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Eyes and Ears

Anthony Thwaite, 23 June 1988

The Silence in the Garden 
by William Trevor.
Bodley Head, 204 pp., £9.95, June 1988, 9780370312187
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Sea Music 
by David Profumo.
Secker, 207 pp., £10.95, May 1988, 9780436387142
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Tell it me again 
by John Fuller.
Chatto, 202 pp., £10.95, April 1988, 0 7011 3288 4
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The Continuing Silence of a Poet: The Collected Short Stories of A.B. Yehoshua 
Peter Halban/Weidenfeld, 377 pp., £11.95, June 1988, 1 870015 14 2Show More
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... gentry and the mass of submerged peasantry. The Rollestons’ family house of Carriglas, in County Cork, is the setting of The Silence in the Garden – decayed gentry rather than middle class. The Rollestons established their inheritance centuries before the book begins, and had an ancestral reputation for decency and kindness to their tenants during the ...

Absolutely Bleedin’ Obvious

Ian Sansom: Will Self, 6 July 2006

The Book of Dave 
by Will Self.
Viking, 496 pp., £17.99, June 2006, 0 670 91443 6
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... reading Tyndale, Coverdale, Milton, Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Francis Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw and the inspired committee-work of the Authorised Version – one immediately notices that the biblical texts are really quite vile, and that the poets’ ‘personal agendas’ seem almost without exception bizarre, baffling or psychotic. In ...

Joan Didion’s Style

Martin Amis, 7 February 1980

The White Album 
by Joan Didion.
Weidenfeld, 223 pp., £5.95, October 1980, 0 297 77702 5
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... country. On 7 October 1964, Lucille Miller took her depressive and generally below-par husband, Cork, out for a moonlight drive in their Volkswagen. After a visit to a nearby supermarket, Mrs Miller stopped the car in the middle of the road, poured a can of petrol over her husband, set fire to him, and then attempted to propel the VW over a four-foot ...

Nothing could have been odder or more prophetic

Gillian Darley: Ruins, 29 November 2001

In Ruins 
by Christopher Woodward.
Chatto, 280 pp., £12.99, September 2001, 9780701168964
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... been lost to the dead hand of over-zealous interpretation and expensive presentation. In 1855, Richard Deakin, a Victorian botanist, published a volume devoted to the species he found growing on and around the Colosseum, a six-acre site which supported 420 different plants. Deakin is one of Woodward’s many unsung heroes. The conjunction of nature and ...

Living Doll and Lilac Fairy

Penelope Fitzgerald, 31 August 1989

Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington 1893-1932 
by Gretchen Gerzina.
Murray, 342 pp., £18.95, June 1989, 0 7195 4688 5
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Lydia and Maynard: Letters between Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes 
edited by Polly Hill and Richard Keynes.
Deutsch, 367 pp., £17.95, September 1989, 0 233 98283 3
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Mazo de la Roche: The Hidden Life 
by Joan Givner.
Oxford, 273 pp., £18, July 1989, 0 19 540705 9
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Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby: A Working Partnership 
by Jean Kennard.
University Press of New England, 224 pp., £24, July 1989, 0 87451 474 6
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Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists 
by Susan Leonardi.
Rutgers, 254 pp., $33, May 1989, 0 8135 1366 9
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The Selected Letters of Somerville and Ross 
edited by Gifford Lewis.
Faber, 308 pp., £14.99, July 1989, 0 571 15348 8
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... between 1918 and 1925, when they married, has been edited by a niece and a nephew, Polly Hill and Richard Keynes, who rightly believe that it will be ‘of value and interest and will not offend their ghosts’. In an excellent introduction they admit that Lydia, in the early stages, must have worn herself out in flattering Maynard. She had abandoned her ...

Diary

Stephen Smith: What about Somalia?, 11 February 1993

... here. I felt millions would be watching around the world.’ What millions saw were perspiring, cork-blackened Marines conquering the airport and harbour of Mogadishu – no matter that they had both been under UN auspices for three months – and, at length, pushing out from the capital to blackspots like Baidoa and Bardere. It played well in the diners ...

I just let him have his beer

Christopher Tayler: John Williams Made it Work, 19 December 2019

The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, ‘Stoner’ and the Writing Life 
by Charles Shields.
Texas, 305 pp., £23.99, October 2018, 978 1 4773 1736 5
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Nothing but the Night 
by John Williams.
NYRB, 144 pp., $14.95, February 2019, 978 1 68137 307 2
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... someone will feel compelled to publish a good novel.’In July 1964 someone, in the shape of Cork Smith, an editor at Viking, was sufficiently compelled to offer Williams a contract. The novel was published as Stoner, after its central character, the following April, and was ‘briefly noted’ in the New Yorker. It sold around 1700 copies: those who ...

