Julia Caesar

Marilyn Butler, 17 March 1983

The Prince and the Wild Geese 
by Brigid Brophy.
Hamish Hamilton, 62 pp., £5.95, February 1983, 0 241 10894 2
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... tenderly, or drily. Julia watches a bloody duel fought over her, with the courteous interest of a lady at a medieval tournament, from what appears, surreally, to be the window of a public bathhouse. This puzzling scene provides a turning-point to the drama, for it is followed by the one drawing of a tête-à-tête between the lovers – a misnomer, since her ...

Morgan to his Friends

Denis Donoghue, 2 August 1984

Selected Letters of E.M. Forster: Vol. I: 1879-1920 
edited by Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank.
Collins, 344 pp., £15.95, October 1983, 0 00 216718 2
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... and similar impossibles’, but then he was writing to Aunt Laura, who was reading Portrait of a Lady and may have indicated that the going was getting rough. In Aspects of the Novel (1927) Forster gave several pages to The Ambassadors, and showed that he thought it quite possible but stingy – an instance of James’s premise, according to Forster’s ...

Look, I’d love one!

John Bayley, 22 October 1992

Stephen Spender: A Portrait with Background 
by Hugh David.
Heinemann, 308 pp., £17.50, October 1992, 0 434 17506 4
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More Please: An Autobiography 
by Barry Humphries.
Viking, 331 pp., £16.99, September 1992, 0 670 84008 4
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... seven young men named Snowball, which started a giggle that swiftly died away. Having read about Lady Ottoline and Garsington young Barry decided to become a conscientious objector, which to his great surprise rather impressed the grim headmaster, Mr Sutcliffe, and resulted in our hero’s being able to stroll past rigid platoons of classmates, ‘their ...

Revolutionary Chic

Neal Ascherson, 5 November 1992

Chamfort: A Biography 
by Claude Arnaud, translated by Deke Dusinberre.
Chicago, 372 pp., £21.50, May 1992, 0 226 02697 3
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... own name. Chamfort was the illegitimate son of Jacqueline de Vinzelles, an aristocratic married lady from the region of Clermont-Ferrand, and a young canon at the cathedral. He was dumped on a baker’s wife, whose own baby had died, and given the dead baby’s name: Sebastien Roch Nicolas. Brilliant as a schoolboy, tormented by rage and resentment when he ...

Diary

Elaine Showalter: My Year of Living Dangerously, 2 April 1998

... Nancy said to me after the show as we waited for an armed guard to escort us to her car. ‘Lady, you have balls!’ In New York the next morning, I ended the tour with an appearance on Crossfire, a public-affairs programme on which two antagonists duke it out, each with her very own hostile interviewer; as a friend remarked, it’s like being locked in ...

Bug-Affairs

Hugh Pennington: Bedbugs!, 6 January 2011

... edge of the wood, the dermatologist said, ‘extracting nourishment from the legs of unsuspecting lady passengers. Men were never affected, their stouter nether garments providing sufficient protection. The tram was disinfected, the grooves were planed out … the epidemic came to an end.’ In 2008, bugs were found on the New York subway, on wooden benches ...

Down the Telescope

Nicholas Penny: The Art of Imitation, 24 January 2019

Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War 
by Elizabeth Prettejohn.
Yale, 286 pp., £45, June 2017, 978 0 300 22275 3
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... a pendant to one of the greatest of European portraits. (Unfortunately the painting, bequeathed by Lady Eastlake to the National Gallery, was destroyed in the flood of 1928 at the Tate Gallery, to which it had been transferred.) It illustrates the taste – not just for Raphael but for Guido Reni – against which the Pre-Raphaelites rebelled, but it also ...

The Debate

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2024

... a Jewish husband, ‘hates’ Israel.And of course Trump had to bring up the cats. Vance’s cat lady crack wasn’t going away, so the Republicans had demonstrated their cat-loving credentials by creating the completely false story that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing cats off the front porches of real Americans and eating them. This ...

Candles for the living

Julian Barnes, 22 November 1990

... in Britain: taciturn becapped old workers line up alongside bright young students. A middle-aged lady looks me directly in the eye and says: ‘We are a poor country but we love books.’ It is a straightforward statement, and not in the least mawkish. It is also true. At a meeting with editors from two of Bulgaria’s literary journals, I am unable to tell ...

