Anything but Staffordshire

Rosemary Hill, 18 September 1997

Rare Spirit: A Life of William De Morgan 1839-1917 
by Mark Hamilton.
Constable, 236 pp., £22.50, September 1997, 0 09 474670 2
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... the museum had been created in the first place, were given their first reassessment. The curator, Elizabeth Aslin, recalled hearing the sound of sledgehammers destroying Victorian tiles and furnishings in one part of the museum as she set but the exhibits in another. The balance of taste had, however, begun to shift for De Morgan the potter. The novelist will ...

Short Cuts

Mattathias Schwartz: John Bolton’s Unwitting Usefulness, 16 July 2020

... until after the mid-term elections, because ‘there’s nothing positive about the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders having more authority.’ Trump may be bad, but Democratic gains would be worse: Bolton seems determined to remain in the good graces of the Republican Party while condemning the sitting Republican president. He toes the party ...

No More D Minor

Peter Phillips: Tallis Survives, 29 July 2021

Tallis 
by Kerry McCarthy.
Oxford, 288 pp., £25.99, October 2020, 978 0 19 063521 3
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... resilient. He lived to be eighty, having served four monarchs (Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I) and spent 43 years as a member of the Chapel Royal. Unfortunately for historians, his music and his longevity are all we have to go on, since Tallis left almost nothing about himself. Unlike William Byrd and John Sheppard, he wrote no letters that ...

Trump: Some Numbers

R.W. Johnson, 3 November 2016

... years in advance and she had a virtual monopoly of super-delegates. If a left-wing Democrat like Elizabeth Warren runs next time she will not face such an opponent. Sanders might well have beaten Trump. And while it would have caused a Democrat civil war, given the ‘entitled’ Clinton bandwagon, Obama probably missed a trick by discouraging Joe Biden from ...

Utterly Oyster

Andrew O’Hagan: Fergie-alike, 12 August 2021

The Bench 
by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, illustrated by Christian Robinson.
Puffin, 40 pp., £12.99, May 2021, 978 0 241 54221 7
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Her Heart for a Compass 
by Sarah, Duchess of York.
Mills & Boon, 549 pp., £14.99, August 2021, 978 0 00 838360 2
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... children about, or sell to them, rather than simply give.Lilibet II’s great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon could get very caught up in the swooshiness of poetry. She loved going fishing with Ted Hughes. In the long boring afternoons in the Highlands, the hours between kippers and drinkies, poor Ted would take her down to the river and start ...

Why praise Astaire?

Michael Wood: Stanley Cavell, 20 October 2005

Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow 
by Stanley Cavell.
Harvard, 302 pp., £18.95, May 2005, 0 674 01704 8
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... deaths’ reappear in Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, again in connection with scepticism. When Elizabeth Bennet receives a letter from Darcy and realises that she has been ‘blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd’, this moment of self-knowledge also represents, Cavell says, her knowledge of being known, of being acknowledged, ‘as if until then her ...

Outcanoevre

Aingeal Clare: Alice Oswald, 23 March 2006

Woods etc 
by Alice Oswald.
Faber, 56 pp., £12.99, May 2005, 0 571 21852 0
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... about nature but refuses to call them ‘nature poems’. Her work is ‘full of hymns’, as Elizabeth Bishop said of her own, as well as pagan shouts and birdcalls. Oswald paints wild, stormy miniatures through which large figures lurch, blindfolded and burdened: A mouldering man, a powdered and reconstituted one, walking the same so on and so ...

Underlinings

Ruth Scurr: A.S. Byatt, 10 August 2000

The Biographer's Tale 
by A.S. Byatt.
Chatto, 224 pp., £14.99, June 2000, 0 7011 6945 1
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... difference between his approach to biographical writing and that of Lytton Strachey:   In Elizabeth and Essex, Lytton Strachey writes of Francis Bacon: ‘an old man, disgraced, shattered, alone, on Highgate Hill, stuffing a dead fowl with snow.’ The story of stuffing the hen with snow is Aubrey’s, and may be read here. Bacon was certainly an old ...

