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Closet Virtuoso

Seamus Perry: Magic Mann, 24 February 2022

The Magician 
by Colm Tóibín.
Viking, 438 pp., £18.99, September 2021, 978 0 241 00461 6
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... book is arranged around a series of intense, often fleeting crushes: a classmate at school, the painter Paul Ehrenberg, his own son Klaus, young men who sit admiringly through his lectures, the architect of his Californian house, sunny boys on the beach, a handsome waiter. These hidden intensities constitute a kind of shadow life, which is strikingly at ...

Hierophants

Stefan Collini: C. Day-Lewis, 6 September 2007

C. Day-Lewis: A Life 
by Peter Stanford.
Continuum, 368 pp., £25, May 2007, 978 0 8264 8603 5
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... Day-Lewis began to tire of being in the spotlight, and in 1938 he ‘noiselessly slipped the painter’ of public life, as he put it, retreating to rural seclusion in a cottage in Devon, just inside the border with Dorset. By this point he had been married to his first wife, Mary, for ten years, had two small children, and was growing sexually ...

Elizabeth Bishop’s Aviary

Mark Ford: Elizabeth Bishop’s Aviary, 29 November 2007

... happiness. ‘Love,’ she asserts in the third of her ‘Three Valentines’, which develops a George Herbert-inspired set of conceits between Love and the avian, ‘is feathered like a bird/To keep him warm,/To keep him safe from harm’. In ‘Rain towards Morning’, one of four love poems collected in A Cold Spring (1955), she exults with unusual lack ...

Pickering called

Rivka Galchen: ‘The Glass Universe’, 5 October 2017

The Glass Universe: The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars 
by Dava Sobel.
Fourth Estate, 336 pp., £16.99, January 2017, 978 0 00 754818 7
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... haven’t even mentioned the earthquake in Peru, the fire at the director’s house, or the blind painter heiress who pays for people to look at the stars), there are extended portions of The Glass Universe which one might fairly term dull. Part of the dullness is unavoidable: meticulously tracking the brightness and position of thousands of stars on ...

Consulting the Furniture

Rosemary Hill: Jim Ede’s Mind Museum, 18 May 2023

Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists 
by Laura Freeman.
Cape, 377 pp., £30, May, 978 1 78733 190 7
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... One of the most important Kettle’s Yard artists, and one of Ede’s greatest friends, was the painter and poet David Jones, whose long poem In Parenthesis W.H. Auden was not alone in thinking the greatest book about the First World War. It emerged after long gestation. Ede, opening his copy when it arrived one morning in 1937, was at once moved to ...

One of the Cracked

Dinah Birch: Barbara Bodichon, 1 October 1998

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon: Feminist, Artist and Rebel 
by Pam Hirsch.
Chatto, 390 pp., £20, July 1998, 0 7011 6797 1
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... seems to me the only remedy,’ she once remarked. She was also a prolific and rather successful painter, and founded the Society of Female Artists. There was hardly a scheme for the furtherance of women’s interests that did not bear the imprint of her driving aspirations. The only exception lay in projects sponsored by any branch of Christianity, for ...

Fiction and Failure

Adrian Poole, 15 April 1982

Blind Understanding 
by Stanley Middleton.
Hutchinson, 159 pp., £7.50, March 1982, 0 09 146990 2
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Fifty Stories 
by Kay Boyle.
Penguin, 648 pp., £2.95, February 1982, 0 14 005922 9
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Unsolicited Gift 
by Jacqueline Simms.
Chatto, 151 pp., £6.95, March 1982, 0 7011 2616 7
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Nellie without Hugo 
by Janet Hobhouse.
Cape, 192 pp., £6.95, March 1982, 0 224 01969 4
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Levitation: Five Fictions 
by Cynthia Ozick.
Secker, 157 pp., £6.95, March 1982, 0 436 25482 4
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... him’, and finds himself drawn to various men who seem to know something he doesn’t – the painter of the naked praying woman, an old teacher and poet, a retired Methodist minister. But such revival as he finds comes not from these men outside at the edge of his life, but from the women inside, his wife and her sister. Jacqueline Simms’s ...

