We were the Lambert boys

Paul Driver, 22 May 1986

The Lamberts: George, Constant and Kit 
by Andrew Motion.
Chatto, 388 pp., £13.95, April 1986, 0 7011 2731 7
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... just merits the attention of a critical-biographer – as well write a book on Walter Legge or Arthur Gelb. Since the Lamberts as a dynasty do not have the special cultural force of the Bloomsbury Group, the Vorticists or even the Auden Group, we are left with the supposition that the biography’s publishers, who already include Constant’s Music Ho! and ...

Modernisms

Frank Kermode, 22 May 1986

Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement 
by C.K. Stead.
Macmillan, 393 pp., £27.50, March 1986, 0 333 37457 6
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The Myth of Modernism and 20th-century Literature 
by Bernard Bergonzi.
Harvester, 216 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 7108 1002 4
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The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts 
by Roger Shattuck.
Faber, 362 pp., £15, March 1986, 0 571 12071 7
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... is related to his not being a Modernist, his not being willing to ‘go all the way’ with his young mentor Pound. A further charge against him is that he wrote prose versions of his poems and then worked them up ‘into an arrangement of images, lines and rhythms’. The word ‘poem’ is here slyly avoided because such practices seem to show that Yeats ...

Misunderstandings

J.H. Burns, 20 March 1986

Henry Brougham 1778-1868: His Public Career 
by Robert Stewart.
Bodley Head, 406 pp., £18, January 1986, 0 370 30271 0
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Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The ‘Edinburgh Review’ 1802-1832 
by Biancamaria Fontana.
Cambridge, 256 pp., £22.50, December 1985, 0 521 30335 4
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... the sense in which that description applies, for instance, to John Stuart Mill (or even perhaps to Arthur Balfour). Brougham’s intellect could serve him superbly in political life, especially perhaps in the mastery of complex subjects displayed in some of his astonishing speeches. Yet the great 1828 speech on law reform, whether or not Brougham was ...

Received Accents

Peter Robinson, 20 February 1986

Collected Poems 
by Charles Tomlinson.
Oxford, 351 pp., £15, September 1985, 0 19 211974 5
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Selected and New Poems: 1939-84 
by J.C. Hall.
Secker, 87 pp., £3.95, September 1985, 0 436 19052 4
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Burning the knife: New and Selected Poems 
by Robin Magowan.
Scarecrow Press, 114 pp., £13.50, September 1985, 0 8108 1777 2
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Englishmen: A Poem 
by Christopher Hope.
Heinemann, 41 pp., £4.95, September 1985, 0 434 34661 6
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Selected Poems: 1954-1982 
by John Fuller.
Secker, 175 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 436 16754 9
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Writing Home 
by Hugo Williams.
Oxford, 70 pp., £3.95, September 1985, 0 19 211970 2
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... those who endure? Tomlinson’s ‘Up at La Serra’ dramatises the restricting circumstances of a young Italian poet called Paolo Bertolani,                 who had no more to offer than a sheaf of verse          in the style of Quasimodo. Bertolani has since achieved a style of his own; his most recent volume, Seina, is written in ...

Bringing it home to Uncle Willie

Frank Kermode, 6 May 1982

Joseph Conrad: A Biography 
by Roger Tennant.
Sheldon Press, 276 pp., £12.50, January 1982, 0 85969 358 9
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Edward Garnett: A Life in Literature 
by George Jefferson.
Cape, 350 pp., £12.50, April 1982, 0 224 01488 9
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The Edwardian Novelists 
by John Batchelor.
Duckworth, 251 pp., £18, February 1982, 0 7156 1109 7
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The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism 
by Allon White.
Routledge, 190 pp., £12, August 1981, 0 7100 0751 5
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... Western Eyes, another novel that proved too much for Garnett. He once remarked admiringly of the young Arnold Bennett that ‘the most interesting thing about him is the strange amalgam he presents of commercial man pure and simple, and author’. But he had to deal with less adaptable authors, and he did so with skill and endless enthusiasm. His review of ...
Digging Deeper: Issues in the Miners’ Strike 
edited by Huw Beynon.
Verso, 252 pp., £3.95, March 1985, 0 86091 820 3
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Policing the Miners’ Strike 
edited by Bob Fine and Robert Millar.
Lawrence and Wishart, 243 pp., £4.95, March 1985, 0 85315 633 6
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The Strike: An Insider’s Story 
by Roy Ottey.
Sidgwick, 157 pp., £7.95, March 1985, 9780283992285
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Scargill and the Miners 
by Michael Crick.
Penguin, 172 pp., £2.95, March 1985, 0 14 052355 3
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The Great Strike: The Miners’ Strike of 1984-5 and its Lessons 
by Alex Callinicos and Mike Simons.
Socialist Worker, 256 pp., £3.95, April 1985, 0 905998 50 2
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... fully comprehend. In the course of his narrative, Ottey comments on acts of personal kindness by Arthur Scargill; for him, the NUM President represents ‘a strange mixture of ruthlessness and sensitivity’. A similar sense of contradiction informs Crick’s critical yet not hostile study. The second edition has appeared only two months after the first ...

