Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... breath. We all have our links. I was once married to Jean Brodie of Annandale Street, who went to James Gillespie’s High School, the one in Muriel Spark’s novel. When I asked her the other day how she would vote, she shrugged. But almost immediately she added: ‘Well, it does seem that the notion of social justice is still alive, just, in Scotland.’ I ...”

His Own Sort of Outsider

Philip Clark: Tippett’s Knack, 16 July 2020

Michael Tippett: The Biography 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 750 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4746 0602 8Show More
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“... tested operatic techniques to retell an existing story, and even Britten, in his setting of Henry James, leaned heavily on technique when genuine inspiration dimmed. But in composing The Midsummer Marriage Tippett, typically, discovered the techniques that he needed to write the piece as he went along. The music shimmered and sparkled, but without an ounce of ...”

Making Do and Mending

Rosemary Hill: Penelope Fitzgerald’s Letters, 25 September 2008

So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald 
edited by Terence Dooley.
Fourth Estate, 532 pp., £25, August 2008, 978 0 00 713640 7Show More
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“... offered to send her any books she wanted, for a copy of Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. An account of a 30,000-mile journey around the continent by two naturalists, it was originally published in 1955 and was being reissued in memory of Peterson, who had recently died. Fitzgerald wanted it, however, for the sake of his co-author, who ...”

My Feet Are Cut Off

Barbara Newman: Lives of the Saints, 3 December 2009

Gilte Legende Vol. I 
edited by Richard Hamer and Vida Russell.
Early English Text Society (Oxford), 496 pp., £65, November 2006, 0 19 920577 9Show More
Gilte Legende Vol. II 
edited by Richard Hamer and Vida Russell.
Early English Text Society (Oxford), 1036 pp., £65, August 2007, 978 0 19 923439 4Show More
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“... a saint that the executioners cut off his head. The litany of holy violence culminates in St James the Dismembered, whose legend could have inspired an episode in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Slain finger by finger and toe by toe, this martyr responds to the loss of each digit with a Bible verse or a prayer. Only when the 27th stroke has severed his ...”

Missionary Work

Christopher Turner: Henry Wellcome, 13 May 2010

An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World 
by Frances Larson.
Oxford, 343 pp., £18.99, September 2009, 978 0 19 955446 1Show More
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“... Wellcome felt free to start collecting on a grander scale. In his 1994 biography, Robert Rhodes James dismissed Wellcome as a ‘magpie collector’ who tried to rationalise the contents of his hoard after the fact, and concentrated instead on his subject’s social and business interests and his patronage of scientific research. Frances Larson, in ...”

Like Cooking a Dumpling

Mike Jay: Victorian Science Writing, 20 November 2014

Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age 
by James Secord.
Oxford, 306 pp., £18.99, March 2014, 978 0 19 967526 5Show More
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“... Revolution broke out, Priestley’s Birmingham laboratory was torn down by patriotic Church and King mobs and eventually he fled to exile in America. Davy’s previous employer, the chemist and physician Thomas Beddoes, had also been confined to the margins of his profession because of his support for the French Revolution. Davy’s address to the Royal ...”

Did he leap?

Mendez: ‘Harlem Shuffle’, 16 December 2021

Harlem Shuffle 
by Colson Whitehead.
Fleet, 320 pp., £16.99, September 2021, 978 0 7088 9944 1Show More
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“... for Boys: it tells the story of Elwood Curtis, a talented 16-year-old acolyte of Martin Luther King Jr, who has hope and promise snatched away by the torturous racial violence to which he’s subjected at a reform school in Florida in the early 1960s.Assured of another bestseller, Whitehead turned back to Harlem Shuffle. Unlike Elwood Curtis, who writes ...”

