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Belgravia Cockney

Christopher Tayler: On being a le Carré bore, 25 January 2007

The Mission Song 
by John le Carré.
Hodder, 339 pp., £17.99, September 2006, 9780340921968
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... A Perfect Spy in 1986, Philip Roth, then spending a lot of time in London, called it ‘the best English novel since the war’. Not being such a fan of A Perfect Spy, I’ve occasionally wondered what Roth’s generous blurb says about the postwar English novel. As a le Carré bore, however, I’ve also wondered how Roth ...

The Coat in Question

Iain Sinclair: Margate, 20 March 2003

All the Devils Are Here 
by David Seabrook.
Granta, 192 pp., £7.99, March 2003, 9781862075597
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... the misrepresented. None of his heroes will be acknowledged in The Oxford Companion to English Literature – except Robert Aickmann (sic) who gets his name misspelled, and he is banished to the ghetto: ‘See ghost stories and horror’. Seabrook’s disinterested championship of Aickman lasted for years and carried him to an interview with ...

After the Referendum

LRB Contributors, 9 October 2014

... plenty of perjink signs saying ‘No Thanks’, stuck on privet hedges. My friends are Scots born, English born, Italian born. Why do I have to insist on that? Because of the constant bitching that the ‘Yes’ movement was simply ‘anti-English’. No one wanted to be alone that evening. We ate a carry-out curry and ...

With the Aid of a Lorgnette

Frank Kermode, 28 April 1994

The Lure of the Sea 
by Alain Corbin, translated by Jocelyn Phelps.
Polity, 380 pp., £35, January 1994, 0 7456 0732 2
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The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the French Social Imagination 
by Alain Corbin, translated by Miriam Kochan.
Picador, 307 pp., £6.99, March 1994, 0 330 32930 8
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... 1848 required that every citizen should have 14 cubic metres of fresh air. As in so much else, the English led the field in the provision of taps and water closets. Baths and bidets slowly caught on. Meanwhile the pleasures of olfaction reached the heights of super-refinement we associate with Huysmans. Yet the crowd remained obstinately ‘loyal to ...

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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... The best-known publication date in English literature,’ says Michael Mason of 1798. But the terse, intelligent Introduction to his new edition of the Lyrical Ballads seems out to disperse the sense of unique significance sticking to the year. Mason points out that the original version of 1798, which was anonymous, caught on less well than the second (1800), twice as long, and firmly attributed to Wordsworth alone ...

Hickup over the Littany

Peter Phillips: What did it sound like?, 14 December 2023

The Pursuit of Musick: Musical Life in Original Writings and Art c.1200-1770 
by Andrew Parrott.
Taverner, 544 pp., £35, December 2022, 978 1 915229 54 0
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... in 1973 continue to work in the light of these discoveries: the Academy of Ancient Music, the English Concert, the Taverner Consort and Players, and the Tallis Scholars (which I started as a choir in Oxford while I was an undergraduate there). The first two concentrated on instruments only; the Tallis Scholars worked with voices only; and the Taverner ...

Diary

Karl Miller: Football Tribes, 1 June 1989

... It was in touch with flourishing literary cultures to the north and south. One Warden of the English East March, Lord Hunsdon, a fierce and effective commander, a hanger and a swearer, and a patron of actors, was destined to be in touch with Shakespeare: reputedly the son of Henry VIII, he was also, I notice, the keeper of the woman claimed by A.L. Rowse ...

Frank knew best

Martin Pawley, 7 April 1994

Frank Lloyd Wright. The Lost Years, 1910-1922: A Study of Influences 
by Anthony Alofsin.
Chicago, 456 pp., £43.95, March 1994, 0 226 01366 9
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... would-be Modernists who came to hear Frank Lloyd Wright were encountering their first authentic English-speaking Modern pioneer. Wright knew Europe well, by the standards of the pre-aviation age; his first visit had been in 1909. Only two years before the London lectures, he had passed through again on his way to the Soviet Union to inspect the enormous ...

