‘You are my heart’s delight’

Susannah Clapp, 7 June 1984

A Portrait of Fryn: A Biography of F. Tennyson Jesse 
by Joanna Colenbrander.
Deutsch, 305 pp., £12.95, March 1984, 0 233 97572 1
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... and favoured a mewing private language: ‘I began a big pastermiece – a dragon, and a lady in a birthday-suit – for which Dod is going to sit.’ They dressed up as butterflies and bacchantes, and squeaked about sex over cocoa and boiled eggs; Mrs Colenbrander tells us that when Harold and Laura Knight arrived: ‘Their brilliant painting ...

Zest

David Reynolds: The Real Mrs Miniver, 25 April 2002

The Real Mrs Miniver 
by Ysenda Maxtone Graham.
Murray, 314 pp., £17.99, November 2001, 0 7195 5541 8
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Mrs Miniver 
by Jan Struther.
Virago, 153 pp., £7.99, November 2001, 1 85381 090 8
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... affluent, it is essential to the film that they are middle class, unlike the aristocratic Lady Beldon. Her granddaughter, Carol, becomes engaged to the Minivers’ elder son, Vin, before he leaves to fight with the RAF. After toying with various endings, MGM killed off Carol in an air raid, leaving Vin and ...

Mmmm, chicken nuggets

Bee Wilson: The Victorian Restaurant Scene, 15 August 2019

The London Restaurant: 1840-1914 
by Brenda Assael.
Oxford, 239 pp., £60, July 2018, 978 0 19 881760 4
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... the Berkeley in Piccadilly even allowed unchaperoned female diners. In 1899, a piece in the Lady claimed that thirty years earlier women had almost never dined in public. Only one or two respectable establishments had allowed female customers, and women were expected to be accompanied by their husbands. Now, the writer for the ...
... wax hardened around them, needed to throw stones at the Irish Literary Revival, led by Yeats and Lady Gregory. ‘The “Irish” Literary Theatre,’ Pearse wrote in 1899,is, in my opinion, more dangerous, because less glaringly anti-national than Trinity College. If we once admit the Irish literature is English idea, then the language movement is a ...

Biscuits. Oh good!

Anna Vaux: Antonia White, 27 May 1999

Antonia White 
by Jane Dunn.
Cape, 484 pp., £20, November 1998, 9780224036191
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... insanity.’ One has to agree: sanity is a long way off as White signs on to become a cleaning lady at her favourite church, gets her flat exorcised, believes a black beetle is the incarnation of Our Lady, and becomes convinced that the Indian mystic Meher Baba is ‘telling’ her to do things: like give up smoking for ...

Sweet Sin

J.P. Stern, 5 August 1982

Marbot 
by Wolfgang Hildesheimer.
Suhrkamp, 326 pp., May 1981, 3 518 03205 4
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... Marbot Bt, the only Roman Catholic among the titled gentry of Northumberland. Andrew’s mother, Lady Catherine, born in 1781 in Dresden, was the daughter of Lord Claverton, who had retired to Redmond Manor (now the property of an Arab magnate), some seventy miles from Marbot Hall, after a lifetime spent in the diplomatic service in Germany, the Low ...

Ravishing

Colm Tóibín: Sex Lives of the Castrati, 8 October 2015

The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds 
by Martha Feldman.
California, 454 pp., £40, March 2015, 978 0 520 27949 0
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Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage and Music in the Life of Atto Melani 
by Roger Freitas.
Cambridge, 452 pp., £22.99, May 2014, 978 1 107 69610 5
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... did not prevent Tenducci, when he arrived in London, from receiving love letters in 1759 from Lady Lyttelton, whose husband wrote to his brother: ‘She has again made herself the talk of the Town by writing Love letters to Signor Tanduchi [sic] a Eunuch, one of which has been shown to several people.’ Dorothea Maunsell fell in love with Tenducci when ...

