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Half a pirate

Patrick O’Brian, 22 January 1987

Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates 
by Robert Ritchie.
Harvard, 306 pp., £16.95, November 1986, 0 674 09501 4
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Richard Knight’s Treasure! The True Story of his Extraordinary Quest for Captain Kidd’s Cache 
by Glenys Roberts.
Viking, 198 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 670 80761 3
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... and conceivably out of patriotism the British members of a privateer took the ship away from the French members, sailed her to Nevis and renamed her the Blessed William. Whether the crew elected Kidd captain in the usual democratic buccaneering way or whether he was appointed by the governor of Nevis makes little odds, for the men would never have sailed ...

For Want of a Dinner Jacket

Christopher Tayler: Becoming O’Brian, 6 May 2021

Patrick O’Brian: A Very Private Life 
by Nikolai Tolstoy.
William Collins, 608 pp., £10.99, October 2020, 978 0 00 835062 8
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... decided to give another writer he’d spotted a chance to fill the gap in the market. He wrote to Patrick O’Brian, who duly signed a contract headed: ‘Untitled novel about an 18th-century naval adventurer’.Hill’s attention had been caught by a chance reading of The Golden Ocean (1956), a novel for teenagers which made it clear that O’Brian knew his ...

Walsingham’s Plumber

Patrick Collinson: John Bossy, 5 July 2001

Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story 
by John Bossy.
Yale, 189 pp., £18.95, May 2001, 0 300 08400 5
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... and Juliet (1956) could have been about Salisbury Court, the London home in the early 1580s of the French Ambassador to the Court of Elizabeth I, Michel de Castelnau, seigneur de Mauvissière, an establishment described by John Bossy as ‘zany, convivial and leak-ridden’. Bossy asks us to take our places at the dinner table at Salisbury Court in November ...

Short Cuts

Patrick Wright: The Moral of Brenley Corner, 6 December 2018

... The same week as that unwanted encounter with European produce, a near disaster was suffered by 23 French holidaymakers, some of whom suffered facial cuts as their Dover-bound coach collided with a Danish TIR lorry at Harbledown. On another occasion the A2 was blocked when a ‘Turkey-bound’ lorry loaded with machinery parked at the side of the road, then ...

Tall Storeys

Patrick Parrinder, 10 December 1987

Life: A User’s Manual 
by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos.
Collins Harvill, 581 pp., £15, October 1987, 0 00 271463 9
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The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room 
by Paul Auster.
Faber, 314 pp., £10.95, November 1987, 0 571 14925 1
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... three hundred-page novel written without the e which is by far the most frequently used letter in French. The counterpart to La Disparition was Les Revenentes (1972), a lipogrammatic novel in a, i, o and u – e being the only permitted vowel. No single word in La Disparition can reappear in Les Revenentes, while many of the most familiar words in the ...

Desperado as Commodity

Alex Harvey: Jean-Patrick Manchette, 26 May 2022

The N’Gustro Affair 
by Jean-Patrick Manchette, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
NYRB, 180 pp., £12, September 2021, 978 1 68137 512 0
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No Room at the Morgue 
by Jean-Patrick Manchette, translated by Alyson Waters.
NYRB, 188 pp., £12, August 2020, 978 1 68137 418 5
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... When​ Jean-Patrick Manchette was asked about his first encounter with detective fiction, he mentioned a scene from Black Wings Has My Angel by the American writer Elliott Chaze. Originally published in 1953, this obscure lovers-on-the-run thriller was only available, until recently, in French translation ...

I am a Cretan

Patrick Parrinder, 21 April 1988

On Modern Authority: The Theory and Condition of Writing, 1500 to the Present Day 
by Thomas Docherty.
Harvester, 310 pp., £25, May 1987, 0 7108 1017 2
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The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert 
by Christopher Prendergast.
Cambridge, 288 pp., £27.50, March 1986, 0 521 23789 0
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... he considered that their mimetic activities would tend to undermine the social order. Modern French critical thought, however, has insisted that ‘realist’ writing is no longer subversive. The ‘scandalous’ texts with their sexual machinery which excited so much censorious attention in the 19th century (and in England much more recently) now stand ...

Dirty Linen

Patrick O’Brian, 4 August 1994

Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the ‘Bounty’ 
by Greg Dening.
Canto, 445 pp., £7.95, April 1994, 0 521 46718 7
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Admiral Satan: The Life and Campaigns of Suffren 
by Roderick Cavaliero.
Tauris, 312 pp., £29.95, May 1994, 9781850436867
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... It is true that he moved on to the Crescent, which though called a frigate was in fact a captured French privateer; and from this very modest height he sank to the Ranger, a snow that carried only eight little three-pounders and that harried smugglers off the Isle of Man. In 1776, having served his time as a midshipman, he passed his examination for ...

