Sacred Parallelogram

Rosemary Hill: Women Paint Women, 23 April 2026

Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Maria Cosway 
by Diane Boucher.
Unicorn, 351 pp., £27.99, June 2025, 978 1 916846 78 4
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Souvenirs 
by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun.
David Zwirner, 184 pp., £10.95, May 2025, 978 1 64423 162 3
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“... Kauffman were friends, while the younger Cosway began her career, as her critical friend James Northcote wrote, ‘filled with the highest expectations of being … another Angelica Kauffman’. Le Brun and Cosway coincided several times in Paris, where Cosway cut a lesser figure. She was scathing in her diary about her French rival, who probably had ...”

Pipe down back there!

Terry Castle: The Willa Cather Wars, 14 December 2000

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism 
by Joan Acocella.
Nebraska, 127 pp., £13.50, August 2000, 0 8032 1046 9
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“... on the various ways in which Cather – in Acocella’s view the only American novelist besides James to rival Tolstoy and Flaubert for beauty of style and moral depth – had been manhandled by contemporary academic critics. The story Acocella told was one of noble articulation – Cather’s poised, pared-down imaginative utterance – overwhelmed by ...”

Don’t wait to be asked

Clare Bucknell: Revolutionary Portraiture, 2 March 2023

A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830 
by Paris Spies-Gans.
Paul Mellon Centre, 384 pp., £45, June 2022, 978 1 913107 29 1
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“... the Human Body. Frances Reynolds, Joshua Reynolds’s younger sister, explained to the Academician James Northcote that she did, out of propriety, ‘draw all her figures cloath’d’, except infants, ‘which she often paints from life’, Northcote reported, using ‘some beggar woman’s child which is laid naked on a pillow’. Kauffman, whose large ...”

The Reviewer’s Song

Andrew O’Hagan: Mailer’s Last Punch, 7 November 2013

Norman Mailer: A Double Life 
by J. Michael Lennon.
Simon and Schuster, 947 pp., £30, November 2013, 978 1 84737 672 5
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“... to deal in headlines not footnotes, which wrecked him for some but made him a hero to me. In Henry James’s ‘The Lesson of the Master’, Henry St George, the older novelist, offers the young writer Paul Overt a demonstration in self-sufficiency. He tells him a writer would do better not to marry, to put his passion into his work. Then marries the girl they ...”

Growing

Barbara Everett, 31 March 1988

“... predecessor is lost – the first ever detective story or civilised thriller. The drama critic James Agate, who once savagely described Donald Wolfit’s Hamlet as a private detective watching the jewels at the Claudius-Gertrude wedding feast, may have said more than he knew. Yet to praise Hamlet as the first detective story makes sense mainly in terms of ...”

The poet slams his door

Seamus Perry: Likeable Michael Longley, 9 July 2026

Ash Keys: New Selected Poems 
by Michael Longley.
Cape, 182 pp., £13, July 2025, 978 1 78733 485 4
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“... went on to publish. ‘Where else could it be placed?’ Heaney asked Dennis O’Driscoll, his Boswell. The contrast between the two signature poems is striking. Heaney finds in the spectacle of his father digging a model for his own poetic enterprise: he is obliged to use his pen where ‘the old man’ used a spade, but in some sense he is continuing in ...”

Fielding in the dock

Claude Rawson, 5 April 1990

Henry Fielding: A Life 
by Martin Battestin and Ruthe Battestin.
Routledge, 738 pp., £29.50, October 1989, 0 415 01438 7
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New Essays 
by Henry Fielding, edited by Martin Battestin.
Virginia, 604 pp., $50, November 1989, 0 8139 1221 0
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The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding. The True Patriot, and Related Writings 
edited by W.B. Coley.
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An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings 
edited by Malvin Zirker.
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The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register Office 
by Henry Fielding, edited by Bertrand Goldgar.
Oxford, 446 pp., £50, December 1988, 0 19 818511 1
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Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels of Henry Fielding and the Feminist Debate 1700-1750 
by Angela Smallwood.
Harvester, 230 pp., £35, March 1989, 0 7108 0639 6
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“... invites study.) Two important correspondences in particular have recently come to light: one with James Harris of Salisbury, the author of Hermes, whom Johnson called ‘a prig, and a bad prig’, but who was a warm friend to Fielding, lent him money sometimes, and wrote an unpublished essay on his ‘Life and Genius’; the other concerned with Fielding’s ...”

Don’t abandon me

Colm Tóibín: Borges and the Maids, 11 May 2006

Borges: A Life 
by Edwin Williamson.
Penguin, 416 pp., £9.99, August 2005, 0 14 024657 6
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“... It was as though an artist such as Picasso, whose father was a failed painter, or William James, whose father was a failed essayist, or V.S. Naipaul, sought to compensate for his father’s failure while at the same time using his talent as a way of killing the father off, showing his mother who was the real man in the household. Jorge Luis Borges was ...”

You better not tell me you forgot

Terry Castle: How to Spot Members of the Tribe, 27 September 2012

All We Know: Three Lives 
by Lisa Cohen.
Farrar Straus, 429 pp., £22.50, July 2012, 978 0 374 17649 5
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“... popular Bay Area psychic, a friend to Allen Ginsberg and the Beats and the experimental filmmaker James Broughton and a prominent gay political activist.) Despite Arthur’s chronic selfishness, Esther appears to have treated him in a generous if not saintly spirit. He ended up extracting quite of lot of money from her and decades after they split was still ...”