Forget the Dylai Lama

Thomas Jones: Bob Dylan, 6 November 2003

Dylan's Visions of Sin 
by Christopher Ricks.
Viking, 517 pp., £25, October 2003, 9780670801336
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... Line Saga’, ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ and ‘Mr Tambourine Man’; ‘Lust’ at ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’ and ‘On a Night like This’; ‘Justice’ at ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, ‘Seven Curses’ and ‘Oxford Town’. Ricks aims to demonstrate how the songs under consideration in the first half of his book engage with but avoid the ...

The Devil upon Two Sticks

Charles Nicholl: Samuel Foote, 23 May 2013

Mr Foote’s Other Leg: Comedy, Tragedy and Murder in Georgian London 
by Ian Kelly.
Picador, 462 pp., £18.99, October 2012, 978 0 330 51783 6
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... still raise a smile. The vain but short-statured Garrick was a perennial target. Asked by a lady if the puppets in his new show were life-size, Foote replied: ‘No Madam, they are just a little bigger than Garrick.’ And of the actor’s somewhat mannered tragic style: ‘Garrick was a man born’ – long pause – ‘never to finish a ...

Diary

Terry Castle: Shaking Hands with the Hilldebeest, 31 March 2016

... the Donald?) The Grinch Who Lost Her Emails! The Ethical Wreck! Our Straight-Talking-Thick-Ankled Lady of the Half-Explained! (Will Huma be there?) OMGoddess! It should be awesome, we figure: our first sighting, not only of the She-Deity, but also of her millionaire internet-drone advance guard – boyish CEO putti of Cupertino and Mountain View, who have ...

Don’t Ask Henry

Alan Hollinghurst: Sissiness, 9 October 2008

Belchamber 
by Howard Sturgis.
NYRB, 345 pp., £8.99, May 2008, 978 1 59017 266 7
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... life. Sainty’s life is shaped by two powerful women, very different from each other: his mother, Lady Charmington, a heavy-going Presbyterian Scot, whose severe morals and devotion to good works do not wholly conceal more brutal instincts; and Lady Eccleston, Cissy’s mother, a tireless schemer who constructs the marriage ...

The Real Price of Everything

Hilary Mantel: The Many Lives of Elizabeth Marsh, 21 June 2007

The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History 
by Linda Colley.
HarperPress, 363 pp., £25, June 2007, 978 0 00 719218 2
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... was women of little fortune, and needy widows, Colley tells us, who were willing to go into print. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish letters had been published only posthumously, in 1763. Six years later Elizabeth published anonymously, but this did not give her privacy much protection, as her friends raised a subscription to finance the publication. So ...

Dancing in the Service of Thought

Jonathan Rée: Kierkegaard, 4 August 2005

Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography 
by Joakim Garff, translated by Bruce Kirmmse.
Princeton, 867 pp., £22.95, January 2005, 9780691091655
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... second-floor apartment in the centre of old Copenhagen, across the road from the Church of Our Lady. He knew the building well, but the prospect did not please him. As a student, hapless and heavily in debt, he used to take communion there with his ancient and immovably melancholy father; but that was long ago, and he had been an erratic and inconsistent ...

Introversion Has Its Limits

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Essayism’, 8 March 2018

Essayism 
by Brian Dillon.
Fitzcarraldo, 138 pp., £10.99, June 2017, 978 1 910695 41 8
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Sound: Stories of Hearing Lost and Found 
by Bella Bathurst.
Wellcome, 224 pp., £8.99, February 2018, 978 1 78125 776 0
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Proxies: A Memoir in Twenty-Four Attempts 
by Brian Blanchfield.
Picador, 181 pp., £9.99, August 2017, 978 1 5098 4785 3
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... taxing it. But Woolf has found in Hare’s book a scene of extremity with which to end her essay: Lady Waterford would wave to [her husband] and think, each time, what if this should be the last? And so it was one morning. His horse stumbled. He was killed. She knew it before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he ran downstairs the ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Where I was in 1993, 16 December 1993

... approaches a nurse:QM: Don’t you know who I am?Nurse: No, dear, but if you go over and ask the lady at the desk she’ll probably be able to tell you.14 January. Most of the headlines this morning quote Bush’s remark that they have given Saddam Hussein ‘a spanking’, a homely term which nicely obscures the fact, nowhere mentioned, that people were ...