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Cute, My Arse

Seamus Perry: Geoffrey Hill, 12 September 2019

The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 148 pp., £20, April 2019, 978 0 19 882952 2
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... school of regard. Wharton was best known for a column he wrote in the Telegraph under the name ‘Peter Simple’, and he was pleased to see in Hill’s austere lyricism a salutary rejection of vulgar modern mores, so I am not sure what he would have made of ‘Cute, my arse’ – not to mention, from later sections of the poem, ‘a shot of jism’, ‘a ...

Failed Vocation

James Butler: The Corbyn Project, 3 December 2020

Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour under Corbyn 
by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire.
Bodley Head, 376 pp., £18.99, September, 978 1 84792 645 6
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This Land: The Story of a Movement 
by Owen Jones.
Allen Lane, 336 pp., £20, September, 978 0 241 47094 7
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... then slated for 2020. When he was pressed not to vote for Corbyn as leader in 2015, Clive Lewis replied: ‘It’ll be about democratising the party, handing power back to the membership and opposing austerity: why wouldn’t I back it?’ Once these goals were achieved, many expected Corbyn would sub in a more conventional politician, firmly of the ...

Diary

Tom Paulin: In Donegal, 8 October 1992

... warmth and talk and joyous spirit, its cultural zest and variously lovely landscapes which C.S. Lewis and other writers in Craig’s anthology so tenderly celebrate – for all the abounding glittering jet, as Yeats would never say, of this region – there is another side to the lived experience of the place which cries out for embodiment. And with a deft ...

Radio Fun

Philip Purser, 27 June 1991

A Social History of British Broadcasting. Vol. I: 1922-29, Serving the Nation 
by Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff.
Blackwell, 441 pp., £30, April 1991, 0 631 17543 1
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The Collected Essays of Asa Briggs. Vol. III: Serious Pursuits, Communication and Education 
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 470 pp., £30, May 1991, 0 7450 0536 5Show More
The British Press and Broadcasting since 1945 
by Colin Seymour-Ure.
Blackwell, 269 pp., £29.95, May 1991, 9780631164432
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... written archives must by now fall open at the right places, marked perhaps by a spent match Peter Black inserted in 1971 or a shrivelled potato chip left behind by Asa Briggs. As for the one or two specific issues Scannell and Cardiff are able to enlarge upon, notably the treatment of unemployment and poverty, they have done so by venturing beyond the ...

Runagately Rogue

Tobias Gregory: Puritans and Others, 25 August 2011

The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570-1640 
by Christopher Haigh.
Oxford, 284 pp., £32, September 2009, 978 0 19 921650 5
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... Country Divinity (1581), Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601) and Lewis Bayley’s The Practice of Piety (1611) aimed to set forth the rudiments of soul-saving doctrine in plain English. Their authors were Puritan ministers, who drew on their own experience in addressing parishioners’ spiritual concerns, and their books help ...

Europe, what Europe?

Colin Kidd: J.G.A. Pocock, 6 November 2008

The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 344 pp., £18.99, September 2005, 9780521616454
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Barbarism and Religion. Vol. III: The First Decline and Fall 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 527 pp., £19.99, October 2005, 0 521 67233 3
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Barbarism and Religion. Vol. IV: Barbarians, Savages and Empires 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £17.99, February 2008, 978 0 521 72101 1
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... as the Cambridge School, inaugurated a contextualist revolution. The school’s founding father, Peter Laslett, pointed out the errors and anachronisms of political philosophers who paid no attention to the genesis of the texts they studied. Although Locke’s Two Treatises of Government wasn’t published until after the Glorious Revolution of ...

Who was David Peterley?

Michael Holroyd, 15 November 1984

... This process has enriched our recent fiction – most remarkably, perhaps, the novels of Peter Ackroyd, D.M. Thomas, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes and Thomas Keneally, whose Schindler’s Ark was marketed in America (under a slightly different title) as non-fiction and in Britain as a novel. Writers of light fiction, too, have added to the ...

Speaking well

Christopher Ricks, 18 August 1983

Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir 
by David Pryce-Jones.
Collins, 304 pp., £12.50, July 1983, 0 333 32827 2
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J.B. Yeats: Letters to His Son W.B. Yeats and Others, 1869-1922 
edited with a memoir by Joseph Hone.
Secker, 296 pp., £7.95, May 1983, 0 436 59205 3
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... unprepossessing as my own.’ Evelyn Waugh being ‘our valued friend’, ‘it amused me to hear Peter laughing at Evelyn’s “provincial little Arnold Bennett arriviste appearance”.’ If Chelsea (and Oxford) might be at odds with Bloomsbury (and Cambridge) for territorial competitive reasons, the two were at one when it came to making bad ...

