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Earl Grey Moments

Tobias Jones, 2 October 1997

Grace Notes 
by Bernard Mac Laverty.
Cape, 277 pp., £14.99, July 1997, 9780224044295
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... needing no grandiose themes or schemata to shore up the taut narratives. His two previous novels, Lamb and Cal, rely on the most frugal plotting: since the crime has already been committed (the abduction of Owen Kane, the killing of Robert, the RUC officer), the narratives are internalised – rueful accounts of the lives ...

Bumming and Booing

John Mullan: William Wordsworth, 5 April 2001

Wordsworth: A Life 
by Juliet Barker.
Viking, 971 pp., £25, October 2000, 9780670872138
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The Hidden Wordsworth 
by Kenneth Johnston.
Pimlico, 690 pp., £15, September 2000, 0 7126 6752 0
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Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s 
by David Bromwich.
Chicago, 186 pp., £9.50, April 2000, 0 226 07556 7
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... faulty passages, but I know of no poet in any language who has written so much that is good,’ Robert Southey wrote (the declaration is emblazoned on the dust-jacket of Juliet Barker’s new Life). Yet any sense of this – of the subtle, elementary qualities of Wordsworth’s verse – is rarely apparent to those who study him, and rarely apparent in the ...

Fill it with fish

Helen Cooper: The trail of the Grail, 6 June 2002

Parzival and the Stone from Heaven: A Grail Romance Retold for Our Time 
by Lindsay Clarke.
HarperCollins, 239 pp., £14.99, September 2001, 0 00 710813 3
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Merlin and the Grail: ‘Joseph of Arimathea’, ‘Merlin’, ‘Perceval’ The Trilogy of Arthurian Romances Attributed to Robert de Boron 
translated by Nigel Bryant.
Boydell and Brewer, 172 pp., £30, May 2001, 0 85991 616 2
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Le Livre du Graal. Tome I: ‘Joseph D’Arimathie’, ‘Merlin’, ‘Les Premiers Faits du Roi Arthur’ 
edited by Daniel Poirion and Philippe Walter.
Gallimard, 1993 pp., £50.95, April 2001, 2 07 011342 6
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... Jungians is questionable. Chrétien’s earliest and most influential follower, Robert de Boron, would certainly not have done, having altogether more orthodox Christian ideas in mind. He took up Chrétien’s passing remark about the Mass wafer, and turned the Grail (now deserving a capital letter) into an object of religious ...

Under the Ustasha

Mark Mazower: Sarajevo, 1941-45, 6 October 2011

Sarajevo, 1941-45: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Hitler’s Europe 
by Emily Greble.
Cornell, 276 pp., £21.50, February 2011, 978 0 8014 4921 5
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... all in here,’ he said as he put it down. It was the Penguin edition of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. For a vast and often unreadable book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was read by a lot of people at the time. Unless you were willing to plough through huge volumes on workers’ self-management, the rise and ...

Diary

David Gascoyne: Notebook, New Year 1991, 25 January 1996

... libre ou mourir’, but that wouldn’t have rhymed with ‘holocauste fort’. Plenty of Hubert Robert (‘du plus pur Hubert Robert,’ as Jouve used to say). Found a Folio series edition of Restif de la Bretonne’s Nuits de Paris in the tempting bookshop. When I first knew the Marais in the late Forties it was ...

At Free Love Corner

Jenny Diski, 30 March 2000

Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers 
by Frances Wilson.
Faber, 258 pp., £12.99, October 1999, 0 571 19288 2
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... halfway interested in literature would know already. In an initial compilation chapter Caroline Lamb falls for Byron, and Elizabeth Smart for George Barker, while Mary Godwin and Shelley shadow the literary love of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, Robert Graves and Laura ...

Dixie Peach Pomade

Alex Abramovich: In the Room with Robert Johnson, 6 October 2022

Brother RobertGrowing Up with Robert Johnson 
by Annye C. Anderson with Preston Lauterbach.
Hachette Go, 224 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 0 306 84526 0
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... Columbia Records released King of the Delta Blues Singers – a collection of tracks by Robert Johnson – in 1961, it was the first time in decades that more than a handful of people had access to more than a handful of songs by any country bluesman. Bob Dylan got an acetate from his producer, John Hammond, and played it for his mentor, Dave Van ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: A Plot in Highgate Cemetery, 23 June 1994

... weld us all together, before we knew the Eighties were coming. Anyway, we had a great bonfire, a lamb roasting on a spit, rock ’n’ roll megawatting through monster speakers and the decidedly mixed inhabitants of the square – the teenage villains, prepubescent truants and lawless toddlers of our Free School plus the recent incoming gentry whose houses ...