Hillside Men

Roy Foster: Ernie O’Malley, 16 July 1998

Ernie O’Malley: IRA Intellectual 
by Richard English.
Oxford, 284 pp., £25, March 1998, 0 01 982059 3
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... him. Post-revolutionary Ireland was never comfortable with him, nor he with it: a central theme of Richard English’s absorbing study is O’Malley’s ambivalence towards Irish pieties, and his efforts to define the Ireland he had fought for. The country he had envisaged would have revered the writings of uncompromising Modernists like his friend Samuel ...

Parcelled Out

Ferdinand Mount: The League of Nations, 22 October 2015

The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire 
by Susan Pedersen.
Oxford, 571 pp., £22.99, June 2015, 978 0 19 957048 5
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... high command when it conveyed Lenin back to Russia in that sealed train. In the Watergate affair, Richard Nixon scored not one but two own goals: first, by organising a burglary which could produce only minimal gain for the Republicans if it worked but would destroy him if it went wrong; then by secretly recording his conversations in the White House in the ...

Capital’s Capital

Christopher Prendergast: Baron Haussmann’s Paris, 3 October 2002

Haussmann: His Life and Times, and the Making of Modern Paris 
by Michel Carmona, translated by Patrick Camiller.
Ivan Dee, 480 pp., £25, June 2002, 9781566634274
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... of riots and barricades’. There is not the slightest doubt that the changes to the boulevard Richard Lenoir and the canal Saint-Martin were made in part to reduce the scope for working-class manoeuvre. On the other hand, where questions of law and order were concerned, he tended more to a consequentialist than an intentionalist view. In respect of the ...

Joyce and Company

Tim Parks: Joyce’s Home Life, 5 July 2012

James Joyce: A Biography 
by Gordon Bowker.
Phoenix, 608 pp., £14.99, March 2012, 978 0 7538 2860 1
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... this or that physical attribute, or name, or occupation, or address. Readers familiar with Richard Ellmann’s biography of 1959 will be disappointed. Born in 1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the first surviving child of John and May Joyce, whose recent marriage had been fiercely opposed by both sets of parents. Their first baby, named after ...

‘Someone you had to be a bit careful with’

David Sylvester: Gallery Rogues, 30 March 2000

Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser 
by Harriet Vyner.
Faber, 317 pp., £20, October 1999, 0 571 19627 6
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... to that king of the métier Leo Castelli, he was ‘a superb dealer’; among leading artists, Richard Hamilton says that ‘Robert’s was the best gallery I knew in London,’ Ellsworth Kelly that ‘he was a very courageous and flamboyant dealer,’ Claes Oldenburg that ‘Robert really had an eye for draughtsmanship. Very few dealers have.’ He also ...

Birth of a Náison

John Kerrigan, 5 June 1997

The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621-41 
edited by J.F. Merritt.
Cambridge, 293 pp., £35, March 1996, 0 521 56041 1
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The British Problem, c. 1534-1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago 
edited by Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill.
Macmillan, 334 pp., £13.50, June 1996, 0 333 59246 8
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The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture 
edited by Malcolm Smuts.
Cambridge, 289 pp., £35, September 1996, 9780521554398
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Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the 19th Century 
by Joep Leerssen.
Cork, 454 pp., £17.95, November 1996, 1 85918 112 0
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... James Johnstoun. Caroline editions of the work include a finale composed by the Catholic Irishman, Richard Bellings, who rose to prominence in the Royalist confederation and wrote a history of its affairs. The milieu of Ben Jonson’s friend, William Drummond of Hawthornden, was far from exclusively Scottish. Henry Vaughan’s religious poetry emerged from a ...

Wife Overboard

John Sutherland: Thackeray, 20 January 2000

Thackeray 
by D.J. Taylor.
Chatto, 494 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 7011 6231 7
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... personality in various interludes and ‘interchapters’. He is, he admits, no Holmesian (Richard, not Sherlock) ‘pursuer’ of his subject. But he offers a vivid account of a visit he made to Kensal Green Cemetery as he began work on his biography. It was December (the month in which the novelist died): Thackeray’s grave on the south side, where ...

Death to the constitution!

Abigail Green: Mediterranean Revolutions, 10 August 2023

Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions 
by Maurizio Isabella.
Princeton, 685 pp., £35, May, 978 0 691 18170 7
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... jacket and white foustanella, hand on hip, legs apart, a scimitar at his side. This is Major Richard Church of the British-funded 1st Regiment Greek Light Infantry, as painted in 1813 by Denis Dighton. At the time, he was commanding Greek soldiers he had recruited to fight against Napoleon. He subsequently left the British army and, after a stint as the ...

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