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The Voice from the Hearth-Rug

Alan Ryan: The Cambridge Apostles, 28 October 1999

The Cambridge Apostles 1820-1914: Liberalism, Imagination and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life 
by W.C. Lubenow.
Cambridge, 458 pp., £35, October 1998, 0 521 57213 4
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... Fry, too, was an Apostle. But the tentacular reach of the Apostles was epitomised by others. Eddie Marsh was, narrowly considered, a superior civil servant; less narrowly, he was not only an assistant private secretary to Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Lyttelton, but an essential support to Winston Churchill. Nor ought we to overlook such figures as Sir John ...

Gorgon in Furs

D.D. Guttenplan: Paula Fox, 12 December 2002

Borrowed Finery: A Memoir 
by Paula Fox.
Flamingo, 256 pp., £12, August 2002, 0 00 713724 9
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... centre for the neighbouring farms. Most of the farmland, abandoned and neglected, had reverted to marsh and had once been a halting place for myriad birds. Every summer house had, still, in cupboard or basket or bookcase, worn copies of Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds. Then the village people had called in the mosquito-control people. Now ...

Imparadised

Colin Burrow: Cultivation and desire in Renaissance gardens, 19 February 2004

Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens 
by Rebecca Bushnell.
Cornell, 198 pp., £18.95, August 2003, 0 8014 4143 9
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... the largest herbal of the 16th century. John Parkinson, who was appointed apothecary to King James, acquired the title of Botanicus Regius Primarius after the publication of his massive folio on the nature and properties of plants, Paradisi in Sole (1629). Both men provided themselves with coats of arms and salaries to match. Neither was quite as ...

How did she get those feet?

Alice Spawls: The Female Detective, 20 February 2014

The Notting Hill Mystery: The First Detective Novel 
by Charles Warren Adams.
British Library, 312 pp., £8.99, February 2012, 978 0 7123 5859 0
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The Female Detective: The Original Lady Detective 
by Andrew Forrester.
British Library, 328 pp., £8.99, October 2012, 978 0 7123 5878 1
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Revelations of a Lady Detective 
by William Stephens Hayward.
British Library, 278 pp., £8.99, February 2013, 978 0 7123 5896 5
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... Forrester appeared in May 1864. ‘Forrester’ was a pseudonym – the author’s actual name was James Ware – chosen to capitalise on the fame of the Forrester brothers, former Bow Street Runners; Ware’s earlier police ‘casebooks’ under that name had led readers to speculate that the Forresters were the real authors. Ware’s heroine, Miss ...

A Soft Pear

Tom Crewe: Totally Tourgenueff, 21 April 2022

A Nest of Gentlefolk and Other Stories 
by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Jessie Coulson.
Riverrun, 568 pp., £9.99, April 2020, 978 1 5294 0405 0
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Love and Youth: Essential Stories 
by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater.
Pushkin, 222 pp., £12, October 2020, 978 1 78227 601 2
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... of his European friends, by contrast, delighted in his lack of grandeur. ‘Adorable’ was Henry James’s word for him; he was ‘the most approachable, the most practicable, the least unsafe man of genius it has been my fortune to meet. He was so simple, so natural, so modest, so destitute of personal pretension … that one almost doubted at moments ...

Enemies of Promise

Angus Calder, 2 March 1989

Breach of Promise: Labour in Power 1964-1970 
by Clive Ponting.
Hamish Hamilton, 433 pp., £15.95, February 1989, 0 241 12683 5
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James Maxton 
by Gordon Brown.
Fontana, 336 pp., £4.95, February 1988, 0 00 637255 4
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Forward! Labour Politics in Scotland 1888-1988 
edited by Ian Donnachie, Christopher Harvie and Ian Wood.
Polygon, 184 pp., £19.50, January 1989, 0 7486 6001 1
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... and to the ideals of municipal self-help. Wilson’s Labour Party, in the person of slick Dick Marsh, could do no better than renation-alising steel under a board which included a token trade-unionist but was headed by a conservative Old Etonian with no experience in industry. Some Cabinet members – Crosland, Castle, Benn – retained elements of ...

Cultivating Cultivation

John Mullan: English culture, 18 June 1998

The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the 18th Century 
by John Brewer.
HarperCollins, 448 pp., £19.99, January 1997, 0 00 255537 9
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... of a fashionable metropolis. Pleasure gardens were real places, visited by Fanny Burney and James Boswell as well as by characters in novels. They were also places of the imagination, whether that imagination was appalled or enraptured. They were the inventions of a society of conspicuous consumption (‘luxury’ in the old parlance) and leisure, a ...

