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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
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... 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
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... 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
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... 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
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... 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
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... 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 ...

Too Good and Too Silly

Frank Kermode: Could Darcy Swim?, 30 April 2009

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen. Vol. IX: Later Manuscripts 
edited by Janet Todd and Linda Bree.
Cambridge, 742 pp., £65, December 2008, 978 0 521 84348 5
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Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World 
by Claire Harman.
Canongate, 342 pp., £20, April 2009, 978 1 84767 294 0
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... manuscript fragment is of the unfinished novel Sanditon. Another substantial fragment is the early Lady Susan, and a third is The Watsons, also abandoned in manuscript. In addition to line-by-line transcriptions which add to the bulk of the book and may not be much consulted, except by future editors (if one can imagine the need for them), there are some ...

Please enter your pin

Rachel Bowlby: At the Checkout, 22 October 2009

Checkout: A Life on the Tills 
by Anna Sam.
175 pp., £6.99, July 2009, 978 1 906040 29 1
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... me’). There is even a woman who shuts up a child with the thought that she’ll end up like that lady, working behind a checkout, if she doesn’t try harder at school. Sam evokes her solitude and powerlessness when faced with difficult customers. She describes moments of drifting off into a kind of computer-game reverie, suspended somewhere above the ...

The Monster in the Milk Bowl

Richard Poirier, 3 October 1996

Pierre, or The Ambiguities 
by Herman Melville, edited by Hershel Parker.
HarperCollins, 449 pp., £15.99, May 1996, 0 06 118009 2
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... thanking her for what he terms her amazing insights into Moby-Dick. He then remarks; ‘My dear Lady, I shall not again send you a bowl of salt water. The next chalice I commend will be a rural bowl of milk.’ Clearly, ‘a rural bowl of milk’ is expected to suit the tastes of the general public, though it may be significant that in the novel Pierre’s ...

The Reptile Oculist

John Barrell, 1 April 2004

... an effigy of Dundas was carried into George Square and set alight outside the house of his mother, Lady Arniston. Despite the intervention of troops, who were strongly resisted by the crowd, windows were broken in her house and in that of Robert Dundas, the lord advocate and Henry’s nephew. One rioter was shot by the soldiers, several injured. The crowd ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Allelujah!, 3 January 2019

... of peace, kitted out with gardens, vegetable plots, craft centres and all unsullied by men. ‘A Lady of Letters’ ends in a women’s prison, with Miss Ruddock saying: ‘I’m so … happy.’ In ‘Nights in the Gardens of Spain’ two characters find love in a prison garden. Now at the end of Allelujah! (and slightly to my surprise) there comes another ...

Olivier Rex

Ronald Bryden, 1 September 1988

Olivier 
by Anthony Holden.
Weidenfeld, 504 pp., £16, May 1988, 0 297 79089 7
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... had invaded his privacy, not he theirs. His subsequent films, Rebecca, Pride and Prejudice and Lady Hamilton, show him muffling his sexuality in withdrawn diffidence, with that effect of coquetry which led some contemporaries to describe him as flirtatious. But knowledge of his power is clearly present in the scenes where he woos Katherine of France in ...

Distraction v. Attraction

Barbara Everett: Ashbery, Larkin and Eliot, 27 June 2002

... cheap hotels and climactically the shells of aphrodisiac oysters, are not going to do for a social lady – or rather, to see it another way, are too likely to do for a social lady. And the ‘overwhelming question’ leads to the wrong kind of altar. Just as America and Europe seem here to intertwine topographically, so the ...

Two Ships

Andrew O’Hagan, 6 March 1997

... dramas’. Dr Crippen, a bespectacled, respectable man, who lived in North London, killed the lady, cut her up and buried her in the coal bunker. He then took up with his lover, a young thing called Ethel le Neve. Like many murders before and since, the one carried out by Dr Crippen came to be seen as a reflection on and of its time. All manner of local ...

Empire of Signs

James Wood: Joseph Roth, 4 March 1999

The String of Pearls 
by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Granta, 224 pp., £12.99, May 1998, 1 86207 087 3
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... 703. I like the number – I am superstitious about them – for the zero in the middle is like a lady flanked by two gentlemen, one older and one younger.’ Dickens, and more acutely Gogol, may have influenced Roth, but probably the strongest impression was made by Viennese journalism, in particular the practice and perfection of the feuilleton, or short ...

Orwell and Biography

Bernard Crick, 7 October 1982

... one reveals different things about oneself to different people. Even if one never lies, as a lady once said to me, one seldom tells the whole truth. And their own readings of his character, not surprisingly, in the light of their diverse backgrounds, viewpoints and talents, differ. Friends see friends as part of their own lives. Part of how we now see ...

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