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Giving Hysteria a Bad Name

Jenny Diski: At home with the Mellys, 17 November 2005

Take a Girl like Me: Life with George 
by Diana Melly.
Chatto, 280 pp., £14.99, July 2005, 0 7011 7906 6
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Slowing Down 
by George Melly.
Viking, 221 pp., £17.99, October 2005, 0 670 91409 6
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... now two, to live with my aunt in Essex. After leaving Patrick, I went to live with a writer called Michael Alexander who took me to Afghanistan. Several ‘engagements’ (author’s inverted commas) on and she is living with Johnnie, but he wanted a child of his own before Patrick returned to live with them. So ‘when my aunt brought Patrick to the London ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: Marlene Dietrich, 17 December 2020

... notion of the long first part, when Dietrich is an innocent child, a sort of babe in the Russian woods by way of Prussia. Of course, my failed recall is more than a little overdetermined. How could Dietrich ever be innocent? Even when she is playing the child part she asks: ‘When I grow up, can I become a hangman?’The Scarlet Empress was the sixth film ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Tree of Life’, 28 July 2011

The Tree of Life 
directed by Terrence Malick.
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... oversized scaly ostrich, which steps on the head of a fallen lesser animal and trots off into the woods looking very pleased with the experience. The effect is that of 2001 not quite meeting Jurassic Park. There’s some modern material that’s pretty bad too. The date seems to be the present, there are glassy skyscrapers everywhere, and Sean Penn seems to ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘One Fine Morning’, 15 June 2023

... appears when Chris tells Tony the story of the film she is writing. They walk through fields and woods, and her voiceover narrative is full of alternatives, what she may or may not want her characters to do or say, but we see the film as if it were already made. It’s about two people who had an affair when young and meet up again in order to fail to beget ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: Christian Petzold’s ‘Afire’, 21 September 2023

... walk the rest of the way, or rather Felix takes off to see if he remembers the route through the woods. Leon is alone among the trees, looking distinctly worried, and we think we have seen this film before. This is where horrors, natural or supernatural, descend on him. We are wrong, though. Felix returns and says the walk is even shorter than he thought it ...
Selected Poems 
by Patricia Beer.
Hutchinson, 152 pp., £5.95, April 1980, 0 09 138450 8
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The Venetian Vespers 
by Anthony Hecht.
Oxford, 91 pp., £3.95, March 1980, 0 19 211933 8
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Nostalgia for the Present 
by Andrei Voznesensky.
Oxford, 150 pp., £3.50, April 1980, 0 19 211900 1
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Reflections on the Nile 
by Ronald Bottrall.
London Magazine Editions, 56 pp., £3.50, May 1980, 0 904388 33 6
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Summer Palaces 
by Peter Scupham.
Oxford, 55 pp., £3, March 1980, 9780192119322
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... with parts named after such phenomena as ‘Cottage Flowers’, ‘Sky’, ‘Lanes’, ‘Woods’. The poems subjoined are reveries of stodgy Latinate words; celebrations of pure and empty moments; rambles with a thesaurus. There is nothing going on. Not so much as a game of ...

In the Shady Wood

Michael Neill: Staging the Forest, 22 March 2018

The Shakespearean Forest 
by Anne Barton.
Cambridge, 185 pp., £75, August 2017, 978 0 521 57344 3
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... even rewriting a little where necessary, Lees-Jeffries has added a fine introduction, ‘Into the Woods’, pieced together from Barton’s draft original and from portions of a discarded chapter; she has also appended a comprehensive bibliographical essay of her own, bringing the reader up to date with the large amount of related material published in the ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Upstream Colour’, 26 September 2013

Upstream Colour 
directed by Shane Carruth.
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... surfaces with some of the stones Kris completes the sentences. He says: ‘I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbour, in a house which I had built myself, and earned my living by the labour of my hands only’. She says: ‘I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilised life again.’ Then she dives back for ...

Two Poems

Michael Symmons Roberts, 18 May 2017

... why the warm summer heart of this city is so silent tonight. Maybe everyone has run off to the woods to watch our gods and goddesses disport themselves, now it’s a free-for-all. But there is live news on TV, quiet bars ravenous for custom, empty trams on time – the pointless daily liturgies continue. I dare not lift the blinds to look. But my ...

Five Poems

Günter Eich, translated by Michael Hofmann, 25 March 2010

... have been passing. I saw some playing among the pear trees as well. There were more of them in the woods, over the conifer plantations and gravel-pits. They are a nuisance. But even more annoying are the sailors (some high-ranking ones among them too, helmsmen, captains), who keep coming up to the open window and asking for a light for their beastly tobacco. I ...

Impossible Wishes

Michael Wood: Thomas Mann, 6 February 2003

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann 
edited by Ritchie Robertson.
Cambridge, 257 pp., £45.50, November 2001, 9780521653107
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Thomas Mann: A Biography 
by Hermann Kurzke, translated by Leslie Willson.
Allen Lane, 582 pp., £30, January 2002, 0 7139 9500 9
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... Mann’s writing, and even of the recent versions of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain by John Woods. The failings are apparently mostly lexical and syntactical: ‘Knopf have once again employed a translator whose knowledge of German appears inadequate to the task, and who is capable of careless errors.’ Of course it’s good to get things right, but ...

Three Poems

John Burnside, 11 September 2014

... and strange, with a sister’s disdain, or a grandmother’s folded smile. Confiteor for Michael Krüger I heard something out by the gate and went to look. Dead of night; new snow, the larch woods filling slowly, stars beneath the stars. A single cry it was, or so it seemed, though nothing I had recognised as ...

Little Monstrosities

Hannah Rose Woods: Victorian Dogdom, 16 March 2023

Doggy People: The Victorians Who Made the Modern Dog 
by Michael Worboys.
Manchester, 312 pp., £20, February, 978 1 5261 6772 9
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... had bred 2123 dogs and owned 2696.They are often like this, the ‘Doggy People’ who feature in Michael Worboys’s study of twenty ‘eminent and not so eminent Victorians who were the modern dog’s makers’: muscular, energetic, eccentric, polymathic. Kathleen Pelham-Clinton, the Duchess of Newcastle, who imported the borzoi breed from Russia into ...

Feral Children

Michael Morgan, 21 May 1981

The Forbidden Experiment 
by Roger Shattuck.
Secker, 220 pp., £6.95, August 1980, 0 436 45875 6
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... beings and, in particular, about the celebrated ‘Wild Boy of Aveyron’, who emerged from the woods near Saint-Sernin in Southern France in 1800. What make cases of social deprivation of this kind so fascinating are the obvious questions they raise about the determinants of human nature. (See, for example, Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Bye Child’, about the ...

Where the Apples Come From

T.C. Smout: What Makes an Oak Tree Grow, 29 November 2007

Woodlands 
by Oliver Rackham.
Collins, 609 pp., £25, September 2006, 0 00 720243 1
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Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees 
by Richard Mabey.
Chatto, 289 pp., £20, October 2007, 978 1 85619 733 5
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Wildwood: A Journey through Trees 
by Roger Deakin.
Hamish Hamilton, 391 pp., £20, May 2007, 978 0 241 14184 7
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The Wild Trees: What if the Last Wilderness Is above Our Heads? 
by Richard Preston.
Allen Lane, 294 pp., £20, August 2007, 978 1 84614 023 5
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... from the coppice stool after being pushed over by mammoths in the last interglacial? How do our woods, and the ways we have used them, compare with woods in other countries, for example in Japan? The largest and oldest wooden buildings in the world are in the complexes of ancient Japanese temples around Nara. Rackham is ...

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