I want to be queen

Michael Wood: Rimbaud’s High Jinks, 19 January 2023

The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings 
by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Mark Polizzotti.
NYRB, 306 pp., £16.99, July 2022, 978 1 68137 650 9
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... leather! Alas, He, likea thousand white angels who part on the roadis already setting off past the hills! She,all frigid and black, runs! after the man is gone!Polizzotti’s ‘rolled’, ‘stroll’ and ‘knoll’ are very good inventions, but nothing is quite going to catch the jangling irony of the French ‘ombrelle’, ‘ombelle’ and ‘pour ...

Diary

Colin McGinn: A Philosopher in LA, 4 September 1986

... my third-floor balcony a swimming-pool posed for a David Hockney painting, the water the colour of Paul Newman’s eyes, though it was deemed too cold to be usable in ‘winter’. (Appropriately enough, I had met Hockney during my previous visit to LA, through my artist brother. His brother was there too, giving, I think, financial advice to the ...

It’s wild. It’s new. It turns men on

Yitzhak Laor: Amos Oz, 20 September 2001

The Same Sea 
by Amos Oz.
Chatto, 201 pp., £15.99, February 2001, 0 7011 6924 9
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... a washbasin, an earthenware jug, some tin mugs. The four Dutchmen, Thomas, Johan, Wim and Paul, drank a strange, sluggish beer . . . For a modest fee she would grant them ‘grace and favour’ in her room. One at a time, twenty minutes each. Or else all five of them at once, at a discount. She is, of course, rather more than just a whore. She loves ...

Who is Stewart Home?

Iain Sinclair, 23 June 1994

... rock fields they represent are lost in the inevitable sea-fret, the mist drifting down from the hills.But they have to go, these images. They have to be stacked away in the reserve collection, along with the Fontana, the emulsion-on-hardboard multi-head portraits on which a generation of uncatalogued white moulds are breeding. The manifestos have been ...

How the sanity of poets can be edited away

Arnold Rattenbury: The Sanity of Ivor Gurney, 14 October 1999

‘Severn and Somme’ and ‘War’s Embers’ 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by R.K.R. Thornton.
Carcanet, 152 pp., £7.95, September 1997, 1 85754 348 3
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80 Poems or So 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by George Walter and R.K.R. Thornton.
Carcanet, 148 pp., £9.95, January 1997, 1 85754 344 0
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... or even bed. This, and a not unusual country lad’s liking for night-walking the Gloucestershire hills and river-paths, led to a family reputation for solitariness when in fact, for his time and background, he was astonishingly gregarious. Those walks were often taken in company – they lasted for as many as three days and nights at a time, according to ...

Where have all the horses gone?

Eric Banks: Horse Power, 5 July 2018

The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey through Human History 
by Susanna Forrest.
Atlantic, 418 pp., £9.99, October 2017, 978 0 85789 900 2
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Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of Our Relationship 
by Ulrich Raulff, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp.
Penguin, 448 pp., £9.99, February 2018, 978 0 14 198317 2
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... in a carriage to the caparisoned horse of President Kennedy’s funeral cortège. Figures from Paul Mellon to Siegfried Kracauer, Robespierre to Claude Simon, whose cavalry unit was massacred in World War Two, put in appearances, as do Clever Hans, Comanche (the purported lone survivor of Custer’s Last Stand) and Anna Karenina’s ill-fated ...

Anna of All the Russias

John Bayley, 24 January 1991

Selected Poems 
by Anna Akhmatova, selected and translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward.
Harvill, 173 pp., £5.95, November 1989, 0 00 271041 2
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The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova 
translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited by Roberta Reeder.
Zephyr, 1635 pp., £85, October 1990, 0 939010 13 5
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The Garden: New and Selected Poetry and Prose 
by Bella Akhmadulina.
Boyars, 171 pp., £9.95, January 1991, 0 7145 2924 9
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... daughters), are what matter to her. The red towers of Sodom are like Housman’s blue remembered hills. But what matters to the reader is that the wife had not only the poet’s impulse but the woman’s: what she sought to make known to herself for the last time was not romance but everyday existence. Having mentioned Housman it is worth recalling his own ...

