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Jockstraps in the Freezer

Kevin Brazil: On Robert Plunket, 26 September 2024

My Search for Warren Harding 
by Robert Plunket.
New Directions, 286 pp., $18.95, June 2023, 978 0 8112 3469 6
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Love Junkie 
by Robert Plunket.
New Directions, 262 pp., $16.95, May, 978 0 8112 3847 2
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... book on The Aspern Papers. For a long time, he couldn’t figure out why he was so fascinated by Henry James’s narrator. ‘One day it hit me. The guy’s gay! … His relationships with all the women characters were those of a gay man. Now, not an openly gay man or even a consciously gay man. But a man who was just not heterosexual at his core. I don’t ...

The Great Mary

Dinah Birch, 13 September 1990

Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-Eminent Edwardian 
by John Sutherland.
Oxford, 432 pp., £16.99, August 1990, 0 19 818587 1
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... encouraging. But Mary Ward was used to the magisterial arrogance of the Arnold men. Her father, Tom Arnold, had demolished the prosperity of his family and the happiness of his wife by his conversions and unconversions and reconversions to and from the Catholic faith. He took small interest in the upbringing of his oldest and most unruly daughter – ‘A ...

In the Workshop

Tom Paulin: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 22 January 1998

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 672 pp., £23.50, December 1997, 0 674 63712 7
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Shakespeare's Sonnets 
edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones.
Arden, 503 pp., £7.99, September 1997, 1 903436 57 5
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... with Shakespeare’s plays, but I believe it is necessary to set two passages from Richard II and Henry IV Part I next to this sonnet – which, as Vendler says, is the first to remark on ‘a true flaw’ in the friend. In Act III of Richard II, Bolingbroke and his party confront Richard at Flint Castle in Wales: See, see, King Richard doth himself ...

A Cousin of Colonel Heneage

Robert Crawford: Was Eliot a Swell?, 18 April 2019

The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume VIII: 1936-38 
edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden.
Faber, 1100 pp., £50, January 2019, 978 0 571 31638 0
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... most staunch supporters in the 1930s. Few were more unwavering in their support than his brother Henry, yet even he complained the previous year that ‘sometimes you remind me of a gentleman in full evening dress and white gloves attempting to put something right with the kitchen plumbing without soiling his attire.’ It comes as no surprise when the great ...

Madame, vous fatiguez les singes

E.S. Turner: The Tower Menagerie, 24 July 2003

The Tower Menagerie: Being the Amazing True Story of the Royal Collection of Wild and Ferocious Beasts 
by Daniel Hahn.
Simon and Schuster, 260 pp., £15.99, March 2003, 0 7432 2081 1
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... that persists in the 21st century: what is royalty to do with embarrassing and unwanted gifts? Henry III, fourth of his line, had become the brother-in-law of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, who in a friendly gesture sent him three magnificent wildcats, possibly leopards. These creatures of fearful symmetry were the very stuff of heraldry, but their ...
From Bauhaus to Our House 
by Tom Wolfe.
Cape, 143 pp., £6.95, March 1982, 0 224 02030 7
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... Tom Wolfe’s earlier squib against Modernism, The Painted Word, was a reasonable succès de scandale among those with enough interest in the New York School of painting to want to defend it, but went little further than that. From Bauhaus to Our House, on the other hand, has achieved the unprecedented feat (in architectural publishing) of making its way, albeit briefly, into the American best-seller lists, along with all those diets, cats and Barbara Cartland ...

House of Miscegenation

Gilberto Perez: Westerns, 18 November 2010

Hollywood Westerns and American Myth 
by Robert Pippin.
Yale, 198 pp., £25, May 2010, 978 0 300 14577 9
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... Hawks’s Red River (1948) is not about equality but authority. It is a tale of two leaders: Tom Dunson (John Wayne) and his adopted son Matt Garth (Montgomery Clift). Dunson is the organiser of a massive cattle drive, starting out in south-west Texas and heading for a railroad in the Midwest. But the kinder and gentler Matt takes over when the cowhands ...

