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... gathered outside.) The poem is Hood’s ‘Ode to The Great Unknown’, addressed to Sir Walter Scott. Why, Hood wonders, is Scott never to be seen, though his works are so widely read (‘Parent of many children – child of none!’)? At the end of nine intricately rhymed pages, Hood lightheartedly concludes that there ...

On Not Getting the Credit

Brian Dillon: Eileen Gray, 23 May 2013

Eileen Gray 
Pompidou Centre, 20 February 2013 to 20 May 2013Show More
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... painting. For the first half of her long life, Gray knew everybody. At the Slade she met Wyndham Lewis, and soon made friends with the potter Bernard Leach, the explorer Henry Savage Landor and the sculptor Kathleen Bruce, later the wife of Captain Scott. Bruce found Eileen ‘loveable, though rather remote’, and noted ...

Ten Poets

Denis Donoghue, 7 November 1985

Selected Poems 
by Donald Davie.
Carcanet, 124 pp., £2.95, April 1985, 9780856355950
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Collected Poems: 1947-1980 
by Allen Ginsberg.
Viking, 837 pp., £16.95, April 1985, 0 670 80683 8
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Instant Chronicles: A Life 
by D.J. Enright.
Oxford, 58 pp., £4.50, April 1985, 9780019211970
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Selected Poems 
by Edwin Morgan.
Carcanet, 139 pp., £2.95, April 1985, 0 85635 596 8
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Selected Poems 
by Jeffrey Wainwright.
Carcanet, 79 pp., £2.95, April 1985, 0 85635 598 4
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Selected Poems 
by Gillian Clarke.
Carcanet, 112 pp., £2.95, April 1985, 0 85635 594 1
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The Price of Stone 
by Richard Murphy.
Faber, 92 pp., £4, May 1985, 0 571 13568 4
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Selected Poems 
by Iain Crichton Smith.
Carcanet, 121 pp., £2.95, April 1985, 0 85635 597 6
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Selected Poems 
by Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Carcanet, 95 pp., £2.95, April 1985, 0 85635 585 2
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From the Irish 
by James Simmons.
Blackstaff, 78 pp., £3.95, May 1985, 0 85640 331 8
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... are poems about Lenin, Aberdeen, Freud, Miss Brodie’s Edinburgh, King Lear, Hamlet, Gaelic, Scott, Keats, Australia, deer, a dead sheep – indeed, such variety of interest that you wonder what principle brings them together. In the poem about Lenin, Smith praises        the moving on into the endlessly various, real, human, world which is no ...

Zero Grazing

John Ryle, 5 November 1992

To Blight with Plague: Studies in a Literary Theme 
by Barbara Fass Leavy.
New York, 237 pp., £27.95, August 1992, 0 8147 5059 1
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Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence 
edited by Terence Ranger and Paul Slack.
Cambridge, 346 pp., £35, April 1992, 9780521402767
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The Fourth Horseman: A Short History of Epidemics, Plagues and Other Scourges 
by Andrew Nikiforuk.
Fourth Estate, 200 pp., £14.99, April 1992, 1 85702 051 0
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In Time of Plague: The History and Social Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Disease 
edited by Arien Mack.
New York, 272 pp., $35, November 1991, 0 8147 5467 8
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Miasmas and Disease: Public Health and the Environment in the Pre-Industrial Age 
by Carlo Cipolla, translated by Elizabeth Potter.
Yale, 101 pp., £16.95, March 1992, 0 300 04806 8
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International Journal of STD and Aids. Vol. II, Supplement I: Aids and the Epidemics of History 
edited by Harry Rolin, Richard Creese and Ronald Mann.
Royal Society of Medicine, January 2000, 0 00 956462 4
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Monopolies of Loss 
by Adam Mars-Jones.
Faber, 250 pp., £5.99, September 1992, 0 571 16691 1
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Aids in Africa: Its Present and Future Impact 
edited by Tony Barrett and Piers Blaikie.
Belhaven, 193 pp., £35, January 1992, 1 85293 115 9
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... open to infections that were thought, in industrialised countries, to be things of the past. As Lewis Thomas points out in his contribution to In Time of Plague, it gives us a glimpse of how most people in the world have always died: painfully, usually at an early age. And Aids, in another sense, returns us to the condition of our more recent forebears: it ...

