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Shapeshifter

Ian Penman: Elvis looks for meaning, 25 September 2014

Elvis Has Left the Building: The Day the King Died 
by Dylan Jones.
Duckworth, 307 pp., £16.99, July 2014, 978 0 7156 4856 8
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Elvis Presley: A Southern Life 
by Joel Williamson.
Oxford, 384 pp., £25, November 2014, 978 0 19 986317 4
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... rockabilly dudes like Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins. He found an obvious joy in the staged act of seduction: the body does brazen, while the face remains convincingly bashful. Pamela Clarke Keogh’s Elvis: The Man. The Life. The Legend (2004) is mostly what you’d expect from an official biography (‘written with the assistance of ...

Like a Manta Ray

Jenny Turner: The Entire History of Sex, 22 October 2015

The Argonauts 
by Maggie Nelson.
Graywolf, 143 pp., £23, May 2015, 978 1 55597 707 8
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... more than mark that wildness’s grave. Being by trade a poet of plain language – William Carlos Williams would be another hero, also George Oppen, also Eileen Myles – Nelson finds her artistic focus drawn in two main directions. On the one hand, she crafts her words until she gets them to ‘facet’ as accurately as she can: ‘How to explain that for ...

The Reaction Economy

William Davies, 2 March 2023

... of the most famous examples – the video has had ten million views – twin brothers Tim and Fred Williams listen to Phil Collins’s ‘In the Air Tonight’ for the first time and express their astonishment and delight when the drum break hits four minutes in. The most successful reaction video-makers have a likeable, innocent air; they listen in a spirit ...

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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... the popularity of two actresses (let alone in a ‘loud voice’) is to invite disaster, but the joy of the story is that even 60 years afterwards Gielgud doesn’t seem to realise that his aunt wasn’t just being witty but that he had put his foot in it. There were still giants to be glimpsed in the streets of Edwardian London. He saw Sir Squire Bancroft ...

There is no more Vendée

Gavin Jacobson: The Terror, 16 March 2017

The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution 
by Timothy Tackett.
Harvard, 463 pp., £25, February 2015, 978 0 674 73655 9
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... Helen Maria Williams​ travelled to France in July 1790 to take part in the Fête de la Fédération that marked the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. She described the pageantry at the Champ de Mars as the ‘triumph of humankind; it was man asserting the noblest privilege of his nature; and it required but the common feelings of humanity, to become in that moment a citizen of the world ...

I sizzle to see you

John Lahr: Cole Porter’s secret songs, 21 November 2019

The Letters of Cole Porter 
edited by Cliff Eisen and Dominic McHugh.
Yale, 672 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 0 300 21927 2
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... in lights’); the Gershwin songs turned Manhattan into a playground, ‘an isle of joy’. At a stroke, a new urban rhythm pointed the musical in a streamlined contemporary direction. ‘We are living in an age of staccato, not legato. This we must accept,’ George Gershwin said at the time. The 1920s boom brought with it a new sense of ...

Breeding

Frank Kermode, 21 July 1994

The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner 
edited by Claire Harman.
Chatto, 384 pp., £25, June 1994, 0 7011 3659 6
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Sylvia and David: The Townsend Warner/Garnett Letters 
Sinclair-Stevenson, 246 pp., £20, June 1994, 1 85619 341 1Show More
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... some of her poems, and in the days of their widowhood grew close to Peter Pears. She knew Vaughan Williams (detecting a physical resemblance to T.F. Powys, also to Arthur Machen) and records a significant conversation she had with him while his wife and Gerald Finzi’s were buying things in Valentine Ackland’s antique shop. He asked her why she had given ...

Carousel

Michael Hofmann: Zagajewski’s Charm, 15 December 2005

Selected Poems 
by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh, Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry and C.K. Williams.
Faber, 173 pp., £12.99, October 2004, 0 571 22425 3
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A Defence of Ardour: Essays 
by Adam Zagajewski.
Farrar, Straus, 198 pp., $14, October 2005, 0 374 52988 4
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... it’. The writing is still fresh, but a little weary in its familiar celebratoriness: ‘Joy is close’; ‘the ocean’s skin, on which/ships etch the lines of shining poems’; ‘should such a splendid upright shape, a king,/be made a horizontal form, a line of print?’ In 163 poems, there are 30 references to ‘poetry’ or ‘poems’, which ...

