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Why can’t she just do as she ought?

Michael Newton: ‘Gone with the Wind’, 6 August 2009

Frankly, My Dear: ‘Gone with the Wind’ Revisited 
by Molly Haskell.
Yale, 244 pp., £16.99, March 2009, 978 0 300 11752 3
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... Yet for all the compressed magic of this episode, the mystery is that this character and this small love-confusion should require the great background of the war, and those epic colours; that these convoluted amorous pursuits should depend on and find their place within such a magnificent tapestry. It is not so much that the film explores the relation of ...

Guess what? It’s raining

Deborah Friedell: Murder in Florida, 5 July 2012

Injustice: Life and Death in the Courtrooms of America 
by Clive Stafford Smith.
Harvill Secker, 376 pp., £18.99, July 2012, 978 1 84655 625 8
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... The star witness for the prosecution was Neville Butler, a reporter on the Caribbean Echo, a small newspaper that served West Indians in Miami. Butler testified that Maharaj had paid the newspaper $400 to accuse the Moo Youngs of theft. The Moo Youngs then got the newspaper to publish a series of articles that claimed Maharaj was a ...

Flings

Rosemary Hill: The Writers’ Blitz, 21 February 2013

The Love-Charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War 
by Lara Feigel.
Bloomsbury, 519 pp., £25, January 2013, 978 1 4088 3044 4
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... was ‘no doubt fighting fires day and night’, Waugh reflected that ‘the armed forces cut a small figure. We are like wives reading letters from the trenches.’ The usual situation of wives was one of the many things breaking up for the duration. Macaulay for one was glad. ‘How to be useful though married’ is a question put but never satisfactorily ...

The Undesired Result

Gillian Darley: Betjeman’s bêtes noires, 31 March 2005

Betjeman: The Bonus of Laughter 
by Bevis Hillier.
Murray, 744 pp., £25, October 2004, 0 7195 6495 6
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... married, was no secret; he broadcast the fact in frequent asides about fanciable young men or even small boys. But he had also begun to live a double life, sidelining his wife, Penelope Chetwode, a field marshal’s daughter (whom he nicknamed ‘Philth’) in favour of his mistress, the Hon. Elizabeth Cavendish, a duke’s sister (‘Phoeble’). He had met ...

Why always Dorothea?

John Mullan: How caricature can be sharp perception, 5 May 2005

The One v. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel 
by Alex Woloch.
Princeton, 391 pp., £13.95, February 2005, 0 691 11314 9
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... characterisation in negative qualities: the selfishness of Rosamund Vincy, the priggishness of Stephen Dedalus. Woloch looks at the question of how living persons get ‘rendered into literary form’ from an interesting angle. How do novels use, and make us accept, differences between major and minor characters? How do narratives make their protagonists ...
Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life 
by Herman Pleij, translated by Diane Webb.
Columbia, 544 pp., £23.50, June 2001, 0 231 11702 7
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... hordes of the hungry’. (This prevalent and, in my view, productive tendency is characterised by Stephen Greenblatt’s assertion that ‘the normal is constructed on the shifting sands of the aberrant.’) Pleij’s contention (which is perhaps more relevant to Holland than to other parts of medieval Europe) is that great quantities of meat were consumed by ...

Separating Gracie and Rosie

David Wootton: Two people, one body, 22 July 2004

One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal 
by Alice Domurat Dreger.
Harvard, 198 pp., £14.95, May 2004, 0 674 01294 1
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... In rejecting their defence of necessity the court transformed the law. The previous year Sir James Stephen had argued with perfect confidence that there was indeed such a defence: The old instance of the two drowning men on a plank large enough to support one only, and that of shipwrecked persons in a boat unable to carry them all, are the standing ...

I will give thee Madonna

Richard Beck: After Waco, 21 March 2024

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI and the Birth of America’s Modern Militias 
by Kevin Cook.
Holt, 272 pp., £18.99, January, 978 1 250 84051 6
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Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians and a Legacy of Rage 
by Jeff Guinn.
Simon & Schuster, 383 pp., £20, February 2023, 978 1 9821 8610 4
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... risky plan wasn’t without safeguards, but they were all ignored. The bureau’s director, Stephen Higgins, stressed beforehand that surprise was essential. If there was reason to believe that the Davidians knew about the raid, or if they changed their routines in any meaningful way in the days leading up to it, the agents were supposed to call off the ...

