Fault-Finders

Michael Dobson, 18 November 1993

‘Hamlet’ versus ‘Lear’: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art 
by R.A. Foakes.
Cambridge, 262 pp., £30, March 1993, 0 521 34292 9
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Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels 
by Brian Vickers.
Yale, 508 pp., £35, April 1993, 0 300 05415 7
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Shakespeare, Poet and Citizen 
by Victor Kieran.
Verso, 261 pp., £18.95, March 1993, 0 86091 392 9
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... word ‘ethics’ was making an audible comeback against the word ‘power’, someone definitely said ‘character’, and at least one of the main panels was largely devoted to showing that the Author was a lot less dead than Foucault.) Foakes’s purpose isn’t merely to refute and dismiss the critical vogues of the last decade, but to meet their ...

Diary

Ruth Dudley Edwards: Peddling Books, 21 January 1988

... caused great trouble in the shop by making enthusiastic advances to an unstable young dogsbody, Edward Shelley. More than a year before Shelley was to give evidence at Wilde’s trial, his co-workers were addressing him as ‘Miss Oscar’ or ‘Mrs Wilde’. A report of Wilde’s arrest had had the headline ‘Yellow Book Under His Arm’, and although the ...

The German Ocean

D.J. Enright: Suffolk Blues, 17 September 1998

The Rings of Saturn 
by W.G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse.
Harvill, 296 pp., £15.99, June 1998, 1 86046 398 3
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... cannot explain.’ Empathy is often inexplicable. The next journey is to Bredfield, birthplace of Edward Fitzgerald, and thus of Omar Khayyám as we know him in English. Of FitzGerald’s versions of the Rubáiyát, Sebald observes finely that they ‘feign an anonymity that disdains even the least claim to authorship, and draw us, word by word, to an ...

Come back, Inspector Wexford

Douglas Johnson, 7 March 1985

The Killing Doll 
by Ruth Rendell.
Hutchinson/Arrow, 237 pp., £7.95, March 1984, 0 09 155480 2
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The Tree of Hands 
by Ruth Rendell.
Hutchinson, 269 pp., £8.50, October 1984, 0 09 158680 1
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... lives by herself with her infant son James, having refused to marry, or to live with, his father Edward. When her mad mother, Mopsa, comes to stay with her, James is taken ill and dies in hospital. Mopsa then kidnaps Jason, another boy of the same age. We are introduced to Jason’s family, where Barry lives with the nymphomaniac Carol, the child’s ...

JC’s Call

J.I.M. Stewart, 2 April 1981

Joseph Conrad: Times Remembered 
by Joseph Conrad.
Cambridge, 218 pp., £10.50, March 1981, 0 521 22805 0
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... was still obliged to cook the omelettes, since her husband would accept them from nobody else. Edward Garnett, Conrad’s literary adviser and intimate friend from early in his career, observed that his ‘ultra-nervous organisation appeared to make matrimony extremely hazardous’. The novelist was in fact subject to long bouts of depressive illness, and ...

Forever Krystle

Nicholas Shakespeare, 20 February 1986

Watching ‘Dallas’: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination 
by Ien Ang, translated by Della Couling.
Methuen, 148 pp., £10.50, November 1985, 0 416 41630 6
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... of ‘neurofibromatosis’ – and instead of Aeschylus and Sophocles we have the goat-songs of Edward Deblasio and Joel J. Feigenbaum. Sue Ellen’s drinking bouts are a hangover from the Bacchanals of Cithaeron. Blake Carrington’s ‘I’ll be in the library’ harks back to the oracle (who today, in the shape of a doctor, accountant or lawyer, can be ...

At Dulwich Picture Gallery

Alice Spawls: Ravilious, 27 August 2015

... He studied at the Royal College of Art, in the design school not the painting one, where he met Edward Bawden. The two shared a love of neglected landscape watercolourists – John Sell Cotman, Alexander Cozens, Francis Towne and Samuel Palmer; they made a pilgrimage to Palmer’s Shoreham in 1926. Paul Nash, who taught them at the RCA, described their ...

