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Pepys’s Place

Pat Rogers, 16 June 1983

The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol X: Companion and Vol XI: Index 
edited by Robert Latham.
Bell and Hyman, 626 pp., £19.50, February 1983, 0 7135 1993 2
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The Diary of John Evelyn 
edited by John Bowle.
Oxford, 476 pp., £19.50, April 1983, 0 19 251011 8
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The Brave Courtier: Sir William Temple 
by Richard Faber.
Faber, 187 pp., £15, February 1983, 0 571 11982 4
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... survey of Restoration music. Music, be it noted, not just musical life: Luckett is a valuable new brand of commentator on Pepys who realises that the diary contains within itself the foundations of substantive history rather than simply gossip. Here there is an excellent discussion of the use of tablature as against staff notation, and the ways in which this ...

Bebop

Andrew O’Hagan, 5 October 1995

Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940-56 
edited by Ann Charters.
Viking, 629 pp., £25, August 1995, 0 670 84952 9
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... and broken. He wanted to make everything glow and be great, and following Whitman, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe and Fitzgerald, he may be the last of the traditional American literary frontiersmen, opening the Republic up to itself, and romancing the earth. Kerouac’s greatest childhood friend and hero was Sebastian Sampas. Ann Charters, in a nicely ...

A Peacock Called Mirabell

August Kleinzahler: James Merrill, 31 March 2016

James Merrill: Life and Art 
by Langdon Hammer.
Knopf, 913 pp., £27, April 2015, 978 0 375 41333 9
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... Merrill’s called The Bait. During a soliloquy ‘heads swivelled as “Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas … stumbled out,”’ ‘passing judgment’, as Hammer puts it, ‘with their feet’. ‘I learned what Mr Miller, with uncanny insight, had whispered in Dylan’s ear shortly after the curtain rose,’ Merrill wrote years later in his memoir A ...

Let him be Caesar!

Michael Dobson: The Astor Place Riot, 2 August 2007

The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama and Death in 19th-Century America 
by Nigel Cliff.
Random House, 312 pp., $26.95, April 2007, 978 0 345 48694 3
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... work had been recognised more pragmatically on the frontier itself, where in 1764 the explorer Thomas Morris, venturing into what is now Illinois, discovered to his surprise not only that he was not the first anglophone to have got so far west but that the locals already knew exactly how much the crown jewels of his culture were worth: ‘An Indian ...

Black and White Life

Mark Greif: Ralph Ellison, 1 November 2007

Ralph Ellison: A Biography 
by Arnold Rampersad.
Knopf, 657 pp., $35, April 2007, 978 0 375 40827 4
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... committee of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as one of its early supporters; joined the board of the brand new Newport Jazz Festival; was a founding member of the National Council on the Arts, which created the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts; helped create American public educational television; served on the board of ...

Friend or Food?

Alexander Bevilacqua, 14 December 2023

The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 
by Marcy Norton.
Harvard, 419 pp., £33.95, January, 978 0 674 73752 5
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The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding and Race in the Renaissance 
by Mackenzie Cooley.
Chicago, 353 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 226 82228 0
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... different razze, and by those, like the Prince of Ruoti, who decided to change the design of their brand, forcing everyone to update their manuals.Did razza beget race? The contribution of Renaissance breeders is ambiguous at best. More concerned with practicalities, European breeders weren’t great theorists. Breeders and trainers disagreed about whether ...

Velvet Gentleman

Nick Richardson: Erik Satie, 4 June 2015

A Mammal’s Notebook: The Writings of Erik Satie 
edited by Ornella Volta, translated by Antony Melville.
Atlas, 224 pp., £17.50, June 2014, 978 1 900565 66 0
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... designer Paul Poiret, who pioneered trousers for women; Avant-Dernières Pensées at the Galerie Thomas, which was run by Poiret’s sister. Among the glitterati, Satie was introduced to Cocteau, with whom he had an immediate rapport. They started working together on a ballet based on the sideshow acts at a fairground: conjurors, acrobats, dancing ...

Boomster and the Quack

Stefan Collini: How to Get on in the Literary World, 2 November 2006

Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 
by Philip Waller.
Oxford, 1181 pp., £85, April 2006, 0 19 820677 1
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... Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill (Arthur Quiller-Couch and Rudyard Kipling sent messages of ...

Infante’s Inferno

G. Cabrera Infante, 18 November 1982

Legacies: Selected Poems 
by Heberto Padilla, translated by Alastair Reid and Andrew Hurley.
Faber, 179 pp., £8.75, September 1982, 0 374 18472 0
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... for Baroque, this is followed by ‘The Apparition of Gongora’, the man who invented the Spanish brand of bubbling champagne called El Barroco, a heady wine of a style which, according to Borges, carries its own parody within. But Padilla never parodies anybody’s style, not even his own. In ‘Relief, where Every time a generation comes in or goes ...

Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity

James Meek, 18 February 2016

... Robin Hood is a programme of the left. Robin Hood is Jeremy Corbyn. He’s Russell Brand. He’s Hugo Chávez. So it used to seem. But a change has come about. The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the myth to their advantage. In this version of Robin Hood the traditional poor – the ...

Barely under Control

Jenny Turner: Who’s in charge?, 7 May 2015

... failing schools into being taken over by a stronger trust. He also made provision for ‘brand-new schools set up by charities, universities, business, community or faith groups, teachers and groups of parents’, which he snappily called free schools. Legally, the structure of academies and free schools is identical: a charitable company limited by ...

The Irreplaceable

Bee Wilson: Palm Oil Dependency, 23 June 2022

Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything – and Endangered the World 
by Jocelyn C. Zuckerman.
Hurst, 337 pp., £20, May 2021, 978 1 78738 378 4
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Oil Palm: A Global History 
by Jonathan E. Robins.
North Carolina, 418 pp., £32.95, July 2021, 978 1 4696 6289 3
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... and Sainsbury’s stocks tiny bottles of a red palm and rapeseed blend made by a health-food brand called Carotino. But that’s it.The oil palm grew in the floodplains and swamps of Africa millions of years before the existence of humans. Excavations in the Bosumpra Cave in Ghana show that people have been consuming some version of its oil for five ...

I want to love it

Susan Pedersen: What on earth was he doing?, 18 April 2019

Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History 
by Richard J. Evans.
Little, Brown, 800 pp., £35, February 2019, 978 1 4087 0741 8
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... Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and T.E. Lawrence, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf – this is just a small sampling. Basically, he read his way through the Marylebone public library. He periodically put this ...

Little England

Patrick Wright: The view through a bus window, 7 September 2006

Great British Bus Journeys: Travels through Unfamous Places 
by David McKie.
Atlantic, 359 pp., £16.99, March 2006, 1 84354 132 7
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... who, in 1870, already suspected that their new town might fare better if named Upton Royal. Thomas Hardy is hoisted aboard and driven past Weymouth to the Isle of Portland, a rocky place where Marie Stopes was once to be found retired among stoneworkers still accustomed to testing the fertility of potential brides before finally consenting to marry ...

That Wild Mercury Sound

Charles Nicholl: Dylan’s Decade, 1 December 2016

The Bootleg Series, Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965-66 
by Bob Dylan.
Columbia, £60, November 2015
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... immigrants from Eastern Europe. The name he chose has often been said to be a tribute to Dylan Thomas, but it seems he first thought of it as ‘Dillon’, possibly after the hard-bitten Dodge City lawman Matt Dillon, hero of the TV Western Gunsmoke. He was twenty years old, skinny and scruffy in jeans and a ‘Huck Finn cap’. In an early article in the ...

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