Cold Shoulders, Short Trousers

Ian Hamilton, 12 March 1992

Will this do? 
by Auberon Waugh.
Century, 288 pp., £15.99, October 1991, 0 7126 3734 6
Show More
Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper 
edited by Artemis Cooper.
Hodder, 344 pp., £19.99, October 1991, 0 340 53488 5
Show More
Show More
... of your devotion as you have been of mine.’ Auberon explains: ‘I do not think, as others may decide, that the ... sentence was intended ironically. Or at any rate, not very ironically. It certainly was not intended as an embittered father’s curse.’ Well, he should know – except that, on the matter of his dad, Auberon Waugh is not the most ...

Boil the cook

Stephen Sedley: Treasonable Acts, 18 July 2024

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History 
by Allen D. Boyer and Mark Nicholls.
Routledge, 340 pp., £135, February, 978 0 367 50993 4
Show More
Show More
... around’ and ask why the state ‘condones life support’ for it, especially when prosecution may generate the glamour of martyrdom. It’s true that there has for many years been a web of statutes prescribing sentences up to life imprisonment for disclosing official secrets and for unauthorised possession of firearms and explosives. There is legislation ...

Nothing nasty in the woodshed

John Bayley, 25 October 1990

Yours, Plum: The Letters of P.G. Wodehouse 
edited by Frances Donaldson.
Hutchinson, 269 pp., £16.99, September 1990, 0 09 174639 6
Show More
Show More
... seem to have been both immediate and final, like the effects in his own books. In 1956 he reminded Richard Usborne, author of Clubland Heroes, of the source of a quotation. Smiling, the boy fell dead. Mr Usborne, really! I thought everyone knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that ...

Futility

Gabriele Annan, 27 September 1990

Garbo: Her Story 
by Antoni Gronowicz.
Viking, 476 pp., £15.99, August 1990, 0 670 83651 6
Show More
Show More
... other hand, it has many unfamiliar photographs (not counting stills), and any photograph of Garbo may seem worth having. Besides, its preposterousness evokes – far better than a cleverer book like, say, What makes Sammy run – the dream landscape that stretched all the way from Hollywood to UFA in Berlin and Svensk Filmindustri in Stockholm. So much for ...

Funny Water

Frank Kermode: Raban at Sea, 20 January 2000

Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings 
by Jonathan Raban.
Picador, 435 pp., £16.99, November 1999, 0 330 34628 8
Show More
Show More
... that Raban’s boat could not possibly have survived to let him tell the tale) I might choose Richard Hughes on hurricanes, but for all less overwhelming though still astonishing manifestations of troubled water Raban must surely be the man. Auden wrote about ‘the pluck and knock of the tide’, which is a good but tersely elementary way of talking ...

Soldier, Sailor, Poacher

E.S. Turner, 3 October 1985

Great Britons: 20th-Century Lives 
by Harold Oxbury.
Oxford, 371 pp., £14.95, September 1985, 0 19 211599 5
Show More
The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes 
edited by Max Hastings.
Oxford, 514 pp., £9.50, October 1985, 0 19 214107 4
Show More
The Long Affray: The Poaching Wars in Britain 
by Harry Hopkins.
Secker, 344 pp., £12.95, August 1985, 9780436201028
Show More
Show More
... the subjects’ private lives are either inviolate, or uninteresting, or unknown (save as may be fallibly deduced from ‘He was unmarried’). The second, smaller class consists mainly of those in the creative arts whose careers stickily attract phrases like ‘he never married, being a homosexual,’ ‘not always faithful’, ‘his amorous ...

Viva la joia

Roy Porter, 22 December 1983

Montaigne: Essays in Reading 
edited by Gérard Defaux.
Yale, 308 pp., £8.95, April 1983, 0 300 02977 2
Show More
Montaigne and Melancholy: The Wisdom of the ‘Essays’ 
by M.A. Screech.
Duckworth, 194 pp., £19.50, August 1983, 0 7156 1698 6
Show More
Show More
... in the limited sense of the person who put the words on the page.’ Abominating what we may call the ‘ET’ heresy (Extra-Textuality), our authors (or should we say abstractions?) flee the referent for the signifier, and embark upon their philological odyssey through the ‘texts’. The ‘author’, once patriarch of literary property, having ...

Chonkin’s Vicissitudes

Graham Hough, 1 October 1981

Pretender to the Throne: The Further Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin 
by Vladimir Voinovich, translated by Richard Lourie.
Cape, 358 pp., £7.95, September 1981, 9780224019668
Show More
The Temptation of Eileen Hughes 
by Brian Moore.
Cape, 224 pp., £6.50, October 1981, 0 224 01936 8
Show More
Silver’s City 
by Maurice Leitch.
Secker, 181 pp., £6.95, September 1981, 0 436 24413 6
Show More
The Christmas Tree 
by Jennifer Johnston.
Hamish Hamilton, 167 pp., £6.50, September 1981, 0 241 10673 7
Show More
Show More
... Party officials, NKVD officers, a scatter of little people keeping their heads down as best they may. Chonkin is no wily Yossarian figure: he is an innocent, and so is his Nyurka. So, strangely enough, are some of the other characters, even among the least sympathetic. Degraded as their lives and actions are, we are made to feel that they have been caught up ...

