even small pleasure-craft, the capsizing of which would not normally count as shipwrecks. The author is not concerned with the ...

In Praise of Barley Brew

E.S. Turner: Combustible Belloc, 20 February 2003

Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc 
by Joseph Pearce.
HarperCollins, 306 pp., £20, July 2002, 0 00 274095 8
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... Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Richelieu, Wolsey, Cranmer, Cromwell, Charles I and James II was now to be found lamenting ‘this horrible book on Louis XIV’, which he had never wanted to write, and mislaying the uncompleted manuscript of his life of Elizabeth Tudor. Throughout, his battle-cry was, as this book reminds us, that of Pius ...

Diary

Christopher Turner: The controversial Alfred Kinsey, 6 January 2005

... it. Both Kinsey and Reich were investigated by the FBI, itself, according to Kinsey’s biographer James Jones, ‘possibly the only American Institution more obsessed with sex than the Institute for Sex Research’. What does it say about our own times that a mainstream Hollywood movie about Kinsey – a man who died almost fifty years ago – can still be ...

The Thought of Ruislip

E.S. Turner: The Metropolitan Line, 2 December 2004

Metro-Land: British Empire Exhibition Number 
by Oliver Green.
Southbank, 144 pp., £16.99, July 2004, 1 904915 00 0
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... Alan Jackson’s London’s Metropolitan Railway (1986), the name Metroland was the inspiration of James Garland, a copywriter in the company’s publicity department, who was laid up with flu but leapt out of bed in high Archimedean excitement when the name entered his head. The public first heard of Metroland in 1915, when the railway used it in a penny ...

Beyond the Cringe

John Barrell: British Art, 2 June 2016

Art in Britain 1660-1815 
by David Solkin.
Yale, 367 pp., £55, October 2015, 978 0 300 21556 4
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... Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious work of scholarship. Why pedigree mattered to him is rarely clear, as by his own account it seems to have no particular influence on the ...

Great Palladium

James Epstein: Treason, 7 September 2000

Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793-96 
by John Barrell.
Oxford, 7377 pp., £70, March 2000, 0 19 811292 0
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... was adopted at the English treason trials and confirmed in the charge the Chief Justice Sir James Eyre made to the grand jury. The most celebrated response to Eyre’s statement was that of William Godwin, who, ironically, had recently condemned the process of legal reasoning based on precedent. Now he described the medieval statute of treason as ‘one ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: James Gillray, 21 June 2001

... are just straight portraits – and good ones.This skill with likeness is one thing revealed by James Gillray: The Art of Caricature, at Tate Britain until 2 September – the inclusion of formal portraits of his victims by other hands makes it possible to see exactly how he tweaked appearance. Another is his ability as an engraver. There are passages of ...

Charging about in Brogues

Jenny Turner: Sarah Waters, 23 February 2006

The Night Watch 
by Sarah Waters.
Virago, 472 pp., £16.99, February 2006, 1 84408 246 6
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... make them sound; Waters is not at all one of those writers setting out to profit from what Henry James called the ‘fatal cheapness’ of period fiction. Her work is always rich in feeling, and clever, and precise. That Waters has decided to move her historical interests on is courageous, but not surprising. The wonderful Fingersmith surely took the queer ...

As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes

Jenny Turner: On Feminism, 15 December 2011

... doesn’t say so, but this moment comes from a BBC film called People for Tomorrow, made by Selma James in 1971 and now available on open access on the BBC website. The film follows everyday women in Peckham, Belsize Park, Bristol, reflecting on what might change in their lives and how to go about making this happen, in a movement that is plain and ...

Ruskin among others

Raymond Williams, 20 June 1985

John Ruskin: The Early Years 
by Tim Hilton.
Yale, 301 pp., £12.95, May 1985, 0 300 03298 6
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... son of a wealthy sherry merchant, of the firm of Ruskin, Telford and Domecq. But the father, John James, had been working since the age of 16, as clerk and salesman, to get to this position: his marriage to his cousin delayed by his father’s debts, she 37 when she married and rising 39 when John was born. When we later see this son bought in as a ...

Arruginated

Colm Tóibín: James Joyce’s Errors, 7 September 2023

Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ 
by Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner.
Oxford, 1424 pp., £145, February 2022, 978 0 19 886458 5
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... On​ 2 November 1921, James Joyce wrote from Paris to his aunt Josephine in Dublin asking if it was ‘possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of No. 7 Eccles Street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 off the ground and drop unhurt ...

Haleking

John Bossy: Simon Forman, 22 February 2001

The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman 
by Barbara Howard Traister.
Chicago, 260 pp., £19, February 2001, 0 226 81140 9
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Dr Simon Forman: A Most Notorious Physician 
by Judith Cook.
Chatto, 228 pp., £18.99, January 2001, 0 7011 6899 4
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... of the Jacobean society beauty Frances Howard, who wanted to divorce her husband and marry James I’s favourite Robert Carr, and apparently procured the death by poison of Carr’s friend Sir Thomas Overbury, who was against the marriage. Howard had consulted Forman about the fulfilment of her passion, and her confidante Mrs Anne ...

Right-ons

Jenny Turner, 24 October 1991

Gaudi Afternoon 
by Barbara Wilson.
Virago, 172 pp., £4.99, August 1991, 1 85381 264 1
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The players come again 
by Amanda Cross.
Virago, 229 pp., £12.99, August 1991, 1 85381 306 0
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Poetic Justice 
by Amanda Cross.
Virago, 176 pp., £4.99, August 1991, 1 85381 025 8
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Birth Marks 
by Sarah Dunant.
Joseph, 230 pp., £13.99, April 1991, 0 7181 3511 3
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Burn Marks 
by Sara Paretsky.
Virago, 340 pp., £4.99, April 1991, 9781853812798
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Deep Sleep 
by Frances Fyfield.
Heinemann, 198 pp., £13.99, September 1991, 0 434 27426 7
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... showing that lesbians – i.e. Cassandra – can be as rampantly, glamorously promiscuous as any James Bond, without being insensitive to the feelings of the women they leave. And it’s a novel that affirms women, by showing that women – i.e. Cassandra – don’t have to be fey and nymphlike in order to get loved. And it’s a novel that affirms the ...

Look me in the eye

James Hall: Self-portraiture, 25 January 2001

The Artist's Body 
edited by Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones.
Phaidon, 304 pp., £39.95, July 2000, 0 7148 3502 1
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Five Hundred Self-Portraits 
edited by Julian Bell.
Phaidon, 528 pp., £19.95, November 2000, 0 7148 3959 0
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Renaissance Self-Portraiture 
by Joanna Woods-Marsden.
Yale, 285 pp., £45, October 1998, 0 300 07596 0
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... installations and performances constitute a lurid confessional – had been shortlisted for the Turner Prize. The postwar upsurge in self-portraiture is amply documented in Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones’s anthology of texts and images, The Artist’s Body. The serial stuff-strutters include the photo-artists Gilbert & George, Cindy Sherman and John ...

Private Nutshells

Janette Turner Hospital, 4 August 1994

Debatable Land 
by Candia McWilliam.
Bloomsbury, 216 pp., £15.99, June 1994, 0 7475 1708 8
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... which tilts at the sinister shadowside of the familiar and domestic, reads as though Henry James had updated The Turn of the Screw for the late 20th century. Now in Debatable Land she jousts on against her big windmills: the whys and wherefores of unsettled characters and their off-kilter perceptions and the slippage of their language. She writes, that ...

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