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Tit for Tat

Margaret Anne Doody, 21 December 1989

Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology 
edited by Roger Lonsdale.
Oxford, 555 pp., £20, September 1989, 0 19 811769 8
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... is felt usually more in short lines than long, though some, such as Yearsley and Charlotte Smith, are successful in iambic pentameter blank verse. Poets from Rowe through Yearsley sometimes express an impatient sense of the limitations of language itself, ‘the human line/ Of alphabets (misused)’ (Yearsley), even while they express pleasure in ...

There is only one Harrods

Paul Foot, 23 September 1993

Tiny Rowland: A Rebel Tycoon 
by Tom Bower.
Heinemann, 659 pp., £16.99, May 1993, 0 434 07339 3
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... Richmond. He joyfully extended his favours to other members of the Royal Family, such as Princess Margaret, who he once flew free to her hols in Sardinia. Reminding Ogilvy all the while of his secret share options, signed and sealed in the Bahamas, Tiny retained the services of the royal husband for 12 years – until finally Ogilvy was forced to resign in ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Fastsellers, 22 March 2001

... For example: the top five consolidated publishing groups – Bertelsmann, Pearson, News Corp, W.H. Smith and Holtzbrinck – were responsible for a whopping 49.3 per cent of sales in the General Retail Market in 2000; grim news for independents (News Corp’s figures include those of Fourth Estate, swallowed by HarperCollins last July), though in these ...

The Trouble with HRH

Christopher Hitchens, 5 June 1997

Princess MargaretA Biography 
by Theo Aronson.
O’Mara, 336 pp., £16.99, February 1997, 1 85479 248 2
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... in ‘daylight upon magic’. But the damn phrase is inescapable. The fascination of Princess Margaret, I suspect, is that she was the forerunner of the public, vulgar Windsor style: now such a drag but then such a sensation. If you were a commoner of average social mobility in London in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, there was a better than average ...

Here she is

Frank Kermode: Zadie Smith, 6 October 2005

On Beauty 
by Zadie Smith.
Hamish Hamilton, 446 pp., £16.99, September 2005, 0 241 14293 8
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... of the older novel might darken or distort the new one. In the present case it doesn’t. Zadie Smith’s real debt may not lie in her echoes of Howards End, though she does insist on them. Two families of very different temperaments are forced to confront one another when in On Beauty, as in Howards End, a sudden engagement is announced and almost at once ...

You bet your life

Margaret Walters, 21 April 1988

Oscar and Lucinda 
by Peter Carey.
Faber, 512 pp., £10.95, March 1988, 0 571 14812 3
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The Fifth Child 
by Doris Lessing.
Cape, 131 pp., £9.95, April 1988, 0 224 02553 8
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Eight Months on Ghazzah Street 
by Hilary Mantel.
Viking, 299 pp., £11.95, April 1988, 0 670 82117 9
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... constantly repeated horror stories (princesses stoned to death for adultery, the inevitable Helen Smith case), her fury at how little she – or the other Europeans – understand the Saudis. Frances becomes obsessed with the empty flat immediately above hers, with rumours that someone high up in the Government is using it for an adulterous liaison. She ...

Political Purposes

Frances Spalding: Art in postwar Britain, 15 April 1999

New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society 
by Margaret Garlake.
Yale, 279 pp., £35, July 1998, 0 300 07292 9
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Cultural Offensive: America’s Impact on British Art since 1945 
by John Walker.
Pluto, 304 pp., £45, September 1988, 0 7453 1321 3
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... passive role which the Arts Council adopted as a conduit between artist and public: a policy, Margaret Garlake remarks, ‘designed less to inspire than to avoid giving offence’. Despite this, the major exhibitions which the Arts Council mounted at the Tate Gallery during the immediate postwar years greatly enlivened its near-moribund exhibition ...

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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... us to prosperity and liberty but at the price of atomising our picture of the world. The labourer, Smith writes, is ‘not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private ...