Good Girl, Bad Girl

Elaine Showalter, 5 June 1997

Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment 
by Jane Gallop.
Duke, 104 pp., £28.50, June 1997, 0 8223 1918 7
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A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned 
by Jane Tompkins.
Addison-Wesley, 256 pp., $22, January 1997, 0 201 91212 0
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Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death 
by Nancy Miller.
Oxford, 208 pp., £19.50, February 1997, 0 19 509130 2
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... Has Two Faces when Barbra Streisand, playing a frumpy, unconditionally lovable Columbia University English professor, has a makeover and flaunts her cleavage before her astounded class. ‘Okay, so the teacher has breasts,’ she wisecracks to the gaping students. ‘Anything wrong with that?’ Well, no, so long as they don’t get caught in the slide ...

Plenty of Puff

Charles West: Charlemagne, 19 December 2019

King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne 
by Janet Nelson.
Allen Lane, 704 pp., £30, July 2019, 978 0 7139 9243 4
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... set for European unity. An early version of the EEC was dubbed the ‘Union Charlemagne’ by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in his 1950 speech accepting the inaugural Charlemagne prize, awarded by the city of Aachen every subsequent year to those who have advanced the cause of European unity. Receiving the award in 2018, Emmanuel Macron employed a ...

Problems

Peter Campbell, 1 October 1981

Early Disorder 
by Rebecca Josephs.
Farrar, Straus/Faber, 186 pp., £5.50, September 1981, 0 571 12031 8
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A Star for the Latecomer 
by Bonnie Zindel.
Bodley Head, 186 pp., £3.95, March 1981, 0 370 30319 9
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Catherine loves 
by Timothy Ireland.
Bodley Head, 117 pp., £3.95, June 1981, 0 370 30292 3
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Jacob have I loved 
by Katherine Paterson.
Gollancz, 216 pp., £4.95, April 1981, 0 575 02961 7
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... why not eating might seem the only thing left for you to do. Catherine loves is set in a narrower English world where not all the problems are psychological ones. Catherine’s mother takes her with her when she goes to live with Tony, her lover. A baby comes and she returns to her husband: Catherine gives to the new baby the affection no one else seems able ...

Sightbites

Jonathan Meades: Archigram’s Ghost, 21 May 2020

Archigram: The Book 
edited by Dennis Crompton.
Circa, 300 pp., £95, November 2018, 978 1 911422 04 4
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... early 1930s championed by Nikolaus Pevsner, the most conservative of progressives, who described English architecture of the 1950s as ‘not the functionally best solution, nor an economically justifiable solution, nor acceptable in terms of townscape’. Early on, conventionally enough, the practice entered competitions, some for high-vis projects, but more ...

Short Cuts

Jonathan Meades: This Thing Called the Future, 8 September 2016

... page he mentions Elon Musk’s Hyperloop projects, which have their origins in the work of the English engineer Eric Laithwaite, whose promising trials of magnetic levitation were shortsightedly thwarted by the Heath government’s withdrawal of funding. Maglev might have become a commercial reality had Laithwaite, like so many of his ...

The Great Escape

Philip Purser, 18 August 1994

The Fortunes of Casanova, and Other Stories 
by Rafael Sabatini, selected by Jack Adrian.
Oxford, 284 pp., £15.95, January 1994, 9780192123190
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... has expanded to take in other genres, but his hunting ground – or boneyard – is still popular English fiction from about 1880 to 1950, in particular the magazine stories which were an important source of income for writers of that period. So far, this year, Rafael Sabatini and E.F. Benson have been given the benefit of one of his handsome and scholarly ...

Orwellspeak

Julian Symons, 9 November 1989

The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of ‘St George’ Orwell 
by John Rodden.
Oxford, 478 pp., £22.50, October 1989, 0 19 503954 8
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... persona” was at issue,’ he is simply mistaken, in part no doubt because he views the English scene from across the Atlantic. The sales were large because the book was a Left Book Club selection, disliked by many members, and you could have attended many literary gatherings in pre-war London without hearing the Orwell persona mentioned. Nor is it ...

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