“... of survival was if the Eton-City-News International ‘nation’ ceased to call the shots. T.J. Clark But why should the rest of us care? There are some 5.3 million Scots, barely a ripple among the total citizenry of the globe, and less than a tenth even of the population of the UK (which is itself part of the problem). Even so, the referendum possesses ... ”
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Diary
Alan Bennett: What I did in 1999, 20 January 2000
“... of residence or identity and I’m sent home to get them.14 May. A piece in the Independent about David Blunkett tackling falling standards in education. I am pictured, though whether as evidence of decline or hope for the future I can’t make out. Either would please me.Judging from newspaper reports, the congregation at Ted Hughes’s memorial service in ... ”
Who Runs Britain?
Christopher Hitchens, 8 December 1994
The Enemy Within: MI5, Maxwell and the Scargill Affair
by Seumas Milne.
Verso, 352 pp., £18.95, November 1994,0 86091 461 5 Show More
by Seumas Milne.
Verso, 352 pp., £18.95, November 1994,
“... that formed the inspiration for Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War. Its author was Alan Clark. He at least did not pretend that Generals Haig and French, unlike Privates Scargill and Heathfield, were not responsible for a million dead.)To all this invocation of high and evasive metaphor, Milne opposes one hard and fast, earthy injunction. It is, in ... ”
The Hell out of Dodge
Jeremy Harding: Woodstock 1969, 15 August 2019
Woodstock: Three Days of Peace and Music
by Michael Lang.
Reel Art Press, 289 pp., £44.95, July 2019,978 1 909526 62 4 Show More
by Michael Lang.
Reel Art Press, 289 pp., £44.95, July 2019,
“... to play fifty years ago) were also billed, alongside veterans from the founding festival: Santana, David Crosby, Country Joe McDonald, the remains of the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat and others. But Lang’s fifty-up began to unravel when his top-dog investor, the Japanese digicoms company Dentsu Aegis, announced from its London HQ that it was pulling ... ”
Journey to Arezzo
Nicholas Penny: The Apotheosis of Piero, 17 April 2003
Piero della Francesca
by Roberto Longhi, translated by David Tabbat.
Sheep Meadow, 364 pp., £32.50, September 2002,1 878818 77 5 Show More
by Roberto Longhi, translated by David Tabbat.
Sheep Meadow, 364 pp., £32.50, September 2002,
“... grew up believing that Seurat and Cézanne had made Piero’s rediscovery possible. Kenneth Clark, who, as director of the National Gallery, should have inquired how Piero’s paintings came to be in his care, even made the absurd claim that the Victorians could never have understood Piero. For all the influence of this book, Longhi has never been ... ”
Words as Amulets
Ange Mlinko: Barbara Guest’s Poems, 3 December 2009
The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest
edited by Hadley Haden Guest.
Wesleyan, 525 pp., £33.95, July 2008,978 0 8195 6860 1 Show More
edited by Hadley Haden Guest.
Wesleyan, 525 pp., £33.95, July 2008,
Women, the New York School and Other True Abstractions
by Maggie Nelson.
Iowa, 288 pp., £38.50, December 2007,978 1 58729 615 4 Show More
by Maggie Nelson.
Iowa, 288 pp., £38.50, December 2007,
“... If modernism is our antiquity, as T.J. Clark has claimed, then Barbara Guest was a devout classicist. No American poet – with the exception of John Ashbery – so reverently extended early modernist aesthetics into the second half of the 20th century. As Guest put it in her essay ‘Radical Poetics and Conservative Poetry’, ‘everything we loved, emulated, was attached to the lyric modernism of Baudelaire and Mallarmé’s later writing ... ”
Shtum
John Lanchester: Alastair Campbell’s Diaries, 16 August 2007
The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries
edited by Alastair Campbell and Richard Stott.
Hutchinson, 794 pp., £25, July 2007,978 0 09 179629 7 Show More
edited by Alastair Campbell and Richard Stott.
Hutchinson, 794 pp., £25, July 2007,
“... fall of Milosevic, which was brilliant.’ But there are some great little sketches, as when Alan Clark is added to a North London dinner party as a last-minute guest. The Braggs arrived and Melvyn was horrified. He said he loathed Alan C. Alan and Jane arrived in one of his Bentleys, which could barely squeeze through the two lines of parked cars ... ”
In Fiery Letters
Mark Ford: F.T. Prince, 8 February 2018
“... might have issued from Christ’s breast.The consummation imagined here is tellingly related in David Kennedy’s astute essay on Prince’s ‘Portrayal of National Bodies’ to a notebook entry the poet made in 1950, which details a bored church elder haunted by a ‘dream of naked man, opening his arms, receiving love and death upon his bare ... ”
Philosophical Vinegar, Marvellous Salt
Malcolm Gaskill: Alchemical Pursuits, 15 July 2021
The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700
by Jennifer M. Rampling.
Chicago, 408 pp., £28, December 2020,978 0 226 71070 9 Show More
by Jennifer M. Rampling.
Chicago, 408 pp., £28, December 2020,
“... on a stock image developed over centuries, by painters especially. Brueghel in the 16th century, David Teniers in the 17th, and Joseph Wright in the 18th, all painted grimy scenes of reclusion and penury, with hints of mad obsession and radiant wonder. Cornelis Pietersz Bega’s alchemist, from 1663, adds pathos to the mix: were it not for the delicately ... ”
Little England
Patrick Wright: The view through a bus window, 7 September 2006
Great British Bus Journeys: Travels through Unfamous Places
by David McKie.