Short Cuts

Tom Crewe: Found Objects, 12 August 2021

... trousers roughly-patched, striped shirt with the collar folded down and a cap with a peak’, told Henry Mayhew that he and his younger brother spent their days gathering lumps of coal, iron rivets, bits of copper, canvas, wood, stretches of rope, and even floating hunks of fat. Today’s mudlarks have to apply for a permit from the Port of London, costing ...

Different under the Quill

Tom Johnson: On Paper, 12 May 2022

Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fictions 
by Orietta Da Rold.
Cambridge, 270 pp., £75, October 2020, 978 1 108 84057 6
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... cut into sheets. Early European paper bears the marks of this messy process. On a letter sent to Henry III by Berengaria of Castile sometime between 1217 and 1230, the oldest piece of paper to survive in an English archive, it’s still possible to make out the undissolved textile threads. Paper took its medieval European name from the papyrus of the ...

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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... from his mother. Matilda took Robert’s side against her husband and her younger sons, Rufus and Henry, and Orderic is good evidence for the Conqueror’s anger: one of her go-betweens sought sanctuary from a sentence of blinding in St Evroul, where Orderic met him. There were successive rapprochements, even after Robert had bested his father in hand-to-hand ...

At Tate Britain

Tom Crewe: Burne-Jones, 24 January 2019

... besides, or in spite of, the ones they depict. This isn’t a new charge – even an admirer like Henry James thought Burne-Jones’s ‘languishing type … savours of monotony’ – but that hasn’t stopped reviewers of the Tate show serving up stale critique. Jonathan Jones of the Guardian called Burne-Jones ‘stupid’, while to Waldemar Januszczak of ...

Carry on up the Corner Flag

R.W. Johnson: The sociology of football, 24 July 2003

Ajax, the Dutch, the War: Football in Europe during the Second World War 
by Simon Kuper.
Orion, 244 pp., £14.99, January 2003, 0 7528 5149 7
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Broken Dreams: Vanity, Greed and the Souring of British Football 
by Tom Bower.
Simon and Schuster, 342 pp., £17.99, February 2003, 9780743220798
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... is pure ‘Carry on up the Corner Flag’. Later, Kuper interviews the Preston North End winger Tom Finney about the Cup Final of 1941, when Preston beat Arsenal. Wasn’t it odd, he asks, to play the final in bombed-out London? ‘I wasn’t all that interested in the war when I was playing,’ Finney answers. ‘I was only 18. And the main concern was to ...

Kiss me, Hardy

Humphrey Carpenter, 15 November 1984

Peeping Tom 
by Howard Jacobson.
Chatto, 266 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 0 7011 2908 5
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Watson’s Apology 
by Beryl Bainbridge.
Duckworth, 222 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 0 7156 1935 7
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The Foreigner 
by David Plante.
Chatto, 237 pp., £9.95, November 1984, 0 7011 2904 2
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... who had therefore never taken a country walk in his life?’ Wrottesley Poly, however, is as much Tom Sharpe territory as a part of the Amis-Bradbury-Lodge world, and it is in the matter of comic plotting that Coming from Behind seemed to me to fail. Jacobson’s portrayal of Goldberg is flawless, but he seems to have little idea what to do with him, and the ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Da Vinci Code’, 8 June 2006

The Da Vinci Code 
directed by Ron Howard.
May 2006
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... Michael Baigent, who recently sued Brown’s publisher for plagiarism and lost. The third author, Henry Lincoln, didn’t sue. The book itself is mentioned in large capitals, and Teabing comments on it pedantically (‘their fundamental premise is sound’). Of course Brown was playing these games long before the case came up. Perhaps the two authors were ...

Opportunities

David Gilmour, 1 June 1989

Prepared for the worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports 
by Christopher Hitchens.
Chatto, 357 pp., £15.95, April 1989, 0 7011 3459 3
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... envenomed pen. As these essays indicate, he is much better at dealing with the monstrous legacy of Henry Kissinger than scoffing at poor Bill Rodgers of the SDP (as he and it then were). And Britain was also constricting, especially if you were a radical left-wing journalist with an upper-class accent and a taste for good port. You could always affect a ...

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