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Holy Grails, Promised Lands

D.J. Enright, 9 April 1992

Proofs and Three Parables 
by George Steiner.
Faber, 114 pp., £5.99, March 1992, 0 571 16621 0
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... he puts the finishing touches to the second law of thermodynamics, thereby anticipating the heat death of the universe, and a woman’s laugh during love-making. The last is distantly reminiscent of a less learned and much naughtier story by Apollinaire, ‘Le Roi-Lune’, in which a more sophisticated science-fictional device enables its user to intervene ...

More Husband than Female

Sharon Marcus: Gender Renegades, 17 June 2021

Female Husbands: A Trans History 
by Jen Manion.
Cambridge, 350 pp., £17.99, March 2020, 978 1 108 48380 3
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Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from 19th-Century France 
by Rachel Mesch.
Stanford, 344 pp., £24.99, May 2020, 978 1 5036 0673 9
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... James. He was ‘sober, steady, strong and active’. Of course he was a man. Only after Allen’s death, as news of the autopsy spread, did some people begin to express different opinions: they’d always noticed his lack of facial hair, they said, and oddly high voice. But, even then, for every person who feminised Allen in retrospect, another insisted on ...

A Broken Teacup

Amanda Claybaugh: The ambition of William Dean Howells, 6 October 2005

William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life 
by Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson.
California, 519 pp., £22.95, May 2005, 0 520 23896 6
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... and at Harper’s, where his power was even greater if less direct, he promoted women writers (Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton), African-Americans (Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar) and immigrants (Abraham Cahan). He also introduced US readers to foreign literature. British literature was already widely read in the cheap ...

Shave for them

Christian Lorentzen: ‘The Submission’, 22 September 2011

The Submission 
by Amy Waldman.
Heinemann, 299 pp., £12.99, September 2011, 978 0 434 01932 8
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... Gingrich said it ‘would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum’. On Twitter, Sarah Palin wrote: ‘Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.’ Polls showed that most Americans opposed it and that most residents of Manhattan, who know that ...

Exit Humbug

David Edgar: Theatrical Families, 1 January 2009

A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families 
by Michael Holroyd.
Chatto, 620 pp., £25, September 2008, 978 0 7011 7987 8
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... undisputed first couple of the British stage. After Irving’s star waned, and even more after his death in 1905, Terry extended her range, not least into the work of her correspondent Bernard Shaw. She died, a national treasure, in 1928. The succeeding generation followed their parents into the business, though inevitably they were overshadowed. Laurence and ...

‘Drown her in the Avon’

Colin Kidd: Catharine Macaulay’s Radicalism, 7 September 2023

Catharine Macaulay: Political Writings 
edited by Max Skjönsberg.
Cambridge, 312 pp., £24.99, March, 978 1 009 30744 4
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... than Macaulay’s supposed hypocrisy.Johnson was not alone in behaving this way. After the death of her husband in 1766, Macaulay found that as a single woman without a male protector her radical opinions were exposed to heavier criticism, now spiced with innuendo. In August 1770 the Gentleman’s Magazine published a lengthy and at times sexually ...

He’s Bad, She’s Mad

Mary Hannity: HMP Holloway, 9 May 2019

Bad Girls: The Rebels and Renegades of Holloway Prison 
by Caitlin Davies.
John Murray, 373 pp., £10.99, February 2019, 978 1 4736 4776 3
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... the treadwheel at Aylesbury Prison was removed in 1843 after three prisoners were crushed to death in a single year). The women, most of whom had been found guilty of prostitution or drunkenness, lived on F Wing, on the eastern side of the prison. Each cell wall had a list showing the daily prison routine. The day began at 5.45 a.m. in summer and 6.45 ...

