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At Kettle’s Yard

Eleanor Birne: The Reopening, 22 March 2018

... Morocco and France; and while working at the Tate in the 1920s and early 1930s, he and his wife, Helen, had lived in Hampstead, where Braque, Naum Gabo, Diaghilev and Nijinksky were among their many visitors – along with artist friends from closer to home, particularly Ben and Winifred Nicholson. In 1956, the Edes returned to England and Jim started ...

Worrying Wives

Helen King: The Invention of Sparta, 7 August 2003

Spartan Women 
by Sarah Pomeroy.
Oxford, 198 pp., £45, July 2002, 0 19 513066 9
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... beautiful women’, famous for their height and their healthy good looks; most famous of all was Helen, who was ‘of Sparta’ before she became ‘of Troy’. Aristotle wrote that female excellence was best expressed in beauty, and the materials gathered by Pomeroy suggest that Spartan women were as interested in it as the next woman. The patchy nature of ...

Babies Rubbed with Garlic

Helen Pfeifer: Ottoman Nights, 15 December 2022

As Night Falls: 18th-Century Ottoman Cities after Dark 
by Avner Wishnitzer.
Cambridge, 376 pp., £29.99, July 2021, 978 1 108 83214 4
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... and burghers – the main beneficiaries of the policy – routinely stayed out until the small hours of the morning. In the Ottoman Empire, street lighting wasn’t introduced until the 1840s, first in the Pera district of Istanbul and only later in Istanbul proper and in the other cities of the empire. The discrepancy is of the sort that has long ...

Private Thomas

Andrew Motion, 19 December 1985

Edward Thomas: A Portrait 
by R. George Thomas.
Oxford, 331 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 19 818527 8
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... still further by discovering that ‘some years before her death’ Edward Thomas’s ‘widow Helen gave her friend George Thomas open access to all her papers which included some eighteen hundred letters’. Here at last, we are made to think, is the definitive account of one of the century’s most important writers: important for his intrinsic ...

Luck Dispensers

Penelope Fitzgerald, 11 July 1991

The Kitchen God’s Wife 
by Amy Tan.
HarperCollins, 415 pp., £14.99, June 1991, 0 00 223708 3
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... At the beginning and end we hear the voice of her daughter, Pearl. Winnie’s oldest friend, Helen – once Hulan – who followed Winnie to America, has decided (quite mistakenly) that she must soon leave this world, and in order to free herself from the burden of lies, proposes to tell everyone the never-referred-to story of their earlier life. Fear ...

Gorgon in Furs

D.D. Guttenplan: Paula Fox, 12 December 2002

Borrowed Finery: A Memoir 
by Paula Fox.
Flamingo, 256 pp., £12, August 2002, 0 00 713724 9
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... translations that have kept her occupied. The couple have no children. They do have a Mercedes, a small sailing boat, a country house and a brownstone in an up-and-coming neighbourhood – Fox deftly exposes the sordid reality of this estate agent’s cliché. Across the backyard, on ‘the slum street’, the Bentwoods’ neighbours relieve themselves out of ...

Good Jar, Bad Jar

Ange Mlinko: Whose ‘Iliad’?, 2 November 2023

The Iliad 
by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson.
Norton, 761 pp., £30, September 2023, 978 1 324 00180 5
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Homer and His Iliad 
by Robin Lane Fox.
Allen Lane, 442 pp., £30, July 2023, 978 0 241 52451 0
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... a heroic journey out of a return to a middle-aged wife. But women are not incidental to the Iliad. Helen’s abduction has caused the war, and the tussle over Chryseis and Briseis kickstarts the poem’s plot. It is Thetis, Achilles’ mother, who coaxes Zeus to punish the Greeks on her son’s behalf, driving the action of two-thirds of the poem. Aphrodite ...

No One Left to Kill

Thomas Jones: Achilles, 24 May 2001

Achilles 
by Elizabeth Cook.
Methuen, 116 pp., £12.99, March 2001, 0 413 75740 4
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... arrow that pierces his heel. After the funeral, the fall of Troy – which Cook tells mostly from Helen’s point of view. When Yeats wrote, in ‘Leda and the Swan’, ‘A shudder in the loins engenders there/The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead,’ he was thinking as much of Clytemnestra as of ...