What happened in Havering

Conrad Russell, 12 March 1992

Community Transformed: The Manor and Liberty of Havering 1500-1620 
by Marjorie Keniston McIntosh.
Cambridge, 489 pp., £50, September 1991, 0 521 38142 8
Show More
Show More
... definition of the ‘better sort’, to which national, as well as local, economic change may have contributed. Yet in Havering, as in the country, the clearest change seems to be, not a rise or fall in any class, but an increase in the numbers of gentry. Here Havering seems to caricature the national trend. In 1570 to 1590, there were 24 to 25 ...

Oops

Philip Nobel: What makes things break, 21 February 2013

To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure 
by Henry Petroski.
Harvard, 410 pp., £19.95, March 2012, 978 0 674 06584 0
Show More
Show More
... the track’s safety systems had been contracted out, in contrast to the usual practice, which may have resulted in the lack of padding on the column the victim collided with at turn 16. But Petroski also suggests that financial gain shaped the design. He quotes from a post-mortem in the Wall Street Journal: ‘The course’s dangers became part of its ...

Beauty + Terror

Kevin Kopelson: Robert Mapplethorpe, 30 June 2016

Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archive 
by Frances Terpak and Michelle Brunnick.
Getty Research Institute, 240 pp., £32.50, March 2016, 978 1 60606 470 2
Show More
Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs 
by Paul Martineau and Britt Salvesen.
Getty Museum, 340 pp., £40, March 2016, 978 1 60606 469 6
Show More
Show More
... In​ New York in the 1960s, your first sight of gay pornography may well have been in public, looking in a sex shop window. If you were a gay kid, but closeted you would have reacted with pleasure, certainly, maybe even bliss – what Roland Barthes called jouissance. But there would also have been an inexplicable, almost sickening lust, and the fear of being seen looking ...

Mr and Mrs Hopper

Gail Levin: How the Tate gets Edward Hopper wrong, 24 June 2004

Edward Hopper 
edited by Sheena Wagstaff.
Tate Gallery, 256 pp., £29.99, May 2004, 1 85437 533 4
Show More
Show More
... the Whitney, with a note stating: ‘Since I took the trouble of having a photostat made of it, it may indicate that I am not so modest as I am said to be.’ Writing to Flexner himself, Hopper dismissed the interpretation and told the astonished critic that the painting depicted ‘a tuberculosis sanatorium’. The Hoppers had read The Magic Mountain with ...

But Stoney was Bold

Deborah Friedell: How Not to Marry if You’re a Millionaire, 26 February 2009

Wedlock 
by Wendy Moore.
Weidenfeld, 359 pp., £18.99, January 2009, 978 0 297 85331 2
Show More
Show More
... binding – but was paid off with £12,000 and died not long afterwards in Bengal. At first, Mary may have consented to her cloistering: she was pregnant by another man, and in order to secure the child’s legitimacy would have to pretend that it had been conceived later than it had been. The baby was hidden for three months, then presented at its baptism as ...

How to Perfume a Glove

Adam Smyth: Early Modern Cookbooks, 5 January 2017

Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen 
by Wendy Wall.
Pennsylvania, 328 pp., £53, November 2015, 978 0 8122 4758 9
Show More
Show More
... entangled (Partridge’s text is addressed not only to ‘Good Huswives’ but also to Richard Wistow, assistant to the Company of Barbers and Surgeons). According to Galenic humoural theory, health was a matter of balancing the black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm that swam through the body, and food was a crucial means of establishing this ...

Two Sharp Teeth

Philip Ball: Dracula Studies, 25 October 2018

Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote ‘Dracula’ 
by David J. Skal.
Norton, 672 pp., £15.99, October 2017, 978 1 63149 386 7
Show More
The Cambridge Companion to ‘Dracula’ 
edited by Roger Luckhurst.
Cambridge, 219 pp., £17.99, November 2017, 978 1 316 60708 4
Show More
The Vampire: A New History 
by Nick Groom.
Yale, 287 pp., £16.99, October 2018, 978 0 300 23223 3
Show More
Show More
... man’s life in the life of another.’ Stoker’s was, he went on, ‘the strongest love that man may feel for man’. One might assume from this that Stoker was a repressed homosexual. But what that actually means isn’t straightforward. In her essay in the Cambridge Companion, Heike Bauer writes that it was only in Stoker’s day that the boundaries of ...