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Dying Falls

John Lanchester, 23 July 1987

Temporary Shelter 
by Mary Gordon.
Bloomsbury, 231 pp., £11.95, July 1987, 0 7475 0006 1
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Bluebeard’s Egg 
by Margaret Atwood.
Cape, 287 pp., £10.95, June 1987, 0 224 02245 8
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The Native 
by David Plante.
Chatto, 122 pp., £9.95, May 1987, 0 7011 3247 7
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The March of the Long Shadows 
by Norman Lewis.
Secker, 232 pp., £10.95, May 1987, 0 436 24620 1
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... on what has gone before. In ‘Out of the Fray’, an uneasy pre-marital visit to London ends with Ruth watching her husband-to-be asleep and thinking: ‘She understood that when he left her it would be like death and wondered when it happened how she would go on.’ In that sentence, the word ‘understood’ helps to make Mary Gordon seem to be endorsing an ...

You Dying Nations

Jeremy Adler: Georg Trakl, 17 April 2003

Poems and Prose 
by Georg Trakl, translated by Alexander Stillmark.
Libris, 192 pp., £40, March 2001, 1 870352 51 3
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... monk, the virgin and the orphan – become archetypes: his ‘gentle orphan girl’ is the Hebrew Ruth, a Christian martyr and a contemporary victim of sexual murder: Returning home The shepherds found the sweet body Decayed in the thorn-bush. The poet is the scarred victim: I am a shadow far from sombre villages, God’s silence I drank from the spring in ...

Clarety Clarity

Colin Burrow: Herrick and His Maidens, 31 July 2014

The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick 
edited by Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly.
Oxford, 504 pp. and 803 pp., £125, October 2013, 978 0 19 921284 2
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... destroyed a number of his poems in November of that year, ‘confine him to the brew-houses,/The glass-house, dye-vats and their furnaces.’ Cain and Connolly don’t note this echo, but it does help date this poem, and is a good indicator of how rambunctiously Herrick could transform his master. He implicitly compares himself to the fiery element that had ...

Richardson, alas

Claude Rawson, 12 November 1987

Samuel Richardson 
by Jocelyn Harris.
Cambridge, 179 pp., £22.50, February 1987, 0 521 30501 2
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... a model for Clarissa. Astell has been called ‘England’s first feminist’ in a good book by Ruth Perry, where she is also shown to have been (like Richardson) generally conservative in religion and politics.* Like some other critics, Mrs Harris reads Richardson’s novels in the context of Locke’s rebuttal of Filmer’s theories of government, and of ...

The New Lloyd’s

Peter Campbell, 24 July 1986

Richard Rogers 
by Bryan Appleyard.
Faber, 271 pp., £9.95, March 1986, 0 571 13976 0
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A Concrete Atlantis 
by Reyner Banham.
MIT, 265 pp., £16.50, June 1986, 0 262 02244 3
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William Richard Lethaby 
by Godfrey Rubens.
Architectural Press, 320 pp., £30, April 1986, 0 85139 350 0
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... and practical difficulties ... Years later it was Georgie who was to warn Rogers’s second wife, Ruth, not to marry him as he would expect her to look after him every minute of the day, just as Dada had cared for Nino. Dada and Nino being his parents. Georgie had also been his draughtsman, and his inability to draw was still a problem. ‘How can we be ...

Gosh, what am I like?

Rosemary Hill: The Revenge Memoir, 17 December 2020

Friends and Enemies: A Memoir 
by Barbara Amiel.
Constable, 592 pp., £25, October 2020, 978 1 4721 3421 9
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Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power 
by Sasha Swire.
Little, Brown, 544 pp., £20, September 2020, 978 1 4087 1341 9
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... never came back. The divorce was ‘loud’. Neither parent wanted Barbara and her younger sister, Ruth, so they were made wards of court. Her father later took his own life. Her mother, who had legal custody of the girls, ‘was busy dating’ and her second marriage to a man from ‘a working-class family unfamiliar with Jews and apparently not very fond of ...

What does she think she looks like?

Rosemary Hill: The Dress in Your Head, 5 April 2018

... crepe and rayon jersey, one of those new wonder easy-care fabrics, and with its pattern of clear glass and silver beads the dernier cri in art deco. From the museum’s point of view the Tinne Collection is a wonderful historical resource, which includes some rare early examples of brassieres, and, as Rushton puts it, it allows one to see ‘a broad range of ...

