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Bad Character

Andrew O’Hagan: Saul Bellow, 21 May 2015

The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-64 
by Zachary Leader.
Cape, 812 pp., £35, May 2015, 978 0 224 08467 3
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... and wanted to pore over the details of his marital agonies with friends. On a long journey with Herbert and Edith Gold, he ‘wailed and wept as we drove’, according to Herbert: ‘His need was exclusive, unflagging, draining.’ But Leader never trusts a single view; he checks letters and does interviews and finds that ...

The Numinous Moose

Helen Vendler, 11 March 1993

Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It 
by Brett Millier.
California, 602 pp., £18.50, April 1993, 0 520 07978 7
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... view of the history of literature: Chaucer conversing with Dante, Shakespeare with Marlowe, Herbert with Donne, Austen with Thackeray, the Brownings with each other – and now, somewhere, we might add, Bishop with Moore and Lowell. It eliminates nothing that literature confronts – ‘deaths, deaths and sicknesses’, all the flowing and flown ...

Exceptionally Wonderful Book

John Sutherland, 6 October 1994

Knowledge of Angels 
by Jill Paton Walsh.
Green Bay in association with Colt, 268 pp., £14.99, July 1994, 0 948845 05 8
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... that are outstandingly successful from a commercial point of view – Ken Follett and James Herbert, perhaps – or the most saccharine romance. Instead, it awards its prize to ‘the best novel in the opinion of the judges, published each year’. ‘Best’ is interpreted as ‘most distinguished literary performance’. The ulterior ...
A Matter of Justice: The Legal System in Ferment 
by Michael Zander.
Tauris, 323 pp., £16.50, February 1988, 1 85043 040 3
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The Coercive State: The Decline of Democracy in Britain 
by Paddy Hillyard and Janie Percy-Smith.
Fontana, 352 pp., £5.95, February 1988, 0 00 637083 7
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... to describe Leon Brittan is likely to suspect that Zander’s relativities are lopsided. (A.P. Herbert would have likened it to the 13th chime of the clock – not only suspect in itself but casting doubt on everything that has preceded it.) And a look at Hillyard’s and Percy-Smith’s chronicle of Brittan’s record on the parole system, detention ...

Skinned alive

John Bayley, 25 June 1987

Collected Poems 
by George Barker, edited by Robert Fraser.
Faber, 838 pp., £27.50, May 1987, 0 571 13972 8
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By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept 
by Elizabeth Smart, introduced by Brigid Brophy.
Grafton, 126 pp., £2.50, July 1987, 0 586 02083 7
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... it. Or at least that is the idea. In his poem ‘Apollo and Marsyas’ the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert imagines a new sort of howl which might come out of that musical contest. The tone is cool, a little sceptical and very Polish, well aware of the nature of experiences which art can or maybe cannot encompass. At any rate, the kind of art that knows it is ...

Brown and Friends

David Runciman, 3 January 2008

... classics), Michael Gove (Oxford, English) and a few, like Andy Burnham, Chris Grayling, Nick Herbert and Nick Clegg, who went to Cambridge. (Chris Huhne, incidentally, also read PPE at Oxford, but he is now in his fifties and therefore appears to be viewed by some Lib Dem members as already past it.) No doubt they were the leading political talents among ...

Highbrow Mother Goose

Colin Kidd: Constitutional Dramas, 22 February 2024

The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom 
edited by Peter Cane and Harshan Kumarasingham.
Cambridge, 1178 pp., £160, August 2023, 978 1 108 47421 4
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... self-interested – rather than statesmanlike – motivations of 18th-century politicians, while Herbert Butterfield pointed out the present-minded distortions of the past found in grand constitutional narratives. Later, K.B. McFarlane applied Namier’s insights to the 15th century, diverting attention from the constitution to the political elite and the ...