Make-Believe

Patricia Beer, 8 November 1979

The Intruder 
by Gillian Tindall.
Hodder, 286 pp., £5.95
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Mother Can You Hear Me? 
by Margaret Forster.
Secker, 269 pp., £5.90
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Treasures of Time 
by Penelope Lively.
Heinemann, 199 pp., £4.95
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Wild Nights 
by Emma Tennant.
Cape, 134 pp., £4.50
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... and afterwards mayor of St Laurent-le-Nouveau: not exactly a trimmer, not exactly a coward. Margaret Forster’s Mother Can You Hear Me? is well-titled and the answer is no. To my knowledge, there is no official Daughter’s Day yet, but this book is one long high-pitched celebration of the situation of daughter misunderstood by mother. There are three ...

Snob Cuts

Rosemary Hill: Modern Snobbery, 3 November 2016

... and his mother in particular. It is no accident that, as Taylor quotes John Vincent saying, Margaret Thatcher was ‘the point at which all snobberies meet’, for she represented the compacted prejudices of the nation. The dislike she aroused was couched in terms of condescension that had nothing to do with policy. Mary Warnock objected to her ...

A Question of Breathing

John Bayley, 4 August 1988

Elizabeth Barrett Browning 
by Margaret Forster.
Chatto, 400 pp., £14.95, June 1988, 0 7011 3018 0
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Selected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning 
by Margaret Forster.
Chatto, 330 pp., £12.95, June 1988, 0 7011 3311 2
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The Poetical Works of Robert Browning: Vol. III 
edited by Ian Jack and Rowena Fowler.
Oxford, 542 pp., £60, June 1988, 0 19 812762 6
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The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Vol. VIII 
edited by Roma King and Susan Crowl.
Ohio/Baylor University, 379 pp., £47.50, September 1988, 9780821403808
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... was also, in a sense, a conscious and loving masochist in relation to her father and family, and Margaret Forster has done an admirable job in investigating what really went on among them. It takes two – or rather three – to make an Andromeda, and Elizabeth herself was a powerful unit in a close-knit Compton-Burnett family, who all recognised in their ...

‘I was a more man’

Keith Kyle, 12 October 1989

Keith Joseph: A Single Mind 
by Morrison Halcrow.
Macmillan, 205 pp., £14.95, September 1989, 0 333 49016 9
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... Party became vacant in 1965 Sir Keith was a Heath man: he lobbied for him and recruited Margaret Thatcher to that camp. Heath, to all appearances, was to bring into being a new radical form of Conservatism, which was known in the run-up to the 1970 Election as the politics of ‘Selsdon Man’, after the hotel where the strategists drew up the ...

Mary Swann’s Way

Danny Karlin, 27 September 1990

Jane Fairfax 
by Joan Aiken.
Gollancz, 252 pp., £12.95, September 1990, 0 575 04889 1
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Lady’s Maid 
by Margaret Forster.
Chatto, 536 pp., £13.95, July 1990, 0 7011 3574 3
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Mary Swann 
by Carol Shields.
Fourth Estate, 313 pp., £12.99, August 1990, 1 872180 02 7
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... and (even more ludicrously) is endowed with a romantic yearning for Mr Knightley worthy of Harriet Smith herself. A line in feminist literary criticism takes Jane Fairfax, along with Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility, as an exemplary figure of the repressions and suppressions which Austen’s art both questions and practises. But of this struggle ...

Masquerade

Gillian Bennett: Self-impersonation, 3 November 2005

The Woman who Pretended to Be who She Was: Myths of Self-Impersonation 
by Wendy Doniger.
Oxford, 272 pp., £17.99, January 2005, 0 19 516016 9
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... does not simply turn him back into Charles. The triple cross appears to be complete – Charles to Smith to Charles – but . . . he does not become himself . . . again; he merely masquerades as himself. It is not only Charles who wears a mask and swaps identities: Paula, too, assumes a mask to become once more what she is, his wife. In the very ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Basingstoke’s Paisleyite, 21 April 2005

... On 9 June 1983, my father took my elder sister and me to the village hall to vote against Margaret Thatcher. We were only small, so we went with him into the polling booth. He gave my sister the pencil and pointed to where she should draw the first line of a cross, then let me draw the second. All highly irregular, no doubt, though even if his ballot had been discounted it wouldn’t have made any difference: the new Conservative MP for Basingstoke, Andrew Hunter, would just have been elected with a majority of 12,451 rather than 12,450 ...

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