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Gentlemen prefer dogs

Andrew O’Hagan, 10 February 1994

The Dogs 
by Laura Thompson.
Chatto, 254 pp., £9.99, January 1994, 0 7011 3872 6
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... is a gambling game; for the English, it’s all for the fun of the chase, the thrill of the kill. Laura Thompson jumps on this point in order to take the first of many boring swipes at what used to be called the upper orders. In England, she tells us, coursing is part of the world of the English country gentleman, who is rarely a gambling man, because ...

Death in Belgravia

Rosemary Hill, 5 February 2015

A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan 
by Laura Thompson.
Head of Zeus, 422 pp., £20, November 2014, 978 1 78185 536 2
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... studies of the case and what it reveals about postwar Britain and its social structure. Thompson’s book is a mixture of all of these and the result is persuasive and revealing in some parts, absurd and tasteless in others. Yet it is a compelling read. The story doesn’t pall because it has become a myth and myths change with time. As the Lucan ...

But she read Freud

Alice Spawls: Flora Thompson, 19 February 2015

Dreams of the Good Life: The Life of Flora Thompson and the Creation of ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’ 
by Richard Mabey.
Allen Lane, 208 pp., £9.99, March 2015, 978 0 14 104481 1
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... An outsider​ by birth as well as by disposition, Flora Thompson took solitary pleasure in observing her fellow villagers. She stored away characters and scenes from an early age – the naughty children who pulled her hair, Queenie who spoke to bees, the annual pig killing, May Day, the harvest – but published nothing until she was in her thirties, and nothing on her childhood until her early sixties ...

Hatless to Hindhead

Susannah Clapp, 1 May 1980

A Country Calendar 
by Flora Thompson, edited by Margaret Lane.
Oxford, 307 pp., £6.95, October 1979, 9780192117533
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... Flora Thompson was born in 1876 in the hamlet of Juniper Hill in Oxfordshire, the daughter of a nursemaid and a stonemason. At the village school she was good at skipping and scripture. She was expected to go into service like most of her schoolfriends, but she was bad at sewing and ineffective with babies; when she was 14 she became a post-office clerk in a nearby village ...

Their Mad Gallopade

Patrick McGuinness: Nancy Cunard, 25 January 2018

Selected Poems 
by Nancy Cunard.
Carcanet, 304 pp., £12.99, October 2016, 978 1 78410 236 4
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... 24 volumes, including Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos, John Rodker’s Collected Poems and Laura Riding’s Twenty Poems Less. The press also produced Beckett’s Whoroscope, billed as ‘Mr Samuel Beckett’s first separately published work’. Cunard and Richard Aldington had announced a competition – with a prize of £10 and publication – for ...

Benevolent Mr Godwin

E.P. Thompson, 8 July 1993

Political Justice 
by William Godwin, introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth.
Woodstock, £150, November 1992, 1 85196 019 8
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The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin 
edited by Mark Philp.
Pickering & Chatto, £395, March 1993, 1 85196 026 0
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Political Writings 
by Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Janet Todd.
Pickering & Chatto, 411 pp., £39.95, March 1993, 1 85196 019 8
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Memoirs of Wollstonecraft 
by William Godwin, introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth.
Woodstock, 199 pp., £8.95, April 1993, 1 85477 125 6
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... the Quaker Gurneys of Norwich, who were very much caught up in the advanced thought of the time. Laura Gurney’s diary, which she sometimes read aloud with friends, is an index to the approved yes-words and boo-words of the time (1797). Her brother, John, who had purloined her inkstand, got a decidedly poor reference: ‘How I do hate real ...

‘You are my heart’s delight’

Susannah Clapp, 7 June 1984

A Portrait of Fryn: A Biography of F. Tennyson Jesse 
by Joanna Colenbrander.
Deutsch, 305 pp., £12.95, March 1984, 0 233 97572 1
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... and squeaked about sex over cocoa and boiled eggs; Mrs Colenbrander tells us that when Harold and Laura Knight arrived: ‘Their brilliant painting stunned the whole colony.’ After Damit and Horse, there was Tottie Harwood and literary London. Edith Jesse didn’t want her daughter back at home after college, so she started to write to keep ...

