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Thank God for John Rayburn

Mark Ford, 24 January 1991

Hunting Mister Heartbreak 
by Jonathan Raban.
Harvill, 428 pp., £14, November 1990, 0 00 272031 0
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... of the title derives from Berryman’s witty Englishing of his name to Aldous Huxley, from William Bradford to W.H. Auden, have discovered in America an unformulated open space hospitably ready to accommodate their private myths of self-realisation. To less determined or less visionary immigrants it offers a wide variety of ready-made life-styles, and ...

Montale’s Eastbourne

Michael Hofmann, 23 May 1991

The Coastguard’s House 
by Eugenio Montale, translated by Jeremy Reed.
Bloodaxe, 223 pp., £7.95, December 1990, 1 85224 100 4
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... Of this sea-shore. Coldly the wind claws me But a burning light snakes along the windows And white mica of cliffs Glitters in that glare. Bank Holiday ... It brings back the long wave Of my own life, Creeping and sliding, sluggish up the slope. It’s getting late. The brassy noise balloons And sags to silence. There come now on their wheelchairs the ...

Breeding

Frank Kermode, 21 July 1994

The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner 
edited by Claire Harman.
Chatto, 384 pp., £25, June 1994, 0 7011 3659 6
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Sylvia and David: The Townsend Warner/Garnett Letters 
Sinclair-Stevenson, 246 pp., £20, June 1994, 1 85619 341 1Show More
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... she needed to. In addition to the stories and novels she wrote poetry, and a biography of T.H. White. She also translated Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve, was a devoted correspondent, and kept a diary running to 38 volumes. More surprisingly, she was a musicologist of considerable importance, as well as a knowledgeable gardener and a resourceful cook. Since ...

Diary

Clive James, 19 August 1982

... paint Which flies in dollops like wet chamois leathers Whilst air-burst cardboard shells disgorge white feathers. My own view is we ought to go ahead Even though press support brings only shame. But my view’s that of one with a warm bed While others face the shrapnel and the flame. What can you do except note with due dread The other side in this case are ...

Diary

James MacGibbon: Fashionable Radicals, 22 January 1987

... sell a recorded million copies. The others, with their appealing titles, were not far behind: The White Ladies of Worcester, The Mistress of Shenstone, The Postern Gate. They were suitable for ‘your daughter’ – innocent, well-written romances, very popular as Sunday school prizes at half-a-crown. They had an unobstrusive religious whiff, more Methodist ...

At the Foundling Museum

Joanne O’Leary: ‘Portraying Pregnancy’, 2 April 2020

... Court Road turnpike during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745: the guards, in their red coats and white spatterdashes, have gathered ahead of the march to Finchley Common. Drunken grenadiers fondle milkmaids and pilfer pies, prostitutes hang out of the windows of the tavern. In the midst of the chaos, a heavily pregnant ballad-seller bids farewell to her ...

Powers of Darkness

Michael Taylor: Made by Free Hands, 21 October 2021

Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition 
by Bronwen Everill.
Harvard, 318 pp., £31.95, September 2020, 978 0 674 24098 8
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... freed.Free produce was not limited to colonial crops. As well as sugar, cotton and rice (both white and ‘red’), British merchants could acquire a range of new and exotic goods from African sellers. Palm oil and peanut oil were lubricants for industrial machinery and were also used in the production of soap and candles; camwood was a brilliant red ...

The Real Thing

Jenni Quilter, 21 April 2016

Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter 
by Cathy Curtis.
Oxford, 432 pp., £20.99, April 2015, 978 0 19 939450 0
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... which toured Europe during 1958-59. Nelson Rockefeller bought a painting, as did the playwright William Inge. Life magazine called her ‘the most celebrated of the young American women painters’. Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan at the opening of Frankenthaler’s solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York (1957) That ...

Vibrating to the Chord of Queer

Elaine Showalter: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 6 March 2003

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity 
by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Duke, 216 pp., £14.95, March 2003, 0 8223 3015 6
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Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory 
edited by Stephen Barber and David Clark.
Routledge, 285 pp., £55, September 2002, 0 415 92818 4
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... Feeling, the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes its strange and haunting black and white cover photograph as ‘the catalyst that impelled me to assemble the book in its present form’. It depicts a woman clumsily embracing an object that resembles an enormous wasps’ nest made of sticks and twine. The woman’s eyes are shut, and her face is ...

Can you close your eyes without falling over?

Hugh Pennington: Symptoms of Syphilis, 11 September 2003

Pox: Genius, Madness and the Mysteries of Syphilis 
by Deborah Hayden.
Basic Books, 379 pp., £20.99, January 2003, 0 465 02881 0
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... diseases. ‘Know syphilis . . . and all things clinical will be added unto you,’ the great Sir William Osler had said. But it was vital to get things right. Drugs were available, but they were dangerous and expensive. In the untreated, symptoms could disappear quickly, as the organism went to ground, only to re-emerge randomly and unpredictably decades ...

How bad are we?

Bernard Porter: Genocide in Tasmania, 31 July 2014

The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania 
by Tom Lawson.
Tauris, 263 pp., £25, January 2014, 978 1 78076 626 3
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... were none – only mixed-race Tasmanians and those deported to the Australian mainland survived. (William Lanne, the ‘last man’ of Tom Lawson’s title, died in 1869; two Tasmanian women survived him briefly.) There is also disagreement about the way they met their end, or rather about the relative roles played by settler violence, intertribal ...

Fanfaronade

Will Self: James Ellroy, 2 December 2010

The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women 
by James Ellroy.
Heinemann, 203 pp., £16.99, September 2010, 978 0 434 02064 5
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... to that of You Can’t Win, Jack Black’s crim chapbook from 1926, which introduced the jejune William Burroughs to the outlaw lifestyle. The Badge is a breathlessly ingenuous account of Los Angeles’s competitive and notoriously corrupt law enforcement agencies in the 1940s and 1950s. Describing the last hours of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short – the ...

How so very dear

Joshua Cohen: Ben Marcus, 21 June 2012

The Flame Alphabet: A Novel 
by Ben Marcus.
Granta, 289 pp., £16.99, June 2012, 978 1 84708 622 8
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... suddenly, voices are heard, short and longwave sermons. LeBov (there’s an echo in his name of William Labov, pioneer of sociolinguistics, and of the Baal Shem Tov, Master of the Good Name, founder of Eastern Hasidism) believes the key to a cure is to be found in these voices, in their staticky messages that only forest Jews can decode. Samuel, who’d ...

Freebooter

Maurice Keen: The diabolical Sir John Hawkwood, 5 May 2005

Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman 
by Frances Stonor Saunders.
Faber, 366 pp., £17.99, November 2004, 9780571219087
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... of Frances Stonor Saunders’s biography of Sir John Hawkwood (c.1320-94), one-time leader of the White Company made famous by Conan Doyle’s historical novels. The 14th century was indeed an age of opportunity for military adventurers, and for mercenary soldiers in particular. Independent companies, led by seasoned captains, and with their own internal ...

Ends of the Earth

Jeremy Harding: ‘Mimesis: African Soldier’, 6 December 2018

Mimesis: African Soldier 
by John Akomfrah.
Imperial War Museum, until 30 March 2018
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... Olusoga tells us, who worried about the fate of African conscripts in any struggle between white men in the unforgiving north. Above all there was the fear that racial hierarchies might be jeopardised in the colonies when the war ended. White South African settlers were adamant about this. It was madness, in their ...

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