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Can’t you take a joke?

Jonathan Coe, 2 November 2023

Different Times: A History of British Comedy 
by David Stubbs.
Faber, 399 pp., £20, July, 978 0 571 35346 0
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... sense of humour’: a phenomenon everyone considers to be distinctive but no one can define. As David Stubbs writes in Different Times, his impressive survey of British comedy on stage, radio, film and television, ‘it’s not so much a case of Britain producing comedy as comedy producing Britain.’ The book provides a good opportunity to look at ...

I’m being a singer

Andrew O’Hagan: Dandy Highwaymen, 8 October 2020

Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics 
by Dylan Jones.
Faber, 663 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 0 571 35343 9
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... Oakey, from Sheffield, was a hospital porter; he lived for alienation, the post-industrial, David Bowie, and having a show-stopping haircut. He was the singer in the Human League. His hair was long on one side, covering the entire right half of his face, and short on the other. He ‘had the perfect postmodernist haircut for the perfect postmodernist ...

Vorsprung durch Techno

Ian Penman, 10 September 2020

Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany 
by Uwe Schütte.
Penguin, 316 pp., £9.99, February, 978 0 14 198675 3
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... but instead they look a bit tacky and amateurish: middle-aged, mothballed Thunderbird puppets. As David Stubbs puts it in Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany (2014), there is ‘the air of belonging to some bygone astronaut era, veterans of an abandoned space project.’ The fact that Kraftwerk have produced so little since the ...

Crossed Palettes

Ronald Paulson, 4 November 1993

Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in 18th-Century England 
by David Solkin.
Yale, 312 pp., £40, July 1993, 0 300 05741 5
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... in important ways, anti-academic, or ‘English’: Hogarth himself, Zoffany, Wright of Derby, Stubbs, Gainsborough, Rowlandson and Blake. The second group all shared something of Hogarth’s anti-authoritarian scepticism. Turner acknowledged his allegiance to it when he donated Hogarth’s palette to the Royal Academy, while Constable donated ...

Diary

Matt Foot: Children of the Spied-On, 29 June 2023

... time, nothing much seemed to be happening, but then in January the lead counsel to the inquiry, David Barr KC, who has been plodding through the evidence since 2015, made a submission about the role of SDS’s senior management. He focused on a simple question: what was the justification, as understood at the outset, for the infiltration by undercover ...

Emotional Sushi

Ian Sansom: Tony, Nick and Simon, 9 August 2001

One for My Baby 
by Tony Parsons.
HarperCollins, 330 pp., £15.99, July 2001, 0 00 226182 0
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How to Be Good 
by Nick Hornby.
Viking, 256 pp., £16.99, May 2001, 0 670 88823 0
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Little Green Man 
by Simon Armitage.
Viking, 246 pp., £12.99, August 2001, 0 670 89442 7
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... Good now extends this fine line of wit even further: Here is a list of the people that Andrew and David have hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William ...

Hateful Sunsets

David Craig: Highlands and Headlands, 5 March 2015

Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place 
by Philip Marsden.
Granta, 348 pp., £20, October 2014, 978 1 84708 628 0
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... Western Europe reaches one of its fine points here, like Cape Wrath in Sutherland, Lleyn and St David’s Head in Wales, and Cornuaille in Brittany. In such places we come across peaks and juts of rock which look and feel like those in West Penwith: ‘look’ because they draw our eyes and feet like magnets, ‘feel’ because the whitish crystals of ...

Little More than an Extension of France

Hugo Young: The British Isles, 6 January 2000

The Isles: A History 
by Norman Davies.
Macmillan, 1222 pp., £30, November 1999, 9780333763704
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... freer than most of blindness to the Celts. But Henry Hallam, F.W. Maitland and, above all, William Stubbs are presented as the high priests of inveterate Englishism. ‘Despite their immense erudition and their enormous services to the subject, all these scholars positively crowed with nationalistic self-satisfaction.’ Moreover, the multicultural Davies ...

