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Boys will be girls

Clive James, 1 September 1983

Footlights! A Hundred Years of Cambridge Comedy 
by Robert Hewison.
Methuen, 224 pp., £8.95, June 1983, 0 413 51150 2
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... If the publishers thought they were going to get the kind of sputtering firework that one of David Frost’s script associates might help him deliver into a tape-recorder, they haven’t. This is a book meant to be read and even kept. Indeed it might have more keepers than readers, since a probable majority of buyers will be the people mentioned in the ...

Hauteur

Adam Phillips: ‘Paranoid Modernism’, 22 May 2003

The Short Sharp Life of T.E. Hulme 
by Robert Ferguson.
Allen Lane, 314 pp., £20, November 2002, 0 7139 9490 8
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Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis and the Professionalisation of English Society 
by David Trotter.
Oxford, 358 pp., £35, September 2001, 0 19 818755 6
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... original sin, secularised as the problem of anti-social behaviour, has been remarkably resilient. David Trotter believes that what we have learned to call Modernism is more akin to the cumulative trauma of secularisation, and that if we can’t get a wholly convincing sense of the beginnings of Modernism, we can get the next best thing: a sense of what the ...

Coalition Monsters

Colin Kidd, 6 March 2014

In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition Government 
by Matthew D’Ancona.
Penguin, 414 pp., £25, October 2013, 978 0 670 91993 2
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... pact between the Tories and the Lloyd George Liberals, now semi-detached from the Liberal Party of Herbert Asquith. Further schisms followed. The Liberal Nationals, under Sir John Simon, joined the National Government of 1931 and continued for the next thirty years co-operating closely with the Conservatives. Under the Woolton-Teviot Agreement of 1947 the ...

Toolkit for Tinkerers

Colin Burrow: The Sonnet, 24 June 2010

The Art of the Sonnet 
by Stephanie Burt and David Mikics.
Harvard, 451 pp., £25.95, May 2010, 978 0 674 04814 0
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... Julie Andrews kind of nun, who might just want to rip off the wimple and sing. Stephen Burt and David Mikics’s collection of 100 sonnets through the ages is heavily weighted towards poems from the 20th and 21st centuries, and also towards some occasionally groan-worthy American poems – though perhaps hearts less jaded than mine leap up at Emma ...

Why did he not speak out?

Richard J. Evans: The Pope at War, 19 October 2023

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini and Hitler 
by David I. Kertzer.
Oxford, 621 pp., £25, November 2022, 978 0 19 289073 3
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... Allies and the subsequent occupation of Rome by German forces, Heinrich Himmler sent an order to Herbert Kappler, head of the SS in the capital city: ‘All Jews,’ it said, ‘without regard to nationality, age, sex or condition, must be transferred to Germany and liquidated there.’ On 16 October, SS officers, armed with addresses for Rome’s ...

Chimps and Bulldogs

Stefan Collini: The Huxley Inheritance, 8 September 2022

An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family 
by Alison Bashford.
Allen Lane, 529 pp., £30, September 2022, 978 0 241 43432 1
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... made to smuggle some sense of direction or progress back into this account – the ambiguity of Herbert Spencer’s coinage ‘the survival of the fittest’ allowed many to see it as a constant process of improvement – but the strict logic of Darwin’s mechanism didn’t warrant any such comforting inference: chance dictated the appearance of ...

A Little Talk in Downing St

Bee Wilson, 17 November 2016

My Darling Mr Asquith: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Venetia Stanley 
by Stefan Buczacki.
Cato and Clarke, 464 pp., £28.99, April 2016, 978 0 9934186 0 0
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... and post-Edwardian times. In the letters of love and friendship exchanged between the members of Herbert Asquith’s circle – he was the Liberal prime minister from 1908 to 1916 – ‘dearest’ meant something different from ‘darling’ and ‘my darling’ was something else again. As Stefan Buczacki parses it, plain ‘darling’ was so commonly used ...

Stick-at-it-iveness

Mary Hannity: Between Britain and Jamaica, 18 March 2021

Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands 
by Hazel V. Carby.
Verso, 416 pp., £20, September 2019, 978 1 78873 509 4
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... on piecework. Henry had died in Cardiff some time before the birth of Rose’s fifth child, Herbert, in 1896; Stella died of tuberculosis in Bedminster in 1903 aged thirteen.Bristol ‘appeared to wear history on its surfaces’. The Home and Colonial Tea Stores opened a branch in Bedminster in 1903; Guinea Street by the Avon was a reference to the ...

