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Vendlerising

John Kerrigan, 2 April 1987

The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry 
edited by Helen Vendler.
Faber, 440 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 571 13945 0
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Selected Poems 
by John Ashbery.
Carcanet, 348 pp., £16.95, April 1986, 0 85635 666 2
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The Poetry Book Society Anthology 1986/87 
edited by Jonathan Barker.
Hutchinson, 94 pp., £4.95, November 1986, 0 09 165961 2
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Two Horse Wagon Going By 
by Christopher Middleton.
Carcanet, 143 pp., £5.95, October 1986, 0 85635 661 1
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... Slack work from the Notebook years is no substitute for ‘The Quaker Graveyard’ and ‘Mr Edwards and the Spider’. To omit early Lowell constitutes censorship, not choice. Several kinds of density lie outside Vendler’s range, including that tortuous grappling with impacted matter which tends not to write itself in light. Her taste for grotesquerie ...

The Cookson Story

Stefan Collini: The British Working Class, 13 December 2001

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes 
by Jonathan Rose.
Yale, 534 pp., £29.95, June 2001, 0 300 08886 8
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... to them in Shakespeare or Milton or Macaulay than by reading approved ‘left-wing’ authors. Robert Blatchford’s socialist newspaper, the Clarion, was truer to working-class experience than Fabian pamphlets: Blatchford realised, as Rose puts it, that the Labour Party’s ‘doctrinal texts were nothing less than the whole canon of classic ...

Let him be Caesar!

Michael Dobson: The Astor Place Riot, 2 August 2007

The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama and Death in 19th-Century America 
by Nigel Cliff.
Random House, 312 pp., $26.95, April 2007, 978 0 345 48694 3
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... included Spartacus, depicted as a virtuous rebel against some very British-looking patricians in Robert Montgomery Bird’s melodrama The Gladiator (1831), and the anti-aristocratic hero of Robert Conrad’s Jack Cade (1835), a martyr who dies with the words: ‘The bondman is avenged, my country free!’ Perhaps ...

People shouldn’t be fat

Zachary Leader, 3 October 1996

Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu 
by Simon Callow.
Cape, 640 pp., £20, March 1995, 0 224 03852 4
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Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles 
by David Thomson.
Little, Brown, 460 pp., £20, September 1996, 0 316 91437 1
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... Quentin Crisp’. The homosexual directors of the Gate Theatre, Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, were clearly smitten, though as Callow fairly notes, ‘the sexual undercurrent’ in MacLiammóir’s account of Welles’s physical impact (‘small white teeth, a buckling up of the eyes into two oblique slits, a perplexed knitting of the sparse ...

His Own Prophet

Michael Hofmann: Read Robert Lowell!, 11 September 2003

Collected Poems 
by Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter.
Faber, 1186 pp., £40, July 2003, 0 571 16340 8
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... It was reading Robert Lowell that brought me to poetry at the age of 19, in 1976. I had borrowed a friend’s omnibus edition of Life Studies and For the Union Dead, and something in me said: ‘This is it!’ I don’t remember the poem I first had that response to, but most likely it was in Part IV of Life Studies, ‘Dunbarton’ or ‘For Sale’, or perhaps ‘Waking in the Blue ...

The Most Beautiful Icicle

Inigo Thomas: Apollo 11, 15 August 2019

Reaching for the Moon: A Short History of the Space Race 
by Roger D. Launius.
Yale, 256 pp., £20, July 2019, 978 0 300 23046 8
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The Moon: A History for the Future 
by Oliver Morton.
Economist Books, 334 pp., £20, May 2019, 978 1 78816 254 8
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... in chimp mode right now,’ Schirra said as he orbited Earth. He was taunting those test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base in California who had passed over the opportunity of space flight on the grounds that it didn’t require enough skill to be interesting, or viewed astronauts as ‘spam in a can’, or thought space journeys were only for ...

Miracle on Fleet Street

Martin Hickman: Operation Elveden, 7 January 2016

... Harry in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. He had several contacts at Broadmoor, including an orderly, Robert Neave (‘Tipster Bob’), whom he paid £9000 to supply him with news about the Yorkshire Ripper and other killers. The investigation had found an email suggesting that Pyatt paid a Thames Valley police officer – never traced – £1500 for a tale about ...

The poet steamed

Iain Sinclair: Tom Raworth, 19 August 2004

Collected Poems 
by Tom Raworth.
Carcanet, 576 pp., £16.95, February 2003, 1 85754 624 5
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Removed for Further Study: The Poetry of Tom Raworth 
edited by Nate Dorward.
The Gig, 288 pp., £15, March 2003, 0 9685294 3 7
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... experiment (Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, John Rodker) was discounted, along with the social realists (Robert Westerby, James Curtis, Alexander Baron), who remain trapped in a ghetto of unfashionable leftist politics and unfashionable locations. The locations – Whitechapel, Notting Hill – have recovered, but the politics have evaporated like a puddle on hot ...
... Houses of Parliament.) Sentenced to life imprisonment, he would eventually become what Ruth Dudley Edwards described as ‘the spider at the centre of the conspiratorial web’ that would lead to the 1916 Rebellion in Dublin more than thirty years later. He was, in her words, ‘able, vengeful, focused, selfless and implacable’.Clarke’s time in prison ...

My Darlings

Colm Tóibín: Drinking with Samuel Beckett, 5 April 2007

... I bought from him more than ten years ago, maybe fifteen years ago, which I first saw with Robert Armstrong in late December 1980 in his studio in Gorey, Co. Wexford, rests against the wall of the room where I work. We are uneasy with each other now. The talk turns to Christmas and he mentions the sadness of Gorey and that extraordinary space he made ...

Field of Bones

Charles Nicholl: The last journey of Thomas Coryate, the English fakir and legstretcher, 2 September 1999

... travellers carried it with them as a vade mecum or guidebook. Coryate met the adventurer Sir Robert Shirley in the hinterlands of Persia, and was chuffed when he took ‘both my bookes neatly kept’ from his luggage. In the autumn of 1612 Coryate left England, for what would prove to be the last time, en route for the East. Sometime before leaving he ...

The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... town hall, was another blind-windowed institution, more atrophied benevolence, the former Passmore Edwards Library. In front of the library was parked a black box, like an upended budget coffin made from off-cuts of Olympic fence plywood. It came with a spray-on slogan: attlee wuz ere. And it contained the memorial statue of the former mayor of Stepney, Member ...

What We’re about to Receive

Jeremy Harding: Food Insecurity, 13 May 2010

... September 2006, 978 0 09 950402 3Food Futures: Rethinking UK Strategy by Susan Ambler-Edwards, Kate Bailey, Alexandra Kiff, Tim Lang, Robert Lee, Terry Marsden, David Simons and Hardin Tibbs.Chatham House, 50 pp., February 2009http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/publications/papers/view/-/id/695/Rising Food ...

Bitchy Little Spinster

Joanne O’Leary: Queens of Amherst, 3 June 2021

After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet 
by Julie Dobrow.
Norton, 448 pp., £13.99, January 2020, 978 0 393 35749 3
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... had reservations when the couple got engaged in 1878: he had no notable ancestors, save Jonathan Edwards (who was only a distant relation); his means were modest and there was a family history of mental illness. Mabel, however, found it in herself to overlook all this. Her first requirement in a husband was sympathy to her ambitions. ‘No man can make a ...

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