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Hidden Consequences

John Mullan: Byron, 6 November 2003

Byron: Life and Legend 
by Fiona MacCarthy.
Faber, 674 pp., £9.99, November 2003, 0 571 17997 5
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... lover Teresa Guiccioli and her husband, and so on? Are we still interested in the tempests with Lady Caroline Lamb? It is all the worse realising that it will end with the expedition to join the Greek War of Independence, uncomfortably like the scheme of a fantasist. ‘Writing, even with genius, did not appear to him to fulfil a great man’s duty: it had ...

The Cake Uncut

Allen Curnow, 17 February 2000

... still swells up, and up so big you’d never believe, it could be a football there in the leg. The lady kept at us, why don’t you see the doctor? Try everything. What harm can that possibly do? Made him sick – no way would he keep anything down – medicine killing him, we threw it all out. Never went back. No one’s come near till the police – God ...

‘John Betjeman: A Life in Pictures’

Gavin Ewart, 6 December 1984

... Essays and Commentaries. A coffee-table Book of Popular Betjeman Dogs and Horses, edited by Lady Penelope. An unofficial ‘pirated’ life of Miss Joan Hunter Dunn. Organised Platypus Races in Australia. Most of these being explored at this very moment by John ...

Two Poems

Charles Simic, 11 November 1999

... made up of a dentist’s chair, A store dummy, an electric hair-dryer, steak knives ... When a lady fainted seeing me in my underwear. Some nights, however, they opened a hundred doors, Always to a different room, and could not find me. There was only a short squeak now and then, As if a bird had been trapped out there in the dark. The Avenue of Earthly ...

Deor

Simon Armitage, 21 February 2013

... We are told the tale      of troubled Mæðhilde, Geat’s much-loved      lovesick lady; disturbing dreams      dispossessed her of sleep. As that passed over      may this pass also. For thirty long winters      the warlord Đeodric held the fort of the Mærings,      his fame known to many. As that passed over ...

Just William

Doris Grumbach, 25 June 1987

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice 
by Sharon O’Brien.
Oxford, 544 pp., £22.50, March 1987, 0 19 504132 1
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... Lark, My Antonia and One of Ours) in passing, as she does the subsequent démeublé novels A Lost Lady and My Mortal Enemy; she mentions The Professor’s House, arguably Cather’s finest work, only when it provides evidence for her theses. We do not see Cather at work on these books. When we last see her she is ‘drawing upon her, own ...

After Smith

Ross McKibbin, 9 June 1994

... reason to believe that the Government’s policies are benign in inspiration. Rather the reverse. Lady Thatcher as prime minister was entirely open in her determination to destroy those quasi-constitutional conventions of British political life which underlay the hated ‘consensus’ and the country’s decline. Moreover, the language of a bastard ...

Not all that Keen

John Bayley, 16 March 1989

Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free 
by V.S. Pritchett.
Hodder, 235 pp., £12.95, January 1989, 0 340 37409 8
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... the advances of girls who pursued him into mildly romantic friendship. A particularly relentless lady, Lydia Avilova, was pacified by being put to work hunting up the early stories through old newspapers and magazines, so that they could be assembled for a collected edition. Chekovian things from his own plays or stories were apt to happen to Chekhov. I ...

Up from Under

John Bayley, 18 February 1988

The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories 
edited by Murray Bail.
Faber, 413 pp., £12.95, January 1988, 0 571 15083 7
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... social dimension. It is a curious thought that one of the most famous of all, Chekhov’s ‘Lady with the Dog’ could only have taken place as it did where it did, although it seems universal in what it tells and means. Yet Gurov and the lady would have had no story at another time and in another country. The same ...

‘Come, my friend,’ said Smirnoff

Joanna Kavenna: The radical twenties, 1 April 1999

The Radical Twenties: Aspects of Writing, Politics and Culture 
by John Lucas.
Five Leaves, 263 pp., £11.99, January 1997, 0 907123 17 1
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... In 1916, D.H. Lawrence wrote to Lady Cynthia Asquith of his abiding ‘sadness’: ‘for my country, for this great wave of civilisation, 2000 years, which is now collapsing’. Driving to Garsington, Ottoline Morrell’s country seat, he was overwhelmed with a sense of so much beauty and pathos of old things passing away and no new things coming ...

Glaucus and Ione

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 17 April 1980

The Last Days of Pompeii 
by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton.
Sidgwick, 522 pp., £6.95, December 1979, 0 283 98587 9
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... part of it at Cambridge, had experienced a romantic tragedy and also a brief affair with Lady Caroline Lamb; and at 29 had already published several novels. The idea of writing about Pompeii had been suggested to him by a picture he had seen in the Brera at Milan. Till now the picture’s identity has remained unknown, but my colleague Robert ...

Lager and Pernod

Frank Kermode: Alan Warner, 22 August 2002

The Man Who Walks 
by Alan Warner.
Cape, 280 pp., £16.99, May 2002, 0 224 06294 8
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... The work ‘fuck’ and its derivatives were timidly admitted into English fiction after the Lady Chatterley trial. Angus Wilson and Iris Murdoch are said to have steeled themselves and forced the f-words into their prose. At first they fairly leaped off the page, but forty-odd years later they have settled in and may occur in almost any work of ...

Every Rusty Hint

Ian Sansom: Anthony Powell, 21 October 2004

Anthony Powell: A Life 
by Michael Barber.
Duckworth, 338 pp., £20, July 2004, 0 7156 3049 0
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... to say, very little idea of what it might be like working on a chain gang). In 1934 he married Lady Violet Pakenham. Alas, as with Maud, you don’t get much of a sense of Lady Violet from Barber, who fancies himself as rather droll (he is the author also of a witty biography of Simon Raven), and his endearing, if ...

For ever England

John Lucas, 16 June 1983

Sherston’s Progress 
by Siegfried Sassoon.
Faber, 150 pp., £2.25, March 1983, 9780571130337
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The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon 
by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Faber, 160 pp., £5.25, March 1983, 0 571 13010 0
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Siegfried Sassoon Diaries 1915-1918 
edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Faber, 288 pp., £10.50, March 1983, 0 571 11997 2
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... he had identified becoming a parody of itself. In May 1917 Sassoon goes to stay with Lord and Lady Brassey. Lord Brassey is ‘a pattern Englishman, no doubt, very wise in the ways of his generation, a useful servant of the State, but a strange figure to Youth in Revolt, and Youth torn by sacrifice. His wisdom has had its day ... Death presses him ...

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