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On Spanking

Christopher Hitchens, 20 October 1994

AGuide to the Correction of Young Gentlemen or, The Successful Administration of Physical Discipline to Males, by Females 
by a Lady, with illustrations by a Former Pupil.
Delectus, 140 pp., £19.95, August 1994, 1 897767 05 6
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... the care of the young of administering corporal correction and providing them with a media for the frank expression of opinion.Corpun’s ‘unique literary service’ actually consisted of pamphlets, often with introductions by eager clergymen, entitled Girl’s Beating: Punishment Postures, which landed him in court, despite his claim to be upholding ...

Second Wind

C.K. Stead, 16 February 1989

Continuum: New and Later Poems 1972-1988 
by Allen Curnow.
Auckland, 227 pp., £16.50, February 1989, 1 86940 025 9
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... A Book of New Zealand Verse, there had been only poets who were New Zealanders. In a similar way Frank Sargeson (1903-82) gathered around him a group of determined cohorts who made a distinct New Zealand fiction. There is an un-measurable calculus between what the history of a region requires and the talents of the writers who are called upon to supply ...

Uplifting Lust

E.S. Turner: Mills and Boon, 6 January 2000

Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills and Boon 
by Joseph McAleer.
Oxford, 322 pp., £25, November 1999, 0 19 820455 8
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The Romantic Fiction of Mills and Boon 1909-1995 
by Jay Dixon.
UCL, 218 pp., £11.99, November 1998, 1 85728 267 1
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... two halves, one a history of the firm (with instructive, if unsightly, bar-charts) and the other a close analysis of the editorial formula. This method, as he admits, involves much overlapping. The book virtually ends with the takeover by Harlequin Books in 1971 and only a short afterword touches on the sensational expansion since then, ‘an epic tale worthy ...
... example, a not generously staffed and already busy Book Marketing Council, seem insurmountable. Frank Delaney’s notion of a fortnight’s festival in London in the autumn, tied to a BBC 2 book festival, similarly needs to be extended nationally, and so does the newly conceived Edinburgh Book Bonanza, which ran during its Festival. Perhaps the closest ...

Blake’s Tone

E.P. Thompson, 28 January 1993

Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s 
by Jon Mee.
Oxford, 251 pp., £30, August 1992, 0 19 812226 8
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... likely to have derived his eclectic borrowings? No single source can be cited with confidence: as Frank Manuel showed years ago (The 18th Century confronts the Gods, 1959), comparative mythology had been advancing for more than one hundred years. Jacob Bryant’s A New System; or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1775) was mentioned once by Blake, and he ...
Selected Poems 
by James Merrill.
Carcanet, 152 pp., £9.95, April 1996, 1 85754 228 2
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... John Ashbery, who combines the exaltation of Wallace Stevens with the shrugging insouciance of Frank O’Hara in order to come up with poems as expressive and as inscrutable as Reverdy’s. If Merrill was experimental, then it was in the way Bach played with harmonics and textual interpretation in a late cantata such as ‘Ich glaube, lieber Herr, hilf ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: Pearl’s Question, 19 October 1995

... herself to be a witness to a monstrous piece of history (‘I was in the same barracks as Anne Frank. Of course, I didn’t know who she was then. There were just some Dutch girls. They cried all the time.’) Watching the VJ Day commemorations brought it back. ‘I saw those old men, Japanese prisoners of war, and I thought: you shouldn’t forget. Nobody ...

There’s Daddy

Michael Wood, 13 February 1992

Flying in to Love 
by D.M. Thomas.
Bloomsbury, 262 pp., £14.99, February 1992, 0 7475 1129 2
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JFK 
directed by Oliver Stone.
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... death not to have been a meaningless horror. Oswald’s committing the act alone is about as close to meaningless as we can get, and almost any plot is better than that. In March 1963, a few months before Kennedy’s assassination, Thomas Pynchon published a novel in which a character learns what is said to be ‘life’s single lesson’: ‘that there ...