Constable’s Plenty

John Barrell, 15 August 1991

Constable 
by Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams.
Tate Gallery, 544 pp., £45, June 1991, 1 85437 071 5
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Romatic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition 
by Jonathan Bate.
Routledge, 131 pp., £8.99, May 1991, 0 415 06116 4
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... early 19th-century British artists held at the Tate in the last seven or eight years – George Stubbs in 1984; Manners and Morals: Hogarth and British Painting in 1987; Wright of Derby last year. None of these was quite as blandly factual as Constable, nor so studiously innocent of the desire to situate the objects on display within a context wider than ...

Principal Ornament

Jose Harris, 3 December 1992

G.M. Trevelyan: A life in History 
by David Cannadine.
HarperCollins, 288 pp., £18, September 1992, 0 00 215872 8
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... and dominated popular understanding of the nations’s common past for more than half a century. David Cannadine’s characteristically spirited and combative study is more than just an intellectual biography: it is a work of piety, advocacy and passion. He uses the corpus of Trevelyan’s historical writings over fifty years – Wycliffe, Garibaldi, the ...

End of the Century

John Sutherland, 13 October 1988

Worlds Apart 
by David Holbrook.
Hale, 205 pp., £10.95, September 1988, 9780709033639
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Story of My Life 
by Jay McInerney.
Bloomsbury, 188 pp., £11.95, August 1988, 0 7475 0180 7
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Forgotten Life 
by Brian Aldiss.
Gollancz, 284 pp., £11.95, September 1988, 0 575 04369 5
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Incline Our hearts 
by A.N. Wilson.
Hamish Hamilton, 250 pp., £11.95, August 1988, 0 241 12256 2
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... It would be interesting to place Jay McInerney and David Holbrook as neighbours at E.M. Forster’s imaginary table. Both novelists are fascinated by decadence – that much they have in common. But their diagnoses and anatomies of the decadent condition are quite different; worlds apart, to use Holbrook’s dominant image ...

Mayhem at Millbank

David Sylvester: The new hang at the Tate Britain (2000), 18 May 2000

... at their ease; it’s argumentative. Here and there the argument is illuminating, as when David Bomberg’s In the Hold (c.1913-14) is hung next to Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon (1971). Both are busy compositions, with a mass of vigorous figures squeezed closely into a space. But the Bomberg is pretty abstract and is ...

North and South

Linda Colley, 2 August 2012

... the past; and it was propagated by such major figures as De Lolme, Blackstone, Hallam, Macaulay, Stubbs, Maitland and Dicey, and by multitudes of lesser authors such as David Lindsay Keir, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister. Keir’s workmanlike Constitutional History of Modern Britain since 1485 went through nine ...

What happened to Edward II?

David Carpenter: Impostors, 7 June 2007

The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the British Nation 
by Ian Mortimer.
Pimlico, 536 pp., £8.99, April 2007, 978 1 84413 530 1
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... and a preoccupation with constitutional history caused feelings about Edward to change. Bishop Stubbs, ‘peering down on the Middle Ages from the twin heights of an episcopal throne and a professorial chair’, as Mortimer puts it, condemned Edward as ‘ambitious, unscrupulous, selfish, extravagant and ostentatious’. In more recent times, historians ...

What’s Happening in the Engine-Room

Penelope Fitzgerald: Poor John Lehmann, 7 January 1999

John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure 
by Adrian Wright.
Duckworth, 308 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 7156 2871 2
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... Neo-Romantic illustrators, Keith Vaughan and John Minton excelled. Minton decorated Elizabeth David’s first book, A Book of Mediterranean Food with tipsy Breton sailors, market girls, lobster pots, fruits de mer, as a kind of delicious ballet in and out of the dedicated text. As Wright says, when you take up a book published by Lehmann you get the sense ...

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