Coldbath Fields

Simon Bradley: In Praise of Peabody, 21 June 2007

London in the 19th Century: ‘A Human Awful Wonder of God’ 
by Jerry White.
Cape, 624 pp., £20, January 2007, 978 0 224 06272 5
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... future publisher of the Yellow Book, by asking fortuitously: ‘Johnnie darling, won’t you come home with me?’ Even when he’s not quoting directly, White’s stories and statistics are chiefly drawn from contemporary sources. Here, then, is an attempt at a fresh portrait of 19th-century London, describing its evolution from the ...

Eaten by Owls

Michael Wood: Mervyn Peake, 26 January 2012

Peake’s Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings of Mervyn Peake 
edited by Maeve Gilmore.
British Library, 576 pp., £25, June 2011, 978 0 7123 5834 7
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The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy 
by Mervyn Peake.
Vintage, 943 pp., £25, June 2011, 978 0 09 952854 8
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Titus Awakes 
by Maeve Gilmore and Mervyn Peake.
Vintage, 288 pp., £7.99, June 2011, 978 0 09 955276 5
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Complete Nonsense 
by Mervyn Peake.
Fyfield, 242 pp., £14.95, July 2011, 978 1 84777 087 5
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A Book of Nonsense 
by Mervyn Peake.
Peter Owen, 87 pp., £9.99, June 2011, 978 0 7206 1361 2
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... be about, what non-fabulous reality lurks behind it or in its sights? The Lamb, also known as the Lord of the Mines, is the blind ruler of an underground realm beneath a ruined industrial landscape. ‘There had been a time,’ we read, ‘when these deserted solitudes were alive with hope, excitement and conjecture on how the world was to be ...

When Ireland Became Divided

Garret FitzGerald: The Free State’s Fight for Recognition, 21 January 1999

Documents on Irish Foreign Policy. Vol. I: 1919-22 
edited by Ronan Fanning.
Royal Irish Academy and Department of Foreign Affairs, 548 pp., £30, October 1998, 1 874045 63 1
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... At the outbreak of World War One, the British Government decided to postpone Home Rule for Ireland, which had just been enacted. Despite this, many Nationalists as well as Unionists enlisted in the British Army. Some radical Nationalists came to believe that action was needed to revive national sentiment. The Easter Rising of 1916 failed, but the execution of most of its leaders, followed two years later by an attempt to impose conscription on Ireland, led to a radicalisation of Nationalist opinion ...

When did you get hooked?

John Lanchester: Game of Thrones, 11 April 2013

A Song of Ice and Fire: Vols I-VII 
by George R.R. Martin.
Harper, 5232 pp., £55, July 2012, 978 0 00 747715 9
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Game of Thrones: The Complete First and Second Seasons 
Warner Home Video, £40, March 2013, 978 1 892122 20 9Show More
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... sign that no preconceptions about literary categories are in place. I once had to speak up for The Lord of the Rings at a retrospective version of the Booker Prize for 1954 – the other candidates were Under the Net, The New Men, Lucky Jim, A Proper Marriage and Lord of the Flies, which won – and needless to say I was the ...

Man of God

C.H. Sisson, 22 March 1990

Michael Ramsey: A Life 
by Owen Chadwick.
Oxford, 422 pp., £17.50, March 1990, 0 19 826189 6
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Michael Ramsey: A Portrait 
by Michael De-la-Noy.
Collins, 268 pp., £12.99, February 1990, 0 00 215332 7
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... He learned little at the dames’ schools to which he was sent, and for a year was taught at home by his mother, but that ‘made him squirm’ and he pulled horrible nervous faces. So he was sent to King’s College Choir School as a ‘mouldy day-bug’, and here the chaplain, Eric Milner-White, is said to have interested him in religion. Michael ...

Trounced

C.H. Sisson, 22 February 1990

C.S. Lewis: A Biography 
by A.N. Wilson.
Collins, 334 pp., £15, February 1990, 0 00 215137 5
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... C.S. Lewis was born in 1898, the son of a Belfast solicitor. He was educated first at home, then in England at a preparatory school, at Malvern (for one term only), and by a private tutor. So to Oxford. It was 1917. Lewis had volunteered, and he was in effect an officer cadet, soon in ‘barracks’ at Keble. He returned to Oxford after a brief spell on the Western front, where he was wounded, and at Oxford he stayed until 1954 when he was appointed to a chair in Cambridge ...