This Condensery

August Kleinzahler: In Praise of Lorine Niedecker, 5 June 2003

Collected Works 
by Lorine Niedecker, edited by Jenny Penberthy.
California, 471 pp., £29.95, May 2002, 0 520 22433 7
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Collected Studies in the Use of English 
by Kenneth Cox.
Agenda, 270 pp., £12, September 2001, 9780902400696
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New Goose 
by Lorine Niedecker, edited by Jenny Penberthy.
Listening Chamber, 98 pp., $10, January 2002, 0 9639321 6 0
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... maples, boats, fishing (the smell of tarred nets), tittering and squawking noises from the marsh, a happy outdoor grandfather who somehow somewhere had got hold of nursery and folk rhymes to entrance me – all near Beloit College which I attended and in the other direction Madison where I worked for a time in the university’s radio station. Other ...

Imagined Soil

Neal Ascherson: The German War on Nature, 6 April 2006

The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany 
by David Blackbourn.
Cape, 497 pp., £30, January 2006, 0 224 06071 6
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... adversary to be manacled, tamed, subjugated, conquered’. The imagery was warlike from the start. James Dunbar, from Scotland, wrote in 1780: ‘Let us learn to wage war with the elements, not with our own kind.’ Frederick II, looking out over drained marshes, announced: ‘Here I have conquered a province with peaceful means.’ It was in 1743 that he ...

I Will Tell You Everything

Rosemary Hill: Iris Murdoch, 22 April 2010

Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War – Letters and Diaries 1939-45 
edited by Peter Conradi.
Short Books, 303 pp., £16.99, January 2010, 978 1 906021 22 1
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With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch 
by David Morgan.
Kingston, 143 pp., £13.99, March 2010, 978 1 899999 42 2
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... raised uncomfortable questions. She was more at home debating ideological niceties with Hugh James, who ‘took up the orthodox Bolshevik position … that I should not think in analogies as it was dangerous … he is excellent fun to argue with.’ Non-Oxford people were less satisfactory. The ‘hearty old couple’ the troupe stayed with near Water ...

Diary

Richard Gott: Paraguayan Power, 21 February 2008

... I drove on a dirt road across the Chaco, the vast and then almost trackless waste of scrub and marsh that extends westward from the Paraguay River to Bolivia. At that remote frontier, unguarded, there stood cast-iron markers, erected in 1939 by a team from the moribund League of Nations, at the end of Paraguay’s Chaco War with Bolivia. This brutal war ...

Travelling Text

Marina Warner: ‘The Arabian Nights’, 18 December 2008

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights 
translated by Malcolm Lyons, with Ursula Lyons.
Penguin, 2715 pp., £125, November 2008, 978 0 14 091166 4
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‘The Arabian Nights’ in Historical Context: Between East and West 
edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum.
Oxford, 337 pp., £55, November 2008, 978 0 19 955415 7
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... Hamilton, an urbane Jacobite aristocrat and soldier, living in Paris in exile at the court of James II, and a much petted cavaliere servente of the court ladies, read Galland’s translation straight off the press before writing a parody, ‘Fleur d’Epine’ (‘Mayblossom’), to put an end – he hoped – to the insane passion for this tripe. In his ...

Issues for His Prose Style

Andrew O’Hagan: Hemingway, 7 June 2012

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Vol. I, 1907-22 
edited by Sandra Spanier and Robert Trogdon.
Cambridge, 431 pp., £30, October 2011, 978 0 521 89733 4
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... to Arms. The desire for combat is paramount. ‘Not everyone feels such things so intensely,’ James Fenton writes in his introduction to the Everyman edition of the Collected Stories. Many are simply relieved not to have to fight. But the real test for someone of Hemingway’s cast of mind is: to serve in war as a soldier under military ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Eccentric Pilgrims, 30 June 2016

... as we walked the towpath of the Lea Navigation towards the span of the M25 overpass at Rummey Marsh. The filmmaker Andrew Kötting, the driving force of the expedition, is a stocky alpha male with a deep trench of damage in his right leg after a motorcycle collision on the Old Kent Road. He is dressed in a sack of a suit covered with marker-pen Enochian ...

Baffled at a Bookcase

Alan Bennett: My Libraries, 28 July 2011

... to animals was fiction but at the same time I thought the setting of the stories, Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, was a real place set in historical time with the doctor (and Lofting’s own illustrations of the doctor) having some foundation in fact. Shreds of this belief clung on because when, years later, having recorded some of Lofting’s stories for the BBC, I ...

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