MacDiarmid and his Maker

Robert Crawford, 10 November 1988

MacDiarmid 
by Alan Bold.
Murray, 482 pp., £17.95, September 1988, 0 7195 4585 4
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A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle 
by Hugh MacDiarmid, edited by Kenneth Buthlay.
Scottish Academic Press, 203 pp., £12.50, February 1988, 0 7073 0425 3
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The Hugh MacDiarmid-George Ogilvie Letters 
edited by Catherine Kerrigan.
Aberdeen University Press, 156 pp., £24.90, August 1988, 0 08 036409 8
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Hugh MacDiarmid and the Russian 
by Peter McCarey.
Scottish Academic Press, 225 pp., £12.50, March 1988, 0 7073 0526 8
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... of nurture for the developing poet. Particularly acute is his demonstration of the importance of Lewis Spence to MacDiarmid. Bold argues convincingly that it was Spence’s attitude to nationalism and to the Scots language that encouraged Grieve to reverse his earlier condemnation of the attempt to write in that medium, and so stimulated the first Scots ...

Out of the blue

Mark Ford, 10 December 1987

Meeting the British 
by Paul Muldoon.
Faber, 53 pp., £9.95, May 1987, 0 571 14858 1
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Partingtime Hall 
by James Fenton and John Fuller.
Salamander, 69 pp., £7.50, April 1987, 0 948681 05 5
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Private Parts 
by Fiona Pitt-Kethley.
Chatto, 72 pp., £4.95, June 1987, 9780701132064
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Bright River Yonder 
by John Hartley Williams.
Bloodaxe, 87 pp., £4.95, April 1987, 1 85224 028 8
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... Gerard de Nerval, Terence Malick, lots of Yeats, lots and lots of Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’, Scott Fitzgerald, Delmore Schwartz, Marilyn Monroe, Un Chien Andalou, Hart Crane, Ben Hur... An index to proper names in the book would be several pages long. This all-pervasive cosmopolitan glamorousness, often treated ironically, is most vivid in ‘7, Middagh ...

Mganga with the Lion

Kenneth Silverman: Hemingway, 2 September 1999

Hemingway: The Thirties 
by Michael Reynolds.
Norton, 360 pp., £9.95, October 1998, 0 393 31778 1
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Hemingway: The Final Years 
by Michael Reynolds.
Norton, 416 pp., £19.95, July 1999, 0 393 04748 2
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True at First Light 
by Ernest Hemingway.
Heinemann, 319 pp., £16.99, July 1999, 9780434008322
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... sarcasm and rage that alienated virtually all his friends. He picked on the ever-insultable Scott Fitzgerald, taunted Archibald MacLeish for not having a ‘big enough prick’, razzed Gertrude Stein as the ‘lesbian with the old menopause’. Things only got worse after 1936, when sour reviews of Green Hills of Africa left him more than usually ...

The Bloody Sixth

Joshua Brown: The Real Gangs of New York, 23 January 2003

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld 
by Herbert Asbury.
Arrow, 366 pp., £6.99, January 2003, 0 09 943674 4
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Gangs of New York 
directed by Martin Scorsese.
December 2002
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... of the viciously racist leader of the Native Americans, Bill ‘the Butcher’ Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis). With the triumph of the nativist gang (adorned and equipped, like their adversaries, in Braveheart meets Mad Max style), the Rabbits are outlawed and Priest’s young son, Amsterdam Vallon (soon to be Leonardo DiCaprio), is bundled off to a ...

There are some limits Marlowes just won’t cross

Christopher Tayler: Banville’s Marlowe, 3 April 2014

The Black-Eyed Blonde 
by Benjamin Black.
Mantle, 320 pp., £16.99, February 2014, 978 1 4472 3668 9
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... In addition to Shakespeare and Eliot, a.k.a. ‘the poet’, the novel glances at Melville, Scott Fitzgerald, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Lewis Carroll, Wilde (twice) and Peter Pan: ‘You know – by J.M. Barrie?’ At least when Pascal’s wager comes up for the first time, Marlowe says: ‘Who’s Pascal?’ Yet ...

