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From Victim to Suspect

Stephen Sedley: The Era of the Trial, 21 July 2005

The Trial: A History from Socrates to O.J. Simpson 
by Sadakat Kadri.
HarperCollins, 474 pp., £25, April 2005, 0 00 711121 5
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... plain nonsense, and nothing else.’ The prosecutor had made the mistake of calling Henry Sweet a coward. Who are the cowards in this case? . . . Eleven people with black skins? Eleven people, gentlemen, whose ancestors did not come to America because they wanted to, but were brought here in slave ships, to toil for nothing, for the whites . . . He has ...

Duckies

Jane Mendelsohn, 23 September 1993

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love 
by Oscar Hijuelos.
Penguin, 416 pp., £4.99, November 1990, 0 14 014391 2
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The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien 
by Oscar Hijuelos.
Hamish Hamilton, 484 pp., £15.99, July 1993, 0 241 13431 5
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... her daughter. In my favourite incident, Maria, the third sister, discusses romance with Noël Coward on the deck of an ocean-liner. He calls her ‘ducky’ and lets her know ‘that our lives are rather like the cresting waves, with highs and lows, that the moon illumines the night as emotion brings a glorious flame into our hearts. But what one must ...

Esprit de Corps

Roy Porter, 21 January 1988

Granville Sharp Pattison: Anatomist and Antagonist 1791-1851 
by F.L.M. Pattison.
Canongate, 284 pp., £12.95, October 1987, 0 86241 077 0
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Death, Dissection and the Destitute 
by Ruth Richardson.
Routledge, 426 pp., £19.95, January 1988, 0 7102 0919 3
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... Pattison delivered his by now routine challenge and, when Chapman declined, posted him a liar, coward and scoundrel. A paper duel followed, with vicious pamphleteering on both sides and even an element of fisticuffs. The climax came two years later when Pattison fought a duel at last with Chapman’s brother-in-law, General Thomas Cadwalader. The general ...

Soldier, Sailor, Poacher

E.S. Turner, 3 October 1985

Great Britons: 20th-Century Lives 
by Harold Oxbury.
Oxford, 371 pp., £14.95, September 1985, 0 19 211599 5
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The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes 
edited by Max Hastings.
Oxford, 514 pp., £9.50, October 1985, 0 19 214107 4
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The Long Affray: The Poaching Wars in Britain 
by Harry Hopkins.
Secker, 344 pp., £12.95, August 1985, 9780436201028
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... at their garden gate. Gertrude Lawrence is pictured twice, once in her own right, once with Coward. The trawl is wide: statesmen, benefactors, cricketers, spymasters, captains of industry, band leaders, bishops, kings, a flower arranger, a golf writer, the pioneer of mother-craft, the editors of Medium Aevum, the Journal of Pomology and The New ...

Weeding in the Nude

Ange Mlinko: Edna St Vincent Millay, 26 May 2022

Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St Vincent Millay 
edited by Daniel Mark Epstein.
Yale, 390 pp., £28, March, 978 0 300 24568 4
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... men of my acquaintance dialling their phones, to take me out to the Stork Club, or 21, or a Noel Coward opening! Me, to be stuck in a loony bin with a contingent of bulging old biddies.There are times when one thinks of Sylvia Plath – fellow contest-winner and bathing beauty, vivid diarist, world conqueror – without the breakdowns. Millay lived to enjoy ...

Diary

August Kleinzahler: Too Bad about Mrs Ferri, 20 September 2001

... time I called someone a son of a bitch, which must have sounded preposterously foreign and Noël Coward-like. All activity ceased, and I was viciously assaulted by Tommy Grumulia and Anthony Delvecchio. Boys are formed by the playgrounds they come from. Ours was violent, noisy and profane, somewhat operatic in the Italian manner. But there were no guns or ...

Diary

Rachel Kushner: Bad Captains, 22 January 2015

... where the Concordia capsized, a ship that could cost more than a billion pounds to scrap: he was a coward. ‘Vada a bordo, cazzo!’ a Livorno coastguard captain told him, the call famously recorded, then played and replayed: Vada a bordo, Vada a bordo. I wouldn’t want to get back on board. Who would? It doesn’t seem so pleasant, to have to go down with ...

