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John McEnroe plus Anyone

Edward Said: Tennis, 1 July 1999

The Right Set: The Faber Book of Tennis 
edited by Caryl Phillips.
Faber, 327 pp., £12.99, June 1999, 0 571 19540 7
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... idiotic and unnecessary tennis knick-knacks like T-shirts and caps, there’s the sullen crowd of young pros dressed as walking billboards for Hertz, Movado or Volvo rather than as tea-sipping athletes in white flannels. Even the commentators are pros (some of them, like Cliff Drysdale and John McEnroe, excellent ones). In nearly every way tennis has become ...

Slapping the Clammy Flab

John Lanchester: Hannibal by Thomas Harris, 29 July 1999

Hannibal 
by Thomas Harris.
Heinemann, 496 pp., £16.99, June 1999, 0 434 00940 7
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... his sister, Mischa, was killed and eaten by Nazi troops who had previously done the same to a young deer – hence Dr Lecter’s anti-deer-hunter thing; hence also his cannibalism. All this humanises Lecter. We find out about the primal scene in his psychological formation (the one in which Mischa is killed and eaten, and he then finds her teeth in the ...

Eric the Nerd

Ian Hamilton: The Utterly Complete Orwell, 29 October 1998

The Complete Works of George Orwell 
edited by Peter Davidson.
Secker, £750, July 1998, 0 436 20377 4
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... Office’s Information and Research Department. Kingsley Martin: Decayed liberal. Very dishonest; Stephen Spender: Sentimental Sympathiser and very unreliable; Ian Mikardo: I don’t know much about him, but have sometimes wondered; Richard Crossman: ??Political climber. Zionist (appears sincere about this). Too dishonest to be outright FT. Nearly all of ...

Pamphleteer’s Progress

Patrick Parrinder, 7 February 1985

The Function of Criticism: From the ‘Spectator’ to Post-Structuralism 
by Terry Eagleton.
Verso, 133 pp., £15, September 1984, 0 86091 091 1
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... is, basically, a series of quotes from a venerable collection of Whig historians: Macaulay, Stephen, Beljame, and Legouis and Cazamian. Curiously, he deals only in the most general terms with Addison’s writing; the main concern of his discussion of the bourgeois ‘public sphere’ is to define the paradigmatic ‘speech act’ performed in the ...

Mortal Beauty

Paul Delany, 21 May 1981

Feminine Beauty 
by Kenneth Clark.
Weidenfeld, 199 pp., £10, October 1980, 0 297 77677 0
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Of Women and their Elegance 
by Norman Mailer.
Hodder, 288 pp., £12.50, March 1981, 0 340 23920 4
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Nude Photographs 1850-1980 
edited by Constance Sullivan.
Harper and Row, 204 pp., £19.95, September 1981, 0 06 012708 2
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... silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure’, if we may borrow a phrase from another arch-formalist, Stephen Dedalus. Such a view ignores the special status of feminine beauty in Western culture. There is no intrinsic reason why woman, naked or clothed, should be the supreme aesthetic subject of art: she has held that place because an appropriative male desire ...

Bogey’s Clean Sweep

Michael Holroyd, 22 May 1980

The Life of Katherine Mansfield 
by Antony Alpers.
Cape, 466 pp., £9.50, May 1980, 0 224 01625 3
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... something very much more – accept the fact that this may never be? And if there was once, when young, a romantic wish to die, and a courting of death, what then? Will there be guilt, and a dark attempt to shift the blame?’ These are not real questions. Long before we can dial through to Ontario and press our own special insights on the author, the ...

Like ink and milk

John Bayley, 10 September 1992

‘Sons and Lovers’: The Unexpurgated Text 
by D.H. Lawrence, edited by Helen Baron and Carl Baron.
Cambridge, 675 pp., £70, September 1992, 0 521 24276 2
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D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885-1912 
by John Worthen.
Cambridge, 464 pp., £14.95, September 1992, 0 521 43221 9
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‘Sons and Lovers’ 
by Michael Black.
Cambridge, 126 pp., £19.95, September 1992, 0 521 36074 9
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... a spy is arrested’ was set up in type but never printed: the Westminster’s editor, Stephen Spender’s uncle, was mildly pro-German in 1912, and he also turned down a piece called ‘In Fortified Germany’. But the third and fourth articles made it – Lawrence’s debut as a travel writer – and they already exhibit their author’s hedgehog ...