Knobs, Dots and Grooves

Peter Campbell: Henry Moore, 8 August 2002

Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations 
edited by Alan Wilkinson.
Lund Humphries, 320 pp., £35, February 2002, 0 85331 847 6
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The Penguin Modern Painters: A History 
by Carol Peaker.
Penguin Collectors’ Society, 124 pp., £15, August 2001, 0 9527401 4 1
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... not the exhibition pictures of the Salon painters, that held sway. It wasn’t just a matter of size. If a picture is to be seen all the time, a degree of disengagement, an absence of overt emotion, will give it a better chance of holding its place. When Modernism of one kind or another suggested new ways of representing things, or of making ...

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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... of all creativity. Here he could chat happily with such companions as Beethoven about the music of Herbert Howells, his schoolboy friend and fellow music student; or could by turns become Schubert, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Traherne, Whitman, even Gurney – anyone, musician or author, whose work he understood to the point of loving. ‘The idea that he had written ...

Buffed-Up Scholar

Stefan Collini: Eliot and the Dons, 30 August 2012

Letters of T.S. Eliot, Vol. III: 1926-27 
edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden.
Faber, 954 pp., £40, July 2012, 978 0 571 14085 5
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... The most constant members of the group during this period were Bonamy Dobrée, F.S. Flint, Herbert Read and Orlo Williams, all of whom were frequent contributors (and, therefore, frequent recipients of letters from Eliot), with several others participating more sporadically. In practice, Eliot still seems to have made the decisions and carried on the ...

Monsieur Mangetout

Walter Nash, 7 December 1989

The Guinness Book of Records 1990 
edited by Donald McFarlan.
Guinness, 320 pp., £10.95, October 1989, 0 85112 341 4
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The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings: Lists in Literature 
edited by Francis Spufford.
Chatto, 313 pp., £13.95, November 1989, 0 7011 3487 9
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... powerful enough to command assent. I balk pleasurably at a few marginal things, but find only one matter that might be considered centrally, as a moot point. Spufford himself touches on it when he says, of lists, ‘My own inclination is to think of them as a rhetorical figure – like hyperbole, say, or zeugma – an essentially humble figure that can be ...

War Poet

Robert Crawford, 24 May 1990

O Choille gu Bearradh/From Wood to Ridge: Collected Poems in Gaelic and English 
by Sorley MacLean.
Carcanet, 317 pp., £18.95, October 1989, 0 85635 844 4
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... undergraduate studying English at Edinburgh University around 1930 when the influence of Professor Herbert Grierson was so potent. Under that influence, and in response to the impact of Eliot, MacLean became for a time a Donne-worshipper. He also wrote English poems in the style of Eliot and Pound, particularly the Pound of ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’. One can ...

Abbé Aubrey

Brigid Brophy, 2 April 1981

Aubrey Beardsley: An Account of his Life 
by Miriam Benkovitz.
Hamish Hamilton, 226 pp., £8.95, February 1981, 0 241 10382 7
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... though her text has paid it little heed). It is no more than human bad luck that her Herbert Horne suddenly turns into Henry and then reverts to his correct name, and that she says that Ricketts and Shannon lived in ‘The Vale, a cul-de-sac off King’s Road, Chelsea’ without adding for the benefit of pilgrims that, although The Vale is often ...

Sangvinolence

J.A. Burrow, 21 May 1987

The Mirour of Mans Salvacioune: A Middle English Translation of ‘Speculum Humanae Salvationis’ 
edited by Avril Henry.
Scolar, 347 pp., £35, March 1987, 0 85967 716 8
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... says that the stories ‘are not presented word for word in every detail’, he understates the matter. Perhaps one should not quibble about such details – it is not unreasonable, after all, that Job should be seen as prefiguring the sufferings of Christ – yet the liberties taken in this particular case raise questions about the whole typological ...

Stroking

Nicholas Penny, 15 July 1982

Victorian Sculpture 
by Benedict Read.
Yale, 414 pp., £30, June 1982, 0 300 02506 8
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... no general introduction in English to what was produced in Germany or Italy. France is a different matter. Much of what was made between Houdon and Rodin has actually been admired for many years now: for instance, La Dance, Carpeaux’s festive group of girls with darting eyes and flashing teeth and flying hair and dimpled flesh on the front of the Paris ...

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