Sister-Sister

Terry Castle, 3 August 1995

Jane Austen’s Letters 
edited by Deirde Le Faye.
Oxford, 621 pp., £30, March 1995, 0 19 811764 7
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... are descending & I resume my interesting Narrative’) and the twee Caledonian jests of Sir Walter Scott (‘I do not write for such dull elves!’). Elsewhere she announces: ‘I am going to write nothing but short Sentences.’ The result – rather more uncannily – is like proto-Gertrude Stein: There shall be two full stops in every Line. Layton and ...

The World Took Sides

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Martin Luther, 11 August 2016

Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Centre of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe – and Started the Protestant Reformation 
by Andrew Pettegree.
Penguin, 383 pp., £21.99, October 2015, 978 1 59420 496 8
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Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet 
by Lyndal Roper.
Bodley Head, 577 pp., £30, June 2016, 978 1 84792 004 1
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Martin Luther: Visionary Reformer 
by Scott H. Hendrix.
Yale, 341 pp., £25, October 2015, 978 0 300 16669 9
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... still worth having a go at Luther life-writing, and these three biographers all know their Luther. Scott Hendrix is a veteran insider historian from the American Protestant tradition, with the worthy aim of tackling some of the complacent myths all families build up about their founding fathers. His detail can be shaky when he refers to noises off, like the ...

The Tarnished Age

Richard Mayne, 3 September 1981

David O. Selznick’s Hollywood 
by Ronald Haver.
Secker, 425 pp., £35, December 1980, 0 436 19128 8
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My Early life 
by Ronald Reagan and Richard Hubler.
Sidgwick, 316 pp., £7.95, April 1981, 0 283 98771 5
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Naming Names 
by Victor Navasky.
Viking, 482 pp., $15.95, October 1980, 0 670 50393 2
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... ruthlessness, sentimentality and greed. David Selznick came of age in that world. His father, Lewis Selznick, was an early, unsuccessful mogul. In a line not quoted here, he allegedly told his sons: ‘Live expensively! Throw it around! Give it away! Always remember to live beyond your means. It gives a man confidence.’ But if father was a joker, he was ...

My Books

Ian Patterson, 4 July 2019

... out of eight quarto volumes of steel engravings), the works of Homer, Milton, Sir Walter Scott, and so on and on and on. Not exactly a treasure trove, but getting so many books at once, with so few titles I would have chosen, moved me suddenly much closer to possession of my fantasy library. Some of the books were hard going – I never got on with ...

Reasons for Liking Tolkien

Jenny Turner: The Hobbit Habit, 15 November 2001

... my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it with contempt. ‘Hypertrophic . . . A ...

Puellilia

Pat Rogers, 7 August 1986

Mothers of the Novel: One Hundred Good Women Writers before Jane Austen 
by Dale Spender.
Pandora, 357 pp., £12.95, May 1986, 0 86358 081 5
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Scribbling Sisters 
by Dale Spender and Lynne Spender.
Camden Press, 188 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 948491 00 0
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A Woman of No Character: An Autobiography of Mrs Manley 
by Fidelis Morgan.
Faber, 176 pp., £9.95, June 1986, 0 571 13934 5
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Cecilia 
by Fanny Burney.
Virago, 919 pp., £6.95, May 1986, 0 86068 775 9
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Millenium Hall 
by Sarah Scott.
Virago, 207 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 86068 780 5
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Marriage 
by Susan Ferrier.
Virago, 513 pp., £4.50, February 1986, 0 86068 765 1
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Belinda 
by Maria Edgeworth.
Pandora, 434 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 86358 074 2
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Self-Control 
by Mary Brunton.
Pandora, 437 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 9780863580840
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The Female Quixote: The Adventures of Arabella 
by Charlotte Lennox.
Pandora, 423 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 86358 080 7
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... Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel ...

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