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Old Gravy

Mark Ford, 7 September 1995

Robert Graves: Life on the Edge 
by Miranda Seymour.
Doubleday, 524 pp., £20, July 1995, 0 385 40423 9
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Robert Graves and the White Goddess 
by Richard Perceval Graves.
Weidenfeld, 618 pp., £25, July 1995, 0 297 81534 2
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Robert Graves: His Life and Work 
by Martin Seymour-Smith.
Bloomsbury, 600 pp., £25, June 1995, 0 7475 2205 7
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Robert Graves: Collected Writings on Poetry 
edited by Paul O’Prey.
Carcanet, 560 pp., £35, June 1995, 1 85754 172 3
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Robert Graves: The Centenary Selected Poems 
edited by Patrick Quinn.
Carcanet, 160 pp., £15.95, April 1995, 9781857541267
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... the Spanish Civil War, they had attempted a second Holy Circle on a farm owned by Schuyler and Kit Jackson in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Riding immediately set about appropriating Schuyler Jackson – who nurtured philosophical and literary ambitions – which of course necessitated banishing his wife. Kit, she insinuated, was ...

When to Read Was to Write

Leah Price: Marginalia in Renaissance England, 9 October 2008

Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England 
by William Sherman.
Pennsylvania, 259 pp., £29.50, April 2008, 978 0 8122 4043 6
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... rare-book rooms, bags are searched for food, pens are confiscated, hands are gloved. And as H.J. Jackson pointed out in Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, one result of the growth in the number of ‘career library books’ that remain in reading-rooms from which drink or even ink is excluded is that we are left with a thinner record of ...

Impossible Desires

Adam Smyth: Death of the Book, 7 March 2024

Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book 
by Brian Cummings.
Oxford, 562 pp., £37.99, February 2022, 978 0 19 284731 7
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... enables Bibliophobia’s signature trait, which is its rapid vaulting across centuries of mark-making. Take the short span between pages 28 and 35. Cummings notes that in the Heroides, Ovid’s rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope writes Ulysses a letter, saying don’t write back, just come. This relationship between writing and presence takes us ...

At the Serpentine

Paul Myerscough: Cy Twombly, 20 May 2004

... the wrong end of a brush. As recently as the early 1980s, you can find Twombly making his first mark – the letters ‘HRIH’, a spoked wheel, a set of indeterminate forms – then submerging it, almost but not quite completely, in circular scrawls of crimson and black crayon. There’s a barely controlled abandon, and more than a hint of anxiety that ...

When Chicago Went Classical

Andrew Saint: A serial killer and the World’s Fair, 1 April 2004

Devil in the White City 
by Erik Larson.
Bantam, 496 pp., £7.99, April 2004, 0 553 81353 6
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... contender is Chicago 1893. After more than a century, the gleaming White City on the fairway at Jackson Park lingers in the American mind. Its image launched the international ‘city beautiful’ movement and transformed Washington. It has bequeathed its bright nickname to a Tube station and its shabby surroundings in West London. The most strapping of its ...

Only the crazy make it

Thomas Jones: Jim Crace, 8 March 2007

The Pesthouse 
by Jim Crace.
Picador, 309 pp., £16.99, March 2007, 978 0 330 44562 7
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... of Ferrytown. One of them is Franklin Lopez, a young man travelling east with his older brother, Jackson – they are unaware that they have been named after grand old men of American history. They have left their mother behind on the family farm, and hope to be taken by ship, once they reach the coast, to a better life across the ocean. But if this is what ...

Move like a party

Mendez: George Michael’s Destiny, 5 January 2023

George Michael: A Life 
by James Gavin.
Abrams, 502 pp., £25, June 2023, 978 1 4197 4794 6
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George Michael: Freedom Uncut 
directed by David Austin and George Michael.
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... based on the deal that I had signed with Andrew under duress … The head of the record company [Mark Dean of Innervision] turns up with these contracts and we go to this greasy spoon café and he says: ‘Look, if you don’t sign this now, the deal is going away, you won’t have finished demos to take away with you, you won’t own them.’ We were on our ...