Air-Conditioned Unease

Andrew O’Hagan: Joan Didion on the Couch, 26 June 2025

Notes to John 
by Joan Didion.
Fourth Estate, 208 pp., £18.99, April, 978 0 00 876724 2
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Didion & Babitz 
by Lili Anolik.
Atlantic, 344 pp., £10.99, July, 978 1 80546 394 8
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The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir 
by Griffin Dunne.
Grove, 385 pp., £10.99, June, 978 1 80471 057 9
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The Uptown Local: Joy, Death and Joan Didion 
by Cory Leadbeater.
Fleet, 213 pp., £12.99, June, 978 0 349 12717 0
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... at being seen, while Didion, next to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, is balanced between a whisky glass and a lit cigarette, looking at Quintana. The difficulties are already inscribed in the dry air between them.Maybe we only begin to understand our families when we recognise the stories we can’t bear to tell about them. Didion would one day write an ...

Here you are talking about duck again

Mark Ford: Larkin’s Letters Home, 20 June 2019

Philip Larkin: Letters Home, 1936-77 
edited by James Booth.
Faber, 688 pp., £40, November 2018, 978 0 571 33559 6
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... his various rented attics, and by keeping his successive (and sometimes simultaneous) lovers – Ruth Bowman, Monica Jones, Patsy Strang, Maeve Brennan, Betty Mackereth – at arm’s length, he managed to preserve not only the sense of freedom that was necessary for his poems, but the connection to Eva that nourished them. Booth even goes so far as to ...

Higher Ordinariness

Jonathan Meades: Poor Surrey, 23 May 2024

Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39 
by Gavin Stamp.
Profile, 568 pp., £40, March, 978 1 80081 739 5
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The Buildings of England: Surrey 
by Charles O’Brien, Ian Nairn and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 854 pp., £60, November 2022, 978 0 300 23478 7
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... Modern Age had already arrived. It was there for all to see in the Germany of the Weimar republic: glass and streamlining and, in the north, in Pomerania, along the Baltic shore, a mighty sculptural brick architecture derived from the cathedrals and warehouses of the Hansa. It was found in the Netherlands in the compelling futurism of Michel de Klerk. Had de ...

The Wickedest Woman in Paris

Colm Tóibín, 6 September 2007

Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins 
by Rupert Everett.
Abacus, 406 pp., £7.99, July 2007, 978 0 349 12058 4
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... Newell, who wanted Rupert to do a bit of work for the role of David Blakely, the guy killed by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England. Newell wanted to see Rupert’s pain. But, as Rupert himself admits, he was ‘a riddle as an actor. On screen, I had a lot of “feeling” but I couldn’t really act. On stage I could act, but people said I ...

Eat butterflies with me?

Patricia Lockwood, 5 November 2020

Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor 
by Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy.
Penguin, 576 pp., £12.99, November, 978 0 14 139838 9
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... too; we all would. It takes place in a paperweight. ‘A coloured spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life.’ A young aristocrat, 75 per cent composed of foraged mushrooms, asks his pristine parents what an erection is, and they tell him that Tolstoy has died. Who can’t relate? But while these early impressions are documented ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2010, 16 December 2010

... which is illustrated in the book, and some of his Welsh landscapes. I don’t care for his stained glass, though churches are always proud when they have a Piper window, the latest (and no more pleasing than the rest) glimpsed at Paul Scofield’s memorial service in St Margaret’s, Westminster. For all that, though, the book is immensely readable, drawing ...

A Comet that Bodes Mischief

Sophie Smith: Women in Philosophy, 25 April 2024

How to Think like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind 
by Regan Penaluna.
Grove, 296 pp., £9.99, March, 978 1 80471 002 9
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The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy 
edited by Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro.
Routledge, 638 pp., £215, June 2023, 978 1 138 21275 6
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... was cast in brass and sculpted in stone and ivory, depicted on carpets, tapestries and stained-glass windows, and in multiple woodcuts and engravings. My favourite is Hans Baldung’s from 1515. A smirking, corpulent Phyllis sits side-saddle, naked save her hat, whip in one hand, reins in the other, a bit in the mouth of her buff steed. The story is meant ...

The Importance of Aunts

Colm Tóibín, 17 March 2011

... be. In Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748-1818, Ruth Perry examined the make-up of the family in the early years of the novel. ‘Despite the emphasis on marriage and motherhood in late 18th-century society,’ she writes, mothers in novels of the period are notoriously absent – dead or otherwise ...

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