Diary

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

... campaign fundraiser for HRC. (Don’t ask, don’t tell.) Yes: Her Herness Herself! A friendly little plush-covered gathering for six hundred at some well-connected Palo Alto dweller’s farcically supersized manse! The next best thing to a private audience with the Hilldebeest! The Many-Horned Hillaria! (Bernie who?) Hellza-poppin’ H-Rod! (Not the ...

Had he not run

David Reynolds: America’s longest-serving president, 2 June 2005

Franklin Delano Roosevelt 
by Roy Jenkins.
Pan, 208 pp., £7.99, May 2005, 0 330 43206 0
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Franklin D. Roosevelt 
by Patrick Renshaw.
Longman, 223 pp., $16.95, December 2003, 0 582 43803 9
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom 
by Conrad Black.
Weidenfeld, 1280 pp., £17.99, October 2004, 0 7538 1848 5
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... Black draws on the work of pioneering scholars such as William Leuchtenburg, Frank Freidel and Arthur Schlesinger, but he also incorporates a large amount of original material from the Roosevelt Library. And although Black credits a number of research assistants, the argument bears his personal stamp. For FDR, somewhat improbably, turns out to be his great ...

Chapmaniac

Colin Burrow: Chapman’s Homer, 27 June 2002

Chapman’s Homer: The ‘Iliad’ 
edited by Allardyce Nicoll.
Princeton, 613 pp., £13.95, December 1998, 0 691 00236 3
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Chapman’s Homer: The ‘Odyssey’ 
edited by Allardyce Nicoll.
Princeton, 613 pp., £13.95, January 2001, 0 691 04891 6
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... verse translation of Homer before 1598 would have made Homer, or anyone with an ear, groan. Arthur Hall, from Grantham in Lincolnshire, had trundled out ten books of the Iliad in flat, heavy fourteeners in 1581. Hall did not work from the Greek, or even from the Latin, but from Hugues Salel’s French translation, which was in turn translated from a ...

How the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 gave birth to a memorial industry

Norman Finkelstein: Uses of the Holocaust, 6 January 2000

The Holocaust in American Life 
by Peter Novick.
Houghton Mifflin, 320 pp., £16.99, June 1999, 0 395 84009 0
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... Sixties, only a handful of books and films touched on the subject. Jewish intellectuals paid it little attention. No monuments or tributes marked the event. On the contrary, major Jewish organisations opposed such a memorialisation.Fear of alienating Gentiles by emphasising the distinctiveness of Jewish experience was always a problem for American (as well ...

Beaverosity

Seamus Perry: Biography of a Biography, 11 September 2025

Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker 
by Zachary Leader.
Harvard, 449 pp., £29.95, May, 978 0 674 24839 7
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... alone in a London park for two hours during their elopement while he called on the critic Arthur Symons. ‘She thought he would not return,’ Ellmann says. Empson considered it a libel on Nora’s character to imply that she ran away with a man of whom she could think so dimly, and he was not persuaded when he tracked down the source in the ...

Diary

Craig Raine: In Moscow, 22 March 1990

... closed off by her security men. I see a couple of proprietorial Russians trying to ferry Arthur Miller to the graveside. Squeezing past, he steps apologetically on our toes in one direction and then again in the other direction – but gets no nearer the epicentre represented by Yevtushenko and the television cameras. Yevtushenko introduces each ...

An Infinity of Novels

Philip Horne, 14 September 1989

A Short Guide to the World Novel: From Myth to Modernism 
by Gilbert Phelps.
Routledge, 397 pp., £30, September 1988, 0 415 00765 8
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The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction 
by John Sutherland.
Longman, 696 pp., £35, March 1989, 0 582 49040 5
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The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914 
by Peter Keating.
Secker, 533 pp., £30, September 1989, 0 436 23248 0
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... in an Irish lunatic asylum’; after 13 years the wife died and she could at last marry him. It is little wonder that she was interested in bigamy. There is a good deal of bad behaviour recorded in these pages: Froude’s father buying up from the bookshops and destroying his son’s slightly scandalous Shadows of the Clouds (1847); Bulwer-Lytton having his ...

