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The Eng. Lit. Patient

Jeremy Noel-Tod: Andrew Motion, 11 September 2003

The Invention of Dr Cake 
by Andrew Motion.
Faber, 142 pp., £12.99, February 2003, 0 571 21631 5
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Public Property 
by Andrew Motion.
Faber, 112 pp., £6.99, May 2003, 0 571 21859 8
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... John Keats John Keats John Please put your scarf on. The author of these lines is J.D. Salinger’s fictional child-poet, Seymour Glass, showing a precocious acquaintance with literary history for an eight-year-old: his source seems to be an 1821 review of Adonais, Shelley’s elegy on Keats, in the Literary Gazette ...

Powers of Darkness

Michael Taylor: Made by Free Hands, 21 October 2021

Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition 
by Bronwen Everill.
Harvard, 318 pp., £31.95, September 2020, 978 0 674 24098 8
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... freed.Free produce was not limited to colonial crops. As well as sugar, cotton and rice (both white and ‘red’), British merchants could acquire a range of new and exotic goods from African sellers. Palm oil and peanut oil were lubricants for industrial machinery and were also used in the production of soap and candles; camwood was a ...

He don’t mean any harm

John Bayley, 28 June 1990

A.A. Milne: His Life 
by Ann Thwaite.
Faber, 554 pp., £17.50, June 1990, 0 571 13888 8
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... Both seem to have had discreet affairs, he with an actress, she with the American playwright Elmer Rice, and to have come affectionately together again without fuss or damage. Ann Thwaite has already written a quite exceptionally discerning and scholarly biography of that cunning old Edwardian, Edmund Gosse, and this study of Milne has as much or even more ...

At Dulwich Picture Gallery

Alice Spawls: Ravilious, 27 August 2015

... one, where he met Edward Bawden. The two shared a love of neglected landscape watercolourists – John Sell Cotman, Alexander Cozens, Francis Towne and Samuel Palmer; they made a pilgrimage to Palmer’s Shoreham in 1926. Paul Nash, who taught them at the RCA, described their cohort as ‘an outbreak of talent’ and helped Ravilious and Bawden to find work ...

Accidents of Priority

John Redmond, 22 August 1996

Can You Hear, Bird 
by John Ashbery.
Carcanet, 128 pp., £9.95, February 1996, 9781857542240
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The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 
by Jorie Graham.
Carcanet, 220 pp., £12.95, March 1996, 1 85754 225 8
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Selected Poems 
by Barbara Guest.
Carcanet, 220 pp., £12.95, May 1996, 1 85754 158 8
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Selected Poems 1976-1996 
by George Szirtes.
Oxford, 126 pp., £9.99, March 1996, 0 19 283223 9
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Adam’s Dream 
by Peter McDonald.
Bloodaxe, 64 pp., £6.95, March 1996, 1 85224 333 3
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... Parmigianino on a half-globe of wood is the first impression which many people take away from John Ashbery’s poetry. The poem in which it appears, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, a meditation on Parmigianino’s strange Mannerist painting, suddenly made Ashbery’s name much less obscure than his work. The collection to which it lent its name ...

Nothing in a Really Big Way

James Wood: Adam Mars-Jones, 24 April 2008

Pilcrow 
by Adam Mars-Jones.
Faber, 525 pp., £18.99, April 2008, 978 0 571 21703 8
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... Mars-Jones slips in a quick reference to ‘One Arm’, when the narrator, a disabled boy called John Cromer, tells us that he and a schoolfriend ‘wept together over “One Arm” – Jimmy’s tears the more surprising since he knew the story so well’. Craftily, Mars-Jones doesn’t stop to reprise the tale, and the reference is so fleeting that one ...

Gobblebook

Rosemary Hill: Unhappy Ever After, 21 June 2018

In Byron’s Wake: The Turbulent Lives of Lord Byron’s Wife and Daughter 
by Miranda Seymour.
Simon and Schuster, 560 pp., £25, March 2018, 978 1 4711 3857 7
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Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist 
by Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin and Adrian Rice.
Bodleian, 128 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 1 85124 488 1
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... her relations with him would have a respectable front. Annabella wanted to reform him. His friend John Cam Hobhouse made strenuous efforts to stop the whole thing, while the Milbankes merely wanted their daughter settled. Thus the company assembled for the muted wedding ceremony at Seaham Hall on 2 January 1815 came with incompatible hopes and ...

