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Maschler Pudding

John Bayley, 19 October 1995

À la Pym: The Barbara Pym Cookery Book 
by Hilary Pym and Honor Wyatt.
Prospect, 102 pp., £9.95, September 1995, 0 907325 61 0
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... the same pleasure in small fact as Pym’s diaries. How commonplace it would be if all we could read about in that diary entry was their current books and poems, and how each was getting on with them, and what they thought about literature today. The occasion would not have been memorable. As it is, it is. And largely because of the food. I have wondered ...

Inky Scraps

Maya Jasanoff: ‘Atlantic Families’, 5 August 2010

Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later 18th Century 
by Sarah Pearsall.
Oxford, 294 pp., £61, November 2008, 978 0 19 953299 5
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... out new positions in military service and imperial administration. Several, including the turncoat Benedict Arnold, placed their sons in the East India Company army. Others figured among the many ambitious, hard-up men who accepted positions as doctors, lawyers or secretaries in distant parts. Within a generation, there was little to distinguish these American ...

Contre Goncourt

Francis Haskell, 18 March 1982

Painting in l8th-Century France 
by Philip Conisbee.
Phaidon, 224 pp., £20, October 1981, 0 7148 2147 0
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Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime 
by Norman Bryson.
Cambridge, 281 pp., £27.50, January 1982, 0 521 23776 9
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... gaining ground behind the scenes. Norman Bryson, in a work which will necessarily be much less read, entirely bypasses this particular interpretation, but substitutes a new one of his own which is, in part, dependent on changing views of Dutch art of the 17th century. Very briefly, the changes can be summarised as follows. The comfortable households, the ...

Start thinking

Michael Wood: The aphorisms of Karl Kraus, 7 March 2002

Dicta and Contradicta 
by Karl Kraus, translated by Jonathan McVity.
Illinois, 208 pp., £18.50, May 2001, 0 252 02648 9
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... middle. These are aphorisms, after all; each one has its own plot. And it is truly exhilarating to read Kraus in full form, even on the subject of old Vienna. He is amazed that ‘even jealous men allow their wives to mingle freely at masked balls. They have forgotten how much they could once permit themselves there with other men’s wives, and believe that ...

Diary

Tom Johnson: Strange Visitations, 15 August 2024

... Sir Edmund Mortimer and Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, into the rebellion. He wrote to Pope Benedict XIII, exiled in Avignon, seeking approval for a plan to restore Welsh law and to elevate the Welsh Church to an archdiocese that would appoint suffragan bishops to Exeter, Bath, Worcester, Lichfield and Hereford. No more English visitors. But the Welsh ...

Diary

Anne Enright: Censorship in Ireland, 21 March 2013

... examined parcels of posted books in their office in Parnell Square sometimes took them home to be read at greater leisure. This arrangement had the advantage that a man could ‘ask his wife for an opinion in a particularly doubtful case’. The role of the customs in censorship was one which ‘just grew’. In addition to regular staff, vigilantes were ...

What we think about painting

John Barrell, 25 June 1987

Past and Present in Art and Taste: Selected Essays 
by Francis Haskell.
Yale, 256 pp., £20, March 1987, 0 300 03607 8
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... of detailed information while seeming to represent each essay as a short story. His writing can be read as an attempt to close the gap between historical scholarship and belles-lettres. Haskell, however, can seem unwilling to contemplate the fact that at some point the narrative must stop, if a piece of writing is to become the ‘essay’ he claims it to ...

Aviators and Movie Stars

Patricia Lockwood: Carson McCullers, 19 October 2017

Stories, Plays and Other Writings 
by Carson McCullers.
Library of America, 672 pp., £33.99, January 2017, 978 1 59853 511 2
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... to the cover, the people inside were real: Mick Kelly, who heard music in the inner room; Dr Benedict Mady Copeland, a black Marxist dying of tuberculosis who thought continually of the advancement of his people; Biff Brannon, the brusque owner of the New York Café, who sometimes wished he were a mother; the deaf-mute Singer with his flying hands. How ...

English Fame and Irish Writers

Brian Moore, 20 November 1980

Selected Poems 1956-1975 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 136 pp., £3.95, October 1980, 0 571 11644 2
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Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 224 pp., £7.95, October 1980, 0 571 11638 8
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... Yorker, have welcomed the talents of John McGahern, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Edna O’Brien and Benedict Kiely, among others, one could give long odds against a manuscript by an unknown Irish novelist or poet seeing the light of first publication in Boston or in New York.So it’s back to London and the old Anglo-Irish alliance. As we Irish were England’s ...

Rough Wooing

Tom Shippey: Queen Matilda, 17 November 2011

Matilda: Queen of the Conqueror 
by Tracy Borman.
Cape, 297 pp., £20, September 2011, 978 0 224 09055 1
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... Sturluson’s Heimskringla, long kept in print by Everyman but made by someone who could not read Old Norse. Borman’s best source is Orderic Vitalis’s Historia Ecclesiastica. This was completed before 1141, and was written by someone who knew Matilda at least at second-hand, for though English by birth, Orderic was a monk at the Norman monastery of ...

Brexitism

Alan Finlayson, 18 May 2017

... return to a timeless origin, the reclaiming of a land that had been lost. Modern civic nations, as Benedict Anderson identified, are conceived as ‘a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history’. The Brexitist conviction that there is no knowable future is symptomatic of a more widespread collapse in what we might think of as the political ...

Nutty Professors

Hal Foster: ‘Lingua Franca’, 8 May 2003

Quick Studies: The Best of ‘Lingua Franca’ 
edited by Alexander Star.
Farrar, Straus, 514 pp., $18, September 2002, 0 374 52863 2
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... here, and his collection offers helpful accounts of influential thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Benedict Anderson and the radical-turned-Neo-Conservative historian Eugene Genovese, as well as thoughtful reviews of significant debates, such as the contested legacy of Darwin (Stephen Jay Gould v. sociobiology), the stake of revisionist histories of the 1960s ...

Morality in the Oxygen

E.S. Turner: Tobogganing, 14 December 2000

How the English Made the Alps 
by Jim Ring.
Murray, 287 pp., £19.99, September 2000, 0 7195 5689 9
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Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps 
by Fergus Fleming.
Granta, 398 pp., £20, November 2000, 1 86207 379 1
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... Francis Douglas. The chaplain decided to bury what there was of the other three in the snow and read over them the 90th Psalm, from a prayer-book found in the pocket of the dead divine, the Rev. Charles Hudson. Unsurprisingly, the Swiss authorities were displeased about corpses being committed to their snows by English clergymen – Switzerland was not yet ...

Streamlined Smiles

Rosemary Dinnage: Erik Erikson, 2 March 2000

Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik Erikson 
by Lawrence Friedman.
Free Association, 592 pp., £15.95, May 1999, 9781853434716
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... sociologist quoted by Friedman said of his students that ‘you can’t always be sure they’ve read Shakespeare, but you know they’ve read Erikson.’ The last quarter-century after that was, inevitably, a period of decline. Though apparently quite a modest man, once he had attained the position of sage his ideas grew ...

The Faster the Better

Paul Driver: Anatomising Mendelssohn, 3 February 2005

Mendelssohn: A Life in Music 
by Larry Todd.
Oxford, 683 pp., £25, October 2003, 0 19 511043 9
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... men who has ever lived. He could paint, draw and write almost as well as he could compose. He read Homer in Greek and spoke half a dozen other languages. He had a curatorial flair, playing a large part in the rescue of Bach’s music from oblivion, as well as Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony, and as a conductor he gave historically informed ...

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