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Like a Retired Madam

Rosemary Dinnage: Entranced!, 4 February 1999

Mesmerised: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain 
by Alison Winter.
Chicago, 464 pp., £23.95, December 1998, 0 226 90219 6
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... and other scientists, who maintained that if a phenomenon was inexplicable it did not exist, and drew on experience and intuition. Her author, one Horace Smith, had based his novel partly on his own encounters with mesmerism, and probably also on the famous case of the writer Harriet Martineau. Even his modest invalid knew ...

Perfectly Human

Jenny Diski: Lillie Langtry and Mrs Vladimir Nabokov, 1 July 1999

Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals 
by Laura Beatty.
Chatto, 336 pp., £20, March 1999, 1 85619 513 9
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Véra (Mrs Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage 
by Stacy Schiff.
Random House, 456 pp., $27.95, April 1999, 0 679 44790 3
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... have been a milliner’s assistant ... or a poorly paid governess hurrying to her pupils. As I drew near the pavement the girl looked up and I all but sat flat down in the road. For the first and only time in my life I beheld perfect beauty. The face was that of the lost Venus of Praxiteles, and of all the copies handed down to us must have been ...

The Best of Betjeman

John Bayley, 18 December 1980

John Betjeman’s Collected Poems 
compiled by the Earl of Birkenhead.
Murray, 427 pp., £2.50, June 1980, 0 7195 3632 4
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Church Poems 
by John Betjeman.
Murray, 63 pp., £5.95, March 1981, 0 7195 3797 5
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... this and that and little income tax, They probably earn seven times as much As poor old Grosvenor-Smith. But who will grudge Them this, their wild spontaneous holiday? The morning paddle, then the mystery tour By motor-coach inland this afternoon. For that old mother what a happy time! This can be taken as either straight or not straight, but either way it ...

Comprehending Gaddis

D.A.N. Jones, 6 March 1986

The Recognitions 
by William Gaddis.
Penguin, 956 pp., £7.95, January 1986, 0 14 007768 5
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JR 
by William Gaddis.
Penguin, 726 pp., £7.95, January 1986, 0 14 008039 2
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Carpenter’s Gothic 
by William Gaddis.
Deutsch, 262 pp., £8.95, February 1986, 0 233 97932 8
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... and caution: but in Britain he has sometimes been received with a suspicious snort. Martin Seymour-Smith writes in his useful guide, Novels and Novelists, that ‘The Recognitions, a complex novel about forgery and illusion, was found by most critics to be impenetrable and possibly pretentious.’ Now that The Recognitions of 1955 and JR of 1975 are being ...

Hormone Wars

A. Craig Copetas, 23 April 1992

Crazy Cock 
by Henry Miller.
HarperCollins, 202 pp., £14.99, March 1992, 0 00 223943 4
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The Happiest Man Alive 
by Mary Dearborn.
HarperCollins, 368 pp., £18.50, July 1991, 0 00 215172 3
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... Crazy Cock, Miller depicts the desperation that overtook him when his second wife, June Mansfield Smith, skipped to Europe in 1927 with her lesbian lover Jean Kronski, obliging a broke and humiliated 36-year-old Miller to move back in with his parents in Brooklyn and take a non-writing job. He had yet to set up house in Paris: Crazy Cock is his poorly done ...

Predatory Sex Aliens

Gary Indiana: Burroughs, 8 May 2014

Call Me Burroughs: A Life 
by Barry Miles.
Twelve, 718 pp., £17, January 2014, 978 1 4555 1195 2
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... of implying that a home visit in old age from Kurt Cobain or a graveside serenade from Patti Smith has the same cultural importance as the writing of Nova Express and The Wild Boys. Burroughs’s actual achievement seems incidental to the glitzy mythologising of his remaining intimates, though still a bone of contention gnawed by literati. Hardly ...

Degradation, Ugliness and Tears

Mary Beard: Harrow School, 7 June 2001

A History of Harrow School 
by Christopher Tyerman.
Oxford, 599 pp., £30, October 2000, 0 19 822796 5
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... pornography of the written word. But it is clear enough that, as Harrow’s tradition of beating drew to a close, the ethics of writing (as well as of practice) entered the controversy. Tyerman casts his eye equally effectively on other, sometimes awkward aspects of Harrow’s history. His story of low-level, endemic racism and anti-semitism in the school up ...