Misbehavin’

Susannah Clapp, 23 July 1987

A Life with Alan: The Diary of A.J.P. Taylor’s Wife, Eva, from 1978 to 1985 
by Eva Haraszti Taylor.
Hamish Hamilton, 250 pp., £14.95, June 1987, 0 241 12118 3
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The Painted Banquet: My Life and Loves 
by Jocelyn Rickards.
Weidenfeld, 172 pp., £14.95, May 1987, 0 297 79119 2
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The Beaverbrook Girl 
by Janet Aitken Kidd.
Collins, 240 pp., £12.95, May 1987, 0 00 217602 5
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... Graham Greene figure’, closely studied by Alec Guinness when he was preparing to become George Smiley; he ‘could never make close ties with people’. Guy Burgess was ‘always dirty and smelt’. This diary is also a love story: ‘The sun was shining and Alan took my hand.’ Eva Taylor considers her husband ‘cleverer than Macaulay’, whose ...

Sprawson makes a splash

John Bayley, 23 July 1992

Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero 
by Charles Sprawson.
Cape, 307 pp., £15.99, June 1992, 0 224 02730 1
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... as the mother whose caresses would calm his frenetic disposition. Together with Watts Dunton and George Borrow – then over seventy – he would bathe in the Putney ponds ‘with a north-east wind cutting across the icy waters like a razor’. No towels of course: Borrow would run about the grass like an elderly dog, shaking himself to get dry. For ...

Princes, Counts and Racists

David Blackbourn: Weimar, 19 May 2016

Weimar: From Enlightenment to the Present 
by Michael Kater.
Yale, 463 pp., £25, August 2014, 978 0 300 17056 6
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... zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, and moving into the Altenburg Palace on the outskirts of town; Thackeray, George Eliot, Smetana, Berlioz and Wagner all visited. Liszt engaged better musicians, improved the repertory, old and new, and included his own compositions. He put Weimar back on the cultural map, but didn’t get the support he hoped for from the court. He ...

Diary

Patrick Cockburn: Iraq after the handover, 22 July 2004

... allowed in were American and the hearings were timed to coincide with US breakfast TV. If George Bush can pretend for four months that he has Iraq under control he may well be re-elected. If disasters from Iraq continue to dominate the front pages he will probably lose. In April 125 soldiers were killed: the White House needs to show voters that ...

Clairvoyant, Rich and Lucky

Chloë Daniel: Berlin 1904-2014, 30 November 2017

Hannah’s Dress: Berlin 1904-2014 
by Pascale Hugues, translated by C. Jon Delogu and Nick Somers.
Polity, 250 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 5095 0981 2
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... was no longer home to professors and lawyers but to a ‘railway conductor, a seamstress, a house painter, a lathe operator, a panel beater, a cook, three bakers, a hairdresser, two postal workers – one retired’. Many flats had been divided during the economic downturn of the 1930s, now the rest followed. Families shared toilets and kitchens; parquet was ...

At Tate Britain

Tom Crewe: Burne-Jones, 24 January 2019

... to Italy in 1871 and 1873, building on those of 1859 and 1862. Even in his lifetime, his friend George du Maurier was referring to the ‘Burne-Jonesiness of Burne-Jones’. This is the nub of the problem – to those who have one. His style is so tightly-wound, so cumbersomely itself, that the approaching viewer trips over the fact that they’re looking ...

The Duckworth School of Writers

Frank Kermode, 20 November 1980

Human Voices 
by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Collins, 177 pp., £5.25, September 1980, 0 00 222280 9
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Winter Garden 
by Beryl Bainbridge.
Duckworth, 157 pp., £5.95, October 1980, 0 7156 1495 9
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... kinds of attention, kinds of wit, that belonged to novelists who were not trying to be men, like George Eliot; anyway, wit is now female, and so is bravado in the choice and handling of themes. Mrs Fitzgerald used to be published by Duckworth, as were or are Caroline Blackwood, Alice Thomas Ellis and Beryl Bainbridge: all practise surprise and cultivate ...

His Spittin’ Image

Colm Tóibín: John Stanislaus Joyce, 22 February 2018

... theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland. George Moore, in his Confessions of a Young Man, blatantly proclaims his sense of liberation and relief when his father died. Synge makes an attempted parricide the theme of his Playboy of the Western World; James Joyce describes in Ulysses how Stephen ...

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