Snail Slow

Colm Tóibín: Letters to John McGahern, 27 January 2022

The Letters of John McGahern 
edited by Frank Shovlin.
Faber, 851 pp., £30, September 2021, 978 0 571 32666 2
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... auctioneer in County Leitrim. McKiernan, in the novel, has overseen Ruttledge’s purchase of his small house and farm. McGirl must have done as much for McGahern, who mentions him in a letter to a friend as ‘the one I dealt with, more interested in machine guns than in coffins’. In the novel, when McKiernan asks, ‘You don’t seem to have any interest ...

Serried Yuppiedromes

Owen Hatherley: What happened to London?, 21 August 2014

Guide to the Architecture of London 
by Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward.
Phoenix, 511 pp., £16.99, July 2013, 978 1 78022 493 0
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... The sources of inspiration begin in 1920s Berlin and end in the Costa del Sol. The passage is a small masterpiece of architectural criticism, exact in its judgments and surprising in its choices. Berthold Lubetkin’s Highpoint flats (1935-38) They aren’t always so subtle, or so dispassionate. In one of the few judgments cut from later ...

The pleasure of not being there

Peter Brooks, 18 November 1993

Benjamin Constant: A Biography 
by Dennis Wood.
Routledge, 321 pp., £40, June 1993, 0 415 01937 0
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Isabelle de Charrière (Belle de Zuylen): A Biography 
by C.P Courtney.
Voltaire Foundation, 810 pp., £49, August 1993, 0 7294 0439 0
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... and theoretician of constitutional monarchy, but his liberalism is not so easily categorised, as Stephen Holmes noted in his fine Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism. It was, not simply a vision of the laissez-faire state guaranteeing the French bourgeoisie the right to get rich – as François Guizot was famously to propose during the ...

Who is Stewart Home?

Iain Sinclair, 23 June 1994

... ghosts through, the instigators of riot.Single button strategically undone at the throat of the small-check Ben Shermans, slippery bomber jacket zipped to the V, No 1 crop eliding to suedehead: the performance of a performance. Stewart Home rampaging from the cover of No Pity. The tasty venue? ‘Upstairs at the Garage’, an evening of sponsored ...

Touching the music

Paul Driver, 4 January 1996

Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship 
by Robert Craft.
Vanderbilt, 588 pp., £35.95, October 1994, 0 8265 1258 5
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... He mentions in the Preface to this edition that he was led by Cyril Connolly to take down the small talk of the great, but was essentially writing ‘to put a fence around my experience. In doing so I discovered an alter ego of which I am not especially fond but which, being opposed to capital punishment, I could not put to death.’ It is a cryptic ...

The Great Scots Education Hoax

Rosalind Mitchison, 18 October 1984

The Companion to Gaelic Scotland 
edited by Derick Thomson.
Blackwell, 363 pp., £25, December 1983, 0 631 12502 7
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Experience and Enlightenment: Socialisation for Cultural Changes in 18th-Century Scotland 
by Charles Camic.
Edinburgh, 301 pp., £20, January 1984, 0 85224 483 5
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Knee Deep in Claret: A Celebration of Wine and Scotland 
by Billy Kay and Cailean Maclean.
Mainstream, 232 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 906391 45 8
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Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland: Schools and Universities 
by R.D. Anderson.
Oxford, 384 pp., £25, July 1983, 0 19 822696 9
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Scotland: The Real Divide 
edited by Gordon Brown and Robin Cook.
Mainstream, 251 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 906391 18 0
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Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment 
edited by Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff.
Cambridge, 371 pp., £35, November 1983, 0 521 23397 6
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... of them to alter their middle-class character. It was the policy of the cuckoo in the nest. A small number of middle-class boys had first been allowed to share in the endowments made for the poor early in the 19th century. By the 1870s there was a powerful ‘reform’ movement pressing for the new type of school. Some of the hospitals, notably ...

The Wrong Blond

Alan Bennett, 23 May 1985

Auden in Love 
by Dorothy Farnan.
Faber, 264 pp., £9.95, March 1985, 0 571 13399 1
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... mother Bertha was a cultivated woman, who had acted in Yiddish theatre. She died when Chester was small, his father remarried, and the boy was largely brought up by his grandmother. His grandmother’s name was Bobby. His stepmother’s name was Syd. (In their choice of names the Americans have always been more eclectic than we are: a girl in Dynasty, for ...

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