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What’s Happening in the Engine-Room

Penelope Fitzgerald: Poor John Lehmann, 7 January 1999

John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure 
by Adrian Wright.
Duckworth, 308 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 7156 2871 2
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... New Englander, twenty years younger than himself. Their family consisted of three girls – Helen, the indulged Rosamond, Beatrix – and, at long last, the boy John. Their children’s talents must have been partly, at least, inherited, but no trace of their father Rude’s jolly German Kameradschaft seems to have been passed on. Adrian Wright has been ...

What a Mother

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Marianne Moore and Her Mother, 3 December 2015

Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore 
by Linda Leavell.
Farrar, Straus, 455 pp., $18, September 2014, 978 0 374 53494 3
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... was something she too enjoyed. Pretending to be someone or something else, preferably a small fluffy animal or a character from The Wind in the Willows, suited her well. Speaking in her own voice never got her as far. She married John Moore in 1885 in her father’s church and settled down in a Boston suburb where Moore thought he had ...

Fiction and the Poverty of Theory

John Sutherland, 20 November 1986

News from Nowhere 
by David Caute.
Hamish Hamilton, 403 pp., £10.95, September 1986, 0 241 11920 0
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O-Zone 
by Paul Theroux.
Hamish Hamilton, 469 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 241 11948 0
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Ticket to Ride 
by Dennis Potter.
Faber, 202 pp., £9.95, September 1986, 9780571145232
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... Salisbury’.) Like his previous attempt at mixing 100 per cent proof world history with the small beer of English fiction (The Decline of the West, a title to rank with Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part II), News from Nowhere is a crashing failure. But it’s a monumental failure, a Spruce Goose or Centre Point of novels that will stand as ...

Unsex me here

John Bayley, 20 May 1982

Shakespeare’s Division of Experience 
by Marilyn French.
Cape, 376 pp., £12.50, March 1982, 0 224 02013 7
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... of ruling Carthage after the departure of Aeneas. ‘Niobe and Hecuba weep through eternity and Helen is always young.’ Here Dr French touches on an area of real interest for criticism, not least because Shakespeare himself is the great exception to the point she is making. One of the most significant things about the elaborate portraits of women in 18th ...

The Real Life of Melodrama

Philip Horne, 16 June 1983

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter 
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Helen Lane.
Faber, 374 pp., £7.95, May 1983, 0 571 13021 6
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... response, made in the details of thought and speech by people in everyday life, to the large and small miseries of living. Before his understanding with Aunt Julia gets properly established, the narrator unburdens himself to the scriptwriter.‘I’ve got love troubles, my friend Camacho,’ I said to him straight out, surprised at hearing myself use a soap ...

Pushy Times

David Solkin, 25 March 1993

The Great Age of British Watercolours 1750-1880 
by Andrew Wilton and Anne Lyles.
Prestel, 339 pp., £21.50, January 1993, 3 7913 1254 5
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... by so prominent an amateur as Lady Diana Beauclerk, or by as highly esteemed a professional as Helen Allingham. The implicit assignment of women’s art to a devalued realm of domestic handicraft goes hand in hand with an unprecedented attempt to insist on the serious intellectual character of all significant watercolour practice; indeed, at one point the ...

How’s the Empress?

James Wood: Graham Swift, 17 April 2003

The Light of Day 
by Graham Swift.
Hamish Hamilton, 244 pp., £16.99, February 2003, 0 241 14204 0
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... the course. George is very likable. He is poorly educated but keen enough to learn. His daughter, Helen, had been an art student, and George had tried to keep up: ‘I even went to art galleries, and looked – and yawned. I even mugged up on her favourite painter, Caravaggio (they all looked like waxworks to me). And found out he was a bit of a tearaway ...

Call it Hollywood

Wayne Koestenbaum: The sex life of Rudolph Valentino, 16 December 2004

Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino 
by Emily Leider.
Faber, 514 pp., £8.99, November 2004, 0 571 21819 9
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... Here’s how his friendship with Paul Ivano, a consumptive photographer, began: Princess Helen Troubetzkoy knocked at the bungalow door of a friend, Paul Ivano, at two in the morning to ask if Rudy could be put up in his spare room. Ivano agreed, delighted to learn that his uninvited guest spoke French. They went horseback riding in the morning and ...

Cauldrons for Helmets

Barbara Newman: Crusading Women, 13 April 2023

Women and the Crusades 
by Helen J. Nicholson.
Oxford, 287 pp., £25, February, 978 0 19 880672 1
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... penance and imitation of Christ in his Passion, especially in the very lands where he suffered.Helen Nicholson’s project in Women and the Crusades is to consider all dimensions of women’s participation, both on campaign and on the home front. She casts a very broad net. Like other recent historians, Nicholson redefines crusading to denote ‘any ...

Frognal Days

Zachary Leader: Files on the Fifties, 4 June 1998

Previous Convictions: A Journey Through the Fifties 
by Nora Sayre.
Rutgers, 464 pp., £27.95, April 1997, 0 8135 2231 5
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... and authors approaching fifty at the start of the decade or only lately past it, grew up in small provincial towns, emigrated to New York in the Jazz Age and worked together in the city rooms of the Herald Tribune and the New York World. Unlike their successors, writers who came of age in the Depression, or World War Two, or, like Sayre herself, in the ...

Diary

Melanie McFadyean: In the Wrong Crowd, 25 September 2014

... expedition: ‘Drop your drift net into the ocean and you pull up all sorts of fish, big and small, and you hope someone’s going to drop the small fish back in before it’s too late but you can never be sure that’s going to happen.’ As well as small fry like Conteh, the law ...

Diary

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s Grotto, 5 October 2023

... other, a thatch’d house, a round pavilion on a mount, [and] Shake Spear’s house, in which is a small statue of him, and his works in a glass case; and in all the houses and seats are books in hanging glass cases. Kirk established that ‘Shake Spear’s house’ – where presumably the countess and fellow members of the Shakespeare Ladies Club sat at the ...

That Wilting Flower

Hilary Mantel: The Lure of the Unexplained, 24 January 2008

Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained 
edited by Una McGovern.
Chambers, 760 pp., £35, October 2007, 978 0 550 10215 7
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... and to our evolutionary past. Aware of this, and acknowledging that, as the dictionary says, ‘a small percentage of the population appear to have such vivid imaginations that they can find it hard to distinguish between reality and illusion,’ should the rationalist who is confronted by alternative explanations for the world be steaming mad, mildly ...

Asterisks and Obelisks

Colin Burrow, 7 March 2019

Poems of Sextus Propertius 
edited and translated by Patrick Worsnip.
Carcanet, 253 pp., £12.99, September 2018, 978 1 78410 651 5
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... thinks lathes are for honing (‘Get out that fine lathe now to hone your verse’). But that’s small matter. Pound’s Homage has always been hammered by pedants for getting words wrong, but its main limitation is its very strong bias towards the later more programmatic and Maecenas-influenced Propertius. This turns drunkenly loving Cynthia into a ...

Hit by Donald Duck

Oliver Hill-Andrews: The Red Scientist, 24 May 2018

Popularising Science: The Life and Work of J.B.S. Haldane 
by Krishna Dronamraju.
Oxford, 367 pp., £26.99, February 2017, 978 0 19 933392 9
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... the modern evolutionary synthesis, in which the theories of natural selection (which assumed small, continuous variations between organisms) and Mendelian inheritance (which initially postulated large, discontinuous variations) were seen as complementary. ‘Quantitative work shows clearly that natural selection is a reality,’ Haldane wrote in ...

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