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The Coburg Connection

Richard Shannon, 5 April 1984

Albert, Prince Consort 
by Robert Rhodes James.
Hamish Hamilton, 311 pp., £15, November 1983, 0 241 11000 9
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... was a schoolboy under Sir Roger Fulford. He puts one in mind of those Sloane Rangers who, so it is said, keep to their A-level texts at university to avoid intellectual fatigue. Yet, as against this, his is the first biography of the Prince to make what might be called both significant and candid use of the materials in the Royal Archives. He shows that a ...

Stalking Out

David Edgar: After John Osborne, 20 July 2006

John Osborne: A Patriot for Us 
by John Heilpern.
Chatto, 528 pp., £25, May 2006, 0 7011 6780 7
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... Finney), Inadmissible Evidence (with Nicol Williamson) and A Patriot for Me (which, along with Edward Bond’s later Saved, can be credited with having brought about the end of theatre censorship). Moving through two further marriages in quick succession (to Mary Ure, who played his first wife in Look Back in Anger, then to Penelope Gilliatt, the film ...

We did and we didn’t

Seamus Perry: Are yez civilised?, 6 May 2021

On Seamus Heaney 
by R.F. Foster.
Princeton, 228 pp., £14.99, September 2020, 978 0 691 17437 2
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... a lot of coverage to speeches by civil rights leaders the previous evening. ‘Tell us this,’ he said, ‘are yez unionists or are yez not?’ At the centre of Auden’s work, an equally categorical question is implicit: ‘Tell us this, are yez civilised or are yez not?’You could be forgiven for feeling caught up in some private argument here, but there ...

Merely a Warning that a Noun is Coming

Bee Wilson: The ‘Littlehampton Libels’, 8 February 2018

The Littlehampton Libels: A Miscarriage of Justice and a Mystery about Words in 1920s England 
by Christopher Hilliard.
Oxford, 256 pp., £30, June 2017, 978 0 19 879965 8
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... beard, was asked whether he had ever heard his daughter use indecent language. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘She was brought up quite differently. I have never heard such language from her or any others of my family of nine children.’ Edith Swan, a 30-year-old laundress from the seaside town of Littlehampton in Sussex, was accused of sending a letter to a ...

Notes on a Notebook

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 September 1999

... spoke of it as ‘a disgusting act of barbarity’. David Andrews, the Irish Foreign Minister, said that it was ‘clearly designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on the RUC station at Lurgan. A few of them threw petrol bombs at it. Mrs Nelson had been the Catholic ...

The Suitcase: Part Two

Frances Stonor Saunders, 13 August 2020

... wind). I didn’t recognise this as a warning that his brain was on the verge of collapse.It​ is said that the first lie of a map is that it tells the truth. The only true map would be on a scale of 1:1, a map that shows every single detail, including the map of the map of the map. Even supposing that such infinite regress could be shown (it can’t), the ...

The Hard Zone

Andrew O’Hagan: At the Republican National Convention, 1 August 2024

... push him into actions more heroic than himself.’I picked up. ‘Are you safe?’ my 20-year-old said.‘There’s none of us safe in the world.’‘No, I’m serious. Trump’s been shot or something.’I got up CNN on my phone. ‘Loud bangs heard at rally; Trump whisked away with blood on face,’ the headline said. It ...

Uncle of the Bomb

Steven Shapin: The Oppenheimer Brothers, 23 September 2010

Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and The World He Made Up 
by K.C. Cole.
Houghton Mifflin, 439 pp., $27, August 2009, 978 0 15 100822 3
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... programme for developing the hydrogen bomb so enthusiastically promoted by his former colleague Edward Teller. That opposition, combined with continuing suspicion of his left-wing political affiliations before and during the war, led in 1954 to the AEC hearings, which resulted in the withdrawal of his security clearance. (Robert had flirted with joining the ...

Illuminating, horrible etc

Jenny Turner: David Foster Wallace, 14 April 2011

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace 
by David Lipsky.
Broadway, 320 pp., $16.99, 9780307592439
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The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel 
by David Foster Wallace.
Hamish Hamilton, 547 pp., £20, April 2011, 978 0 241 14480 0
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... Jest, my friend Francis got in touch to say a) he found the book astonishing, everything I’d said it was, one of the greatest literary works of all time; b) but when he got to the ending – 981 pp. body copy, another 96 of small-print endnotes – did I think he was going to think it was worth it? No, I said, the ...

Simply Doing It

Thomas Laqueur, 22 February 1996

The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain 1650-1950 
by Roy Porter and Lesley Hall.
Yale, 414 pp., £19.95, January 1995, 0 300 06221 4
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... offered his ‘celestial bed’, a king-sized arena of sexual delight, to voluptuaries (so said his enemies) or to infertile couples (so said he, not a little disingenuously). The steep price of bliss kept the bed out of wide circulation. Sexual knowledge in the Enlightenment is, within its limits, pretty innocent ...

Diary

Tom Paulin: The Belfast agreement, 18 June 1998

... was positive. It would soon be a done deal, they insisted. That Friday, when the announcer said the Agreement had been signed, I felt a sort of cold hope: I remembered Sunningdale, the Loyalist Workers’ Strike, the collapse of the Power-Sharing Executive in 1974. At seven that evening, we reached the house of the friend we were staying with on Lough ...

To be continued

Brigid Brophy, 6 November 1980

The Mystery of Edwin Drood 
by Charles Dickens and Leon Garfield.
Deutsch, 327 pp., £7.95, September 1980, 0 233 97257 9
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... much of the up-front money (£7,500 to cover the first 25,000 copies) should be repaid ‘if the said Charles Dickens shall die’ or be otherwise incapacitated ‘during the composition of the said work’. (Presumably nothing had, in fact, to be repaid, since John Forster recorded that 50,000 copies were sold ‘while ...

Johnson’s Business

Keith Walker, 7 August 1980

A Dictionary of the English Language 
by Samuel Johnson.
Times, 2558 pp., £45, June 1980, 0 7230 0228 2
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Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s Middle Years 
by James Clifford.
Heinemann, 372 pp., £10, February 1980, 0 434 13805 3
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... Waller, ‘to improve the English tongue’. Nothing much came of this. In 1658, Milton’s nephew Edward Philips had published a New World of English Words which reached its seventh edition by 1720. Swift busied himself with the state of the language in his ‘Proposals for Correcting the English Tongue’ (1712) and elsewhere, hoping that ‘some method ...

Bonking with Berenson

Nicholas Penny, 17 September 1987

Bernard Berenson. Vol. II: The Making of a Legend 
by Ernest Samuels.
Harvard, 680 pp., £19.95, May 1987, 0 674 06779 7
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The Partnership: The Secret Association of Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen 
by Colin Simpson.
Bodley Head, 323 pp., £15, April 1987, 9780370305851
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... on their spiritual significance and indeed tells us what the Renaissance really meant. ‘I said just now that Signor Crespi’s portrait’ – a painting of a lady now in the National Gallery in London and agreed to be a Titian, but proposed by Berenson as a copy of a Giorgione – had a certain family resemblance to the one of the former Doetsch ...

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