Who’s the real cunt?

Andrew O’Hagan: Dacre’s Paper, 1 June 2017

Mail Men: The Unauthorised Story of the ‘Daily Mail’, the Paper that Divided and Conquered Britain 
by Adrian Addison.
Atlantic, 407 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 78239 970 4
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... white wine are ‘poofters’ and believed, according to the paper’s literary editor Graham Lord, ‘that Aids was a fair punishment for buggery’. According to a memoir written by Junor’s daughter, Penny, the great editor and columnist bullied his wife and children while proclaiming the family values that made him such a darling of the right. Fleet ...

Murderous Thoughts

Lauren Oyler: ‘Women Talking’, 22 November 2018

Women Talking 
by Miriam Toews.
Faber, 216 pp., £12.99, August 2018, 978 0 571 34032 3
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... often as I handled the bread and wine in the mass, that they were not the flesh and blood of the Lord’). Continually persecuted and forced to migrate, his followers split into many smaller groups; according to a survey conducted by the Mennonite World Conference in 2015, there are now more than 2.1 million Mennonites living in 87 countries. Beyond beliefs ...

Little Beagle

Lucy Wooding: Early Modern Espionage, 12 September 2024

All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil 
by Stephen Alford.
Allen Lane, 424 pp., £30, July, 978 0 241 42347 9
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Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration 
by Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman.
Yale, 317 pp., £20, June, 978 0 300 26754 9
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... to keep the country stable. He had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was for forty years the bedrock of Elizabeth I’s government, and learned his complicated profession at his father’s side, as the elder Cecil struggled to maintain the Elizabethan regime. It is clear that father and son rarely got away from ...

The Italianness of it all

Tessa Hadley: Iris Origo, 24 May 2018

Images and Shadows: Part of a Life 
by Iris Origo.
Pushkin, 384 pp., £12.99, February 2017, 978 1 78227 266 3
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War in Val d’Orcia 
by Iris Origo.
Pushkin, 320 pp., £9.99, February 2017, 978 1 78227 265 6
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A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary 1939-40 
by Iris Origo.
Pushkin, 200 pp., £14.99, October 2017, 978 1 78227 355 4
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A Study in Solitude: The Life of Leopardi 
by Iris Origo.
Pushkin, 416 pp., £12.99, June 2017, 978 1 78227 268 7
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The Last Attachment 
by Iris Origo.
Pushkin, 576 pp., £12.99, June 2017, 978 1 78227 267 0
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... like it to be different for Iris,’ he wrote in his last letter to his wife. ‘Make a home for her and yourself, all this travelling and homelessness is so bad for you and will be bad for her.’ Yet when Sybil Cutting rented the Villa Medici in Fiesole, she was not exactly submerging herself and her daughter in authentic Italian life. They joined ...

Diary

Audrey Gillan: The drubbing of Mohammad Sarwar, 22 January 1998

... heat, dust and beggars. It isn’t marked on the map but it was there that I found Rifat, at the home of Khalid Mehmood, the illiterate factory worker she had been forced to marry. Behind the mud-baked walls and through the steel door of a flat-roofed house women were gathered round a fly-plagued courtyard: here, in purdah, they had discarded their ...

Throw it out the window

Bee Wilson: Lady Constance Lytton, 16 July 2015

Lady Constance Lytton: Aristocrat, Suffragette, Martyr 
by Lyndsey Jenkins.
Biteback, 282 pp., £20, March 2015, 978 1 84954 795 6
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... said that the most terrible moment of her life had been finding herself alone at breakfast with Lord Salisbury, and unable to think of anything to talk about except jam. Yet the more Jenkins tells us of this first Constance, the more we see that being an aristocratic nerve-wracked Victorian spinster was actually the ideal training for becoming an Edwardian ...

Humid Fidelity

Peter Bradshaw: The letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill, 16 September 1999

Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill 
edited by Mary Soames.
Black Swan, 702 pp., £15, August 1999, 0 552 99750 1
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... killed just outside the coverts – about 11 o’clock Venetia [Stanley] – I were just going home when the hounds got away after a big cub (I believe it was an old fox!) – we had a glorious run for about half an hour. She is always going away to recover from a series of ailments, including tonsillitis, bronchitis, lumbago and blood poisoning, and her ...

Seagull Soup

Fara Dabhoiwala: HMS Wager, 9 May 2024

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder 
by David Grann.
Simon and Schuster, 329 pp., £10.99, January 2024, 978 1 4711 8370 6
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... been lost at sea. Of the almost two thousand men who had embarked on his expedition, 188 returned home with him.The smallest of the warships accompanying Anson had been HMS Wager, a broad-bottomed merchant vessel reconfigured by the navy as an armed freighter. It was named after Charles Wager, the first lord of the ...