How the sanity of poets can be edited away

Arnold Rattenbury: The Sanity of Ivor Gurney, 14 October 1999

‘Severn and Somme’ and ‘War’s Embers’ 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by R.K.R. Thornton.
Carcanet, 152 pp., £7.95, September 1997, 1 85754 348 3
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80 Poems or So 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by George Walter and R.K.R. Thornton.
Carcanet, 148 pp., £9.95, January 1997, 1 85754 344 0
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... of all creativity. Here he could chat happily with such companions as Beethoven about the music of Herbert Howells, his schoolboy friend and fellow music student; or could by turns become Schubert, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Traherne, Whitman, even Gurney – anyone, musician or author, whose work he understood to the point of loving. ‘The idea that he had written ...

Jackson breaks the ice

Andrew Forge, 4 April 1991

Jackson Pollock: An American Saga 
by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith.
Barrie and Jenkins, 934 pp., £19.95, March 1990, 0 7126 3866 0
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Abstract Expressionism 
by David Anfam.
Thames and Hudson, 216 pp., £5.95, August 1990, 0 500 20243 5
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Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston 
by Musa Mayer.
Thames and Hudson, 256 pp., £8.95, February 1991, 0 500 27633 1
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... as if he had been rushing towards his death for a long time. Talking about watching Pollock work, Herbert Matter said: ‘The way he stood, the way he looked at the canvas, the way he worked it, always made me think of a farmer.’ For Pollock the identification was precise. He spoke of memories that would come to him as he worked of standing by his father ...

Dogface

Ian Hamilton, 28 September 1989

Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War 
by Paul Fussell.
Oxford, 330 pp., £15, September 1989, 0 19 503797 9
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War like a Wasp: The Lost Decade of the Forties 
by Andrew Sinclair.
Hamish Hamilton, 312 pp., £17.95, October 1989, 0 241 12531 6
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... on the great issues of our time. In The Great War and Modern Memory he quotes with enthusiasm David Jones’s dodgy-sounding dictum that ‘the artist in man is the infantryman in man ... all men are aboriginally of this infantry, though not all serve with this infantry ... continued employment “away from the front” has made habitual and widespread a ...

A Proper Stoic

John Bayley, 8 May 1986

Duff Cooper: The Authorised Biography 
by John Charmley.
Weidenfeld, 265 pp., £12.95, April 1986, 0 297 78857 4
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... number of fairly obvious reasons, and the spirited Lady Agnes had gone off with a young man called Herbert Flower. He was the man she really loved, but he died suddenly at the age of 27. Neither parents nor society were at all forgiving, and in getting over her grief Lady Agnes once again showed spirit and resource. She went to London and took a humble job at ...

Looking for a Way Up

Rosemary Hill: Roy Strong’s Vanities, 25 April 2013

Self-Portrait as a Young Man 
by Roy Strong.
Bodleian, 286 pp., £25, March 2013, 978 1 85124 282 5
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... interior of All Saints, Margaret Street, but less predictably by the writings of George Herbert, Thomas Traherne and Henry Vaughan. When it comes to sex he is for once almost apologetic, regretting that he had not been more open about his homosexuality in his early life but explaining that for a long time he had no real idea what homosexuality ...

Best Known for His Guzzleosity

Helen Hackett: Shakespeare’s Authors, 11 March 2010

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? 
by James Shapiro.
Faber, 367 pp., £20, April 2010, 978 0 571 23576 6
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... Revealed (2007), have continued to deal in biography: Duncan-Jones explores the case for William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, as the young man of the Sonnets; Weis points out such details as the greater frequency of medical characters in Shakespeare’s plays after his daughter Susanna’s marriage to Dr John Hall. Can we – should we – tell ourselves not ...

23153.8; 19897.7; 15635

Adam Smyth: The Stationers’ Company, 27 August 2015

The Stationers’ Company and The Printers of London: 1501-57 
by Peter Blayney.
Cambridge, 2 vols, 1238 pp., £150, November 2013, 978 1 107 03501 0
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... Company has ‘scarcely a paragraph free of factual errors, unfounded assumptions, or both’. David Daniell’s statistics on Bible printing ‘are both misleading and inaccurate’. A.W. Pollard ‘misunderstood the paragraph almost completely’. Of Lotte Hellinga’s analysis of Robert Redman’s piratical printing practices: ‘Not a word of that is ...

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