Pinhookers and Pets

Jackson Lears: Inventing the Non-Smoker, 18 February 2021

The Cigarette: A Political History 
by Sarah Milov.
Harvard, 395 pp., £28.95, October 2019, 978 0 674 24121 3Show More
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“... started slowly. Before the First World War, smoking had doubtful associations for most Americans. James Buchanan Duke’s American Tobacco Company pioneered the manufacture of desire by surrounding cigarettes with Orientalist fantasy, but the unintended consequence of such advertising was to reinforce the connection in the popular mind between smoking and ...”

Reasons

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 1 April 1983

A Treatise on Social Theory. Vol. I: The Methodology of Social Theory 
by W.G. Runciman.
Cambridge, 350 pp., £25, March 1983, 0 521 24906 6Show More
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“... than rows of ponderous foxhunters, fat with Staffordshire and Devonshire ale, men who drank to the King across the Water and believed all the fundholders were Jews,’ is, Runciman says, to lapse into ‘too much conscious literary merit to be counted even under the most generous rubric’ – and Runciman’s own rubric stretches to history itself – ‘as ...”

Sticktoitiveness

John Sutherland, 8 June 1995

Empire of Words: The Reign of the ‘OED’ 
by John Willinsky.
Princeton, 258 pp., £19.95, November 1994, 0 691 03719 1Show More
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“... utopian Philological Society, based at the University of London, the amazing sticktoitiveness of James Murray, editor and mastermind of the project from 1879 to his death in 1915, and the (initially) nervous patron, OUP, who inherited the project 22 year after its launch. Willinsky tells much the same story as that given by Elisabeth Murray (Caught in the ...”

Dashing for Freedom

Paul Foot, 12 December 1996

Full Disclosure 
by Andrew Neil.
Macmillan, 481 pp., £20, October 1996, 0 333 64682 7Show More
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“... Later in the book, describing a weekend journey to the countryside to meet his new amanuensis, James Adams, Neil gives a pretty clear idea of how he likes to see himself: ‘James,’ Neil writes, ‘was surprised when somebody his own age emerged one sunny Sunday in shorts and open-necked shirt from a black convertible ...”

Morality in the Oxygen

E.S. Turner: Tobogganing, 14 December 2000

How the English Made the Alps 
by Jim Ring.
Murray, 287 pp., £19.99, September 2000, 0 7195 5689 9Show More
Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps 
by Fergus Fleming.
Granta, 398 pp., £20, November 2000, 1 86207 379 1Show More
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“... he found ‘the genuine British cockney in all his terrors’, and in his hotel was a ‘genuine king’. Both kings and cockneys, he felt, were very objectionable neighbours in a hotel. Henry James thought the new breed of tourists were ‘rarely, to judge by their faces and talk, children of light to any eminent ...”

Putin’s Counter-Revolution

James Meek, 20 March 2014

“... singing the Ukrainian national anthem, Ukrainian revolutionary rap, a video of a savage Rodney King-style assault by Ukrainian policemen on a defenceless civilian, and as much more in the same vein as your eyes can bear. If you replace ‘Maidan’ with ‘Banderovtsy’, the catch-all term opponents of the revolution use to refer to its activists (after ...”

The Wrong Blond

Alan Bennett, 23 May 1985

Auden in Love 
by Dorothy Farnan.
Faber, 264 pp., £9.95, March 1985, 0 571 13399 1Show More
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“... gave a reading at the Keynote Club in Manhattan. Kallman and another Brooklyn student, Walter James Miller, were in the audience, with Kallman sitting in the front row giving the two international pederasts the glad eye. Afterwards he and Miller went backstage. Miller was tall, blond, Anglo-Saxon and (a friend who was not a ...”

Subjects

Craig Raine, 6 October 1983

Peter Porter: Collected Poems 
Oxford, 335 pp., £12.50, March 1983, 0 19 211948 6Show More
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“... Hardly any good poems came out of the conflict in Vietnam and most of those were written by James Fenton, a poet alert to the eerie surrealism of war. What happens when the war is banished from the front page and into the history books? Pound said, in the ABC of Reading, that ‘literature is news that STAYS news.’ Eliot, on the other hand, was less ...”
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