Happy Valleys

Dan Jacobson, 18 November 1982

White Mischief 
by James Fox.
Cape, 293 pp., £8.95, November 1982, 0 224 01731 4
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Earth to Earth 
by John Cornwell.
Allen Lane, 174 pp., £7.95, October 1982, 0 7139 1045 3
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... and the birth of an heir. In the early hours of the next morning, two miles from the marital home, the lover is found dead in his car. He has been shot through the ear at close range. Later that day the husband lights a bonfire near the house: in this bonfire he tries to burn, among other things, a pair of gym shoes and a blood-stained golf-stocking. He ...

Either Side of the Barbed-Wire Border

Maria Margaronis: Sotiris Dimitriou, 25 April 2002

May Your Name Be Blessed 
by Sotiris Dimitriou, translated by Leo Marshall.
Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, 84 pp., £8, May 2000, 0 7044 2189 5
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... stories are almost untranslatable, though Leo Marshall’s English versions in Woof, Woof, Dear Lord (Kedros, 1995) give something of their flavour. Dimitriou’s first novel, May Your Name Be Blessed, is a more likely candidate for cultural migration: history is more explicitly present than it is in the stories, offering a handhold for foreign readers. The ...

Britain is Your Friend

Rosemary Hill: British WW2 Propaganda, 15 December 2016

Persuading the People: British Propaganda in World War Two 
by David Welch.
British Library, 224 pp., £25, September 2016, 978 0 7123 5654 1
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... experiment with a Press and Censorship Board, serious efforts to control the media were abandoned. Lord Reith, who was briefly minister for information, believed that the news was ‘the shock troops of propaganda’ and that it should be as full and truthful as possible in order to be believed. This became the official position, a change of policy that left ...

Bring back the 19th century

Miles Taylor, 22 June 2000

British Society 1680-1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change 
by Richard Price.
Cambridge, 349 pp., £40, October 1999, 0 521 65172 7
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... guardians of the poor and all-round improvers of public amenities, for fear that instability at home would undermine British power overseas. It is not difficult to see the attractions of these new interpretations. Hanoverian history has become exciting again. The long stand-off between Namierite history from above and Edward Thompson-style history from ...

A Bride for a Jackass

Christopher de Bellaigue: Vita in Persia, 25 March 2010

Twelve Days in Persia 
by Vita Sackville-West.
Tauris Parke, 142 pp., £9.99, August 2009, 978 1 84511 933 1
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... or progress, or Proust), it will be followed and to blazes with the armchair traveller back home. No, she decides near the beginning of Passenger to Tehran, she is not even sure she likes the idea of travel. Perhaps – and for the Nicolsons there are few greater sins – it is middle class, like saying ‘weekend’ or getting a knighthood. She went ...

Dreadful Sentiments

Tom Paulin, 3 April 1986

The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats. Vol. I: 1865-1895 
edited by John Kelly and Eric Domville.
Oxford, 548 pp., £22.50, January 1986, 0 19 812679 4
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... out of the book I am copying) English poetry more from seeing a place like this. I only felt at home once – when I came to a steep lane with a Stream in the middle. The rest one noticed with a foreign eye, picking out the strange and not as in ones own country the familiar things for interest – the fault by the way of all poetry about countries not the ...

Nate of the Station

Nick Richardson: Jonathan Coe, 3 March 2016

Number 11 
by Jonathan Coe.
Viking, 351 pp., £16.99, November 2015, 978 0 670 92379 3
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... CHOICE’. Winshaw turns out to have been a mentor to the current rector of the college, Lord Lucrum, who sets up a committee called the Institute for Quality Valuation, which specialises in evaluating things that aren’t usually thought of – or haven’t yet been thought of – as having a price. Rachel’s tutor, Laura, ends up working as a ...

Blood Boiling

Paul Foot: Corporate takeover, 22 February 2001

Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain 
by George Monbiot.
Macmillan, 430 pp., £12.99, September 2000, 0 333 90164 9
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No Logo 
by Naomi Klein.
Flamingo, 501 pp., £8.99, January 2001, 0 00 653040 0
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... any privatised prisons back into public ownership ‘as soon as contractually possible’, now as Home Secretary negotiating with yet more big corporations for the privatisation of yet more prisons; ‘bluff John’ Prescott, the authentic voice of proletarian Old Labour, who made it ‘crystal clear’ to the 1993 Labour Party Conference that a Labour ...

How to Perfume a Glove

Adam Smyth: Early Modern Cookbooks, 5 January 2017

Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen 
by Wendy Wall.
Pennsylvania, 328 pp., £53, November 2015, 978 0 8122 4758 9
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... caught neatly in Partridge’s recipe for ‘Marmelade very comfortable and restorative for any Lord or Lady whatsoever’. Many manuscript collections present more intimate, first-hand associations (‘Cousin Mabel’s way of making almond milk’). Partridge’s recipes were (he tells us) ‘gathered out of sundry Experiments, lately practised by men of ...