How to Perfume a Glove

Adam Smyth: Early Modern Cookbooks, 5 January 2017

Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen 
by Wendy Wall.
Pennsylvania, 328 pp., £53, November 2015, 978 0 8122 4758 9
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... of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie (a most rare pie), a dish of anchovies, good wine of several sorts, and all things mighty noble and to my great content’. With such extensive meals it’s no wonder that early ...

Peerie Breeks

Robert Crawford: Willa and Edwin Muir, 21 September 2023

Edwin and Willa Muir: A Literary Marriage 
by Margery Palmer McCulloch.
Oxford, 350 pp., £100, March, 978 0 19 285804 7
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The Usurpers 
by Willa Muir, edited by Anthony Hirst and Jim Potts.
Colenso, 290 pp., £15, March, 978 1 912788 27 9
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... a 21st-century viewpoint, it seems more like a pioneering eco-poem. Human ‘dominion’ over what Robert Burns in ‘To a Mouse’ termed ‘nature’s social union’ had often disturbed the Romantic poets, but Muir intensified this by bringing together fears that technology might lead to human extinction with concerns about how to restore a lost balance ...

In Letchworth

Gillian Darley: Pevsner's Hertfordshire, 2 January 2020

... but ‘counterbalanced with magnificent and ornate interiors’. It belonged to the Lamb family, forebears of Queen Victoria’s first prime minister, Lord Melbourne and was bought in the 1920s by a Liverpool brewer, soon ennobled as Lord Brocket. Then it became a hotel and conference centre. The lake, a dammed section of the River Lea, attracts ...

When the Jaw-Jaw Failed

Miles Taylor: Company Rule in India, 3 March 2016

The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805-1905 
by Ferdinand Mount.
Simon & Schuster, 784 pp., £12.99, January 2016, 978 1 4711 2946 9
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... Low’s minimal involvement in the action. In another chapter, mutton is literally dressed as lamb, when Low is embroiled in a mundane dispute about the quality of the meat supplied to his regiment. By the time Low gets a part – taking Baji Rao into custody – we are a quarter of the way through the book. Fortunately, Low soon meets two men who were ...

Cockneyism

Gregory Dart: Leigh Hunt, 18 December 2003

The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt 
edited by Robert Morrison and Michael Eberle-Sinatra.
Pickering & Chatto, £495, July 2003, 1 85196 714 1
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... he was a friend of Thomas Barnes, a future editor of the Times, and a younger contemporary of Lamb and Coleridge. John and Leigh Hunt brought a new idealism to English journalism when they launched the Examiner in 1808. At a time when most polite journals were still tied to the Whig or Tory parties, it was genuinely independent. And from the Peninsular ...

Turbulence

Walter Nash, 9 November 1989

The Mezzanine 
by Nicholson Baker.
Granta, 135 pp., £10.95, September 1989, 0 14 014201 0
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The Memoirs of Lord Byron 
by Robert Nye.
Hamish Hamilton, 215 pp., £11.95, September 1989, 0 241 12873 0
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All you need 
by Elaine Feinstein.
Hutchinson, 219 pp., £11.95, September 1989, 0 09 173574 2
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The woman who talked to herself 
by A.L. Barker.
Hutchinson, 186 pp., £11.95, October 1989, 0 09 174060 6
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Restoration 
by Rose Tremain.
Hamish Hamilton, 371 pp., £12.95, September 1989, 0 241 12695 9
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... the amusing discovery of a how-d’ye-do as we come to know Him and Her. In the case of Robert Nye’s The Memoirs of Lord Byron, it is less a question of discovering an interesting personality than of retrieving or rehabilitating one. The basis of the fiction here is a historical fact – that after his death, Lord Byron’s Memoirs were burned by ...

Mr Lion, Mr Cock and Mr Cat

Roger Lonsdale, 5 April 1990

A Form of Sound Words: The Religious Poetry of Christopher Smart 
by Harriet Guest.
Oxford, 293 pp., £35, October 1989, 0 19 811744 2
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... experience. These include Abel Evans, Elizabeth Rowe, Aaron Hill and Joseph Trapp, and even Robert Lowth, whose The Genealogy of Christ (1729) was written when he was still a schoolboy at Winchester, and the much-derided Sir Richard Blackmore. Johnson later respected Blackmore’s The Creation (1712), which for Guest illustrates the route to divine ...

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