Fetch the Scissors

Colin Burrow: B.S. Johnson, 11 April 2013

Well Done God! Selected Prose and Drama of B.S. Johnson 
edited by Jonathan Coe, Philip Tew and Julia Jordan.
Picador, 471 pp., £25, February 2013, 978 1 4472 2710 6
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Trawl 
by B.S. Johnson.
Picador, 183 pp., £12.99, February 2013, 978 1 4472 0036 9
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Albert Angelo 
by B.S. Johnson.
Picador, 180 pp., £12.99, February 2013, 978 1 4472 0037 6
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Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry 
by B.S. Johnson.
Picador, 187 pp., £12.99, February 2013, 978 1 4472 0035 2
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House Mother Normal 
by B.S. Johnson.
Picador, 204 pp., £12.99, February 2013, 978 1 4472 0038 3
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... of forty on 13 November 1973. He left (as the obituarists say) a wife and two children. Before his death he had published six novels, which were completed in the course of little more than a decade, and had written one more, which was to have been the first part of a trilogy about his mother’s death from cancer. He also ...

Merely an Empire

David Thomson: Eighteen Hours in Vietnam, 21 September 2017

The Vietnam War 
directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.
PBS, ten episodes
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... of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Whatever else, it was a wild time to be alive and come close to death. The fierce young had never seemed more vivid. This is what one flier, Merrill McPeak, remembers from 269 missions:The late 1960s were a kind of confluence of several rivulets – there was the anti-war movement itself, the whole movement towards racial ...

The Ramsey Effect

Kieran Setiya, 18 February 2021

Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers 
by Cheryl Misak.
Oxford, 500 pp., £25, February 2020, 978 0 19 875535 7
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... career was entwined, Ramsey didn’t fit the stereotype of the tortured genius. After his early death, he was eclipsed by Wittgenstein, whose influence dominated Cambridge philosophy for decades. Ramsey’s admirers have ventured to project what would have happened in philosophy had he lived. But, as he knew, the counterfactual is idle: there is no fact of ...

Sorrows of a Polygamist

Mark Ford: Ted Hughes in His Cage, 17 March 2016

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life 
by Jonathan Bate.
William Collins, 662 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 00 811822 8
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... in the life and work of Ted Hughes was weird and transgressive that even now, 18 years after his death, it is hard to feel confident that his actions and beliefs and literary achievement can be judiciously and authoritatively assessed. For a start, he wrote and published at such a rate: Jonathan Bate’s bibliographic tally of Hughes’s books runs to more ...

Beyond the Cringe

John Barrell: British Art, 2 June 2016

Art in Britain 1660-1815 
by David Solkin.
Yale, 367 pp., £55, October 2015, 978 0 300 21556 4
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... in 1953 and appeared in five separate editions, the last in 1994, nine years after Waterhouse’s death. Waterhouse’s history was quickly recognised as a classic. To a large extent he made the subject he was studying; or as Solkin puts it, ‘he revealed a verdant topography where previous observers had perceived a barren wilderness.’ He found numerous ...

‘It was everything’

Eliot Weinberger: The Republican Convention, 11 August 2016

... Party stayed away: all of the previous presidential and vice-presidential nominees (even Sarah Palin), with the exception of the nonagenarian Bob Dole; the Bush family and anyone who held an important post in the administrations of either Bush; 11 of the 16 candidates who ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the ...

‘I can’t go on like this’

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 19 January 1989

The Letters of Edith Wharton 
edited by R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis.
Simon and Schuster, 654 pp., £16.95, October 1988, 0 671 69965 2
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Women Artists, Women Exiles: ‘Miss Grief’ and Other Stories 
by Constance Fenimore Woolson, edited by Joan Myers Weimer.
Rutgers, 341 pp., $42, December 1988, 0 8135 1347 2
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... a public as the American illustrated magazines are addressed to.’ Yet three years before her death, and in the midst of the Depression, she was threatening to leave Appleton ‘for the simple reason that I cannot afford to neglect any chance of selling my books’ – this despite the fact that in the Twenties she had largely abandoned her original ...

To the Great God Pan

Laura Jacobs: Goddess Isadora, 24 October 2013

My Life: The Restored Edition 
by Isadora Duncan.
Norton, 322 pp., £12.99, June 2013, 978 0 87140 318 6
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... which began in the 1890s, peaked between 1910 and 1920, and continued intermittently until her death in 1927, at the age of 50. In those days film was in its infancy and still silent (The Jazz Singer was released the year Duncan died). Because music – Chopin, Schubert, Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner – was the spiritual inspiration for so much of what she ...

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