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Orphans

Joan Aiken, 17 July 1980

... mortgage on her home. Fleda, in Queechy, had the same problem; the word mortgage had a fearsome ring then, which it may have regained today. There was Anne of Green Gables, straight from the orphanage and received coldly because she had red hair and should have been a boy. There was Tom Sawyer, painting the fence for Aunt Polly. Boys did not seem to work ...

Imbalance

Michael Hofmann: The Charm of Hugo Williams, 22 May 2003

Collected Poems 
by Hugo Williams.
Faber, 288 pp., £20, September 2002, 0 571 21233 6
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... gorgeous and desolating poem, like a conjurer’s display of pulling silks through a ring. There is something characteristically metaphysical about the poem’s enactment of absence (as with ‘And think I am in France’). This wistfulness – beginning with something (‘We spread our things on the sand’) and ending with nothing, though an ...

At the British Library

Katherine Rundell: Harry Potter, 14 December 2017

... for live-action family entertainment. But they are big-budget motion pictures: tap them and they ring like money. Great children’s fiction isn’t slick; the film studio’s imperatives of mass audiences and shareholders erode at the difficult edges of a work. The current exhibition at the British Library, Harry Potter: A History of Magic (until 28 ...

Consider Jack and Oskar

Michael Rossi: Twin Studies, 7 February 2013

Born Together – Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study 
by Nancy Segal.
Harvard, 410 pp., £39.95, June 2012, 978 0 674 05546 9
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... belief that all organisms’ behaviours could be attributed to systems of stimulus and response (ring bell, dog salivates), behaviourists had little need for germ plasm, cheerfulness factors or heritability. Perhaps more significant, studies of the biological bases of psychological traits came into stark disrepute in the 1930s and 1940s owing to their ...

A Long Day at the Chocolate Bar Factory

James Wood: David Bezmozgis, 16 December 2004

‘Natasha’ and Other Stories 
by David Bezmozgis.
Cape, 147 pp., £10.99, August 2004, 0 224 07125 4
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... way in which he strings an exotic sketch of a minor character along a rope of exile. Stein in Lord Jim, for instance, with his collections of butterflies and ‘catacombs of beetles’, is said to have taken part in the revolutions of 1848, then fled to Trieste, and then to Tripoli, ‘with a stock of cheap watches to hawk about’. Bezmozgis is similarly ...

Adrian

Peter Campbell, 5 December 1985

... but a syndrome, need no longer suspect itself of hypochondria. Sue Townsend’s descriptions ring true, the word is out: kids, parents, pets and geriatrics are all in this mess together. Children take to the books partly, I gather, because the disgusting details of Adrian’s spots, the mention of his wet dreams and of his regular measuring of his ...

Only the Camels

Robert Irwin: Wilfred Thesiger, 6 April 2006

Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer 
by Alexander Maitland.
HarperCollins, 528 pp., £25, February 2006, 0 00 255608 1
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... Thesiger belonged to the second category. He read the novels of John Buchan and Rider Haggard, Jim Corbett’s tales of tiger hunting, Rowland Ward’s Records of Big Game, Blackwood’s Tales from the Outposts, Jock of the Bushveld, Henri de Monfreid’s account of smuggling across the Red Sea, Churchill’s The River War and, of course, The Seven Pillars ...

More Pain, Better Sentences

Adam Mars-Jones: Satire and St Aubyn, 8 May 2014

Lost for Words 
by Edward St Aubyn.
Picador, 261 pp., £12.99, May 2014, 978 0 330 45422 3
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Books 
by Charlie Hill.
Tindal Street, 192 pp., £6.99, November 2013, 978 1 78125 163 8
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... male confessional, as practised by the bestselling novelist Gary Sayles, whose bibliography should ring some bells: Our Legendary Twenties was about a single twentysomething professional Londoner looking for love. Cutting the Cake concerned itself with a late twentysomething professional Londoner unsure whether or not to move in with his ...