Different Stories

David Hoy, 8 January 1987

Nietzsche: Life as Literature 
by Alexander Nehamas.
Harvard, 261 pp., £14.95, January 1986, 0 674 62435 1
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... the generation of younger Anglophone philosophers benefiting from the work of Walter Kaufmann and Arthur Danto. Anyone at all interested in Nietzsche will certainly want to read it. Nehamas’s reading of Nietzsche is, however, an example of a more general method of literary and philosophical interpretation which he has worked out independently. In ‘The ...

Literature and the Left

Marilyn Butler, 18 August 1983

English Literature in History: 1730-80: An Equal, Wide Survey 
edited by Raymond Williams, by John Barrell.
Hutchinson, 228 pp., £13.50, March 1983, 0 09 149820 1
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English Literature in History: 1350-1400: Medieval Readers and Writers 
edited by Raymond Williams, by Janet Coleman.
Hutchinson, 337 pp., £12, July 1981, 0 09 144100 5
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English Literature in History: 1780-1830: Pastoral and Politics 
edited by Raymond Williams, by Roger Sales.
Hutchinson, 247 pp., £13.50, March 1983, 0 09 149830 9
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The Cambridge Guide to English Literature 
by Michael Stapleton.
Cambridge/Newnes Books, 992 pp., £15, April 1983, 9780521256476
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... word, there has been radio and tape since. But this is a regretful aside, which appears to have little bearing on a series evidently designed for the use of students of academic Eng Lit. Williams has worked out a guarded compromise, and briefed his team of specialists to select three themes they think important (affecting ‘writing of a certain ...

Moral Lepers

John Banville: Easter 1916, 16 July 2015

Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923 
by R.F. Foster.
Allen Lane, 433 pp., £10.99, May 2015, 978 0 241 95424 9
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... were patriotic, and used the revolution ‘as a useful cloak for the settling of scores that had little to do with ideas of nationalism or “the nation”’. In fact, Foster, in his introduction to Vivid Faces, questions whether the Rising and the War of Independence together constituted a revolution at all, ‘in the generally accepted meaning of the ...

She gives me partridges

Bee Wilson: Alma Mahler, 5 November 2015

Malevolent Muse: The Life of Alma Mahler 
by Oliver Hilmes, translated by Donald Arthur.
Northeastern, 360 pp., £29, May 2015, 978 1 55553 789 0
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... about his physical defects. ‘My dear, you keep on stressing, as often as you can, how precious little I am and have, how many things make me unsuitable to belong to you … Have you got so much to give, so infinitely much … that everyone else is a beggar by comparison?! Exchanging love for love, that’s all I know.’ Exchanging love for love was not ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2013, 9 January 2014

... not just because they were considerably cheaper, which of course they were, but because one had little sense of being exploited. Now as I pay my water bills for instance, I think of their overpaid executives and the shareholders to whom the profits go and I know, despite the assurances of all such companies, that they are charging what they know they can ...

A Girl Called Retina

Tom Crewe: You’ll like it when you get there, 13 August 2020

British Summer Time Begins: The School Summer Holidays, 1930-80 
by Ysenda Maxtone Graham.
Little, Brown, 352 pp., £18.99, July 2020, 978 1 4087 1055 5
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... in 1932) says, ‘and the money we earned went towards Christmas. And it meant we could afford little luxuries like soap and flannels. We were outside in the sunshine all day, singing, putting the hops in big bins made of sacking.’ Kath Crawley remembers going picking and being thrown into the Yalding River by the Kray twins: ‘They were boisterous kids ...

Camden Town Toreros

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Corey Fah Does Social Mobility’, 4 January 2024

Corey Fah Does Social Mobility 
by Isabel Waidner.
Hamish Hamilton, 160 pp., £12.99, July, 978 0 241 63253 6
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... Waidner favours a hybrid, even mutated, form able to sprout wings without losing its sharp little teeth. Sterling is kept in detention in Margate pending trial, and the unfairness of this is not personalised but laid out in statistical terms: ‘Of everyone leaving detention in the last decade, 66 per cent were detained for less than 29 days, 17 per ...