Thirty Years Ago

Patrick Parrinder, 18 July 1985

Still Life 
by A.S. Byatt.
Chatto, 358 pp., £9.95, June 1985, 0 7011 2667 1
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Wales’ Work 
by Robert Walshe.
Secker, 279 pp., £8.95, July 1985, 9780436561450
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... are voiced by Raphael Faber, supposedly a leading young Cambridge don. Faber, who teaches the French Symbolists and abominates George Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, is a poet whose art is one of ‘material reference’ deprived of (apparent) spiritual meaning. He is also a Jew, whose male relatives were all killed in the Holocaust, and a recognisable donnish ...

Mrs Berlioz

Patrick Carnegy, 30 December 1982

Fair Ophelia: A Life of Harriet Smithson Berlioz 
by Peter Raby.
Cambridge, 216 pp., £12.95, September 1982, 0 521 24421 8
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Mazeppa: The Lives, Loves and Legends of Adah Isaacs Menken 
by Wolf Mankowitz.
Blond and Briggs, 270 pp., £10.95, September 1982, 0 85634 119 3
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... conjunction of beauty, forlorn love, madness and premature death’ was irresistible to the French. Through her, Shakespeare suddenly became a central part of French consciousness and the preoccupation of writers such as Hugo and Dumas. The young Berlioz worshipped her from afar, but so intensely that he nearly had a ...

Celtic Revisionism

Patrick Parrinder, 24 July 1986

A Short History of Irish Literature 
by Seamus Deane.
Hutchinson, 282 pp., £15, March 1986, 0 09 161360 4
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The Peoples of Ireland 
by Liam de Paor.
Hutchinson, 344 pp., £15, April 1986, 9780091561406
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Portrait of Ireland 
by Liam de Paor.
Rainbow, 192 pp., £13.95, May 1986, 1 85120 004 5
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The Complete Dramatic Works 
by Samuel Beckett.
Faber, 476 pp., £12.50, April 1986, 0 571 13821 7
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The Beckett Country: An Exhibition for Samuel Beckett’s 80th Birthday 
by Eoin O’Brien and James Knowlson.
Black Cat, 97 pp., £5, May 1986, 0 948050 03 9
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... would be interesting to know how many British university libraries shelve Beckett’s books under French, not Irish, literature. Traitors sell their nationality, whereas writers, if they are well-known, find themselves trading on their nationality whether they like it or not. Neither traitors nor imaginative writers can ever fully discard what we choose to ...

Unusual Endowments

Patrick Collinson, 30 March 2000

Philip Sidney: A Double Life 
by Alan Stewart.
Chatto, 400 pp., £20, February 2000, 0 7011 6859 5
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... a participant in the often menacing jollifications which accompanied the finalisation of an Anglo-French treaty and a marriage alliance with the house of Navarre. In early August the French King made him a gentleman of his bedchamber, which carried the title of baron. But by the end of the month he was caught up in the ...

Over-Indulging

Patrick Parrinder, 9 February 1995

The Sin of Father Amaro 
by Eça de Queirós, translated by Nan Flanagan.
Carcanet, 352 pp., £14.95, August 1994, 1 85754 101 4
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The City and the Mountains 
by Eça de Queirós, translated by Roy Campbell.
Carcanet, 217 pp., £14.95, August 1994, 1 85754 102 2
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... of his working life in England and France. He liked to maintain that his novels were fundamentally French, and that he himself was French in everything but his fondness for ballad-singers and cod with onions. Certainly he was no Englishman, nor likely to become one, despite 14 years spent in the consular service in Bristol ...

La Bolaing

Patrick Collinson: Anne Boleyn, 18 November 2004

The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn 
by Eric Ives.
Blackwell, 458 pp., £25, July 2004, 0 631 23479 9
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... dynasty. And it was part of that sexual magnetism that Anne, having spent most of her life in French-speaking courts, in Brussels and Paris, was to all intents and purposes French. Lancelot de Carles wrote that ‘no one would ever have taken her to be English by her manners, but a native-born Frenchwoman.’ She was ...

Happy in Heaven

Patrick O’Brian, 10 February 1994

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The Life and Death of the Little Prince 
by Paul Webster.
Macmillan, 276 pp., £17.99, September 1993, 0 333 54872 8
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... for an armistice; de Gaulle had made his appeal from London; and the Royal Navy had destroyed the French fleet at Mers el-Kebir to prevent it falling into the hands of the Germans. Some of his friends urged Saint-Exupéry to join the Free French, but he would not. He had no opinion of Pétain and still less of the ...

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