Art of Embarrassment

A.D. Nuttall, 18 August 1994

Essays, Mainly Shakespearean 
by Anne Barton.
Cambridge, 386 pp., £40, March 1994, 0 521 40444 4
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English Comedy 
edited by Michael Cordner, Peter Holland and John Kerrigan.
Cambridge, 323 pp., £35, March 1994, 0 521 41917 4
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... unfolds. When it is over, Cleopatra whispers in Charmian’s ear and Iras says: ‘Finish, good lady, the bright day is done, and we are for the dark.’ Cleopatra answers: ‘It is provided’, referring without question to the means of death. Given the drumbeat consistency of the references to the death-plan in counterpoint with the studied formality of ...

Wild Hearts

Peter Wollen, 6 April 1995

Virginia Woolf 
by James King.
Hamish Hamilton, 699 pp., £25, September 1994, 0 241 13063 8
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... Russes on Bloomsbury was enormous and lasting. Omega’s first major commission came in 1913, from Lady Hamilton, whose niece worked for Diaghilev, and who, in Judith Collins’s words, wanted to turn her own home into ‘the approximation of a stage-set for a Diaghilev ballet’. The influence of the Ballets Russes went much deeper than décor, however. As ...
Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles 
by Irwin Gellman.
Johns Hopkins, 499 pp., $29.95, April 1995, 0 8018 5083 5
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Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley 
edited by Geoffrey Ward.
Houghton Mifflin, 444 pp., $24.95, April 1995, 0 395 66080 7
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No Ordinary Time. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War Two 
by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Simon and Schuster, 759 pp., £18, June 1995, 0 671 64240 5
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The End of Reform 
by Alan Brinkley.
Knopf, 371 pp., $27.50, March 1995, 0 394 53573 1
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... in love, the woman she will later install in a White House bedroom across from her own. The First Lady’s passionate attachment to her woman friend has cooled, however, supplanted by her feelings for a radical student leader young enough to be her son. When the President’s wife meets her young man at a Chicago hotel during his furlough from the Army, the ...

Hoarder of Malt

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare, 7 January 1999

Shakespeare: A Life 
by Park Honan.
Oxford, 479 pp., £25, October 1998, 0 19 811792 2
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Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ 
by E.A.J. Honigmann.
Manchester, 172 pp., £11.99, December 1998, 0 7190 5425 7
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... many children Shakespeare had than it has with untheorised speculations about the number born to Lady Macbeth, it has nonetheless been prepared to look afresh at the relations between the plays and their different historical and cultural milieux. Shakespeare: A Life is thus enriched not only by recent studies of the biographical archive (notably David ...

Hate, Greed, Lust and Doom

Sean O’Faolain, 16 April 1981

William Faulkner: His Life and Work 
by David Minter.
Johns Hopkins, 325 pp., £9.50, January 1981, 0 8018 2347 1
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... care their pattern fits together.’ For an amusing American view I recall the patrician old lady from the Deep South who persisted to the end of the first quarter of the novel and then handed it back with a haughty: ‘I can only conclude that this novel was written by a congenital idiot.’ Tot homines ... However, if nobody can safely be dogmatic ...

Joining up

Angus Calder, 3 April 1986

Soldier, Soldier 
by Tony Parker.
Heinemann, 244 pp., £9.95, September 1985, 0 434 57770 7
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Echoes of the Great War: The Diary of the Reverend Andrew Clark 1914-1919 
edited by James Munson.
Oxford, 304 pp., £10.95, October 1985, 0 19 212984 8
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The Unknown Army: Mutinies in the British Army in World War One 
by Gloden Dallas and Douglas Gill.
Verso, 178 pp., £18.50, July 1985, 0 86091 106 3
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Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle 
by John Keegan and Richard Holmes.
Hamish Hamilton, 288 pp., £12.95, September 1985, 0 241 11583 3
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... married man which in my case I am not, you have your house and all the rest of it, though my young lady and me will be getting married very shortly. Then she will have everything she wants too, and she’s very ready to join the Army with me, as they say sir. Because if a man’s wife is not right for the Army, then that man is not right for the Army either. I ...