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Why we have them I can’t think

Rosemary Hill: ‘Mrs Woolf and the Servants’, 16 August 2007

Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service 
by Alison Light.
Fig Tree, 376 pp., £20, August 2007, 978 0 670 86717 2
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... other households in Gordon Square, remembered Mrs Woolf as ‘lovely … always sort of the grand lady’ and gave the most succinct summing-up of her relationship with her former cook; Nellie, she said, was ‘a bit highly strung’ and ‘Virginia Woolf was’ too. Despite Light’s efforts, Nellie struggles to emerge as a rounded personality rather than ...

Who Won’t Be Voting for Trump

Eliot Weinberger: Anyone for Trump?, 20 October 2016

... It is almost certain that if Trump is elected, Melania Trump will be the first First Lady to have posed for softcore pornographic ‘girl on girl’ photos.African Americans and Jews Trump: ‘Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.’Women As ...

What Dettol Can’t Fix

Bee Wilson: A Life in Lists, 13 September 2018

Elisabeth’s Lists: A Family Story 
by Lulah Ellender.
Granta, 318 pp., £16.99, March 2018, 978 1 78378 383 0
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... a triple mirror, a mustard pot, a pearl necklace from ‘Grandpapa’, a cheque for £25 from Lady Brabourne, a tablecloth and more. She noted the date the presents were received and the names of the present-givers, from Lady Sligo to Nanny.One of the thoughts the book gives rise to is just how many belongings would ...

Anti-Writer

Clair Wills: Plain Brian O’Nolan, 4 April 2019

The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien 
edited by Maebh Long.
Dalkey Archive, 619 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 1 62897 183 5
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... knew he could afford to wait. By the early twenties he had got his hooks into that wealthy US lady and money trouble no longer bothered him. His main interest in life was acting the ballocks as grd. seigneuer [grand seigneur]. His jealousy of the patronage Joyce enjoyed is understandable, given his own financial situation. Still, the basis of the attack ...

Man Is Wolf to Man

Malcolm Gaskill: C.J. Sansom, 23 January 2020

Tombland 
by C.J. Sansom.
Pan Macmillan, 866 pp., £8.99, September 2019, 978 1 4472 8451 2
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... against Thomas Seymour, the Lord Protector’s brother, and his marital designs on the 15-year-old Lady Elizabeth, the future (Protestant) queen. She is disliked by the Lord Protector, who favours her elder half-sister, Lady Mary, the future (Catholic) queen. William Cecil, a rising royal secretary, is protective towards ...

Paper Grave

Kevin Okoth: On Scholastique Mukasonga, 14 December 2023

The Barefoot Woman 
by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Jordan Stump.
Daunt, 160 pp., £9.99, April 2022, 978 1 914198 08 3
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Kibogo 
by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Mark Polizzotti.
Daunt, 155 pp., £9.99, October, 978 1 914198 58 8
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... college looking for inyenzi. Mukasonga turned this episode into the climax of her first novel, Our Lady of the Nile (2012), which weaves the personal dramas of a group of schoolgirls into a narrative about the disintegration of postcolonial Rwanda. The novel is set in the Lycée Notre-Dame du Nil, a fictionalised version of her own school. The boarders there ...

Just say it, Henry

Colin Burrow: Henry James’s Hot-Air Balloon, 15 August 2024

The Prefaces 
by Henry James, edited by Oliver Herford.
Cambridge, 636 pp., £95, March, 978 1 107 00268 5
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... of human reality is evoked in a wonderful passage from the preface to The Portrait of a Lady:The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million – a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still piercable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the ...

You know who

Jasper Rees, 4 August 1994

Jim Henson – The Works: The Art, the Magic, the Imagination 
by Christopher Finch.
Aurum, 251 pp., £20, April 1994, 1 85410 296 6
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... both of the Old Masters and the Moderns: Degas’s The La Danseur, Vermeer’s Young Lady Adorning Herself with Pearls (And Why Not?), Toulouse-Lautrec’s La Belle Epigue and Botticelli’s The Birth of You Know Who. A personal favourite is Jan Van Eyck’s The Marriage of Froggo Amphibini and Giopiggi Porculini, an inferior version of which is ...

Ars Brevis, Vita Longa

Dan Jacobson, 16 July 1981

The Oxford Book of Short Stories 
by V.S. Pritchett.
Oxford, 547 pp., £9.50, June 1981, 0 19 214116 3
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The Short Story in English 
by Walter Allen.
Oxford, 413 pp., £9.50, February 1981, 0 19 812666 2
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... so, how is it that they both cite Chekhov as one of the greatest masters of the form. Does ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’, which is probably the most famous of his tales, concentrate on a single event? ‘The Duel’? ‘My Life’? Hardly. As for the poetic quality which is supposed to be peculiar to the short story, is it possible to conceive of prose ...

Family Dramas

J.A. Burrow, 2 July 1981

Symbolic Stories 
by Derek Brewer.
Boydell, 190 pp., £15, October 1980, 0 85991 063 6
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... the mother-figure, who is ‘split’ between the malevolent Morgan le Fay and the seductive lady of the castle, if he is to escape from the stifling environment of home and grow up. Gawain, in fact, turns out to be that painfully familiar figure, the adolescent emerging into manhood, facing and surviving the threat of castration (the beheading) at the ...

Chronicities

Christopher Ricks, 21 November 1985

Gentlemen in England 
by A.N. Wilson.
Hamish Hamilton, 311 pp., £9.95, September 1985, 0 02 411165 1
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... to avail itself of the novelist’s feeling for life, issuing in poems like ‘Portrait of a Lady’ which preserved the essence of a novelist’s acumen much as the dramatic monologue preserved the essence of drama. Wilson’s enterprise is a deft turn: infusing the current novel, elsewhere so schematic and teachable, with the specificities and energies ...

Memres of Alfred Stoker

Christopher Reid, 7 August 1986

... chugs of ice ikles on the rops dirte to and Ma get a coff Like a kie in a door woned open: a Lady mises Bussen ded Stut to a door Step frosen and the Skin her face tore of when the Lift her Cobet gone the peles feck him Ma Took the Swize box to a man of Wite Chaple 10 bob its a fare price: and we woke to a fortine Teller That no the Tea Lees in a yelow ...

Sidney and Beatrice

Michael Holroyd, 25 October 1979

A Victorian Courtship: The Story of Beatrice Potter and Sidney Webb 
by Jeanne Mackenzie.
Weidenfeld, 148 pp., £5.50
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... in love, erupted as a plague of spots. He had already been spotted by a love-affair with a lady who married a Liberal MP, and now he fell in love with Beatrice. There was more than physical attraction on his side. ‘You have it in your hands to make me in the noblest sense, great,’ he informed her. Beatrice had begun to see herself as the ...

On Rachael Allen

Matthew Bevis, 5 March 2020

... and down the coast.It’s as though the silent addressee of Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ – the lady who was told to ‘Come to the window’ so that the coastal landscape, and her place in it, might be explained to her – is being given space to sketch her own picture. The opening poem features a girl with ‘no tongue’, which raises the ghost of ...

Diana of the Upper Air

Lavinia Greenlaw, 29 July 2021

... came into question. An archery expert was one of many who remarked that ‘undoubtedly the young lady would be injured were she to shoot as posed.’ The sculpture of Diana at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2017. In 2013 she was regilded, a process that took five months and 180 square feet of gold leaf. Even though she was refinished according to ...

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