Atlantic, 359 pp., £16.99, March 2006,1 84354 132 7 Show More
by David McKie.
Atlantic, 359 pp., £16.99, March 2006,
“... tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the ... ”
Open in a Scream
Colm Tóibín, 4 March 2021
Francis Bacon: Revelations
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.
William Collins, 869 pp., £30, January,978 0 00 729841 9 Show More
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.
William Collins, 869 pp., £30, January,
“... introduced Bacon to collectors and galleries and other painters, even persuading Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, to visit Bacon’s studio. (‘Interesting, yes,’ Clark said. ‘What extraordinary times we live in.’) In 1945, Ben Nicholson pulled out of a planned six-artist show and Sutherland ... ”
Look Me in the Eye
Julian Bell: Art and the Brain, 8 October 2009
Splendours and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness
by Semir Zeki.
Wiley-Blackwell, 234 pp., £16.99, November 2008,978 1 4051 8557 8 Show More
by Semir Zeki.
Wiley-Blackwell, 234 pp., £16.99, November 2008,
Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki
by John Onians.
Yale, 225 pp., £18.99, February 2008,978 0 300 12677 8 Show More
by John Onians.
Yale, 225 pp., £18.99, February 2008,
Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images
by Barbara Maria Stafford.
Chicago, 281 pp., £20.50, November 2008,978 0 226 77052 9 Show More
by Barbara Maria Stafford.
Chicago, 281 pp., £20.50, November 2008,
“... and natural history within a ‘big history’ such as those outlined by the American writers David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown – or, in the terminology of Edward O. Wilson, in a ‘consilience’, a convergence of intellectual disciplines, humanities with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts department pays a kind of homage to ... ”
Self-Made Women
John Sutherland, 11 July 1991
The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present
edited by Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy and Patricia Clements.
Batsford, 1231 pp., £35, August 1990,0 7134 5848 8 Show More
edited by Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy and Patricia Clements.
Batsford, 1231 pp., £35, August 1990,
The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel
by Richard Altick.
Ohio State, 854 pp., $45, March 1991,0 8142 0518 6 Show More
by Richard Altick.
Ohio State, 854 pp., $45, March 1991,
“... Patience Strong; ‘John’ Radclyffe Hall, but not Jan Morris; Julia Kristeva, but not Elizabeth David (nor Jane Grigson, nor even Mrs Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw deal. There is no entry on Katharine ... ”
Old Gravy
Mark Ford, 7 September 1995
Robert Graves: Life on the Edge
by Miranda Seymour.
Doubleday, 524 pp., £20, July 1995,0 385 40423 9 Show More
by Miranda Seymour.
Doubleday, 524 pp., £20, July 1995,
Robert Graves and the White Goddess
by Richard Perceval Graves.
Weidenfeld, 618 pp., £25, July 1995,0 297 81534 2 Show More
by Richard Perceval Graves.
Weidenfeld, 618 pp., £25, July 1995,
Robert Graves: His Life and Work
by Martin Seymour-Smith.
Bloomsbury, 600 pp., £25, June 1995,0 7475 2205 7 Show More
by Martin Seymour-Smith.
Bloomsbury, 600 pp., £25, June 1995,
Robert Graves: Collected Writings on Poetry
edited by Paul O’Prey.
Carcanet, 560 pp., £35, June 1995,1 85754 172 3 Show More
edited by Paul O’Prey.
Carcanet, 560 pp., £35, June 1995,
Robert Graves: The Centenary Selected Poems
edited by Patrick Quinn.
Carcanet, 160 pp., £15.95, April 1995,9781857541267 Show More
edited by Patrick Quinn.
Carcanet, 160 pp., £15.95, April 1995,
“... what makes him such a disastrously blinkered critic, at once ill-tempered, dogmatic and smug. His Clark Lectures (1954-5) and Oxford Addresses on Poetry (1961) are packed with denunciations of just about any poet you care to name – Milton, Pope, Dryden, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Browning, Tennyson, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Dylan Thomas ... Graves also ... ”
The Essential Orwell
Frank Kermode, 22 January 1981
Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s
edited by Frank Gloversmith.
Harvester, 285 pp., £20, July 1980,0 85527 938 9 Show More
edited by Frank Gloversmith.
Harvester, 285 pp., £20, July 1980,
Culture and Crisis in Britain in the Thirties
edited by Jon Clark, Margot Heinemann, David Margolies and Carole Snee.
Lawrence and Wishart, 279 pp., £3.50, March 1980,0 85315 419 8 Show More
edited by Jon Clark, Margot Heinemann, David Margolies and Carole Snee.
Lawrence and Wishart, 279 pp., £3.50, March 1980,
“... Professor Crick’s subject is important and his research has evidently been diligent. We now know a lot more about Orwell than we did, and the increment of knowledge is not always trivial. Why, then, is it impossible to commend this book with warmth? For two main reasons: first, in a work of such length the prevalence of carelessly written pages is a strong disincentive to continuing (and of course they are shown up all the more by their proximity to quotations from Orwell); and secondly, Orwell was a literary figure as well as a political thinker, and Crick’s literary touch is far from certain ... ”
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