Middle-Class Hair

Carolyn Steedman: A New World for Women, 19 October 2017

... here: the white lipstick! the headscarves! – too much like a hybrid of county lady and Mandy Rice-Davies (she did do Rice-Davies’s nails). But she was very taken by the library-steps photograph from the Sunday Times Colour Supplement, which I remember as if it were still before my eyes. In the kitchen, Streatham ...

How the War Will End

Karim Makdisi: Israel’s war on Lebanon, 3 August 2006

... France, China and Russia at least have made reassuring gestures. George Bush and Condoleezza Rice have backed Israel’s right to ‘self-defence’ and blamed Hizbullah’s very existence for the current violence. Meanwhile Tony Blair – in an ironic reversal of the Blair Doctrine, which calls for intervention for humanitarian reasons – has called ...

Bitov’s Secrets

Michael Glenny, 18 October 1984

... theory, however, is vulnerable to that deadly comment on all self-justifying testimony – Mandy Rice-Davies’s ‘He would, wouldn’t he?’ Bitov himself has been the most prolific source of conflicting versions of his disappearance in Venice, his appearance in London and his reappearance in Moscow, with each story altered to suit his listeners at the ...

Love the eater

Deborah Friedell: Lionel Shriver, 20 June 2013

Big Brother 
by Lionel Shriver.
HarperCollins, 373 pp., £16.99, May 2013, 978 0 00 727109 2
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... that we might all be trooping across a canvas by Fernando Botero.’ They’re in need of ‘Big John’ toilet seats, ‘800-pound-rated shower chairs, and “LuvSeats” for couples of size to have sex’. Pandora Halfdanarson, who wants to lose ‘at least 20 pounds’, is unable to recognise her brother, Edison, when she picks him up at the airport, so ...

Next Door to War

Tariq Ali: After Benazir, 17 July 2008

Descent into Chaos: How the War against Islamic Extremism Is Being Lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia 
by Ahmed Rashid.
Allen Lane, 484 pp., £25, July 2008, 978 0 7139 9843 6
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Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars within 
by Shuja Nawaz.
Oxford, 655 pp., £16.99, May 2008, 978 0 19 547660 6
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... treatment. In January, he wrote an open letter to Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, Condoleezza Rice and the president of the European Parliament. The letter, which remains unanswered, explained the real reasons for Musharraf’s actions: At the outset you may be wondering why I have used the words ‘claiming to be the head of state’. That is quite ...

Up the avenue

Peter Clarke, 11 June 1992

Election Rides 
by Edward Pearce.
Faber, 198 pp., £5.99, April 1992, 0 571 16657 1
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... the campaign, as a series of media events contrived to produce a predetermined image. Even when John Major defiantly got out his own soap box, it was an artifact, a television prop, a designer soap box. It was a surrender to show business, a triumph of trivia, a debasement of debate. Never in the history of electoral conflict had so little been said by so ...

Obama’s Delusion

David Bromwich: The Presidential Letdown, 22 October 2009

... It has become the party of wars and jails, and its moral physiognomy is captured by the faces of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, faces hard to match outside Cruikshank’s drawings of Dickens’s villains, hard as nails and mean as dirt and with an issue still up their sleeve when wars wind down and the jails are full: a sworn hostility towards immigrants ...

Draining the Whig bathwater

Conrad Russell, 10 June 1993

The Personal Rule of Charles I 
by Kevin Sharpe.
Yale, 983 pp., £40, November 1992, 0 300 05688 5
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... than remarks from others, and Dr Sharpe is too ready to rely on statements which deserve Mandy Rice-Davies’s famous reply. The question of how far Charles’s social policies were designed for the public good, and how far they were simply designed to make money is an interesting one. Yet it will not do to claim that patents of monopoly were concerned ...

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