Growing up

Dinah Birch, 20 April 1989

Passing on 
by Penelope Lively.
Deutsch, 210 pp., £10.95, April 1989, 0 233 98388 0
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The man who wasn’t there 
by Pat Barker.
Virago, 158 pp., £10.95, March 1989, 0 86068 891 7
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The Sugar Mother 
by Elizabeth Jolley.
Viking, 210 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 670 82435 6
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Give them all my love 
by Gillian Tindall.
Hutchinson, 244 pp., £11.95, April 1989, 0 09 173919 5
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Storm in the Citadel 
by Kate Saunders.
Cape, 293 pp., £12.95, March 1989, 0 224 02606 2
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... is not there. Dorothy Glover, a woman of formidable selfishness, is dead. She had three children: Helen, resigned to middle-aged unfulfilment; Edward, who has displaced his meek passions into worries about the environment; and the rebellious Louise, the only one who has succeeded in producing a family of her own. It soon becomes clear that Dorothy’s ...

Our Little Duckie

Thomas Jones: Margaret Atwood, 17 November 2005

The Penelopiad 
by Margaret Atwood.
Canongate, 199 pp., £12, October 2005, 1 84195 645 7
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... when she was 15. Various men compete for her by running a race, which Odysseus wins by cheating. Helen, already married to Menelaus, is unpleasant about it. ‘I think Odysseus would make a very suitable husband for our little duckie,’ she says. ‘She likes the quiet life . . . She can help him look after his goats. She and Odysseus are two of a ...

Right-ons

Jenny Turner, 24 October 1991

Gaudi Afternoon 
by Barbara Wilson.
Virago, 172 pp., £4.99, August 1991, 1 85381 264 1
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The players come again 
by Amanda Cross.
Virago, 229 pp., £12.99, August 1991, 1 85381 306 0
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Poetic Justice 
by Amanda Cross.
Virago, 176 pp., £4.99, August 1991, 1 85381 025 8
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Birth Marks 
by Sarah Dunant.
Joseph, 230 pp., £13.99, April 1991, 0 7181 3511 3
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Burn Marks 
by Sara Paretsky.
Virago, 340 pp., £4.99, April 1991, 9781853812798
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Deep Sleep 
by Frances Fyfield.
Heinemann, 198 pp., £13.99, September 1991, 0 434 27426 7
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... disposable wealth was greatly enhanced by the false-spring media and finance boom of the Eighties, small, independent publishers, able to expand thanks to the self-same boom, fall over themselves to plug the gap. Virago Crime, Women’s Press Science Fiction, and a welter of smaller, now failed imprints, were and are a mixture of the odd inspired reprint, a ...

Mr Dug-out and His Lady

Helen McCarthy: Woman’s Kingdom, 19 November 2020

Endell Street: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran World War One’s Most Remarkable Military Hospital 
by Wendy Moore.
Atlantic, 376 pp., £17.99, April, 978 1 78649 584 6
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... the Edwardian suffrage movement, the two women had reason to celebrate a reform they had played no small part in bringing about. The eyecatching and well-publicised war service performed by British women over the previous four years had slowly recast the suffrage debate. Patriotic displays of civic duty – from making munitions to tilling the land – made ...

Soothe and Scold

Helen McCarthy: Mothers, 12 September 2019

Mother: An Unconventional History 
by Sarah Knott.
Viking, 336 pp., £14.99, March 2019, 978 0 241 19860 5
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... interruption, distraction and inconsequence. The history of mothering has to be told through small, unfinished stories because hardly anyone before the mid-20th century believed the subject deserved lengthy description. Mothers appeared to stand outside historical time: empires rose and fell while babies napped. Knott addresses her reader ...

Short Cuts

Daniel Soar: Sokal 2.0, 25 October 2018

... Earlier​ this month, a small storm hit social media when it was revealed that a number of cultural studies journals had been the victims of a massive hoax. Three collaborators had submitted twenty ‘bat-shit insane’ papers – as they described them – to places like Gender, Place and Culture and Sex Roles. Four of the papers were published, and another three had been accepted for publication ...

Surviving the Reformation

Helen Cooper: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, 15 October 1998

The Beggar and the Professor: A 16th-Century Family Saga 
by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Chicago, 407 pp., £11.95, June 1998, 0 226 47324 4
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... from the house of the aunts who were raising him into the snow and almost froze to death; still a small child, he was hauled up from a ledge by a courageous older companion after he had fallen down a rockface while tending goats. He spent his teens wandering Central Europe with a group of other young vagabonds, looking for an education and surviving by ...

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