Wordsworth and the Well-Hidden Corpse

Marilyn Butler, 6 August 1992

The Lyrical Ballads: Longman Annotated Texts 
edited by Michael Mason.
Longman, 419 pp., £29.99, April 1992, 0 582 03302 0
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Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Literary Possession 
by Susan Eilenberg.
Oxford, 278 pp., £30, May 1992, 0 19 506856 4
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The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries 
by Nicholas Roe.
Macmillan, 186 pp., £35, April 1992, 0 333 52314 8
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... could expose Mason to comparison, not only with two serious recent biographies, of Wordsworth by Stephen Gill and of Coleridge by Richard Holmes, but with Susan Eilenberg’s persuasive book-length treatment of this very subject. Mason underplays the psychological interest of Wordsworth’s unceremonious takeover of the second edition, and (surely) its ...

Behind the Green Baize Door

Alison Light: The Servant Problem, 5 March 2020

Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class and Domestic Labour in the Women’s Suffrage Movement 
by Laura Schwartz.
Cambridge, 248 pp., £75, July 2019, 978 1 108 47133 6
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... 20-year-old maid inaugurated a similar union, the Scottish Federation of Domestic Workers. Jessie Stephen told the assembled crowd of mistresses and maids that she was ‘out to preach the divine doctrine of discontent’. Soon blacklisted by employers – one of the dangers of unionisation – she made her way to London and joined forces with Oliver. The ...

Who Will Lose?

David Edgar, 25 September 2008

Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future 
by Newton Minow and Craig LaMay.
Chicago, 219 pp., £11.50, April 2008, 978 0 226 53041 3
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... the US , going back to seven fabled three-hour tussles between the Illinois senatorial candidates Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln in 1858 (which certainly did involve direct confrontation), all on the single subject of slavery. In the 1920s, the League of Women Voters sponsored a ten-month series of radio debates, not between presidential candidates but ...

Diary

Sheila Fitzpatrick: File-Selves, 22 September 2022

... Commonwealth immigrants as well. ‘Sorry, love,’ kindly immigration officials would say to us young Australians, directing us to the long non-British entry line at Customs. ‘It’s a shame, but we have to do it.’I tried appealing to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for special permission to go on the British exchange, but my application was ...

The Leveller

Ben Ehrenreich: Famine in East Africa, 17 August 2017

... listening. When I asked Abdi what the land here would normally look like at this time of year, a young man shoved a cellphone into my hand to show me a photo of himself reclining in a field of tall green grass. He pointed to a patch of bare earth behind him, where the photo had been taken, and laughed. War rarely feels far away. The wrecks of Siad Barre’s ...

Thou Old Serpent!

James Butler, 10 March 2022

The Penguin Book of Exorcisms 
edited by Joseph P. Laycock.
Penguin, 336 pp., £12.99, September 2021, 978 0 14 313547 0
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... embraced in non-Christian examples: illusion is the domain of spirits. Among Christians (as Stephen Greenblatt has observed) these qualities are more problematic. Mimetic art – especially theatre – has troubled many Western thinkers, Christian or otherwise. Christianity is founded on a series of truth claims – the gospel, the saving act, the ...

The Rack, the Rapier, the Ruff and the Fainting Nun

Nicholas Penny: Manet/Velázquez, 10 July 2003

Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting 
by Gary Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre et al.
Yale, 592 pp., £50, March 2003, 0 300 09880 4
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... on the walls was a large picture, exquisitely painted by Spagnoletto,’ of the martyrdom of St Stephen. The Spanish school evoked the rack, the rapier, the ruff, the spiral ebony chair-leg and the fainting nun, and a world that was now sufficiently distant or in decline (in The Antiquary it is the invasion of Bonaparte, not the Jacobites, for which beacons ...

Rampaging

John Connelly: Stalin’s Infantry, 22 June 2006

Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1939-45 
by Catherine Merridale.
Faber, 396 pp., £20, October 2005, 0 571 21808 3
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A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-45 
edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova.
Harvill, 378 pp., £20, September 2005, 9781843430551
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... which was both male and female, consisted of dozens of national groups, ranged from the very young to the quite old, and fought on many fronts. What can we learn about such an army from the several dozen memoirs and diaries, the letters and the interview notes the author has in her possession? A great deal. The most urgent and interesting questions about ...

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