Lecherous Goates

Tobias Gregory: John Donne, 20 October 2016

John Donne 
edited by Janel Mueller.
Oxford, 606 pp., £95, July 2015, 978 0 19 959656 0
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“... Jasper Heywood, was briefly the leader of the Jesuit mission in England. In 1593 Donne’s brother Henry was arrested for harbouring a priest, and died of the plague in prison; the priest was hanged, drawn and quartered. We don’t know when Donne converted, or why. On Donne’s own account, he made his decision only after he had ‘to the measure of my poore ...”

Cronyism and Clientelism

Peter Geoghegan, 5 November 2020

“... debate.*Johnson, the group agreed, needed a simple message that the public could get behind. Henry de Zoete, a former digital director at Vote Leave and successful Dragon’s Den contestant, suggested advising people to stay at home. Guerin, a New Zealander, noted that ‘stay home, save lives’ had worked well in other parts of the world. Cain proposed ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: A Round of Applause, 7 January 2021

“... of 3 January 2019): ‘The tattoo remains popular, though bizarrely one person thought it was of Henry Kissinger. It also makes for an amusing conversation during intercourse.’ This suggests the intercourse might be less than fervent, my name in itself something of a detumescent.28 April. The most one can hope from a reader is that he or she should ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: Selling my hair on eBay, 6 January 2022

“... whether the prince had successfully slept with Catherine, there would have been no marriage for Henry VIII, thus no divorce and no Reformation.29 May, Yorkshire. I’ve lost count of the number of times on TV I’ve seen the sequence whereby a dead lamb is skinned and the skin fitted onto an orphaned lamb which is then foisted on a bereaved sheep which is ...”

Homage to Rabelais

M.A. Screech, 20 September 1984

“... personally assured him that he continued to enjoy royal support – an important assurance, since Henry II reversed many of the policies of Francis I within minutes of the latter’s death. Rabelais could go on jesting at tyrants and ignorant monks, championing Evangelical attitudes, defending oppressed Evangelicals from the deadly interests of the ...”

Unpranked Lyre

John Mullan: The Laziness of Thomas Gray, 13 December 2001

Thomas Gray: A Life 
by Robert Mack.
Yale, 718 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 300 08499 4
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“... became a guide and friend to many enlightened, doubtful readers. It was because of the Elegy that James Boswell would, at difficult times, enjoin himself in his journal to ‘Be Gray.’ In literary history Gray is more often an object of curiosity than of admiration. He is known for having not just one of his poems but his poetic language held up to the ...”

Brooke’s Benefit

Anthony Powell, 16 April 1981

“... usually relevant. Bernard Jocelyn Brooke was born 30 November 1908, third child and second son of Henry Brooke and his wife Mary, née Turner, the youngest of the family by ten years or more. Both his grandfathers had been wine merchants, also his father, who had started life as a solicitor. Brooke’s elder brother, after ten years as a regular officer in ...”

Save My Beer

Tom Johnson: Industrious Revolution, 2 April 2026

The Experience of Work in Early Modern England 
by Jane Whittle, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb and Taylor Aucoin.
Cambridge, 362 pp., £105, October 2025, 978 1 316 51994 3
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“... To begin with, you needed to know a shearling from a gimmer lamb, or hire someone who did. In 1611 Henry Bankes employed two shepherds, Durington and Blackwell, to value some lambs in Yorkshire; it turned out he was overpaying by sixpence a head. Then you had to set your sheep in a pasture, and send someone, perhaps a young servant like Jacob Jackson of ...”

Tennyson’s Text

Danny Karlin, 12 November 1987

The Poems of Tennyson 
edited by Christopher Ricks.
Longman, 662 pp., £40, May 1987, 0 582 49239 4
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Tennyson’s ‘Maud’: A Definitive Edition 
edited by Susan Shatto.
Athlone, 296 pp., £28, August 1986, 0 485 11294 9
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The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Vol.2: 1851-1870 
edited by Cecil Lang and Edgar Shannon.
Oxford, 585 pp., £40, May 1987, 0 19 812691 3
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The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse 
edited by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 654 pp., £15.95, June 1987, 0 19 214154 6
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“... by knowing the first publication was anonymous). Are there readers who are ignorant of Arthur Henry Hallam and all that? Well, yes, there are, as any teacher of Victorian literature has cause to lament. The question arises: what does it mean to read such a poem without even the beginnings of contextual knowledge? It may be argued that the anthology is ...”

Loose Canons

Edward Mendelson, 23 June 1988

History and Value: The Clarendon Lectures and the Northcliffe Lectures 1987 
by Frank Kermode.
Oxford, 160 pp., £15, June 1988, 0 19 812381 7
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Nya 
by Stephen Haggard and Frank Kermode.
Oxford, 475 pp., £5.95, June 1988, 0 19 282135 0
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British Writers of the Thirties 
by Valentine Cunningham.
Oxford, 530 pp., £30, February 1988, 0 19 212267 3
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“... Even when he illustrates his theoretical argument with an impressively bravura social reading of Henry Green’s Party Going (a rejoinder to Kermode’s hermeneutic reading in The Genesis of Secrecy) the text never loses its formal identity by being treated as a disturbed and disturbing meditation on the themes of its moment. Nor would it gain anything in ...”

Hare’s Blood

Peter Wollen: John Berger, 4 April 2002

The Selected Essays of John Berger 
edited by Geoff Dyer.
Bloomsbury, 599 pp., £25, November 2001, 0 7475 5419 6
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“... Pollock, Dubuffet and Germaine Richier among them. The second, more positive category included Henry Moore, Ceri Richards, William Roberts, Josef Herman, David Bomberg, L.S. Lowry, George Fullard and Frank Auerbach, together with the Dutchman Friso ten Holt. Of these, only the enthusiastic review of Lowry is included in the new collection, which is ...”

Balfour, Weizmann and the Creation of Israel

Charles Glass: Palestine, 7 June 2001

One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate 
by Tom Segev, translated by Haim Watzman.
Little, Brown, 612 pp., £25, January 2001, 0 316 64859 0
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Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine 1917-48 
by Naomi Shepherd.
Murray, 290 pp., £12.99, September 2000, 0 7195 6322 4
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“... in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. While nurturing the ‘national home’, a term as deliberately vague as Palestinian ‘autonomy’ is today, Britain ...”

It’s queer how I’m lonely

Alan Hollinghurst: Ronald Firbank’s Century, 13 August 2026

“... with a very strong stylistic stamp, Firbank can easily be thought of as doing just one thing. Henry Green, who learned much from Firbank’s experiments, is another example, the impression solidified by the confusable gerunds of his titles, Living, Loving, Doting. But, like Green’s books, Firbank’s are in fact technically quite distinct from one ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: Bennett’s Dissection, 1 January 2009

“... the Mail. It was first put on in 1980, and while generally enthusiastic the Mail assumes, as did James Fenton at the time of the first production, that by putting the main young man in drag I am signalling my own (presumably suppressed) desire to get into a frock. It may be that the Mail assumes all homosexuals would like to be in skirts (or ought to ...”

The Impermanence of Importance

David Runciman: Obama, 2 August 2018

The World as It Is: Inside the Obama White House 
by Ben Rhodes.
Bodley Head, 450 pp., £20, June 2018, 978 1 84792 517 6
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“... the outstanding individual, someone whose outsize talent can carry the weaker players. When LeBron James moves from city to city, the teams he plays for rise and fall with him. Obama was so much more talented than anyone else around – so smart, so eloquent, so cool under pressure – that his teammates must have hoped he could do the same for them. Golf is ...”