The Stamp of One Defect

David Edgar: Jeremy Thorpe, 30 July 2015

Jeremy Thorpe 
by Michael Bloch.
Little, Brown, 606 pp., £25, December 2014, 978 0 316 85685 0
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Closet Queens: Some 20th-Century British Politicians 
by Michael Bloch.
Little, Brown, 320 pp., £25, May 2015, 978 1 4087 0412 7
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... short and hairless body’ and a passion for silk underwear. Oh, and he got on with Noël Coward. In his foreword, Matthew Parris insists that ‘Bloch is very, very careful to distinguish between rumour, report and incontrovertible fact,’ which is true to the extent that, when Bloch has no evidence to back up his assertions, he usually admits ...

Get a Lobotomy

Sally Rooney: ‘Motherhood’, 30 August 2018

Motherhood 
by Sheila Heti.
Harvill Secker, 277 pp., £16.99, May 2018, 978 1 84655 837 5
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... narrator isn’t smug about her decision. She describes herself as ‘a draft dodger’ and ‘a coward’; she worries that ‘life without children has the quality of waiting on the doorstep.’ Only by the end of the book does she decide that a life with or without children would be ‘equal in emptiness and equal in fullness … neither path better and ...

Newfangled Inner Worlds

Adam Phillips: Malingering, 3 March 2005

Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War 
by Peter Barham.
Yale, 451 pp., £19.99, August 2004, 0 300 10379 4
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... impossible situations: so is ‘malingerer’. From one point of view the malingerer is clearly a coward; from another point of view he is someone who really knows himself, knows the limits of what he can bear, of what is morally and emotionally acceptable to him. From one point of view, his talent for pretending is a sign of his authenticity; from another ...

Stones

John Harvey, 6 August 1981

A Confederacy of Dunces 
by John Kennedy Toole.
Allen Lane, 338 pp., £7.95, May 1981, 9780713914221
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The Meeting at Telgte 
by Günter Grass, translated by Ralph Manheim.
Secker, 147 pp., £5.95, June 1981, 0 436 18778 7
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Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi 
by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni.
Allen Lane, 160 pp., £5.95, May 1981, 0 7139 1421 1
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Penny Links 
by Ursula Holden.
Eyre Methuen, 156 pp., £5.50, May 1981, 0 413 47210 8
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... to the contrary, and as well as being a pedant is, at various stages, a pig, a liar, a bully and a coward. In his literary ancestry, on the fat side, he has more than a pound of Ubu. Indeed, Toole makes it clear that his hero is repulsive – repulsive, ludicrous, and central, as if his author had conceived him in a caricaturing passion of self-dismay, finding ...

Bare feet and a root of fennel

John Bayley, 11 June 1992

Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England 
by Alexander Welsh.
Johns Hopkins, 262 pp., £21.50, April 1992, 0 8018 4271 9
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... lack of stupidity, prejudice, conditioned reflex. Such a man would be brave when it suits and a coward when it doesn’t: it has often been remarked that in any age the same soldiers will fight courageously one day and run away the next. But of course Shakespeare never insists on contradiction – that was left to his more intelligent romantic followers in ...

Land of Pure Delight

Dinah Birch: Anglicising the Holy Land, 20 April 2006

The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism 
by Eitan Bar-Yosef.
Oxford, 319 pp., £50, October 2005, 0 19 926116 4
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... the Valley of the Shadow of Death was, that lane where the overhanging trees were . . . I was a coward. At dusk I’d whistle, going down that particular lane.’ Potter’s apprehension of otherworldly encounters that could transform the everyday into strangeness is grounded in this knowledge, and it colours all of his most forceful drama. The Victorian ...

Bond in Torment

John Lanchester: James Bond, 5 September 2002

From Russia with Love, Dr No and Goldfinger 
by Ian Fleming.
Penguin, 640 pp., £10.99, April 2002, 0 14 118680 1
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... lively introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, quotes Fleming’s friend and neighbour Noël Coward on the subject of Honeychile Rider’s world-famous bottom, ‘almost as firm and rounded as a boy’s’: ‘I know we are all becoming progressively more broadminded nowadays but really, old chap, what could you have been thinking of?’ In a way, we are ...

Stone’s Socrates

Alan Ryan, 27 October 1988

The Trial of Socrates 
by I.F. Stone.
Cape, 282 pp., £12.95, September 1988, 0 224 02591 0
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... to kill him for not obeying them, he would have taken no notice of their threats. He was not the coward Stone implies; his concerns really were other-worldly, and unpolitical – and by modern, utilitarian standards pretty inhuman. Like I.F. Stone, Pericles might well have thought Socrates a lousy citizen, since Pericles agreed with most of Athens that a man ...

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