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‘Come, my friend,’ said Smirnoff

Joanna Kavenna: The radical twenties, 1 April 1999

The Radical Twenties: Aspects of Writing, Politics and Culture 
by John Lucas.
Five Leaves, 263 pp., £11.99, January 1997, 0 907123 17 1
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... simply make[s] one sit still in an apathy, and watch the clock spinning backwards’. For Henry James, the war seemed ‘to undo everything’: ‘My sense of what is generally happening all about us here is only unutterable,’ he confessed to Brander Matthews. The country house, that central prop of the idyllic British afternoon, figured prominently in ...

Quashed Quotatoes

Michael Wood: Finnegans Wake, 16 December 2010

Finnegans Wake 
by James Joyce, edited by Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon.
Houyhnhnm, 493 pp., £250, March 2010, 978 0 9547710 1 0
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Joyce’s Disciples Disciplined 
edited by Tim Conley.
University College Dublin, 185 pp., £42.50, May 2010, 978 1 906359 46 1
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... Lewis Carroll seems an obvious precursor of James Joyce in the world of elaborate wordplay, and critics have long thought so. Harry Levin suggested in 1941 that Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty was ‘the official guide’ to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake. Why wouldn’t he be? He was the inventor of the portmanteau word (‘You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’), an inspired parodist of what Saussure later called the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (that is, its being grounded in nothing but convention) and extremely proud of his ability to ‘explain all the poems that ever were invented – and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet ...

Social Arrangements

John Bayley, 30 December 1982

The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry 
edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion.
Penguin, 208 pp., £1.95, October 1982, 0 14 042283 8
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The Rattle Bag 
edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.
Faber, 498 pp., £10, October 1982, 0 571 11966 2
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... a close similarity between Wordsworth’s manifesto in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and Edward Marsh introducing the first Georgian anthology in 1912 with the statement that ‘English poetry is once again putting on a new strength and beauty.’ The difference is that Wordsworth really was heralding a new era of sensibility, as Ezra Pound was to do in his ...

Hemingway Hunt

Frank Kermode, 17 April 1986

Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years 
by Peter Griffin.
Oxford, 258 pp., £12.95, March 1986, 0 19 503680 8
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The Young Hemingway 
by Michael Reynolds.
Blackwell, 291 pp., £14.95, February 1986, 0 631 14786 1
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Hemingway: A Biography 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Macmillan, 646 pp., £16.95, March 1986, 0 333 42126 4
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... more astonishingly, when he told his horrified parents that he was engaged to the film star Mae Marsh, and again when he said he was set on becoming a wartime pilot, knowing all the while that no combatant service would have him. But one feels that Griffin is really telling us all this to make his hero more rather than less remarkable. Probably his greatest ...

Degrees of Not Knowing

Rory Stewart: Does anyone know how to govern Iraq?, 31 March 2005

What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building 
by Noah Feldman.
Princeton, 154 pp., £12.95, November 2004, 0 691 12179 6
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Blinded by the Sunlight: Surviving Abu Ghraib and Saddam’s Iraq 
by Matthew McAllester.
Harper Perennial, 304 pp., $13.95, February 2005, 0 06 058820 9
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The Fall of Baghdad 
by Jon Lee Anderson.
Little, Brown, 389 pp., £20, February 2005, 0 316 72990 6
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The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq 
by Christian Parenti.
New Press, 211 pp., £12.99, December 2004, 1 56584 948 5
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... On 30 January, the day of the election, in Amara in the old marsh region of southern Iraq, the sheikh advances and smiles and hugs me and kisses me: once, twice, pauses and, as I am about to step away, a third time. He greets me in Farsi: ‘Khubi? Chetori? Hal-e-shoma chetor ast?’ He is speaking Farsi rather than Arabic as a joke, I think ...

Fine Art for 39 Cents

Marjorie Garber: Tupperising America, 13 April 2000

Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America 
by Alison Clarke.
Smithsonian, 241 pp., £15.95, November 1999, 1 56098 827 4
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... art: ‘plastic art’, ‘plastic merit’ and ‘plastic beauty’ were high compliments. Henry James, describing an aesthete, notes that ‘his appreciation ... was based partly on his fine sense of the plastic.’ Yet a hundred years after Baudelaire the figurative meaning of ‘plastic’ had fallen; it was now nearly synonymous with words like ...

How They Brought the Good News

Colin Kidd: Britain’s Napoleonic Wars, 20 November 2014

In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815 
by Jenny Uglow.
Faber, 739 pp., £25, November 2014, 978 0 571 26952 5
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... 1798 and 1803, prompting defensive measures, coastal fortifications and even plans to flood Romney Marsh. French troops landed not only in Ireland during the Rebellion of 1798, but also in Great Britain itself, at Fishguard, in 1797. While it was true, for the most part, that Britain ruled the waves, Napoleon reckoned that he only needed control of the Channel ...

