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Stubble and Breath

Linda Colley: Mother Germaine, 15 July 1999

The Whole Woman 
by Germaine Greer.
Doubleday, 351 pp., £16.99, March 1999, 0 385 60015 1
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Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew 
by Christine Wallace.
Cohen, 333 pp., £18.99, March 1999, 1 86066 120 3
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... and flatter males. This is someone, after all, who opted to write her MA thesis on Lord Byron; who urged us in The Female Eunuch to emulate ‘the masculine virtues of magnanimity and generosity and courage’; who describes men in The Whole Woman as immune to sartorial vanity, as admirably brief and efficient in their grooming, and as ruthlessly ...

Missing the Vital Spark

Mark Ford: Tony Harrison, 13 May 1999

Prometheus 
by Tony Harrison.
Faber, 86 pp., £8.99, November 1998, 0 571 19753 1
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... transgression, and an inspiring political allegory. ‘Of thine impenetrable Spirit,’ wrote Byron in his 1816 poem ‘Prometheus’, ‘Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,/A mighty lesson we inherit.’ Two years later, Shelley embarked on his long poetic drama Prometheus Unbound, which celebrated the Titan’s rebellion against Zeus as the ...

High Punctuation

Christopher Ricks, 14 May 1992

But I digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse 
by John Lennard.
Oxford, 324 pp., £35, November 1991, 0 19 811247 5
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... odd of differently-minded critics to want to shut their ears to the poets’ words about it. If Byron and Browning (on whom Lennard is acutely provocative) were reachable by ouija board, it would be perverse of us to refuse to hear whether they would assent to an interpretation of their work – with oui and ja (the etymology after all) – or whether we ...

Was Plato too fat?

Rosemary Hill: The Stuff of Life, 10 October 2019

Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life 
by Christopher Forth.
Reaktion, 352 pp., £25, March 2019, 978 1 78914 062 0
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... end of the 18th century thinness was more or less permanently in. A fat Romantic was anathema, as Byron, who constantly battled with his weight, knew. Even royalty could not escape the pressure for a youthful silhouette. The immensely vain George IV found that the glass of fashion would not flatter him as it had Henry VIII, for he lived in an age when ...

Centre-Stage

Ian Gilmour, 1 August 1996

The Younger Pitt: The Consuming Struggle 
by John Ehrman.
Constable, 911 pp., £35, May 1996, 9780094755406
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... sovereign Belgium’ came into existence in 1815, although here he is in distinguished company: Byron refers to ‘Belgium’s capital’ in the third canto of Childe Harold. If Pitt’s career during the last eight years of his life was in decline, he remained the master of the House of Commons. When he sat down in November 1797 after what a contemporary ...

Green Pastel Redness

Colin Kidd: The Supreme Court Coup, 24 March 2022

Dissent: The Radicalisation of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Supreme Court 
by Jackie Calmes.
Twelve, 478 pp., £25, July 2021, 978 1 5387 0079 2
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Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months that Transformed the Supreme Court 
by Linda Greenhouse.
Random House, 300 pp., £22.50, November 2021, 978 0 593 44793 2
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... appointed by Republican presidents. In dissent were Rehnquist, another Nixon appointee, and Byron White, a socially conservative Democrat, who had been nominated to the court by John F. Kennedy. Over time, however, the growing influence of evangelical moralism in Republican politics meant that opposition to Roe emerged as a litmus test of party ...

In the Circus

William Wootten: Low-Pressure Poetry, 3 August 2006

The Collected Poems 
by Kenneth Koch.
Knopf, 761 pp., £40, November 2005, 1 4000 4499 5
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... on the other hand, are attempts at comic epic. Written in emulation of Ariosto, and in homage to Byron, Ko is a world series of cartoonish adventures: the hero is a Japanese baseball player; the villain wishes to control the world’s dogs. ‘What I found in Ariosto was a poetry that was all action,’ Koch said. ‘There’s almost no reflection in the ...

Diary

Jonathan Dollimore: Depression Studies, 23 August 2001

... direction.’ Maybe the will to live and the wish to die share the same obscure origins. I suspect Byron was saying something like this, as well as writing from his own depression, when, in Don Juan, he says that ‘life’s strange principle will often lie/Deepest in those who long the most to die.’ The mystery is there, too, in the loneliness of the ...