Isn’t London hell?

Seamus Perry: Evelyn Waugh, 10 August 2023

Brideshead Revisited 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 480 pp., £16.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58531 3
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Decline and Fall 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 320 pp., £14.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58529 0
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A Handful of Dust 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 336 pp., £14.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58527 6
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Vile Bodies 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 304 pp., £14.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58528 3
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Sword of Honour 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 928 pp., £18.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58532 0
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... More remarkable still, Waugh found in Rossetti a dark predicament which sounded rather close to home: ‘the baffled and very tragic figure of an artist born into an age devoid of artistic standards’.Given that ‘very tragic’ plight, it may not be surprising that Waugh began his study with the observation that ‘there is singularly little fun to be ...

Attercliffe

Nicholas Spice, 17 May 1984

Present Times 
by David Storey.
Cape, 270 pp., £8.95, May 1984, 0 224 02188 5
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The Uses of Fiction: Essays on the Modern Novel in Honour of Arnold Kettle 
edited by Douglas Jefferson and Graham Martin.
Open University, 296 pp., £15, December 1982, 9780335101818
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The Hawthorn Goddess 
by Glyn Hughes.
Chatto, 232 pp., £8.95, April 1984, 0 7011 2818 6
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... in writing plays again. Maybe it’ll be the start of a new romance. Dusk falls. Attercliffe goes home to his ‘four-bedroomed, one bathroomed, one living-roomed (dining-annexed), one-kitchened “executive” dwelling’ at 24 Walton Lane on the outskirts of Morristown. Through the window he sees Elise his eldest daughter washing her hair in the kitchen ...

Fat and Fretful

John Bayley, 18 April 1996

Foreign Country: The Life of L.P. Hartley 
by Adrian Wright.
Deutsch, 304 pp., £17.99, March 1996, 0 233 98976 5
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... gondolier. With Hartleian cunning she dissembles this passion, writing to her close friend back home that she has met a lady called Simonetta Perkins who is in the same predicament, and what advice should she be given? The comedy is delicate and poignant too, with an anti-climactic climax of droll simplicity. Minor characters are masterfully etched, in ...

A Spot of Firm Government

Terry Eagleton: Claude Rawson, 23 August 2001

God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination 1492-1945 
by Claude Rawson.
Oxford, 401 pp., £25, June 2001, 0 19 818425 5
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... to be thinking of literary critics, not grapepickers or hairdressers. The good news is that the Home Counties view of literature has now been decisively despatched. The native of the Southern hemisphere no longer appears in Anglo-Saxon culture only through the sights of a rifle or at the end of a sherry decanter. E.M. Forster had it both ways, allowing his ...

Much of a Scramble

Francesca Wade: Ray Strachey, 23 January 2020

A Working Woman: The Remarkable Life of Ray Strachey 
by Jennifer Holmes.
Troubador, 392 pp., £20, February 2019, 978 1 78901 654 3
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... applause at the bill’s passing, she hurried off to break the news to Fawcett, who was waiting at home by the fire in her dressing gown, and in her elation, drove her car straight into a police officer. Ray Strachey (in the driver’s seat) with Millicent Garrett Fawcett, her daughter Philippa and sister Agnes on 2 July 1928. The Cause, though not a ...

Dislocations

Stephen Fender, 19 January 1989

Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The world turned upside down 
by Robert Lawson-Peebles.
Cambridge, 384 pp., £35, March 1988, 0 521 34647 9
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Mark Twain’s Letters. Vol. I: 1853-1866 
edited by Edgar Marquess Branch, Michael Frank and Kenneth Sanderson.
California, 616 pp., $35, May 1988, 0 520 03668 9
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A Writer’s America: Landscape in Literature 
by Alfred Kazin.
Thames and Hudson, 240 pp., £15.95, September 1988, 0 500 01424 8
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... its own project, which is to fix American writers in their proper locales: ‘It was while walking home with a student one evening that [Wallace] Stevens ... spoke of his recent poem, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”. “I said that I thought we’d reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognised it was a ...

How Laws Discriminate

Stephen Sedley: The Law’s Inequalities, 29 April 1999

... sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.’ France’s English contemporary Lord Justice Mathew made the point in more genteel terms: ‘In England,’ he said, ‘justice is open to all, like the Ritz.’ The Early Victorian poet Thomas Love Peacock had noted the unequal impact of the Sunday observance laws: The poor man’s sins are ...