Am I dead?

Jordan Kisner: Susan Taubes’s Stories, 5 October 2023

Lament for Julia: And Other Stories 
by Susan Taubes.
NYRB, 240 pp., £13.99, June, 978 1 68137 694 3
Show More
Show More
... in the US in 1969, it was panned by Hugh Kenner in the New York Times as the work of a ‘lady novelist’. A few days later, at the age of 41, she walked into the sea in the Hamptons. Sontag identified the body.The fiction was out of print for decades, but in recent years there has been a revival of interest in Taubes. Divorcing was reissued by New ...

On V.R. Lang

Mark Ford, 4 July 2024

... collected here. Reworking a solemn pronouncement of T.S. Eliot’s from ‘Ash Wednesday’ (‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree’), she writes: ‘Baby, 3 black/Panthers soiling the plantain leaves at the noon of day’. Hip phrases seep into Lang’s verse, and her arcane symbols, such as the White Crow, verge on parody: ‘I waited ...

At the Rijksmuseum

Clare Bucknell: Panniers and Petticoats, 21 November 2024

... daughters, feared for their internal organs. ‘She used to tell us a dreadful moral tale about a lady who laced herself so hard that she cut her liver right in half.’Structural transformations of the figure weren’t limited to the upper half of the body. In the early 18th century there was a vogue for gigantic skirts, which had to be supported by ...

Expertest Artificers

Kate Heard: Tudor Art, 19 February 2026

The Story of Tudor Art 
by Christina J. Faraday.
Apollo, 448 pp., £40, September 2025, 978 1 80454 739 7
Show More
Holbein: Renaissance Master 
by Elizabeth Goldring.
Yale, 424 pp., £40, November 2025, 978 1 913107 50 5
Show More
Show More
... at great risk. Individual pieces are made to stand in for an entire culture. How representative is Lady Anne Drury’s inventive closet, painted with sprightly emblems and botanical motifs in the early 17th century? The decorated panelling was moved between different residences and then, on the destruction of Hardwick House in the 1920s, to an Ipswich ...

Out of Ottawa

John Bayley, 21 November 1991

By Heart. Elizabeth Smart: A Life 
by Rosemary Sullivan.
Lime Tree, 415 pp., £17.99, October 1991, 0 413 45341 3
Show More
Show More
... the pattern, for the greediest wanting and getting was for her also a form of frenzied bestowal. Lady Bountiful is by tradition a predatory and demanding figure, evaded by the victims of her benevolence. And as Rosemary Sullivan remarks in this readable and informative study, Elizabeth and her younger sister ‘acted out a fantasy of social ...

What the children saw

Marina Warner, 7 April 1994

Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany 
by David Blackhourn.
Oxford, 463 pp., £40, December 1993, 0 19 821783 8
Show More
Show More
... and Belgium in particular. La Salette, where, in 1846, three shepherd children saw a ‘beautiful lady’, provided a closer comparison to Marpingen. One of the little-noticed effects of cultural globalisation is that Mary, like Marilyn Monroe or Mickey Mouse or the Lone Ranger, has come to dominate the cable networks of the imagination. Local saints with ...

Wounding Nonsenses

E.S. Turner, 6 February 1997

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh 
edited by Charlotte Mosley.
Hodder, 531 pp., £25, October 1996, 0 340 63804 4
Show More
Show More
... more wounding nonsenses. She cannot let Mitford get away with imputing ‘intense cowardice’ to Lady Derby for not trying to strangle a crazed footman who murdered her butler and under-butter; seemingly, she was in no state to strangle anybody since, as the first to be attacked, she was already lying in a pool of blood. Other nonsenses are not worth ...

Chinaberry Pie

D.A.N. Jones, 1 March 1984

Modern Baptists 
by James Wilcox.
Secker, 239 pp., £7.95, January 1984, 9780436570988
Show More
Speranza 
by Sven Delblanc, translated by Paul Britten Austin.
Secker, 153 pp., £7.95, February 1984, 9780436126802
Show More
High Spirits 
by Robertson Davies.
Penguin, 198 pp., £2.50, January 1984, 0 14 006505 9
Show More
Hanabeke 
by Dudley St John Magnus.
Angus and Robertson, 133 pp., £6.95, January 1984, 0 207 14565 2
Show More
Train to Hell 
by Alexei Sayle.
Methuen, 152 pp., £7.95, February 1984, 0 413 52460 4
Show More
The English Way of Doing Things 
by William Donaldson.
Weidenfeld, 229 pp., £7.95, January 1984, 0 297 78345 9
Show More
Show More
... smart in his new tie from Fraternity Row, over in Mississippi. But there are bad omens – the lady in the mink stole, the kind that had the heads left on it, the eyes ‘small, black, vicious beads that glared at him in outrage’, and the change in the Louisiana weather, ‘turning the crisp November air into a rank soup that smelled of hearty ...

