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Coiling in Anarchy

Rosemary Hill: Top of the Lighthouse, 16 February 2023

Where Light in Darkness Lies: The Story of the Lighthouse 
by Veronica della Dora.
Reaktion, 280 pp., £25, March 2022, 978 1 78914 549 6
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... explored in Bella Bathurst’s The Lighthouse Stevensons (1999), an account of Robert Louis Stevenson’s immediate ancestors and their pioneering contribution to lighthouse design around Britain and beyond.There is a pervading vagueness about Dora’s free-associating meditations. The word ‘liminal’ is tested to destruction, appearing on nearly ...

Blessed, Beastly Place

Douglas Dunn, 5 March 1981

Precipitous City 
by Trevor Royle.
Mainstream, 210 pp., £6.95, May 1980, 0 906391 09 1
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RLS: A Life Study 
by Jenni Calder.
Hamish Hamilton, 362 pp., £9.95, June 1980, 0 241 10374 6
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Gillespie 
by J. MacDougall Hay.
Canongate, 450 pp., £4.95, November 1979, 0 903937 79 4
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Scottish Satirical Verse 
edited by Edwin Morgan.
Carcanet, 236 pp., £6.95, June 1980, 0 85635 183 0
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Collected Poems 
by Robert Garioch.
Carcanet, 208 pp., £3.95, July 1980, 0 85635 316 7
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... Hunt. A poet found himself in a city of prose. He came from ‘the ploughtail’, said R. L. Stevenson, ‘to an academy of gilt unbelief and artificial letters’. Mr Royle does not neglect Burns’s social embarrassment in Edinburgh, but he goes no further than to indicate frustrated opportunity and ambition. By now Edinburgh was consolidating itself ...

Still Defending the Scots

Katie Stevenson: Robert the Bruce, 11 September 2014

Robert the Bruce: King of the Scots 
by Michael Penman.
Yale, 443 pp., £25, June 2014, 978 0 300 14872 5
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... by Edward I of England) were soon established as Robert de Brus, fifth lord of Annandale, and John Balliol, lord of Galloway. Both claims originated in the marriages of the daughters of David, earl of Huntingdon, the youngest grandson of David I of Scotland. Balliol had a claim by primogeniture, as the grandson of Earl David’s eldest ...

‘The Meeting of the Waters’

John Barrell, 27 July 2017

... made of it than either the waters or their meeting deserve.’ This is the English travel writer John Barrow writing of the Vale of Avoca in 1835. Like him, I find it hard to decide on the register of the phrase, so lyrical as a song title, so grandiloquent as a synonym for ‘confluence’; unlike Barrow, I find these meetings fascinating, but I don’t ...

Gaslight and Fog

John Pemble: Sherlock Holmes, 26 January 2012

The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England 
by Haia Shpayer-Makov.
Oxford, 429 pp., £30, September 2011, 978 0 19 957740 8
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... clichés from the Victorian literary bazaar. Dickens and the melodrama supplied fog and gaslight; Stevenson, Wilde and Pater props and accessories: revolver, boxing gloves, jack-knife, briar pipe, jewelled snuffbox, Stradivarius violin, a penchant for recondite chemistry, cocaine, Sarasate and the polyphonic motets of Lassus – and eyelids that are a little ...

Sitting it out

Paul Sieghart, 2 August 1984

Two men were aquitted 
by Percy Hoskins.
Secker, 221 pp., £9.95, May 1984, 0 436 20161 5
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... The trial of Dr John Bodkin Adams at the Old Bailey in 1957 was one of the causes célèbres of the post-war years. Apart from sex, it had everything. Adams was a fashionable Eastbourne doctor. Portly. With a chauffeur-driven Rolls. Charged with murdering one of his rich old women patients, for a chest of silver. There were strong hints she was not his only victim ...

For ever Walsall

Angus Calder, 21 March 1985

Rural Life in England in the First World War 
by Pamela Horn.
Gill and Macmillan, 300 pp., £25, November 1984, 0 312 69604 3
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Britain in Our Century: Images and Controversies 
by Arthur Marwick.
Thames and Hudson, 224 pp., £12.95, November 1984, 9780500250914
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Labour and Society in Britain: 1918-1979 
by James Cronin.
Batsford, 248 pp., £8.95, August 1984, 0 7134 4395 2
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Women in England 1870-1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change 
by Jane Lewis.
Wheatsheaf, 240 pp., £16.95, November 1984, 0 7108 0186 6
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... so deeply divided, and so unstable, as to be on the brink of social disintegration, was given by John Stevenson and Chris Cook in The Slump.’ He immediately produces an ‘image’ – one of his book’s 149 illustrations – of the Jarrow Marchers. They look proud and determined. ‘But as the eye pans along to the left and we take in the British ...

