Ink Blots, Pin Holes

Caroline Gonda: ‘Frankenstein’, 28 January 2010

The Original ‘Frankenstein’ 
by Mary Shelley, with Percy Shelley, edited by Charles Robinson.
Bodleian Library, 448 pp., £14.99, October 2009, 978 1 85124 396 9
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... Others are more awkward and sometimes ill-judged, such as the digression in the letter from Elizabeth, who becomes Frankenstein’s wife, to Frankenstein about the place of Justine Moritz in their family: The republican institutions of our country have produced simpler and happier manners than those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround ...

Stuck with Your Own Face

Bee Wilson: The Beauty Industry, 8 July 2010

Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry 
by Geoffrey Jones.
Oxford, 412 pp., £25, February 2010, 978 0 19 955649 6
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... moisturisers. ‘Because you’re worth it,’ as the slogan says. The law rarely intervenes. Elizabeth Arden was forced to change the name of her Orange Skin Food to Orange Skin Cream, since it was not technically a food; and Helene Curtis’s wrinkle-removing cream ‘was seized by regulators on the grounds that the company was making false claims for ...

Diary

R.W. Johnson: World Cup Diary, 22 July 2010

... v. USA match at the anyway small Rustenburg stadium and the Nelson Mandela Bay stadium in Port Elizabeth hasn’t yet been more than two-thirds full.16 June. In the run-up to the World Cup there was a constant rumble of threatened strike action by groups keen to take advantage of this unbeatable blackmail opportunity. Now, however, we have seen wildcat ...

The Real Thing!

Julian Barnes: Visions of Vice, 17 December 2015

Splendeurs et misères: Images de la prostitution 1850-1910 
Musée d’Orsay, until 17 January 2016Show More
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun 
Grand Palais, until 11 January 2016Show More
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun 
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 9 February 2016 to 15 May 2016Show More
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... at a kind of formal informality. In this, she resembles Cecil Beaton at the court of the young Elizabeth II: both produced a very highly worked art whose intended effect was of naturalness. She was very French. She spent three years in England, much of it – from Matlock to the Isle of Wight – reminding her of Switzerland. When visiting Bath she thought ...

Diary

Ben Lerner: On Disliking Poetry, 18 June 2015

... supposedly formerly had. He doesn’t have to do much more than glance at a website to realise Elizabeth Alexander isn’t up to the task: she is, after all, writing actual poems. ‘I am large, I contain multitudes,’ Walt Whitman wrote in ‘Song of Myself’, and Packer’s nostalgia – as with many American nostalgists – is clearly shaped by the ...

In such a Labyrinth

Jonathan Rée: Hume, 17 December 2015

Hume: An Intellectual Biography 
by James Harris.
Cambridge, 621 pp., £35, September 2015, 978 0 521 83725 5
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... who made an even worse case for popular liberty. But there was no point in being censorious: Elizabeth had been an ‘excellent hypocrite’ with a talent for seeming more liberal than she was; James and Charles were less adroit, but they made an ‘excusable mistake’ when they overstepped their constitutional powers; Cromwell was a ‘fanatical ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Thatcher in Gravesend, 9 May 2013

... in Margaret Thatcher, or London’s remote television ceremonies. She meant as much to them as Elizabeth I, who schlepped down here to deliver her rousing speech to the troops at the time of the Spanish Armada. The Railport was booming, but passenger transit and human immigration were over. All the platforms – spectacular ruins at the time of my last ...

Lord Have Mercy

James Shapiro: Plague Writing, 31 March 2011

Plague Writing in Early Modern England 
by Ernest Gilman.
Chicago, 295 pp., £24, June 2009, 978 0 226 29409 4
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... in our imagination’, that like ‘the exegetes of 1603 attempting to connect the reign of Elizabeth with that of her successor over the chasm of an intervening epidemic, we find ourselves reading our own fin de siècle cultural history as a prolepsis’. Again, the analogies are rich and productive, but limited, and raise all sorts of questions. Did ...

