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Contemplating adultery

Lotte Hamburger and Joseph Hamburger, 22 January 1987

... plentiful in her difficult marriage to the austere and often deeply depressed philosopher of law, John Austin. The confidences Sarah Austin unfolds in letter after letter are akin to a disrobing of her personality, even her person, as she reveals and boasts about her sensuality, passionate nature, physical attractions and sexual interests. The circumstances ...

Up from Under

John Bayley, 18 February 1988

The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories 
edited by Murray Bail.
Faber, 413 pp., £12.95, January 1988, 0 571 15083 7
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... said: ‘It’s only that the sink got blocked yesterday evening.’   It sounded so horribly gray, and she looking out with that expression of permanence. Then at once he knew he had been right, and that the girl at the dry cleaner’s had something of his mother: it was the core of permanence. Then Clay grew excited. The awkwardly overdone obviousness ...

Every one values Mr Pope

James Winn, 16 December 1993

Alexander Pope: A Critical Edition 
edited by Pat Rogers.
Oxford, 706 pp., £11.95, July 1993, 0 19 281346 3
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Essays on Pope 
by Pat Rogers.
Cambridge, 273 pp., £30, September 1993, 0 521 41869 0
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... he wrote in 1971. ‘Is there a single memorable aperçu in all his letters? The contrast with Gray, or Keats, or even Hopkins, is glaring.’ Ignoring Pope’s outsider status, a product of his Roman Catholic faith and his physical handicap, some self-proclaimed New Historicists have slandered him as an apologist for such establishment vices as ...

Prynne’s Principia

Elizabeth Cook, 16 September 1982

Poems 
by J.H. Prynne.
Agneau 2, 320 pp., £12, May 1982, 0 907954 00 6
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... is the route by which d became t?’ Changing states attract Prynne’s attention much as they did John Donne’s. Here we don’t get ‘gold to ayery thinnesse beat’ or flesh ‘calcined’ into dust. Instead we have syrups, doughs, pastries, and snow that melts into slush: images of reconstitution and dissolution. The first volume included in Poems is ...

The Vice President’s Men

Seymour M. Hersh, 24 January 2019

... In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly conducted at least 35 covert operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and, most ...

The End of Labour?

Colin Kidd, 8 March 2012

... as party leader also felt constrained to observe the Home Rule commitments of his predecessor, John Smith. Of course, once devolution had been achieved, matters were simpler: as members of a UK-wide party, Labour politicians in the new Scottish Parliament were expected to follow the party line dictated by Blair from London, notwithstanding the supposed ...

Bloodbaths

John Sutherland, 21 April 1988

Misery 
by Stephen King.
Hodder, 320 pp., £11.95, September 1987, 0 340 39070 0
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The Tommyknockers 
by Stephen King.
Hodder, 563 pp., £12.95, February 1988, 0 340 39069 7
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Touch 
by Elmore Leonard.
Viking, 245 pp., £10.95, February 1988, 9780670816545
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Sideswipe 
by Charles Willeford.
Gollancz, 293 pp., £10.95, March 1988, 0 575 04197 8
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Ratking 
by Michael Dibdin.
Faber, 282 pp., £10.95, April 1988, 0 571 15147 7
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... like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE McCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers.’ Instead of which he is the ‘King of Horror’ who had his face on ...

Sonata for Second Fiddle

Penelope Fitzgerald, 7 October 1982

A Half of Two Lives: A Personal Memoir 
by Alison Waley.
Weidenfeld, 326 pp., £10.95, September 1982, 0 297 78156 1
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... as a lone figure on the high snow slopes. ‘His gesture was courtly in salutation,’ wrote Basil Gray: ‘he enjoyed conversation, but never spoke himself unless he had something to say.’ His voice was likened to an autumnal wind passing through the reeds. It was accepted, however, by those who knew him that his emotional life was totally consumed by his ...

The Annual MLA Disaster

John Sutherland, 16 December 1993

The Modern Language Association of America: Program for the 109th Convention, Vol. 108, No. 6 
November 1993Show More
The Modern Language Association: Job Information List 
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... or, How to (De)Flower the Rectal Brain: the Increments and Excrements of “Influence” in Dorian Gray and Edward II’ (this, incidentally, is what passes for Wildean wit at the MLA); ‘Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson’; or the terser, but sublimely opaque ‘Autophagy and the Logic of the Absolute Fragment’. These ...

