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Little England

Patrick Wright: The view through a bus window, 7 September 2006

Great British Bus Journeys: Travels through Unfamous Places 
by David McKie.
Atlantic, 359 pp., £16.99, March 2006, 1 84354 132 7
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... as had been demonstrated by Lloyd George, with his insistence on pressing on with the war in search of a final ‘knock-out blow’, and then allowing ‘war fever’ to be embedded in the Treaty of Versailles. Yet Goldring was more vexed by the influence of ‘quick-witted’ and ‘naturally tyrannical’ Scots. In his autobiography, Odd Man ...

We came, we saw, he died

Jackson Lears: Clinton’s Creed, 5 February 2015

Hard Choices 
by Hillary Clinton.
Simon and Schuster, 635 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 1 4711 3150 9
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HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton 
by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
Hutchinson, 440 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 0 09 195448 2
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... Party’s mixture of technocratic slogans and gestures to identity-based interest groups (gay marriage, abortion rights, immigration reform), topped off by the Democrats’ own version of imperial grandiosity. The intellectual bankruptcy of the Democratic Party is nowhere more evident than in the looming presidential candidacy of Hillary Rodham ...

Lethal Pastoral

Paul Keegan: Housman’s Lethal Pastoral, 17 November 2016

Housman Country: Into the Heart of England 
by Peter Parker.
Little, Brown, 446 pp., £25, June 2016, 978 1 4087 0613 8
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... so many people been searching for England,’ H.V. Morton wrote in his blowsy Baedeker of 1927, In Search of England. They were looking for something which many of them had never seen. But if the countryside was unrecognisable, however untouched by war, it was also because the eyes that saw it had been changed utterly. Shortly before his death Rupert Brooke ...

Strap on an ox-head

Patricia Lockwood: Christ comes to Stockholm, 6 January 2022

The Morning Star 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken.
Harvill Secker, 666 pp., £20, September 2021, 978 1 910701 71 3
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... facts of your life would you call to yourself to raise your identity from the dead? Would you search your pockets for old receipts, a driver’s licence, a notebook? ‘Did I live with Son? And his mother, perhaps? Did I have a wife? I closed my eyes and tried to think of Wife. No face appeared, not even when I tried to picture Son, to conjure up an image ...

The Ultimate Socket

David Trotter: On Sylvia Townsend Warner, 23 June 2022

Lolly Willowes 
by Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Penguin, 161 pp., £9.99, October 2020, 978 0 241 45488 6
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Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life 
by Frances Bingham.
Handheld Press, 344 pp., £15.99, May 2021, 978 1 912766 40 6
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... present in the flesh, and after a six-week acquaintance duly ousted the tea planter. Turpin was gay, which made for a tepid courtship on both sides. ‘Molly had been converted to Catholicism by Bo,’ Bingham notes, ‘and passed it on to Richard, who probably thought that religion would help, too.’ After civil and religious ceremonies, and a truly ...

I only want the OM

Christopher Tayler: Somerset Maugham, 1 September 2005

Somerset Maugham: A Life 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Vintage, 411 pp., £12, April 2005, 1 4000 3052 8
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... almost anything, although the female characters depicted with most sympathy often come across as gay men in disguise. The narrator of ‘The Human Element’ is unfazed when he learns that Lady Betty Welldon-Burns has shacked up with a rough youth in a splendid villa on the Mediterranean coast. Maugham, himself the narrator of The Razor’s Edge, refuses to ...

The Ticking Fear

John Kerrigan: Louis MacNeice, 7 February 2008

Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems 
edited by Peter McDonald.
Faber, 836 pp., £30, January 2007, 978 0 571 21574 4
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Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems 
edited by Michael Longley.
Faber, 160 pp., £12.99, April 2007, 978 0 571 23381 6
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I Crossed the Minch 
by Louis MacNeice.
Polygon, 253 pp., £9.99, September 2007, 978 1 84697 014 6
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The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography 
by Louis MacNeice, edited by E.R. Dodds.
Faber, 288 pp., £9.99, September 2007, 978 0 571 23942 9
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... bold but characteristic step. Auden said in his memorial address that, in technique as well as the search for subject matter, MacNeice ‘shared Cesare Pavese’s belief that “the only joy in life is to begin.”’ And Spender, in a late poem, wrote of MacNeice and Bernard Spencer: Each poem Is still a new beginning. If They had been finished though they ...