Diary

Tim Dee: Twitching, 11 March 2010

... hours if a tricky rarity is glimpsed) when the bird is wrested from a backdrop of wind or sea or marsh, or singled out from a cloud of lookalikes, and then named. In their itch to tag the wild, birders travel through the world as if they were closing it down. For most birdwatchers – a far more numerous category: in Britain, the million-plus members of the ...

Australia’s Nineties

Clive James, 15 July 1982

Christopher Brennan: A Critical Biography 
by Axel Clark.
Melbourne, 358 pp., £20, May 1980, 0 522 84182 1
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... by Wallace Stevens. Thick sleep, with error of the tangled wood, and vapour from the evening marsh of sense, and smoothness of the glide of Lethe, would inaugurate his dullard innocence, cool’d of his calenture, elaborate brute. That last line, in particular, might have come straight out of ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’. Sooner or later a ...

Learned Insane

Simon Schaffer: The Lunar Men, 17 April 2003

The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future 
by Jenny Uglow.
Faber, 588 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 571 19647 0
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... together in England’. Yet during the lifetime of its members, who also included the engineer James Watt, the manufacturer Matthew Boulton and the chemist and radical Joseph Priestley, the Society was barely visible in print. No learned memoirs appeared under its auspices, no grand assemblies were organised by its fellowship. According to the son of the ...

No scene could be worse

Stephanie Burt: Adrienne Rich, 9 February 2012

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-10 
by Adrienne Rich.
Norton, 89 pp., £19.99, February 2011, 978 0 393 07967 8
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A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society 1997-2008 
by Adrienne Rich.
Norton, 180 pp., £11.99, July 2010, 978 0 393 33830 0
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... places and people on fire; a wild fox, alluring and unconstrained; a boat she has to pilot, a marsh or sandbank or peninsula she has to leave. All these figures come back in Tonight, a book as explicit as late Yeats or late Heaney in its return to the poet’s prior work. There are also recurring character types: during the late 1960s, guerrilla ...

Natural-Born Biddies

Ruby Hamilton: Celia Dale’s Nastiness, 15 August 2024

Sheep’s Clothing 
by Celia Dale.
Daunt, 306 pp., £9.99, September 2023, 978 1 914198 60 1
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A Helping Hand 
by Celia Dale.
Daunt, 260 pp., £9.99, September 2022, 978 1 914198 33 5
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A Spring of Love 
by Celia Dale.
Daunt, 359 pp., £9.99, September, 978 1 914198 94 6
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... made it a full decade into the next), she was born in 1912, the only child of the English actor James Dale (best known as the voice of the coincidentally named Jim Dale in Mrs Dale’s Diary), and in 1937 she married Guy Ramsey, a journalist and competitive bridge player. She was a devoted secretary to Rumer Godden, with whom she shares a lean style and ...

Wharton the Wise

D.A.N. Jones, 4 April 1985

The Missing Will 
by Michael Wharton.
Hogarth, 216 pp., £10.95, November 1984, 0 7011 2666 3
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... Thomson, the future BBC producer, and Denis Hills, the African explorer, destined to be rescued by James Callaghan from the clutches of Idi Amin. Michael Wharton spent much of his term-time practising West Riding Knife Throwing with his mates, or drinking in the magical St Ebbes quarter (recently flattened by commercial interests), playing dominoes with little ...

Apocalypse

David Trotter, 14 September 1989

The Rainbow 
by D.H. Lawrence, edited by Mark Kinkead-Weekes.
Cambridge, 672 pp., £55, March 1989, 0 521 22869 7
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D.H. Lawrence in the Modern World 
edited by Peter Preston and Peter Hoare.
Macmillan, 221 pp., £29.50, May 1989, 0 333 45269 0
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D.H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination: Essays on Sexual Identity and Feminist Misreading 
by Peter Balbert.
Macmillan, 190 pp., £27.50, June 1989, 0 333 43964 3
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... We shall not find the “hungry Forties” or the Chartists in the world of the beginning: Tom’s Marsh Farm is still relatively isolated and Lydia comes there as a refugee from history: but we can watch Anna and Will begin to enter the mainstream of their time; and Ursula and Skrebensky live in a fully historic world.’ Like Paradise Lost, the novel moves ...

Being splendid

Stephen Wall, 3 March 1988

Civil to Strangers 
by Barbara Pym.
Macmillan, 388 pp., £11.95, October 1987, 0 333 39128 4
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The Pleasure of Miss Pym 
by Charles Burkhart.
Texas, 120 pp., $17.95, July 1987, 0 292 76496 0
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The World of Barbara Pym 
by Janice Rossen.
Macmillan, 193 pp., £27.50, November 1987, 0 333 42372 0
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The Life and Work of Barbara Pym 
edited by Dale Salwak.
Macmillan, 210 pp., £27.50, April 1987, 0 333 40831 4
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... to raise or consider with the appropriate finesse. The heroine of Civil to Strangers is Cassandra Marsh-Gibbon (Barbara Pym addressed herself as ‘Sandra’ in her Oxford diaries) and she is married to a vain, hypochondriac but (to her) lovable novelist called Adam. Pym wrote to Henry Harvey at the time that ‘Adam is sweet but very stupid. You are sweet ...

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