A Little Holiday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Ben Hecht’s Cause, 23 September 2021

A Child of the Century 
by Ben Hecht.
Yale, 654 pp., £16, April 2020, 978 0 300 25179 1
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Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures 
by Adina Hoffman.
Yale, 245 pp., £10.99, April 2020, 978 0 300 25181 4
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... Weill, and had a choir of fifty rabbis, plus a cast of nearly five hundred, including the young Frank Sinatra. Huge audiences went to see it in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and the Hollywood Bowl. In Washington it was seen by Eleanor Roosevelt, who praised it in her newspaper column.We Will Never Die led Hecht to Zionism, or at least to one wing ...

Makeshiftness

Barry Schwabsky: Who is Menzel?, 17 April 2003

Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in 19th-Century Berlin 
by Michael Fried.
Yale, 313 pp., £35, September 2002, 0 300 09219 9
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... Speaking of the American painters he championed in the 1960s – Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Frank Stella – Fried observed that their work ‘not only arises largely out of their personal interpretations of the situation in which advanced painting found itself at crucial moments in their respective developments’: it ‘also aspires to be judged, in ...

‘I was such a lovely girl’

Barbara Newman: The Songs of the Medieval Troubadours, 25 May 2006

Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours 
translated by Ezra Pound, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Kehew, edited by Robert Kehew.
Chicago, 280 pp., £35, May 2005, 0 226 42933 4
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Medieval Lyric: Middle English Lyrics, Ballads and Carols 
edited by John Hirsh.
Blackwell, 220 pp., £17.99, August 2004, 1 4051 1482 7
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An Anthology of Ancient and Medieval Woman’s Song 
edited by Anne Klinck.
Palgrave, 208 pp., £19.99, May 2004, 9781403963109
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... tinged with religious yearning, while the earthier Count Guillem de Peiteus preferred love at close hand: I can’t stand their vern acular Who’d keep my love from me afar. By way of words, I guess I’ve found A little saying that runs rife: Let others mouth their loves around; We’ve got the bread, we’ve got the knife. (Snodgrass) The unlikely ...

When Jihadis Win Power

Owen Bennett-Jones, 4 December 2014

The Inevitable Caliphate? A History of the Struggle for Global Islamic Union, 1924 to the Present 
by Reza Pankhurst.
Hurst, 280 pp., £18.99, June 2013, 978 1 84904 251 2
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... four commanders. Since the stalemate at Kobani there are signs that the Islamic State’s power is close to its peak, especially now that it’s fighting no fewer than five enemies: the Iraqi and Syrian armies, the US air force, the Kurdish peshmerga and the Free Syrian Army. But even if it remains a force it won’t be able to satisfy the demands of those it ...

Messages from the 29th Floor

David Trotter: Lifts, 3 July 2014

Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator 
by Andreas Bernard, translated by David Dollenmayer.
NYU, 309 pp., £21.99, April 2014, 978 0 8147 8716 8
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... history of urban planning. After all, the trains which first obliged passengers to sit or stand in close proximity to one another for hours on end without exchanging a word ran between rather than across the great conurbations. Considered as a people-mover, the elevator ranks with those other epochal Fin-de-Siècle inventions, the motor car and the ...

Michael Gove recommends …

Robert Hanks: Dennis Wheatley, 20 January 2011

The Devil Is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley 
by Phil Baker.
Dedalus, 699 pp., £25, October 2009, 978 1 903517 75 8
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... hampered by his reluctance to discuss his friend’s sexual and financial affairs – he was on close terms with Tombe’s mistress but had often lied to her on Tombe’s behalf, and was certainly aware of, if not actively involved in, a lot of the criminal stuff. Tombe’s corpse finally turned up a year and a half later in a cesspit in Surrey, at the farm ...

My Dagger into Yow

Ian Donaldson: Sidney’s Letters, 25 April 2013

The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney 
edited by Roger Kuin.
Oxford, 1381 pp., £250, July 2012, 978 0 19 955822 3
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... the letters of Cicero, translate them into another language, then back into Latin, then check how close he had come to the original. He should study the letters of stylish contemporaries such as Languet’s friend the historian and spy Pietro Bizzarri, a sample letter from whom (in Italian) Languet sent Sidney in November 1573, hoping that ‘in admiring it ...

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