The Animalcule

Nicholas Spice: Little Mr De Quincey, 18 May 2017

Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey 
by Frances Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 397 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 1 4088 3977 5
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... he said (quoting Valerius Flaccus), as ‘viridantem floribus hastas’ – ‘making verdant, and gay with the life of flowers, murderous spears and halberts’. ‘The object in my “Opium Confessions”,’ he concluded, is not the naked physiological theme – on the contrary, that is the ugly pole, the murderous spear, the halbert – but those wandering ...

My Heroin Christmas

Terry Castle: Art Pepper and Me, 18 December 2003

... female-to-male transsexuals get their stubby new little tubercules, they instantly want to become gay men. The problem with Bev’s Taurus is no CD player, so I had unplugged my office boom box, crammed it with six new giant batteries and brought it along too. In addition to all the jazz stuff – Bird, Dexter, Dizzy, Sonny, Miles, Ornette, Dolphy, the ...

A Rumbling of Things Unknown

Jacqueline Rose: Marilyn Monroe, 26 April 2012

... disappointment,’ Steffens wrote when he’d been travelling around the world in the 1920s in search of revolution, ‘to see and hear that sex was the thing.’ Corruption has triumphed and sex has substituted for the political dream. At the end of the First World War he had floated a plan for a general amnesty but ‘the war psychology, which in America ...

Wham Bang, Teatime

Ian Penman: Bowie, 5 January 2017

The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference 
by Paul Morley.
Simon & Schuster, 484 pp., £20, July 2016, 978 1 4711 4808 8
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On Bowie 
by Rob Sheffield.
Headline, 197 pp., £14.99, June 2016, 978 1 4722 4104 7
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On Bowie 
by Simon Critchley.
Serpent’s Tail, 207 pp., £6.99, April 2016, 978 1 78125 745 6
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Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy 
by Simon Reynolds.
Faber, 704 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 0 571 30171 3
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... kind of considered or memorable shape – dozens of weightless surfaces and battling signifiers in search of a missing hook or core. Listening to middle/late albums like Earthling (1997) or Heathen (2002), parts of which are perfectly pleasant or serviceable modern AOR, I kept thinking: is this the kind of thing Bowie himself would sit and listen to at home ...

Yes You, Sweetheart

Terry Castle: A Garland for Colette, 16 March 2000

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette 
by Judith Thurman.
Bloomsbury, 596 pp., £25, November 1999, 0 7475 4309 7
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... and female), the emotional gourmandising, the sheer untrammelled aggressiveness of her search for sensual and imaginative fulfilment – can be at once exhausting and unsettling. She’s scary because she challenges us to a kind of psychosexual wrestling match: who will be the one who gets to suck? For a female biographer – not to mention female ...

Karl Miller Remembered

Neal Ascherson, John Lanchester and Andrew O’Hagan, 23 October 2014

... as much as they did.) He was particularly interested in the Spanner trial, in which a group of gay men involved in consensual sado-masochistic activity were sent to prison. Karl had no doubt that what the men were doing was none of the state’s business, but he was nonetheless riveted by the detail of the trial. ‘What about love?’ he ...

How can it work?

David Runciman: American Democracy, 21 March 2013

... comfortably). Obama had huge majorities among ethnic minorities, young people, single people, gay people. Old people, married people, people with children voted for Romney. On the upbeat account, this is all fine. Obama won among the demographics that are growing; Romney among the demographics that are shrinking. The progressive majority that Obama ...

The Life and Death of Juliano Mer-Khamis

Adam Shatz: A Death in Jenin, 21 November 2013

... It wasn’t long before he cracked. At a checkpoint in Jenin, his commanding officer asked him to search an elderly Palestinian man. Later he would claim that the man was a cousin, though he had never seen him before. No one disputes what happened next: Juliano refused his orders, punched his commanding officer and spent several months in prison. He would ...

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