More Like a Mistress

Tom Crewe: Mr and Mrs Disraeli, 16 July 2015

Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance 
by Daisy Hay.
Chatto, 308 pp., £20, January 2015, 978 0 7011 8912 9
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... lives converged. Her closest friend was the eyebrow-raising Rosina Bulwer Lytton, whose husband, Edward, was a close friend (and possibly lover) of Disraeli’s. When they first met in 1832 she struck him as a ‘flirt and a rattle’. They became closer in 1837 when Disraeli was elected for Maidstone as a Conservative MP, with Wyndham Lewis as his ...

Diary

Ruth Padel: Singing Madrigals, 29 November 2007

... was probably 24. No one knows who wrote the text. Suggestions have ranged from Weelkes himself to Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Thule, the period of cosmographie, Doth vaunt of Hecla whose sulphureous fire Doth melt the frozen clime and thaw the sky; Trinacrian Etna’s flames ascend not higher. These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I, Whose heart ...

Toss the monkey wrench

August Kleinzahler: Lee Harwood’s risky poems, 19 May 2005

Collected Poems 
by Lee Harwood.
Shearsman, 522 pp., £17.95, May 2004, 9780907562405
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... from both sides of the Atlantic. Of the Americans, Fulcrum published three volumes each by Edward Dorn and Gary Snyder, the early work, which has proved to be their best and most enduring. Fulcrum also published two important early collections by Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg’s Ankor Wat and, most significantly, two volumes by Lorine Niedecker, North ...

Knife and Fork Question

Miles Taylor: The Chartist Movement, 29 November 2001

The Chartist Movement in Britain 1838-50 
edited by Gregory Claeys.
Pickering & Chatto, £495, April 2001, 1 85196 330 8
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... easily surpasses in size (and in price) the principal older collections edited by F.C. Mather and Edward Royle, although for the hardy there remains a less easily available set put together by Dorothy Thompson, the doyenne of Chartist studies. Claeys is a past master of the art of compilation, having already produced similar collections of the writings of ...

At Pallant House

Rosemary Hill: On Dora Carrington, 3 April 2025

... the period were their friends and fellow alumni of the Slade: Paul and John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. They were all influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, which introduced the British to Continental art, especially Cézanne, but they were able to develop their own ...

A Monk’s-Eye View

Diarmaid MacCulloch, 10 March 2022

The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History 
by James G. Clark.
Yale, 649 pp., £25, October 2021, 978 0 300 11572 7
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Going to Church in Medieval England 
by Nicholas Orme.
Yale, 483 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 0 300 25650 5
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... In the late 1540s, the much more self-consciously Protestant government of Henry’s son, Edward VI, delivered the coup de grâce to the old system. It closed and confiscated the endowments of the thousands of chantries where non-monastic priests still celebrated masses for souls. In doing so it killed off a host of accompanying devotional practices ...

Arruginated

Colm Tóibín: James Joyce’s Errors, 7 September 2023

Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ 
by Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner.
Oxford, 1424 pp., £145, February 2022, 978 0 19 886458 5
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... This looks like Bloom just getting things wrong, as he sometimes does. But Gifford tells us that Edward VII had tattoos, as did George V, as did Nicholas II of Russia and Alphonso XII of Spain, not to speak of Lady Randolph Churchill. Slote, Mamigonian and Turner add that Edward VII ‘received his first tattoo in ...

Our Jack

Julian Symons, 22 July 1993

Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare 
by Theresa Whistler.
Duckworth, 478 pp., £25, May 1993, 9780715624302
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... aback, disbelieving, tries desperately to change what she has heard. Perhaps Denis had really said: ‘Squire, Binyon and Shanks’, ‘Childe, Blunden and Earp’, even ‘Abercrombie, Drink-water and Rabindranath Tagore’? But she knows it is not so: Blight, Mildew and Smut were for Denis the poets of the decade. Aldous Huxley’s joke against Georgian ...