Howl, Howl, Howl!

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Fanny Kemble, 22 May 2008

Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life 
by Deirdre David.
Pennsylvania, 347 pp., £26, June 2007, 978 0 8122 4023 8
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... the Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation. Based on a series of letters she sent to Elizabeth Sedgwick, a prominent New England abolitionist and sister-in-law of Kemble’s close friend the novelist Catharine Sedgwick, and modelled on the work of another novelist, the gothic ‘Monk’ Lewis’s account of a visit to his Jamaican estate, the ...

Out of Bounds

Ian Gilmour: Why Wordsworth sold a lot less than Byron, 20 January 2005

The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period 
by William St Clair.
Cambridge, 765 pp., £90, July 2004, 9780521810067
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... Johnson wrote The Lives of the Poets,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning grumbled, ‘and left out the poets.’ She exaggerated, of course, but a book of that title which omitted Chaucer and Shakespeare, Spenser and all the Elizabethans, Donne and nearly all the Jacobeans, while including a host of nonentities, such as Pomfret, Stepney, Dyer, Smith, Duke and King, was at the very least defective and misleading ...

Back to Reality

David Edgar: Arthur Miller and the Oblong Blur, 18 March 2004

Arthur Miller: A Life 
by Martin Gottfried.
Faber, 484 pp., £25, October 2003, 0 571 21946 2
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... about the nature of the real’, it falls apart: we should be and are in no doubt that John and Elizabeth Proctor are unjustly accused. Miller has p0inted out that The Crucible tends to be staged in countries which are about to enter or leave a period of dictatorship. This is not because the play is a philosophical treatise, or indeed a documentary about a ...

Who wouldn’t buy it?

Colin Burrow: Speculating about Shakespeare, 20 January 2005

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare 
by Stephen Greenblatt.
Cape, 430 pp., £20, October 2004, 9780224062763
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... belief that A Midsummer Night’s Dream might reflect aspects of the performances put on before Elizabeth I at Kenilworth, 12 miles from Stratford, in 1575. Harry Goldingham, the actor who played Arion, apologetically tore off his costume and revealed his true identity in a way that’s very like Snug the joiner’s declaration ‘that I as Snug the joiner ...

A Tulip and Two Bulbs

Jenny Turner: Jeanette Winterson, 7 September 2000

The PowerBook 
by Jeanette Winterson.
Cape, 243 pp., £14.99, September 2000, 0 224 06103 8
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... winning through against the forces of darkness, like Jane Eyre, like Anne of Green Gables, like Elizabeth I. Read Oranges now and you will still find in it the exuberance and the craft of a jack-in-the-box. There is so much energy stowed away in those neat, demure little sentences. It will leap out and cuff you hard. You can feel that will in the way ...

Slowly/Swiftly

Michael Hofmann: James Schuyler, 7 February 2002

Last Poems 
by James Schuyler.
Slow Dancer, 64 pp., £7.99, January 1999, 1 871033 51 9
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Alfred and Guinevere 
by James Schuyler.
NYRB, 141 pp., £7.99, June 2001, 0 940322 49 8
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... station./Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small’ against the author of ‘Arches’ – besides, Elizabeth Bishop was a great admirer of both. From ‘The Payne Whitney Poems’, I ranged happily over the rest of The Morning of the Poem (1980), and then the Selected and Collected Poems of 1990 and 1993. The Collected was never published in the UK, but the ...

The Imagined Market

Donald MacKenzie: Money Games, 31 October 2002

Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science 
by Philip Mirowski.
Cambridge, 670 pp., £24.95, February 2002, 0 521 77526 4
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... utterances – ‘you are now husband and wife’; ‘I name this ship Queen Elizabeth’ – make themselves true by being uttered.) In part, Callon has in mind loosely ‘economic’ practices such as marketing and accountancy, and the Enron scandal has certainly focused attention on how key data such as firms’ earnings are ...