Fans and Un-Fans

Ferdinand Mount, 22 February 2024

More Than a Game: A History of How Sport Made Britain 
by David Horspool.
John Murray, 336 pp., £25, November 2023, 978 1 5293 6327 2
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... Gold Cup and the Grand National in the space of two years. By then, women trainers such as Venetia Williams and Henrietta Knight were as successful as the men; Jenny Pitman had two Gold Cup winners and two Grand National winners. In the early days, a woman had to train with her husband’s name on the licence, although there are records of widows being granted ...

Wielded by a Wizard

Seamus Perry: Shelley’s Kind of Glee, 3 January 2019

Selected Poems and Prose 
by Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy.
Penguin, 893 pp., £12.99, January 2017, 978 0 241 25306 9
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... plausibly recalled than the conger eel story is the fine remark made by Shelley’s friend Jane Williams when Trelawny first encountered him. No sooner had they met than Shelley disappeared, and a puzzled Trelawny asked where on earth he had gone. ‘Mrs Williams said: “Who? Shelley? Oh, he comes and goes like a ...

Where’s the barbed wire?

John Lahr: August Wilson's Transformation, 9 May 2024

August Wilson: A Life 
by Patti Hartigan.
Simon and Schuster, 531 pp., £30, August 2023, 978 1 5011 8066 8
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... and necktie, pipe in his mouth. The posture was both a mask and an admission: he was lost. Chawley Williams, a drug dealer turned poet who befriended Wilson early on and to whom Wilson dedicated King Hedley II, said: ‘August wasn’t really Black. He was too dark to be white, and he was too white to be dark. He was in no man’s land.’In 1965, rummaging ...

Making a Mouth in a Contemptuous Manner

John Gallagher: Civility Held Sway, 4 July 2019

In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilisation in Early Modern England 
by Keith Thomas.
Yale, 457 pp., £25, June 2018, 978 0 300 23577 7
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... sexes and conditions’. Some argued that Native Americans had their own codes of civility: Roger Williams wrote that the Algonquian people with whom he had lived were ‘of two sorts (as the English are)’, some ‘rude and clownish’, but most having ‘a savour of civility and courtesy … both amongst themselves and towards strangers’. Having learned ...

Nothing for Ever and Ever

Frank Kermode: Housman’s Pleasures, 5 July 2007

The Letters of A.E. Housman 
edited by Archie Burnett.
Oxford, 1228 pp., £180, March 2007, 978 0 19 818496 6
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... alone. Chorus: I thought I heard a sound within the house Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy. Eri: He splits my skull, not in a friendly way, Once more; he purposes to kill me dead. Cho: I would not be reputed rash, but yet I doubt if all be gay within the house. Eri: O! O! Another stroke! That makes the third. He stabs me to the heart against ...

Pepys’s Place

Pat Rogers, 16 June 1983

The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol X: Companion and Vol XI: Index 
edited by Robert Latham.
Bell and Hyman, 626 pp., £19.50, February 1983, 0 7135 1993 2
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The Diary of John Evelyn 
edited by John Bowle.
Oxford, 476 pp., £19.50, April 1983, 0 19 251011 8
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The Brave Courtier: Sir William Temple 
by Richard Faber.
Faber, 187 pp., £15, February 1983, 0 571 11982 4
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... first, the version by Bright in Wheatley’s edition: 5th. I with my Lord Bruncker and Mrs Williams by coach with four horses to London, to my Lord’s house in Covent-Guarden. But, Lord! what staring to see a nobleman’s coach come to town. And porters every where bow to us; and such begging of beggars! And a delightfull thing it is to see the towne ...

What a Mother

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Marianne Moore and Her Mother, 3 December 2015

Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore 
by Linda Leavell.
Farrar, Straus, 455 pp., $18, September 2014, 978 0 374 53494 3
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... an artist’, she replied: ‘Endless curiosity, observation, research – and a great amount of joy in the thing.’In place of a diary she kept a notebook – ‘I salvage anything promising and set it down in a small notebook.’ She didn’t use it to write about her feelings or about herself. She was interested in the fate of her poems, not in the mood ...

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