McNed

Gillian Darley: Lutyens, 17 April 2003

The Architect and His Wife: A Life of Edwin Lutyens 
by Jane Ridley.
Chatto, 524 pp., £25, June 2002, 0 7011 7201 0
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Edwin Lutyens, Country Houses: From the Archives of ‘Country Life’ 
by Gavin Stamp.
Aurum, 192 pp., £35, May 2001, 1 85410 763 1
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Lutyens Abroad 
edited by Andrew Hopkins and Gavin Stamp.
British School at Rome, 260 pp., £34.95, March 2002, 0 904152 37 5
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... system of proportion to which all in his office alluded but no one could explain. When Robert Byron wrote his fine articles for Country Life in 1931 commemorating the achievement at New Delhi he noted that the meeting of classicism and the Orient was ‘a fusion, not of historical reminiscences, but of two schools of architectural thought. The outcome of ...

Like Cooking a Dumpling

Mike Jay: Victorian Science Writing, 20 November 2014

Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age 
by James Secord.
Oxford, 306 pp., £18.99, March 2014, 978 0 19 967526 5
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... The era has been viewed as something of a literary hiatus, with Romanticism in decline after Byron and the Victorian serial yet to emerge with Dickens. Secord gallantly proposes some counter-examples, but the thrust of his argument is that these years witnessed a surge in the non-fiction market: a greatly expanded reading public educated itself as never ...

Phantom Gold

John Pemble: Victorian Capitalism, 7 January 2016

Forging Capitalism: Rogues, Swindlers, Frauds and the Rise of Modern Finance 
by Ian Klaus.
Yale, 287 pp., £18.99, January 2015, 978 0 300 18194 4
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... the other a paladin who combines the wealth of Croesus, the wisdom of Solomon and the beauty of Byron. But their glamour is pallid beside the turpitude of Dickens’s Nickleby, Dombey and Merdle, or Trollope’s Melmotte. Even Disraeli reckoned that capitalism of the sort that came to Britain with William of Orange (‘Dutch finance’) was detestable: it ...

Determinacy Kills

Terry Eagleton: Theodor Adorno, 19 June 2008

Theodor Adorno: One Last Genius 
by Detlev Claussen.
Harvard, 440 pp., £22.95, May 2008, 978 0 674 02618 6
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... hold untrammelled sway. Discussing the prosody of Don Juan is all very well, but how on earth did Byron get to Sintra on a club foot? As far as such literary prurience goes, Claussen remains high-mindedly Teutonic. Beyond a discreet allusion to the fact that female students found him attractive, a fact the photographs of him provided in this volume do nothing ...

Urban Messthetics

John Mullan: Black and Asian writers in London, 18 November 2004

London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City 
by Sukhdev Sandhu.
Harper Perennial, 498 pp., £9.99, November 2004, 0 00 653214 4
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... solipsistic way of thinking’. Surely this is overstated: the letters of Jane Austen or Lord Byron are quite as dash-sprinkled as Sancho’s. Equiano’s autobiography and Sancho’s letters, both recently reprinted, are worth recovering, and have had a powerful influence on black British authors. Sandhu notes that several of the contemporary writers ...

Teeth of Mouldy Blue

Laura Quinney: Percy Bysshe Shelley, 21 September 2000

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Volume I 
edited by Donald Reiman and Neil Fraisat.
Johns Hopkins, 494 pp., £58, March 2000, 0 8018 6119 5
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... to mime the subject but Shelley sustains the momentum of the stanza only with some awkwardness. (Byron had the same problem in Childe Harold, which may be why he switched to ottava rima for Don Juan.) And the interposition of the long Alexandrine poses an obstacle to propelling the poem on from stanza to stanza. But within a decade, Shelley had ...

Out of His Furrow

William Poole: Milton, 8 February 2007

Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity 
by Gordon Teskey.
Harvard, 214 pp., £21.95, March 2006, 0 674 01069 8
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... composed’). Now and then Teskey courts a criticism that he wittily borrows from Byron on Coleridge – ‘Explaining metaphysics to the nation/I wish he would explain his Explanation’ – but his book is an interesting reaffirmation in today’s often contrary academic climate of a poetic approach to Milton, swiping at those who would ...

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