At the Ashmolean

Rosemary Hill: The Capture of the Westmorland, 19 July 2012

... subjects might as well have stuck their heads through a hole in a pre-painted background. But as John Brewer emphasises in his catalogue essay, the Tour was more socially mixed than it might appear. Basset, the biggest spender among the consigners to the Westmorland, was not an aristocrat but the beneficiary of a recent family fortune made from Cornish ...

The Family Biden

Christian Lorentzen, 6 January 2022

... with Hallie, his brother’s widow, in order to ‘break’ his father psychologically. Bill Stevenson, Jill Biden’s first husband, tells Schreckinger that unnamed supporters of Trump offered to pay him to write in a memoir that Joe and Jill began having an affair while Joe’s first wife, Neilia, was still alive, ‘and that the affair drove Neilia to ...

On Nagorno-Karabakh

Tom Stevenson, 19 October 2023

... prevailing over steel tanks and Israeli-made loitering munitions blowing up rusty 1960s Howitzers. John Antal, a retired US army colonel and military analyst, called it ‘the first war in history won primarily by robotic systems’. It’s true that Armenia’s Soviet-era air defence systems were no match for Turkish-built drones and other imported military ...

Dream on

C.K. Stead, 3 December 1992

A World of My Own: A Dream Diary 
by Graham Greene.
Reinhardt, 116 pp., £12.99, October 1992, 1 871061 36 9
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... In that sense he was always a storyteller for boys, in the tradition (a very good one) of R.L. Stevenson and John Buchan. In A Sort of Life, which was as near to an autobiography as he was ever prepared to go (and itself the result of psychotherapy for a period of writer’ block), Greene tells how he first came to keep ...

Flying the flag

Patrick Parrinder, 18 November 1993

The Modern British Novel 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Secker, 512 pp., £20, October 1993, 0 436 20132 1
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After the War: The Novel and English Society since 1945 
by D.J. Taylor.
Chatto, 310 pp., £17.99, September 1993, 9780701137694
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... Cheered on by the Tory faithful, John Major recently dismissed as ‘claptrap’ a letter signed by 500 university teachers of English attacking the proposed revisions to the National Curriculum. The academics were accused – falsely, I believe – of wanting to undermine the teaching of Shakespeare. A few months earlier, the Education Secretary John Patten sent back an official report on English in schools with the comment that 15-year-olds perhaps ought to be made to study the ‘great tradition of the novel ...

The First Hundred Years

James Buchan, 24 August 1995

John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier 
by Andrew Lownie.
Constable, 365 pp., £20, July 1995, 0 09 472500 4
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... recently with a Cabinet Minister will know that it is not just the labourer who is thus incapable. John Buchan, whose grandson I am, was a late and flesh-and-blood representative of that lost epoch before economic expediency: a writer who not so much rejected the division of labour (Baudelaire and the Romantics do that) as overcame it. He fascinated his age ...

Wigan Peer

Stephen Koss, 15 November 1984

The Crawford Papers: The Journals of David Lindsay, 27th Earl of Crawford and 10th Earl of Balcarres, during the Years 1892 to 1940 
edited by John Vincent.
Manchester, 645 pp., £35, October 1984, 0 7190 0948 0
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... Ballin, compiled 54 ornately-bound volumes of diaries, which his son eventually entrusted to John Vincent for editing ‘That Lord Crawford was a man of distinction was agreed by all,’ attests Vincent, who seems unduly impressed by royal letters of condolence. Nevertheless, Vincent admits to finding it slightly difficult ‘to convey something of his ...

Disappearing Ink

Tom Stevenson: Life of a Diplomat, 10 August 2023

And Then What? Inside Stories of 21st-Century Diplomacy 
by Catherine Ashton.
Elliott and Thompson, 256 pp., £20, February, 978 1 78396 634 9
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... outposts, white ones sent to London from missions abroad – are full of entertaining examples. John Russell’s 1967 dispatch from Brazil begins: ‘Like the surface of the moon Rio is short of water, covered in dust and pocked with deep holes.’ American diplomats wrote of hotels in Xilin which provided contraception as standard and noted ‘no mention ...

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