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Shee Spy

Michael Dobson, 8 May 1997

The Secret Life of Aphra Behn 
by Janet Todd.
Deutsch, 545 pp., £25, October 1996, 0 233 98991 9
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... called Colonel Colepeper, we can be fairly confident that Behn was the daughter of a Canterbury barber called Johnson, born on 14 December 1640 and christened Eaffrey. From here onwards, though, things get difficult. When we next hear of her, Eaffrey/Aphra is in her mid-twenties and calling herself Mrs Behn, though of Mr Behn we have only a report in the ...

Crazy Don

Michael Wood, 3 August 1995

The History of that Ingenious Gentleman Don Quijote de la Mancha 
by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, translated by Burton Raffel.
Norton, 802 pp., $14.95, September 1995, 0 393 03719 3
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... but everyone, and not just Don Quixote, is prepared to talk as if it is. Is this shining object a barber’s basin or Mambrino’s helmet? It’s a barber’s basin, but the barber is wearing it on his head, and a whole innful of people later conspire, as a joke, to certify that it’s a ...

From Old Adam to New Eve

Peter Pulzer, 6 June 1985

The Conservative Party from Peel to Thatcher 
by Robert Blake.
Methuen/Fontana, 401 pp., £19.95, May 1985, 0 413 58140 3
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Westminster Blues 
by Julian Critchley.
Hamish Hamilton, 134 pp., £7.95, May 1985, 0 241 11387 3
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... Qui trop embrasse, mal étreint. His tribute to the organisational genius of Lord Woolton and Sir Michael Fraser is diminished by the extravagant encomia for Anthony Barber and Cecil Parkinson. We cannot yet write the history of post-Thatcherite Britain, but perhaps it is not too soon to start summarising the ...

The Heart of a Prickle Bush

Clare Bucknell: What if she’s a witch?, 29 July 2021

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch 
by Rivka Galchen.
Fourth Estate, 275 pp., £14.99, July 2021, 978 0 00 754873 6
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... the baker’s wife, Rosina Zoft, allows Katharina to use her bread oven from time to time; Michael Stahl, who owns a shed, lets her store her grain there; when she needs fresh milk, neighbours supply it. She, in turn, dispenses homemade herbal remedies, lends money and makes gifts of food and wine. Resentments arise when too little or too much is ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Did in 2015, 7 January 2016

... in his digs in Keble Road in Oxford when I was with Eric Korn and possibly, over from Cambridge, Michael Frayn. Oliver said that he had fried and eaten a placenta. At that time I don’t think I knew what a placenta was except that I knew it didn’t come with chips.11 September. David Cameron has been in Leeds preaching to businessmen the virtues of what he ...

Time Unfolded

Perry Anderson: Powell v. the World, 2 August 2018

... arrival, when the non-Aryan proportion in its membership had seemed to many unnecessarily high.’ Michael Barber, Powell’s earlier biographer, who first pointed out these passages, sensibly did not make too much of them. Like offhand dismissals of democracy, casual expressions of antisemitism were comme il faut in the upper classes of the period, a ...

Bastilles and Battalions

Sarah Resnick: On Rikers Island, 22 September 2022

Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage 
by Jarrod Shanahan.
Verso, 433 pp., £20, May, 978 1 78873 995 5
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... preventable deaths. They are Antonio Bradley, Anibal Carrasquillo, Ricardo Cruciani, Albert Drye, Michael Lopez, Elijah Muhammed, Michael Nieves, Mary Yehudah and Tarz Youngblood. The name ‘Rikers Island’ conjures a monolithic structure, but there are ten correctional facilities on the island, seven of which are ...

Dark Shoes on a Doorstep

Catriona Crowe, 31 July 1997

The Bend for Home 
by Dermot Healy.
Harvill, 307 pp., £6.99, May 1997, 1 86046 354 1
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... in the Sligo area, where he lives. With writers such as Eugene McCabe, Tom McIntyre and Michael Harding he shares a commitment to local territories of the imagination and their distinct idioms, giving us access to a set of rich dialects and views of the world, on the one hand, and, on the other, setting up a healthy opposition to the Dublin/London ...