Superficially Pally

Jenny Turner: Richard Sennett, 22 March 2012

Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-Operation 
by Richard Sennett.
Allen Lane, 323 pp., £25, February 2012, 978 0 7139 9874 0
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... one recent front-page story says. ‘The midwives were caring, fulfilled and passionate,’ a young journalist writes about her decision to retrain. People look to their jobs for so much that’s not written into any contract: self-respect, stability, social standing. Work is ‘a road’, as Richard Sennett once wrote, ‘to the unification of the ...

Why weren’t they grateful?

Pankaj Mishra: Mossadegh, 21 June 2012

Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup 
by Christopher de Bellaigue.
Bodley Head, 310 pp., £20, February 2012, 978 1 84792 108 6
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... first generation contained polemicists like al-Afghani, who gathered energetic but disorganised young anti-imperialists around him in Kabul, Istanbul, Cairo and Tehran. The next generation produced men like Mossadegh, who had been exposed to Western ways or trained in Western-style institutions and were better equipped to provide their increasingly restless ...

Reckless Effrontery

Barbara Newman: Richard II and Henry IV, 20 March 2025

The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV 
by Helen Castor.
Allen Lane, 652 pp., £35, October 2024, 978 0 241 41932 8
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... had sequestered him. But the rebels’ hope lay in the 14-year-old king himself, still too young to be blamed for the misrule and corruption that surrounded him. Richard met with Tyler and his supporters at Smithfield and conceded to all their demands, following a risky plan hatched by his defenders. His ‘fair words’ counted for nothing: the ...

Cooked Frog

David Edgar: Orbán’s Hungary, 7 March 2024

Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary 
by Zsuzsanna Szelényi.
Hurst, 438 pp., £25, November 2022, 978 1 78738 802 4
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... aren’t a coincidence. Fidesz has been advised by American political consultants including Arthur J. Finkelstein, who began his career advising Nixon. According to Szelényi, the party has used the issue of gender ‘to bind together markedly different groups, such as committed Catholics, the less educated elderly and even radical football ...

Provocation

Adam Phillips, 24 August 1995

Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls 
by Denis Donoghue.
Knopf, 364 pp., $27.50, May 1995, 0 679 43753 3
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... his pleasure. This, of course, was a question, and an invitation, calculated to appeal to those young enough, or bold enough, to have confidence in their possibilities for pleasure. Pater assumed, at least in his writing, that pleasure and sensation – not to mention the peculiar – were morally good. So when The Renaissance was published in 1873 it was a ...

How Dirty Harry beat the Ringo Kid

Michael Rogin, 9 May 1996

John Wayne: American 
by Randy Roberts and James Olson.
Free Press, 738 pp., £17.99, March 1996, 0 02 923837 4
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... of the isolated outsider. Praising his performance in Sands of Iwo Jima, General Douglas Mac Arthur (whose words had opened and closed John Wayne’s Bataan/Corregidor film, They Were Expendable), told him in front of the American Legion: ‘You represent the American serviceman better than the American serviceman himself.’ So saturated with realism ...

Streamlined Smiles

Rosemary Dinnage: Erik Erikson, 2 March 2000

Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik Erikson 
by Lawrence Friedman.
Free Association, 592 pp., £15.95, May 1999, 9781853434716
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... grandparenting authority, the weight of ‘Mom-ism’ and ‘bossism’. He contrasts the plea in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman – ‘I just can’t take hold, Mom, I can’t take hold of some kind of a life’ – with rip-roaring frontier folk material: ‘Raised in the backwoods, suckled by a polar bear, nine rows of jaw teeth, a double coat of ...

The Atmosphere of the Clyde

Jean McNicol: Red Clydeside, 2 January 2020

When the Clyde Ran Red: A Social History of Red Clydeside 
by Maggie Craig.
Birlinn, 313 pp., £9.99, March 2018, 978 1 78027 506 2
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Glasgow 1919: The Rise of Red Clydeside 
by Kenny MacAskill.
Biteback, 310 pp., £20, January 2019, 978 1 78590 454 7
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John Maclean: Hero of Red Clydeside 
by Henry Bell.
Pluto, 242 pp., £14.99, October 2018, 978 0 7453 3838 5
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... they polished the wooden cabinets that housed the machines. The strike began after three of the 15 young women in this department were moved elsewhere and the remaining 12 told to do the same amount of work for a weekly wage of 12 shillings: a pay cut of two shillings. They walked out, followed by two thousand other women workers, and soon afterwards by the ...

Corncob Caesar

Murray Sayle, 6 February 1997

Old Soldiers Never Die: The Life of Douglas MacArthur 
by Geoffrey Perret.
Deutsch, 663 pp., £20, October 1996, 9780233990026
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... his lawyer grandfather had emigrated to the US in 1828 from Glasgow. His father, then Captain Arthur MacArthur, already had genuine military credentials, despite his lowly rank. MacArthur Sr had enlisted in the US Army as a student during the Civil War, from which he emerged, aged 21, a full colonel. Joining the regular army, he dropped in rank to second ...