In Time of Famine

R.W. Johnson: In Zimbabwe, 22 February 2007

... one that he is stuck for ever in the era of the liberation struggle. During the many years of Ian Smith’s white minority regime, it seemed there was little that Mugabe’s party, Zanu, could do in the face of white power. Zanu’s armed wing, Zanla, was no match for the better trained and better equipped Rhodesians, and Mugabe dreamed in vain of driving out ...

The Buffalo in the Hall

Susannah Clapp: Beryl Bainbridge, 5 January 2017

Beryl Bainbridge: Love by All Sorts of Means, a Biography 
by Brendan King.
Bloomsbury, 564 pp., £25, September 2016, 978 1 4729 0853 7
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... by her. Particularly by her claim that she didn’t see the point of making things up: that she drew on her family and childhood for her early novels and historical data for her later work. He overdoes it. He often seems to be fighting an imaginary adversary: a reader who thinks that fiction is a code, who opens a novel and gets cross if an autobiography ...

Nom de Boom

Ian Penman: Arthur Russell's Benediction, 15 August 2024

Travels over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life 
by Richard King.
Faber, 296 pp., £30, April, 978 0 571 37966 8
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... afford to live in big cities like London and New York. But the world that incubated Russell, and drew out all the snaking tendrils of his offbeat eclecticism, is long gone. Lofts once inhabited by breadline artists, musicians and filmmakers are now the sole preserve of billionaires. The cross-pollination that allowed Russell to switch between different ...

Culture Wars

W.J.T. Mitchell, 23 April 1992

... American television, reaching unprecedented numbers of viewers. According to Major-General Perry Smith in How CNN fought the war, CNN’s public relations office estimated that one billion people in 108 nations watched their coverage of the Gulf War. The Kennedy assassination drew transfixed viewers into an instant ...

Pint for Pint

Thomas Laqueur: The Price of Blood, 14 October 1999

Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce 
by Douglas Starr.
Little, Brown, 429 pp., £20, February 1999, 0 316 91146 1
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... and gave her name to the modified milk bottle in which donated blood was stored. Another, Charles Drew, Columbia’s first African American medical graduate, built the infrastructure for plasma collection in the US for shipment to the various theatres of war. At a time when black blood was acceptable only when specifically labelled pint by pint, and was ...

How long before Ofop steps in?

Patrick Carnegy, 16 March 2000

In House: Covent Garden, 50 Years of Opera and Ballet 
by John Tooley.
Faber, 318 pp., £25, November 1999, 9780571194155
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Never Mind the Moon: My Time at the Royal Opera House 
by Jeremy Isaacs.
Bantam, 356 pp., £20, November 1999, 0 593 04355 3
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... Mellor and Gerald Kaufman (described by Isaacs as possessing ‘toxic conceitedness’) to Chris Smith were not amused. How, people asked, was the ‘income requirement’ of the Arts Council’s most voracious client arrived at? Were the singers’ fees not excessive, did the stage crews not live the life of Riley? A succession of investigations by ...

England rejects

V.G. Kiernan, 19 March 1987

The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868 
by Robert Hughes.
Collins Harvill, 688 pp., £15, January 1987, 0 00 217361 1
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Rights of Passage: Emigration to Australia in the 19th Century 
by Helen Woolcock.
Tavistock, 377 pp., £25, September 1986, 9780422602402
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... who figure in these pages in a very unfavourable light are that fun-loving clergyman, Sydney Smith, and the then unregenerate Tory, Gladstone. George Arthur, governor of Van Diemen’s Land or Tasmania from 1824, was a puritanically self-righteous person, convinced that mankind is ‘born and saturated in wickedness’ and that his wards, in ...

Clashes and Collaborations

Linda Colley, 18 July 1996

Empire: The British Imperial Experience, from 1765 to the Present 
by Denis Judd.
HarperCollins, 517 pp., £25, March 1996, 9780002552370
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Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire 
edited by P.J. Marshall.
Cambridge, 400 pp., £24.95, March 1996, 0 521 43211 1
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Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500-c.1800 
by Anthony Pagden.
Yale, 244 pp., £19.95, August 1995, 0 300 06415 2
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... is to show first how Spanish, French and English/British intellectuals, jurists and writers all drew on the legacy of the Roman Empire to define imperialism and to implement and legitimise it. Secondly, Pagden sets out to demonstrate that these ideologues also modified their arguments in relation to each other. Referring back to Rome – both pagan Rome and ...

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