Never the twain

Mark Amory, 4 March 1982

Evelyn Waugh, Writer 
by Robert Murray Davis.
Pilgrim Books, 342 pp., $20.95, May 1981, 0 937664 00 6
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... started without a Best and Dr Benito, the press secretary in Scoop, was originally Bonham Carter Jackson. Brideshead is much altered. Charles Ryder began as Peter Fenwick and was then in Debrett, the second son of a second baronet: ‘Very obscure,’ says Sebastian, whose sister was not at first Cordelia, but Bridget, the name of Waugh’s devout ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Bob Dylan’s Tall Tales, 21 October 2004

... wrested political access to pop culture from the Democrats. Reagan overstepped the mark in 1984, however, when he tried to appropriate Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ as the anthem of his re-election campaign, having failed to pay attention either to the song’s lyrics (which are kind of ironic) or to the general thrust of ...

Rather Break than Bend

Clare Jackson: The Winter Queen, 26 May 2022

Elizabeth Stuart: Queen of Hearts 
by Nadine Akkerman.
Oxford, 581 pp., £20, December 2021, 978 0 19 966830 4
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... In​ a collection of essays published in 2005 to mark four hundred years since the Gunpowder Plot, Antonia Fraser imagined Elizabeth Stuart being crowned as Queen Elizabeth II in January 1606. ‘The Gunpowder Plot Succeeds’ describes the plotters’ confessed intention, in the chaos following the death of James VI and I in the explosion at Westminster, of abducting his eldest daughter from her governor’s home in Warwickshire ...

Having Fun

Ben Jackson: Online Shaming, 9 April 2015

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed 
by Jon Ronson.
Picador, 277 pp., £16.99, March 2015, 978 0 330 49228 7
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... millions of people waiting for her to land.’ The word ‘cunt’ is practically a punctuation mark in these outbursts; the language of online shaming is overwhelmingly misogynistic. Women are subjected to fantasies of rape and sexual violence while men escape with character assassination. When Jonah Lehrer, a staff writer at the New Yorker, was caught ...

Brand New Day

Niela Orr: ‘The Wiz’ and the Prez, 18 March 2021

... a record label, bought the movie rights. The subsequent film, which starred Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, as well as Richard Pryor and Lena Horne, was a commercial and critical flop. But it became classic holiday viewing for many Black Americans, including my family. The Wiz is set in late 1970s New York, dingy and rundown, full of dilapidated tenements of ...

Every club in the bag

Michael Howard, 10 September 1992

The Chiefs: The Story of the United Kingdom Chiefs of Staff 
by Bill Jackson and Dwin Bramall.
Brassey, 508 pp., £29.95, April 1992, 0 08 040370 0
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... book about it. With trained military skill they camouflage their identity on the dust-jacket: Bill Jackson and Dwin Bramall they call themselves, for all the world as if they were just reporters on the Sunday Times. Then on the title-page they unmask their batteries, and we find that we are actually in the hands of General Sir William ...

Englishmen’s Castles

Gavin Stamp, 7 February 1980

The Victorian Country House 
by Mark Girouard.
Yale, 470 pp., £14.95, September 1980, 0 300 02390 1
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The Artist and the Country House 
by John Harris.
Sotheby Parke Bernet, 376 pp., £37.50, November 1980, 0 85667 053 7
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National Trust Studies 1980 
edited by Gervase Jackson-Stops.
Sotheby Parke Bernet, 175 pp., £8.95, October 1980, 0 85667 065 0
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... in architecture, but country houses manage to secure a much wider, even popular, audience. Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House has actually become a best-seller – extraordinary in the field of architectural history – and its unprecedented success has encouraged Yale to issue as a companion volume a new edition of his earlier The ...

Mad Monkey

Jackson Lears: ‘Matterhorn’, 23 September 2010

Matterhorn 
by Karl Marlantes.
Corvus, 600 pp., £16.99, August 2010, 978 1 84887 494 7
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... are quickly negated by the overwhelming fecundity of tropical nature. ‘The company left no more mark on the jungle than a ship’s wake on the sea,’ Marlantes writes. Advanced technology is repeatedly undone by weather and topography: fixed-wing aircraft are useless in the highlands, and helicopters are vulnerable to hidden sniper and artillery ...

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