Demob

Robert Morley, 7 July 1983

Downing Street in Perspective 
by Marcia Falkender.
Weidenfeld, 280 pp., £10.95, May 1983, 0 297 78107 3
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... front door and, when exhausted, even offered money to passing schoolchildren to take it in turn to ring the door bell. One night well after midnight, some friends who lived opposite lured the smaller night shift of newspapermen away momentarily, while she and her family ran quickly across the mews into a friend’s house (they had left the door on the latch ...

Don’t

Jenny Diski, 5 November 1992

Sex 
by Madonna.
Secker, 128 pp., £25, October 1992, 0 436 27084 6
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Sex and Sensibility 
by Julie Burchill.
Grafton, 269 pp., £5.99, October 1992, 0 00 637858 7
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Too hot to handle 
by Fiona Pitt-Kethley.
Peter Owen, 134 pp., £15.50, November 1992, 0 7206 0875 9
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... Sadly, it’s not between the aluminium covers of Sex. Before I’d laid eyes on the first nipple-ring, I read: ‘by the way, any similarity between characters and events depicted in this book and real persons is not only purely coincidental, it’s ridiculous. Nothing in this book is true.’ I might as well have closed the book there and then, but I’d ...

Dry Eyes

John Bayley, 5 December 1991

Jump and Other Stories 
by Nadine Gordimer.
Bloomsbury, 257 pp., £13.99, October 1991, 0 7475 1020 2
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Wilderness Tips 
by Margaret Atwood.
Bloomsbury, 247 pp., £14.99, September 1991, 0 7475 1019 9
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... then goes to take a bachelor holiday on a Riviera beach. Among the sea stones he finds a valuable ring, and decides to make use of it through an advertisement. The dénouement is admirably done, and the author seems rather disconcertingly at home in it, as if easing herself with a holiday from normal duties and commitments. Connoisseurs of the short story ...

What she wasn’t

Joanna Biggs: ‘The Vanishing Half’, 13 August 2020

The Vanishing Half 
by Brit Bennett.
Dialogue, 343 pp., £14.99, June, 978 0 349 70146 2
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... spotted first by the owner of Mallard’s diner, who bursts back into his restaurant with a ring of sweat around his neck, causing breakfasters at the counter to look up from their grits and eggs. The Vignes twins are remembered, if at all, as ‘selfish girls running from responsibility’, who, after leaving home, left each other too, ‘their lives ...

While Statues Sleep

Thomas Laqueur, 18 June 2020

Learning from the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil 
by Susan Neiman.
Allen Lane, 415 pp., £20, August 2019, 978 0 241 26286 3
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... and again that chattel slavery was replaced ‘by subjugation enforced by law’ – that is, by Jim Crow. The South did not learn the lessons of its defeat by the North in 1865 as the Germans did of theirs by the Allies in 1945.If the ‘truth’ about the Civil War is still not established it isn’t for lack of effort by historians and teachers. Not since ...

Diary

Anne Enright: Boys’ Aliens and Girls’ Aliens, 21 September 1995

... Pérez de Cuéllar. Serious believers might wish that Hopkins would stop telling this story after Jim Schnabel described the follow-up in his book Dark White. † Richard and Dan started following Linda around and finally abducted her themselves. They brought her to a beach house, forced her to wear a nightie, ducked her in the surf, threw away her wedding ...

Performances for Sleepless Tyrants

Marina Warner: ‘Tales of the Marvellous’, 8 January 2015

Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange 
translated by Malcolm Lyons, introduced by Robert Irwin.
Penguin, 600 pp., £25, November 2014, 978 0 14 139503 6
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... When​ Marie-Antoinette couldn’t sleep, she would ring for a lady-in-waiting to come and read to her; a rota of lectrices was on call at Versailles at any time of day or night; before radio or talking books, this was one of the luxuries of the Ancien Régime. The queen could have lit her bedside candle and read to herself, but it wasn’t just a rich woman’s indolence that made that remedy less appealing ...

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