If everybody had a Wadley

Terry Castle: ‘Joe’ Carstairs, the ‘fastest woman on water’, 5 March 1998

The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of ‘Joe’ Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water 
by Kate Summerscale.
Fourth Estate, 248 pp., £12.99, August 1997, 1 85702 360 9
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... annual holidays in New York and the Riviera to local beauties. No such scruples inhibited Father Julian Henshaw, the Firbankian priest Carstairs brought in from Capri to preside over the spiritual life of the island: on his merry way to drinking and fox-trotting himself to death, he delighted in pederastic idylls with his Whale Cay choirboys.As the years ...

Beebology

Stefan Collini: What next for the BBC?, 21 April 2022

The BBC: A People’s History 
by David Hendy.
Profile, 638 pp., £25, January, 978 1 78125 525 4
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This Is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain? 1922-2022 
by Simon J. Potter.
Oxford, 288 pp., £20, April, 978 0 19 289852 4
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... The Black and White Minstrel Show, just as I laughed at the byplay between ‘Sandy and my fwiend Julian’ in Round the Horne without understanding the innuendo.My epiphany occurred late on a Saturday evening in November 1962. I was a spotty 15-year-old with an unsteady grasp of the difference between girls and Martians, and a literary urge whose expression ...

No Foreigners

Jonathan Rée: Derrida’s Hospitality, 10 October 2024

Hospitality, Volume 1 
by Jacques Derrida, edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf, translated by E.S. Burt.
Chicago, 267 pp., £35, November 2024, 978 0 226 82801 5
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Hospitality, Volume 2 
by Jacques Derrida, edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf, translated by Peggy Kamuf.
Chicago, 261 pp., £36, April 2024, 978 0 226 83130 5
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... he called ‘irreplaceable’), while the saint’s embrace of a leper in Flaubert’s ‘Julian the Hospitaller’ takes hospitality to another extreme. Meanwhile Molière’s Dom Juan plays host to a stone guest, the statue of a man he slaughtered, who returns the invitation; which may remind us of the way Hamlet follows the ghost of his murdered ...

A Susceptible Man

Ian Sansom: The Unhappy Laureate, 4 March 1999

Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis 
by Albert Gelpi.
Oxford, 246 pp., £30, March 1998, 0 19 509863 3
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... have been, according to A. Alvarez, ‘a professional patrician’, but he was also, according to Martin Dodsworth, guilty of ‘artistic parasitism’. In his capacity as Poet Laureate, according to Julian Symons, even ‘the task of producing semiofficial occasional poems that were also of poetic interest defeated ...

Passing-Out Time

Christopher Tayler: Patrick Hamilton’s drinking, 29 January 2009

The Slaves of Solitude 
by Patrick Hamilton.
Constable, 327 pp., £7.99, September 2008, 978 1 84529 415 1
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The Gorse Trilogy 
by Patrick Hamilton.
Black Spring, 603 pp., £9.95, June 2007, 978 0 948238 34 5
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... to his current position as the go-to guy for shabby-genteel, pub-dwelling pre-colour seediness. (Julian Maclaren-Ross, his main competition these days, is associated with a slightly later period and a more confident bohemianism.) Jones had one or two revelations about Hamilton’s pitiable sex life, which was often confined to paying women to let him tie ...

Roaming the Greenwood

Colm Tóibín: A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods, 21 January 1999

A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition 
by Gregory Woods.
Yale, 448 pp., £24.95, February 1998, 0 300 07201 5
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... a gay novel called “Nineteen Forty-Eight”, in which two young Londoners called Winston and Julian fall in love with each other and struggle to sustain their relationship under the continuous threat of blackmail, exposure and arrest.’ He realises, of course, that neither Orwell nor his straight readers had any idea that the novel could be read in this ...

Mullahs and Heretics

Tariq Ali: A Secular History of Islam, 7 February 2002

... contact with continental Europe. He received promises of support and much encouragement from Count Julian, the Exarch of Septem (Ceuta in Morocco). In April 711, Musa’s leading lieutenant, Tarik bin Ziyad, assembled an army of 7000 men, and crossed over to Europe near the rock which still bears his name, Jabal Tarik (or Gibraltar). Once again, the Muslim ...

When Bitcoin Grows Up

John Lanchester: What is Money?, 21 April 2016

... Stone Money’, published in 1991. There’s a particularly good retelling of the story by Felix Martin in his 2013 book Money: The Unauthorised Biography. Yap has no metal. There’s nothing to make into coins. What the Yapese do instead is sail 250 miles to an island called Palau, where there’s a particular kind of limestone not available on their home ...

It’s already happened

James Meek: The NHS Goes Private, 22 September 2011

... between car and human engineering. Jill Charnley remembers him roaring down to London in his Aston Martin – ‘a brute of a car, a good engineering car’ – to visit her. He told her he was redesigning nature, and illustrated his theories with ball bearings from the British Motor Corporation’s new Mini. They were married in 1957 and Jill moved into his ...

My Heroin Christmas

Terry Castle: Art Pepper and Me, 18 December 2003

... seek button – derangingly – every two or three seconds. Burbly soft rock, stale oldies, Dean Martin singing Christmas carols, Mexican polka music, endless mirthless ads for Petco and Wal-Mart – the full auditory wasteland of American popular culture assailed us. Shades of when we used to be girlfriends. We bickered most of the rest of the way. By the ...

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

... defendants pleaded not guilty. Six men and six women then took their place in the jury box, and Mr Julian Bevan QC stood up to open for the Crown. According to lawyers and journalists who have observed him at work, Bevan is a ‘pleasant, mild sort of man’, ‘jolly in a hail-fellow-well-met sort of way’, ‘nice, but lacking the instinct for the jugular ...

After Martha

Paul Laity, 25 September 2025

... the liver team is seen as a ‘flagship service’.The patient safety expert (and airline pilot) Martin Bromiley believes there is a lack of oversight of influential consultants within hospitals: ‘You have people in charge with no process for reviewing or observing them. They are allowed to just go off and practise, to have a lot of autonomy and ...