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Hogged

E.S. Turner, 22 January 1998

Shipwrecks of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Eras 
by Terence Grocott.
Chatham, 430 pp., £30, November 1997, 1 86176 030 2
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... a corpse-filled sea; the crew drinking themselves senseless to blunt the horrors of near-certain death; and, on the adjacent cliffs, country folk aghast at a catastrophe they can do nothing to alleviate. An all too frequent scene is that of sailors, deeming themselves safe at last, broaching spirits in such quantities that they die on the spot. Fourteen ...

Pioneering

Janet Todd, 21 December 1989

Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up 
by Hermione Lee.
Virago, 409 pp., £12.99, October 1989, 0 86068 661 2
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... which influenced her frequent habit of using male narrators. During her McClure years she met Sarah Orne Jewett whose preference for ‘everyday people who grow out of the soul’ she much approved, though she mocked the old-fashioned life lived by Jewett and her female companion in Boston. In New York Cather formed a circle of admiring women friends ...

Getting the Undulation

Benjamin Lytal: Willa Cather’s Letters, 20 February 2014

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather 
edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout.
Knopf, 715 pp., £24, April 2013, 978 0 307 95930 0
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... to examine life as it is’. She received buckets of mail from priests who saw themselves in Death Comes for the Archbishop, from doughboys grateful for One of Ours, and what Cather called ‘love letters’ from young men struck by the September-May romance of A Lost Lady. And she lived, according to some posthumous critics, as a closeted ...

One of Those Extremists

Seth Anziska: Golda Meir, 13 July 2023

The Only Woman in the Room: Golda Meir and Her Path to Power 
by Pnina Lahav.
Princeton, 376 pp., £28, November 2022, 978 0 691 20174 0
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... for Tel Aviv and then Jerusalem, where Meir gave birth to a son, Menachem, in 1924 and a daughter, Sarah, two years later. But Meir felt ‘suffocation and resentment’: she had moved to Palestine ‘to become a new Jew, cultivating the land with her toil’, in the words of her earlier biographer Francine Klagsbrun in Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of ...

Diary

Celia Paul: Lucian Freud’s Sitters, 12 September 2024

... her loving focus as curiosity he didn’t welcome. He became secretive. But after her husband’s death two years earlier Lucie Freud had tried to kill herself. She lost interest in the world and stopped worrying about her son. Her new lack of concern liberated him. His paintings of her are some of the most memorable he ever made. Each is distinct and ...

Who will punish the lord?

Robert Alter: Saramago’s Cain, 6 October 2011

Cain 
by José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Harvill Secker, 150 pp., £12.99, July 2011, 978 1 84655 446 9
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... can penetrate, lilith and cain are like two swordsmen sharpening their blades for a duel to the death,’ and a moment later: ‘lilith, when she does finally open her legs to allow herself to be penetrated, will not be surrendering, but trying to devour the man to whom she said, Enter.’ The terse biblical narrative, as many readers over the generations ...

On Laura Kasischke

Stephanie Burt: Laura Kasischke, 2 August 2018

... a greasy sky.’ ‘The oven as womb./The oven as grave.’ Because she imagines her own death so often, and because she’s so sensitive to the particular traps facing women and girls, she’s able to depict at once the contingent, politically salient evils of life under a toxic patriarchy – the double binds of working mothers, the threat of ...

The Adulteress Wife

Toril Moi: Beauvoir Misrepresented, 11 February 2010

The Second Sex 
by Simone de Beauvoir and Constance Borde, translated by Sheila Malovany-Chevallier.
Cape, 822 pp., £30, November 2009, 978 0 224 07859 7
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... Fallaize and I decided to draw attention to the situation again. Fallaize, whose premature death at the end of last year Beauvoir scholars mourn, analysed the effects of the vast cuts Parshley made in the chapter on ‘The Married Woman’. I wrote about Parshley’s philosophical confusions, drew attention to a number of elementary French ...

The Beautiful Undead

Jenny Turner: Vegetarian Vampires, 26 March 2009

Twilight 
directed by Catherine Hardwick.
November 2008
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Breaking Dawn 
by Stephenie Meyer.
Atom, 757 pp., £12.99, August 2008, 978 1 905654 28 4
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... but he can barely let himself even kiss her, for fear of ‘losing control’, squashing her to death in his super-powered passion – ‘I could reach out, meaning to touch your face, and crush your skull by mistake. You don’t realise how incredibly breakable you are’ – or biting her to death in uncontrollable ...

Pipe down back there!

Terry Castle: The Willa Cather Wars, 14 December 2000

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism 
by Joan Acocella.
Nebraska, 127 pp., £13.50, August 2000, 0 8032 1046 9
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... the window, she has time only to save one object before fleeing: either a compact disc reissue of Sarah Bernhardt declaiming from Phèdre or an old sepia-tinted postcard of Eleonora Duse in D’Annunzio’s La Città morta. Quick! Which to choose? The Bernhardt has always been a source of deep hilarity: given the primitive acoustic equipment (the original ...

Who needs a welfare state?

Deborah Friedell: The Little House Books, 22 November 2012

The Little House Books 
by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Library of America, 1490 pp., £56.50, August 2012, 978 1 59853 162 6
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The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of ‘Little House on the Prairie’ 
by Wendy McClure.
Riverhead, 336 pp., £10, April 2012, 978 1 59448 568 8
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... would make a try at killing FDR now.’ Four years ago, when the New York Times interviewed Sarah Palin’s relatives, the Little House books were the only ones that anyone could remember her having liked. Caroline Fraser, who edited the books for the Library of America, points to an essay in National Affairs by Meghan Clyne, a former Bush ...

Once a Catholic…

Marina Warner: Damien Hirst, 5 July 2012

Damien Hirst 
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... The YBAs as a group held street markets, improvised shops and mail order art (Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas together), and installed their work in unusual and distant derelict sites (their inaugural, epoch-defining group show, Freeze, at Surrey Docks, which Hirst curated). Seen in a room in a national monument the work inevitably loses the social defiance ...

The Candidate of Beauty

Alexander Stille: D’Annunzio and the Pursuit of Glory, 2 July 1998

Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel 
by John Woodhouse.
Oxford, 420 pp., £25, February 1998, 0 19 815945 5
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... from his father, something he celebrated and vilified. In his early novel The Triumph of Death, he offered a horrifying portrait of the old sensualist: Flesh, flesh, this brutish thing, full of veins, tendons, ligaments, glands, bones, full of instincts and needs; flesh, sweating and stinking; flesh becoming deformed, sick, covered in ...

Dining Room Radicals

Rosemary Hill, 7 April 2022

Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age 
by Daisy Hay.
Chatto, 518 pp., £25, April 2022, 978 1 78474 018 4
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... notable protégés included Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft. For decades, until Johnson’s death in 1809, they came in varying combinations to his weekly dinners, where the vitality of the conversation made up for the dullness of the menu, in which boiled fish and rice pudding loomed large.If Johnson was anything but idle, he was vulnerable in other ...

Diary

Rebecca Solnit: After the Oil Spill, 5 August 2010

... clots of phlegm. From the surface the chunky brown stuff looks like vomit. ‘Just globs of death out there,’ one diver, Al Walker, says in a Southern accent. ‘Oil so thick it blocks out almost all the light below,’ says another diver. An AP photograph by Dave Martin shows one of the gentle little waves of the Gulf Coast in close-up, a wave on ...

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