Urban Messthetics

John Mullan: Black and Asian writers in London, 18 November 2004

London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City 
by Sukhdev Sandhu.
Harper Perennial, 498 pp., £9.99, November 2004, 0 00 653214 4
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... anti-hero, Buckram, through the alleys. Martin portrays Samuel Johnson’s black servant, Francis Barber, as ‘a nouveau-riche social climber’, and both Sancho and Equiano are depicted in suitably unheroic fashion. Sandhu loves all this, though the passages he quotes don’t quite live up to his extravagant praise. But then Sandhu’s literary criticism ...

Motoring

Frank Kermode: James Lees-Milne, 30 November 2000

Deep Romantic Chasm: Diaries 1979-81 
by James Lees-Milne, edited by Michael Bloch.
Murray, 276 pp., £22.50, October 2000, 0 7195 5608 2
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A Mingled Measure: Diaries 1953-72 
by James Lees-Milne.
Murray, 325 pp., £12.99, October 2000, 0 7195 5609 0
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Ancient as the Hills: Diaries 1973-74 
by James Lees-Milne.
Murray, 228 pp., £12.99, October 2000, 0 7195 6200 7
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... been reissued as rather grand paperbacks, along with an eighth, a final hardback selection made by Michael Bloch. They all have titles like Ancestral Voices, Caves of Ice, Through Wood and Dale, Midway on the Waves and Prophesying Peace, and it will not escape the notice of the literate public that they are all derived, one with a bit of a spin on it, from ...

Tycooniest

Deborah Friedell: Trump and Son, 22 October 2015

Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success 
by Michael D’Antonio.
Thomas Dunne, 389 pp., £18, September 2015, 978 1 250 04238 5
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... In 1885, Mark Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Friedrich Drumpf, apprentice barber, arrived in New York Harbor. He came from the village of Kallstadt, in southwest Germany, but his son and grandson would do a lot of business with Jews — why not avoid unpleasantness? And so in interviews and in his memoir, The Art of the Deal ...
A Word from the Loki 
by Maurice Riordan.
Faber, 64 pp., £6.99, January 1995, 0 571 17364 0
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After the Deafening 
by Gerard Woodward.
Chatto, 64 pp., £7.99, October 1994, 0 7011 6271 6
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The Ice-Pilot Speaks 
by Pauline Stainer.
Bloodaxe, 80 pp., £6.95, October 1994, 1 85224 298 1
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The Angel of History 
by Carolyn Forché.
Bloodaxe, 96 pp., £7.95, November 1994, 1 85224 307 4
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The Neighbour 
by Michael Collier.
Chicago, 74 pp., £15.95, January 1995, 0 226 11358 2
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Jubilation 
by Charles Tomlinson.
Oxford, 64 pp., £6.99, March 1995, 0 19 282451 1
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... not have to be a corpse (‘I’m asleep, you say, possibly dead’) and also indicates a debt to Michael Longley, who wrote a similar poem about Lowry’s painting. Whereas the vertical man was supposed to carry out dynamic acts of construction, the horizontal man is open to sober acts of reconstruction and it is the latter category which dominates A Word ...

Slashed, Red and Dead

Michael Hofmann: Rilke, To Me, 21 January 2021

... wrong time: ‘Naples too, as indeed everything Italian, is more beautiful in the summer.’ His barber warns him of an impending change of weather: ‘Pioggia, scirocco, eh –’ He haunts the museum, takes refuge in the book he has brought with him from Munich, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. In his dedication to the first volume of New Poems, he writes ...

Hey, Mister, you want dirty book?

Edward Said: The CIA, 30 September 1999

Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War 
by Frances Stonor Saunders.
Granta, 509 pp., £20, July 1999, 1 86207 029 6
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... The main vehicle for all of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967’. My first encounter (pun unintended) with the Congress was through The God that Failed, a compendium of confessions by well-known former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was ...

Noisomeness

Keith Thomas: Smells of Hell, 16 July 2020

Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times 
by Robert Muchembled, translated by Susan Pickford.
Polity, 216 pp., £17.99, May, 978 1 5095 3677 1
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The Clean Body: A Modern History 
by Peter Ward.
McGill-Queen’s, 313 pp., £27.99, December 2019, 978 0 7735 5938 7
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... smell.’Unfamiliar odours, by contrast, were (and are) greeted with suspicion. In 1657 a London barber was prosecuted for making and selling ‘a liquor called “coffee”’, to the ‘great nuisance and prejudice of the neighbourhood’. Yet it did not take long for people to regard the smell of coffee as even better than the taste. Meanwhile, unpleasant ...

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