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Blighted Plain

Jonathan Meades: Wiltshire’s Multitudes, 6 January 2022

The Buildings of England: Wiltshire 
by Julian Orbach, Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 828 pp., £45, June 2021, 978 0 300 25120 3
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... next to the power of the great estates that the rivers flow through – Wilton House and Longford Castle. Sixty years ago deference was assumed. The earls of Radnor and Pembroke did not get where they are by ceding their land for the common good. This holds true today, as too do the last rites of deference: London is ninety miles and many decades distant. The ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... popular success she had ever enjoyed. This tickled Sontag, hitherto not known for being ticklish. Terry Castle, author of the comedy classic ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ (LRB, 17 March 2005), described Sontag’s response when a waiter said to her: ‘“I know you’re famous but I don’t know who you are.” “Well, I am Susan Sontag. I’m a ...

Serried Yuppiedromes

Owen Hatherley: What happened to London?, 21 August 2014

Guide to the Architecture of London 
by Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward.
Phoenix, 511 pp., £16.99, July 2013, 978 1 78022 493 0
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... fallible’ (a very Jones and Woodward turn of phrase), had some kind words for Quinlan Terry (of his neo-neo-Palladian St Mary’s Church Hall in Paddington, they note that it is ‘eminently sane and practical’) and even gave admiring accounts of some works by Terry Farrell, such as the immense superstructure ...

I’ll be back

Marjorie Garber: Sequels, 19 August 1999

Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel 
edited by Paul Budra and Betty Schellenberg.
Toronto, 217 pp., £40, February 1999, 0 8020 0915 8
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... appears to have been a brief passage embedded in the middle of Masquerade and Civilisation, Terry Castle’s ground-breaking book on the carnivalesque in 18th-century fiction, published in 1986. No fewer than five times in Part Two the contributors lash out at Castle’s intelligent observation that ‘sequels ...

Shopping in Lucerne

E.S. Turner, 9 June 1994

Addicted to Romance: The Life and Adventures of Elinor Glyn 
by Joan Hardwick.
Deutsch, 306 pp., £20, June 1994, 0 233 98866 1
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Mother of Oscar: The Life of Jane Francesca Wilde 
by Joy Melville.
Murray, 308 pp., £19.99, June 1994, 0 7195 5102 1
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... muskets glittering brightly in the light of heaven’ – muskets to surround the ‘doomed Castle’ where the infamous English tyrant had sat for seven hundred years; and much more. The English tyrant shut down the Nation but spared the leader-writer because she was one of the Ascendancy (and how could a silly young woman commit treason?). Erin failed ...

Post-Humanism

Alex Zwerdling, 15 October 1987

The Failure of Theory: Essays on Criticism and Contemporary Theory 
by Patrick Parrinder.
Harvester, 225 pp., £28.50, April 1987, 0 7108 1129 2
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... to keep up. For Parrinder, the typical case is that of the ‘fleet-footed pamphleteer’ Terry Eagleton, the impact of whose work ‘has been due to the adventurism of a critic swiftly assimilating, and memorably responding to, wave after wave of neo-Marxist theory. As major ...

What’s wrong with that man?

Christian Lorentzen: Donald Antrim, 20 November 2014

The Emerald Light in the Air: Stories 
by Donald Antrim.
Granta, 158 pp., £12.99, November 2014, 978 1 84708 649 5
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... Be careful not to go too far because the Waverley novels will return you, inevitably, to The Castle of Perseverance, and you’ll never get out. It’s better to remain in the 19th century if you can get there. As you know, we’ve had shelving problems, so don’t panic if you see Russians mixed in with the triple deckers. Put your head down and charge ...

Into Thin Air

Marina Warner: Science at the Séances, 3 October 2002

The Invention of Telepathy 
by Roger Luckhurst.
Oxford, 334 pp., £35, June 2002, 0 19 924962 8
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... her activities and died only in 1956.2 In this lucid and richly layered study, Luckhurst echoes Terry Castle’s ‘the invention of the uncanny’ (from The Female Thermometer), to tell the story of telepathy. Castle described the internalisation of spectres, hauntings, terrors and the rise of the phantasmal at the ...

In Hyperspace

Fredric Jameson, 10 September 2015

Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative 
by David Wittenberg.
Fordham, 288 pp., £18.99, March 2013, 978 0 8232 4997 8
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... histories have gained popularity and a certain respectability; my personal favourite is Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain, in which John Brown’s raid succeeds and a black socialist republic emerges in the South, as prosperous and superior in relation to its shrunken rust-belt northern neighbour as West Germany was to the East in the old ...

It’s the plunge that counts

Heathcote Williams: Waterlog by Roger Deakin, 19 August 1999

Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain 
by Roger Deakin.
Chatto, 320 pp., £15.99, May 1999, 0 7011 6652 5
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... eighties and look sixty. They all put it down to the cold water.’ The supervisors at the pond, Terry and Les, swear to Deakin that ‘it’s the plunge that counts.’ The supposed anaphrodisiac effect of cold water is a myth: a NASA research programme, conducted at the University of Miami School of Medicine, apparently showed that cold water was ...

Worse than Pagans

Tom Shippey: The Church v. the Fairies, 1 December 2016

Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church 
by Richard Firth Green.
Pennsylvania, 285 pp., £36, August 2016, 978 0 8122 4843 2
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... lady’. But they are dangerous too. Elves are ‘cruel for fun’, Granny Weatherwax says in Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies (1992) – another hardline view, denied by some (Tolkien), maintained by others (Keats). They were thought to be wise, even prescient, which explains names like Ælf-red, ‘Elf-counsel’. The idea that if you go into ...

Communism’s Man of Letters

J.P. Stern, 26 September 1991

Georg Lukács: Life, Thought and Politics 
by Arpad Kadarkay.
Blackwell, 538 pp., £45, June 1991, 1 55786 114 5
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... prevent him from comparing his subject to Socrates and Christ, Montaigne, Goethe and Eliot, while Terry Eagleton claims that this ‘magisterial study’ will restore Lukács to his ‘true political status’. The years of Lukács’s exile in Vienna – 1920-29 – were penurious but not intolerable. Although he and his fellow exiles had undertaken to ...

Narco Polo

Iain Sinclair, 23 January 1997

Mr Nice: An Autobiography 
by Howard Marks.
Secker, 466 pp., £16.99, September 1996, 0 436 20305 7
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Pulp Election: The Booker Prize Fix 
by Carmen St Keeldare.
Bluedove, 225 pp., £12.99, September 1996, 0 9528298 0 0
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... corridor between the Lambeth and Vauxhall Bridges. Sitting in the circular temple outside Terry Farrell’s MI6 fortress to roll a monster joint. Prison flashbacks were still raw. He’d developed a phobia about water. Surveillance cameras watched the scene with stoic indifference. Not a human presence on any of those decks and walkways, dark ...

Enemies For Ever

James Wolcott: ‘Making It’, 18 May 2017

Making It 
by Norman Podhoretz.
NYRB, 368 pp., £13.98, May 2017, 978 1 68137 080 4
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... Classics has revived Podhoretz’s battle-scarred memoir with an innocuous new introduction by Terry Teachout, Commentary’s critic at large, who isn’t about to jeopardise his post by saying anything too jazzy or impolitic here. Given the long history of gangland strife between Commentary and the New York Review of Books, it’s gracious of its reprint ...

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