Self-Positioning

Stefan Collini: The Movement, 25 June 2009

The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie and Their Contemporaries 
edited by Zachary Leader.
Oxford, 336 pp., £18.99, May 2009, 978 0 19 955825 4
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... work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume added the name of Thom Gunn. Insofar as there has ever been agreement on the matter, the Movement has been taken to consist of these nine writers. They appeared in these ...

Ruck in the Carpet

Glen Newey: Political Morality, 9 July 2009

Philosophy and Real Politics 
by Raymond Geuss.
Princeton, 116 pp., £11.95, October 2008, 978 0 691 13788 9
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... the point of morality. Whereas descriptive talk aims to make our words fit the world, as the late Elizabeth Anscombe put it, evaluative talk such as morality aims to make the world fit our words. That the world may not, straight off, fit our moral words is part of what it is for the words to be moral rather than descriptive. The nature of the moral ought is ...

Laertes has a daughter

Bee Wilson: The Redgraves, 6 June 2013

The Redgraves: A Family Epic 
by Donald Spoto.
Robson, 361 pp., £25, November 2012, 978 1 84954 394 1
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The House of Redgrave: The Lives of a Theatrical Dynasty 
by Tim Adler.
Aurum, 336 pp., £20, July 2012, 978 1 84513 623 9
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... film based on the notion that Shakespeare was really the Earl of Oxford, Joely plays the young Elizabeth I and Vanessa plays the old version. Later this year, Joely’s 21-year-old daughter Daisy Bevan will appear in her first feature film, The Two Faces of January, adapted from Patricia Highsmith. (The casting director has claimed to have been unaware of ...

Gentlemen Did Not Dig

Rosemary Hill: 18th-Century Gap Years, 24 June 2010

The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment 
by Jason Kelly.
Yale, 366 pp., £40, January 2010, 978 0 300 15219 7
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... the only one available. It was no longer necessary to be rich to enter the debate about taste. Elizabeth Bennet could travel to Derbyshire in pursuit of the picturesque and Keats could seal a letter to his sister with a Tassie gem, one of the cheap reproduction cameos sold in Leicester Square. All this would repay more, or more delicate, analysis than ...

No Longer Merely the Man Who Ate His Boots

Thomas Jones: The Northwest Passage, 27 May 2010

Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage 
by Glyn Williams.
Allen Lane, 440 pp., £25, October 2009, 978 1 84614 138 6
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Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation 
by Andrew Lambert.
Faber, 428 pp., £20, July 2009, 978 0 571 23160 7
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... financed by a group of 18 investors who called themselves the Company of Cathay. Two years earlier Elizabeth I had rejected a plan for a voyage through the Strait of Magellan: one of the great advantages of a northwest passage, besides the shorter distance, would be its remoteness from Spanish spheres of influence. And a northeast passage had already proved ...

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 ...