Sideswipes

Stephen Walsh: Prokofiev, 25 September 2003

Prokofiev: From Russia to the West 1891-1935 
by David Nice.
Yale, 390 pp., £25, April 2003, 0 300 09914 2
Show More
Show More
... he took up residence in Moscow exactly a month before Pravda’s denunciation of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth, which at last made plain to musicians how little their future well-being was going to depend on their ability to compose what Prokofiev had understood as ‘music that would correspond both in form and content to the grandeur of the epoch’ – the ...

Delicious Sponge Cake

Dinah Birch: Elizabeth Stoddard, Crusader against Duty, 9 October 2003

Stories 
by Elizabeth Stoddard, edited by Susanne Opfermann and Yvonne Roth.
Northeastern, 238 pp., £14.50, April 2003, 1 55553 563 1
Show More
Show More
... such cravings, and wrote ruefully about ‘the prestige which money gives’. Writing as ‘Our Lady Correspondent’ for the Daily Alta California, a San Francisco paper, she wonders why ‘writers, especially female writers, make their heroines so indifferent to good eating, so careless about taking cold, and so impervious to all the creature ...

Valet of the Dolls

Andrew O’Hagan: Sinatra, 24 July 2003

Mr S.: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra 
by George Jacobs and William Stadiem.
Sidgwick, 261 pp., £16.99, June 2003, 0 283 07370 5
Show More
Show More
... Thus he always needed a girl, and she didn’t have to be famous. First he’d go for his leading lady. If she wasn’t free, he’d try some famous ex, like Lana Turner, whom he’d dated in the 1940s, for old times. Then he’d work his way down the food chain, starting with starlets, then the hookers, and, if all else failed, he’d call Peggy Lee, who ...

Rough Wooing

Tom Shippey: Queen Matilda, 17 November 2011

Matilda: Queen of the Conqueror 
by Tracy Borman.
Cape, 297 pp., £20, September 2011, 978 0 224 09055 1
Show More
Show More
... too often forgotten, one might ask for a biography of King Alfred’s daughter Æthelflæd, ‘Lady of the Mercians’, who in partnership with her brother Edward ‘the Elder’ and her extremely mysterious husband, ‘Alderman’ Æthelræd, played the Isabella role in the tenth-century reconquista of central England from the pagan Vikings, and left her ...

Respectful Perversion

John Pemble: Gilbert and Sullivan, 16 June 2011

Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody 
by Carolyn Williams.
Columbia, 454 pp., £24, January 2011, 978 0 231 14804 7
Show More
Show More
... she warns, ‘make the mistake of reading the Savoy Dames straight.’ With the exception of Lady Blanche in Princess Ida, ‘the large contralto characters’ are ‘not the misogynistic figure itself, but a parody of that figure’. Gilbert isn’t mocking plain, middle-aged women. He’s mocking people who mock such women, because such women are not ...

A Bit of Ginger

Theo Tait: Gordon Burn, 5 June 2008

Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel 
by Gordon Burn.
Faber, 214 pp., £15.99, April 2008, 978 0 571 19729 3
Show More
Show More
... visitor to the park, now a ghost of her former self. The ‘heightened reality of the “Iron Lady”, scourge of the trade unions, victor of the Falklands War, the best man in the cabinet’ has dissipated. She totters through the park, steadied by an agency nurse, wearing ‘old ladies’ clothes’ and ‘flat suede lace-up shoes of the kind you see ...

Bad Shepherd

Robert Crawford: James Hogg, 5 April 2001

The Collected Works of James Hogg. Vol. VIII: The ‘Spy’ 
edited by Gillian Hughes.
Edinburgh, 641 pp., £60, March 2000, 9780748613656
Show More
Show More
... scene-setting, but with direct speech: ‘“I tell you this will never do George,” said the old lady to her son.’ Part One ends on a note of suspense likely to make readers eager for the next issue. Hogg the short-story writer and Hogg the editor learned their crafts together; the Spy’s hodgepodge of genres and voices is springily productive. As he ...