The Unhappy Vicar

Samuel Hynes, 24 January 1980

Orwell: The Transformation 
by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams.
Constable, 240 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 0 09 462250 7
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... and the myth that makes him always virtuous in his style, as in his life, does him a disservice. Peter Stansky and William Abrahams have added another myth to those already wrapped round Orwell. In their previous book, The Unknown Orwell, and again in Orwell: The Transformation, they postulate two characters who inhabit in sequence the same body: first Eric ...

Dixie Peach Pomade

Alex Abramovich: In the Room with Robert Johnson, 6 October 2022

Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson 
by Annye C. Anderson with Preston Lauterbach.
Hachette Go, 224 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 0 306 84526 0
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... South. I’d practised my reading with him, I recall, back in the first grade reading my primer, Peter Rabbit.Anderson doesn’t pretend to know more than she knows. ‘I didn’t have him in my pocket,’ she says. But what she does know brings us almost into the room with him:Brother Robert kept his hair neat, using Dixie Peach pomade. He greased Vaseline ...

Mother One, Mother Two

Jeremy Harding: A memoir, 31 March 2005

... We were all friends, I suppose. You may not remember Graham, but he was Maureen’s first husband, Peter and Jill’s father . . . you do, that’s good. They were Surrey people: they had a grand house in Caterham. Graham was a rich fellow, talented, energetic, generous; he’d made most of his money as a printer: he published the daily stock exchange ...

Customising Biography

Iain Sinclair, 22 February 1996

Blake 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 399 pp., £20, September 1995, 1 85619 278 4
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol I: Jerusalem 
editor David Bindman, edited by Morton D. Paley.
Tate Gallery, 304 pp., £48, August 1991, 1 85437 066 9
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. II: Songs of Innocence and Experience 
series editor David Bindman, edited by Andrew Lincoln.
Tate Gallery, 210 pp., £39.50, August 1991, 1 85437 068 5
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol III: The Early Illuminated Books 
series editor David Bindman, edited by Morris Eaves, Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi.
Tate Gallery, 288 pp., £48, August 1993, 1 85437 119 3
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. IV: The Continental Prophecies: America, Europe, The Song of Los 
editor David Bindman, edited by D.W. Dörbecker.
Tate Gallery, 368 pp., £50, May 1995, 1 85437 154 1
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. V: Milton, a Poem 
series editor David Bindman, edited by Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi.
Tate Gallery, 224 pp., £48, November 1993, 1 85437 121 5
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. VI: The Urizen Books 
 editor David Bindman, edited by David Worrall.
Tate Gallery, 232 pp., £39.50, May 1995, 9781854371553
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... reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third ...

Strutting

Linda Colley, 21 September 1995

All the Sweets of Being: The Life of James Boswell 
by Roger Hutchinson.
Mainstream, 238 pp., £17.50, May 1995, 1 85158 702 0
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James Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ 
edited by Marshall Waingrow.
Edinburgh, 518 pp., £75, March 1995, 0 7486 0471 5
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Johnson and Boswell: The Transit of Caledonia 
by Pat Rogers.
Oxford, 245 pp., £30, April 1995, 0 19 818259 7
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... as a foolish parasite on Johnson’s greatness, a ‘tomtit twittering on an eagle’s back’, as Peter Pindar had called him. Then, in 1925, the seesaw that had always been Boswell’s fate tilted once again. That year saw the beginning of one of three remarkable American initiatives, all linked in some way to Yale University, that would considerably enrich ...
Goldenballs 
by Richard Ingrams.
Private Eye/Deutsch, 144 pp., £4.25
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... It started at David Frost’s house in July 1975 when Frost (who told the story to Peter Jay) introduced Goldsmith to Wilson and Falkender. Since both Goldsmith and Wilson had, at different times, declared that the Eye was dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and social democracy, the conversation must have rattled along. (Goldsmith, says ...

What did they name the dog?

Wendy Doniger: Twins, 19 March 1998

Twins: Genes, Environment and the Mystery of Identity 
by Lawrence Wright.
Weidenfeld, 128 pp., £14.99, November 1997, 0 297 81976 3
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... twins put up for adoption were separated and used for psychological studies under the direction of Peter Neubauer, who never told either them or their parents that they were twins, or that they were being studied. In our day, the political bias has resurfaced in the racist hypotheses and conclusions of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell ...

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