Institutional Hypocrisy

David Runciman: Selling the NHS, 21 April 2005

Restoring Responsibility: Ethics in Government, Business and Healthcare 
by Dennis Thompson.
Cambridge, 349 pp., £16.99, November 2004, 0 521 54722 9
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NHS plc: The Privatisation of Our Healthcare 
by Allyson Pollock.
Verso, 271 pp., £15.99, September 2004, 1 84467 011 2
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Brown’s Britain 
by Robert Peston.
Short Books, 369 pp., £14.99, January 2005, 1 904095 67 4
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... an essay entitled ‘Hypocrisy and Democracy’ in his wonderfully measured new collection, Dennis Thompson quotes Judith Shklar, who described the politics of anti-hypocrisy as an ‘unending game of mutual unmasking’, in which everyone is bound to lose. Because democracy is a system of government that institutionalises distrust, as the price we pay for ...

Ladders last a long time

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Reading Raphael Samuel, 23 May 2024

Workshop of the World: Essays in People’s History 
by Raphael Samuel, edited by John Merrick.
Verso, 295 pp., £25, January, 978 1 80429 280 8
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... of the popular historical imagination in late 20th-century Britain told via case studies, from Laura Ashley fabrics to the touristification of Ironbridge. Since his death from cancer in 1996, however, Samuel has been prolific. A second volume of Theatres of Memory, titled Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, came out in 1998, followed in 2006 by The Lost ...

Ruined by men

Anthony Thwaite, 1 September 1988

The Truth about Lorin Jones 
by Alison Lurie.
Joseph, 294 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 7181 3095 2
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Latecomers 
by Anita Brookner.
Cape, 248 pp., £10.95, August 1988, 0 224 02554 6
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Where the rivers meet 
by John Wain.
Hutchinson, 563 pp., £12.95, June 1988, 9780091736170
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About the Body 
by Christopher Burns.
Secker, 193 pp., £10.95, August 1988, 0 436 09784 2
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Stories 
by Elizabeth Jolley.
Viking, 312 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 670 82113 6
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... lover Betsy) ‘was because of Lorin Jones.’ Lorin’s stepmother says: ‘I’m sorry ... but Laura Zimmern wasn’t a nice person.’ (Lorin has, or had, several names by which she was known; and Polly’s own surname is – perhaps a bit too nudgingly – Alter.) The derogatory descriptions start to accumulate in Polly’s head: self-centred and ...

Red Power

Thomas Meaney: Indigenous Political Strategies, 18 July 2024

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 
by Pekka Hämäläinen.
Norton, 571 pp., £17.99, October 2023, 978 1 324 09406 7
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The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History 
by Ned Blackhawk.
Yale, 596 pp., £28, April 2023, 978 0 300 24405 2
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Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance 
by Nick Estes.
Haymarket, 320 pp., £14.99, July, 979 8 88890 082 6
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... their ancient homeland. Hämäläinen relates the account given to the English explorer David Thompson by one of the Blackfeet Indians, Saahkómaapi. In around 1730, the Blackfeet heard that there were horses in Snake Indian country and that not far away was the body of a horse that had been killed by an arrow. They found the dead horse and gathered ...

Anglo-Egyptian Attitudes

Marina Warner, 5 January 2017

... At home, my parents spoke to each other in English and my mother would use Italian with my sister Laura and me, but their conversation together and with friends was liberally sprinkled with Gallicisms, intended to add class and indicate social nuance; it included words for social structures and types (bourgeois, le gratin, le beau monde and élite ...

Who do you think you are?

Jacqueline Rose: Trans Narratives, 5 May 2016

... Sometime​ in the 1970s, at the home of the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, I found myself in the company of another critic, who had just returned to London from the Berlin Film Festival. Over dinner he took pleasure in regaling us with stories of the male to female transsexual prostitutes he had met on the city’s streets, and how difficult it was to ‘complete’ the transaction since the transsexual body interprets the surgically created vagina as a wound which it tries to close ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... low-rise buildings and walkways at the base of the tower. He immediately sent a text message to Laura Johnson, the council’s director of housing, and to Holgate. Once he’d got dressed and gone outside he called Robert Black. The streets were full of people and blue lights were flashing everywhere. Black told him he was behind the police cordon on ...

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