Nymph of the Grot

Nicholas Penny, 13 April 2000

The Culture of the High Renaissance 
by Ingrid Rowland.
Cambridge, 384 pp., £40, February 1999, 0 521 58145 1
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Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 
by Francesco Colonna, translated by Joscelyn Godwin.
Thames and Hudson, 476 pp., £42, November 1999, 0 500 01942 8
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After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the 16th Century 
by Marcia Hall.
Cambridge, 349 pp., £45, March 1999, 0 521 48245 3
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... desert. The other lunettes do not detain Rowland, although it is likely that Saint Elizabeth, Saint Sebastian, Saint Barbara and so on meant as much to the Pope as Catherine did, and more than the story of Apis (or the Ovidian episodes from the tale of Jupiter and Io, ‘Borgia beef in a feminine key’) on the vault above, which would, in the ...

Unction and Slaughter

Simon Walker: Edward IV, 10 July 2003

Arthurian Myths and Alchemy: The Kingship of Edward IV 
by Jonathan Hughes.
Sutton, 354 pp., £30, October 2002, 0 7509 1994 9
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... and betrayal in a ruined Camelot, completed as the King was forced to flee into exile in 1470. Elizabeth Woodville, Edward’s ambitious wife, had, it seemed, been his Guinevere: ‘Her beauty and falsehood caused such discord that caused all Arthur’s Court and his princes to be slain.’ Edward’s exile proved brief but, following his decisive return ...

A Girl’s Best Friend

Thomas Jones: Tobias Hill, 21 August 2003

The Cryptographer 
by Tobias Hill.
Faber, 263 pp., £12, August 2003, 0 571 21836 9
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... before his murder’ in 1467, and passed through various hands, including those of Elizabeth I – she can be seen wearing the jewel in the ‘Ermine Portrait’ that hangs in Hatfield House – until it was finally lost in the 19th century. In The Love of Stones, the history of the Three Brethren is told by Katharine Sterne, a young woman who ...

A Prehistory of Extraordinary Rendition

Patrick Cockburn, 13 September 2012

... most, saying she showed ‘amiability verging on weakness’. He and his new and pregnant wife, Elizabeth, were in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion. Their house was damaged in the fighting, though more by the efforts of amateur firefighters than by the rebels. At one point a messenger he tried to send out of the city was crucified by the Boxers: Henry told ...

Momentous Conjuncture

Geoffrey Best: Dracula in Churchill’s toyshop, 18 March 2004

Prof: The Life of Frederick Lindemann 
by Adrian Fort.
Cape, 374 pp., £18.99, October 2003, 0 224 06317 0
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... there) and had come to feel some Remains-of-the-Day-like affection for one of his supporters, Lady Elizabeth Lindsay. Nothing came of it. She died of pneumonia early in 1937, and the Prof never loved again. Back on the committee, he seems to have behaved better, even being bracketed with Tizard in R.V. Jones’s account of the completion of the radar chain and ...

A Man’s Man’s World

Steven Shapin: Kitchens, 30 November 2000

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly 
by Anthony Bourdain.
Bloomsbury, 307 pp., £16.99, August 2000, 0 7475 5072 7
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... conviction. It was, after all, Escoffier who instructed his disciples, ‘Faites simple,’ and Elizabeth David who memorialised La Mère Poulard’s response to a Parisian restaurateur’s request for the secret of her famous omelettes at the Auberge de Saint-Michel Tête d’Or: ‘Voici la recette de l’omelette: je casse de bons œufs dans une ...

Creases and Flecks

Laura Quinney: Mark Doty, 3 October 2002

Still Life with Oysters and Lemon 
by Mark Doty.
Beacon, 72 pp., $11, January 2002, 0 8070 6609 5
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Source 
by Mark Doty.
Cape, 69 pp., £8, April 2002, 9780224062282
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... description more generally. Sometimes Doty describes a work of art (Murano glass, a watercolour by Elizabeth Bishop), sometimes an ordinary object (a second-hand kimono, a crab shell), sometimes a part of the natural world (beaches, horses, dogs), sometimes a man-made scene (gardens, harbours, Times Square). He recognises how fond of description he is, and ...