Concierge

John Lanchester, 16 November 1995

Sons of Ezra: British Poets and Ezra Pound 
edited by Michael Alexander and James McGonigal.
Rodopi, 183 pp., $23.50, July 1995, 90 5183 840 9
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‘In Solitude, for Company’: W.H. Auden after 1940 
edited by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins.
Oxford, 338 pp., £40, November 1995, 0 19 818294 5
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Auden 
by Richard Davenport-Hines.
Heinemann, 406 pp., £20, October 1995, 0 434 17507 2
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Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman 
by Thekla Clark.
Faber, 130 pp., £12.99, October 1995, 0 571 17591 0
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... and the Mirror’, ‘what relief have you but in an ever giddier collective gallop ... toward the gray horizon of the bleaker vision ... what goal but the black stone on which the bones are cracked, for only there in its cry of agony can your existence find at last an unequivocal meaning and your refusal to be yourself become a serious despair?’ This ...

‘I thirst for his blood’

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Henry James, 25 November 1999

Henry James: A Life in Letters 
edited by Philip Horne.
Penguin, 668 pp., £25, June 1999, 0 7139 9126 7
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A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art 
by Lyndall Gordon.
Chatto, 500 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6166 3
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... young men’ – James again – as Oliver Wendell Holmes, the future legal scholar John Chipman Gray, and James himself. If Gordon tends to assume rather than show that Woolson’s work has been underrated, her respectful account is a welcome alternative to Edel’s faint condescension; and she makes a ...

Last in the Funhouse

Patrick Parrinder, 17 April 1986

Gerald’s Party 
by Robert Coover.
Heinemann, 316 pp., £10.95, April 1986, 0 434 14290 5
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Caracole 
by Edmund White.
Picador, 342 pp., £9.95, March 1986, 0 330 29291 9
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Lake Wobegon Days 
by Garrison Keillor.
Faber, 337 pp., £9.95, February 1986, 0 571 13846 2
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In Country 
by Bobbie Ann Mason.
Chatto, 245 pp., £9.95, March 1986, 0 7011 3034 2
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... two decades could be summed up in a single title, it would surely be ‘Lost in the Funhouse’. John Barth’s short story, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1967, was a composite text in which an account of a family’s visit to a fairground was spliced in with what appeared to be a set of instructions from a fiction-writer’s manual. The funhouse (in ...

The End of Idiocy on a Planetary Scale

Stephen Holmes: ‘The Communist Manifesto’, 29 October 1998

The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition 
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Verso, 82 pp., £8, April 1998, 1 85984 898 2
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... one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible.’ Hobsbawm, John Gray and others have claimed that the Manifesto remains a momentous work because it foretold the inexorable course of globalisation. The problem is, Marx did not warn against globalisation: he welcomed it. Indeed he exalted it. It spelled, he ...

Progressive Agenda

John Brewer, 18 March 1982

The Watercolours and Drawings of Thomas Bewick and his Workshop Apprentices 
by Iain Bain.
Gordon Fraser, 233 pp., £125, July 1981, 0 86092 057 7
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... as a model for his rural descriptions, praises Bacon and Locke, refers to the poetry of Thomas Gray, Allen Ramsay and Oliver Goldsmith, casually mentions that he does not need to read David Hume on miracles, and obliquely compares his own work with that of Milton? There is a paradox here: the more Bewick strove to establish his credentials as an ...

Pine Trees and Vices

John Bayley, 9 April 1992

The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales 
edited by Chris Baldick.
Oxford, 533 pp., £16.95, March 1992, 0 19 214194 5
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... departure to America, from whose prosperous shores nostalgic tourists would return to visit ‘the gray ruin and the mouldering stone’ of England. Her essay ‘On the Pleasure to be extracted front Objects of Terror’ analysed the Gothic mode as just that. It was a kind of reductio for literary purposes of Burke’s notion of the sublime as the ...

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