Millom

Alan Hollinghurst, 18 February 1982

Sea to the West 
by Norman Nicholson.
Faber, 64 pp., £3, June 1981, 0 571 11729 5
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Out for the Elements 
by Andrew Waterman.
Carcanet, 151 pp., £3.95, October 1981, 0 85635 377 9
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Between Here and Now 
by R.S. Thomas.
Macmillan, 110 pp., £5.95, November 1981, 0 333 32186 3
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Poetry Introduction Five 
Faber, 121 pp., £5.25, January 1982, 0 571 11793 7Show More
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... in sentiment and darkened by the shadow of Ubi sunt? . Unlike the mysteries of tides, caves or hills, these are things the reader knows about, and the assent the poet wins will be too unthinking unless real discovery is enacted by the language. And much of the descriptive writing in Sea to the West is memorably vivid. At one point there is a wildly ...

Top of the World

Jenny Turner: Douglas Coupland, 22 June 2000

Miss Wyoming 
by Douglas Coupland.
Flamingo, 311 pp., £9.99, February 2000, 0 00 225983 4
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... and utter meretriciousness, young-man-type showing-off stuff and genuine wisdom, is a bit like Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent film, Magnolia, which shares Coupland’s interest in coincidence and catastrophe and carpe diem. Do we really need or want to be told about life’s beauties and terrors by a couple of smart-arse North American young men? Would ...

Hard-Edged Chic

Rosemary Hill: The ‘shocking’ life of Schiap, 19 February 2004

Shocking! The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli 
by Dilys Blum.
Yale/Philadelphia Museum of Art, 320 pp., £45, November 2003, 0 300 10066 3
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... detectable before 1914, were suddenly fanned into life. The greatest of the prewar couturiers, Paul Poiret, had predicted that by 1958 women would be wearing trousers. In fact they were wearing them by the 1920s, both literally and figuratively. French couture between the wars was dominated, as never before or since, by female designers: Jeanne ...

Summer with Empson

Jonathan Raban: Learning to Read, 5 November 2009

... them like squeezed-out grapefruit skins. In the course of 24 hours, I might be Nick Adams, Paul Morel, and sitting in one of the dives on 52nd Street, uncertain and afraid, as the clever hopes expired of a low dishonest decade; but these were less acts of serious reading than experiments in identity, made by somebody who very much feared that he lacked ...

Diary

Tim Dee: Derek Walcott’s Birthday Party, 22 May 2014

... intimations of an English pastoral afterlife. When at the party Glyn Maxwell, or perhaps it was Paul Farley, asked him what it was to be a ‘Caribbean’ poet, he lapsed into silence, the chorus of insects and birds answering on his behalf. The two British poets were putting the questions as I held the microphone and watched the sound levels: the ...

Invented Antiquities

Anthony Grafton, 27 July 2017

Baroque Antiquity: Archaeological Imagination in Early Modern Europe 
by Victor Plahte Tschudi.
Cambridge, 320 pp., £64.99, September 2016, 978 1 107 14986 1
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... for a book on the topography and history of the Lazio region. He was nearly sixty. Walking in the hills with a friend, he found a ruined church on a mountain. As he explored the ruin, he came upon a marble tablet with the inscription: ‘This is the holy place where St Eustachius was converted to Christianity.’ It also identified the Emperor Constantine as ...

Blood and Confusion

Jonathan Healey: England’s Republic, 10 July 2025

Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649-60 
by Alice Hunt.
Faber, 493 pp., £12.99, June, 978 0 571 30320 5
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The Fall: The Last Days of the English Republic 
by Henry Reece.
Yale, 464 pp., £35, June 2024, 978 0 300 21149 8
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... republic was torn down and burned in great bonfires, three of which were positioned on nearby hills and were said to have blazed so brightly you could see them from Wales. The traditionally royalist town had been the site of much action during the civil wars between 1642 and 1651. Its medieval castle was besieged and bombarded; much of its fabric was ...

Swiftly Encircling Gloom

Tim Radford, 8 May 1997

Promising The Earth 
by Robert Lamb.
Routledge, 204 pp., £35, September 1996, 0 415 14443 4
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... fuels are producing greenhouse gases and people who don’t want windpower generators on the hills behind where they live. It contains people who won’t wear leather or wool or touch butter or milk and who drink carrot juice because they believe in the ‘natural’. (Carrot juice is sublimely unnatural. No other creature could or would drink it.) It ...