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At the Hop

Sukhdev Sandhu, 20 February 1997

Black England: Life before Emancipation 
by Gretchen Gerzina.
Murray, 244 pp., £19.99, October 1995, 0 7195 5251 6
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Reconstructing the Black Past: Blacks in Britain 1780-1830 
by Norma Myers.
Cass, 162 pp., £27.50, July 1996, 0 7146 4576 1
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... as is shown in her account of the night two Africans, one of them recently enslaved, attended Thomas Southerne’s dramatisation of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko at Drury Lane: ‘The young men received a standing ovation as they entered, and during Oroonoko’s final speech, all eyes were on them as much as on the actors. The recent captives wept at the ...

Departure and Arrival Times

Sheldon Rothblatt, 18 August 1983

The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance 
by John Kenyon.
Weidenfeld, 322 pp., £16.50, March 1983, 0 297 78081 6
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... of Romanticism, the neglect of Lecky and new-wave social science, the scatological treatment of Thomas Carlyle. Other omissions may be added. Frederic Maitland is not very well realised, which is strange given the historians (Kenyon among them) who believe in his greatness. Maitland’s relationship with Leslie Stephen and avid interest in Meredith’s ...

Haley’s Comet

Paul Driver, 6 February 1997

The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Weidenfeld, 431 pp., £25, September 1996, 0 297 81720 5
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... Isaiah Berlin, Tippett, Betjeman and Fred Hoyle became familiar voices. Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas made a poet’s living in what Thomas called ‘the thin puce belfries’ of the Third. Guided by the producer Douglas Cleverdon, Under Milk Wood and Beckett’s All That Fall came into being; and drama thrived – the ...

Peasants wear ultramarine

Barbara Newman: Nuns with Blue Teeth, 10 February 2022

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book 
by Elaine Treharne.
Oxford, 248 pp., £30, October 2021, 978 0 19 284381 4
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Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers 
by Mary Wellesley.
Riverrun, 372 pp., £25, October 2021, 978 1 5294 0093 9
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The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books 
by Elina Gertsman.
Penn State, 232 pp., £99.95, June 2021, 978 0 271 08784 9
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... the case histories of many individual works, from the Lindisfarne Gospels to the prayer book of Henry VIII, giving anecdotal accounts of the ways in which they were lost or found, preserved or destroyed. In Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts, Treharne covers similar ground, concentrating as Wellesley does on British manuscripts. But she addresses a more ...

A Calamitous Man

Patrick Collinson: Incombustible Luther, 29 July 1999

Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death 
by Richard Marius.
Harvard, 542 pp., £19.95, March 1999, 0 674 55090 0
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... both famous and infamous, and famous not for a few minutes but for ever. Three centuries later, Thomas Carlyle will write that but for you there would have been no French Revolution, no America. This is what happened not in a dream but metaphorically to Martin Luther, a hitherto obscure monk and professor of theology in an undistinguished university ...

Diary

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Putting in the Commas, 15 September 1988

... In December 1947 the American writer Susan Sontag was invited to have tea with Thomas Mann. She was 14, a high-minded schoolgirl full of literature and the seriousness of life. She had one friend, and this boy, her disciple, had written to Thomas Mann, who was then living in California, telling him that they had been reading his books and admired them above all others ...

That sh—te Creech

James Buchan: The Scottish Enlightenment, 5 April 2007

The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in 18th-Century Britain, Ireland and America 
by Richard Sher.
Chicago, 815 pp., £25.50, February 2007, 978 0 226 75252 5
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... and booksellers of the second half of the century, such as Andrew Millar, William Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that ...

Cramming for Success

James Wood: Hardy in London, 15 June 2017

Thomas Hardy: Half A Londoner 
by Mark Ford.
Harvard, 305 pp., £20, October 2016, 978 0 674 73789 1
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... was often put in mind of ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ while reading Mark Ford’s study of Thomas Hardy. Ford doesn’t mention it (though he does refer to Baudelaire’s flaneurial poems), perhaps because that manifesto is too obvious, or too obviously theoretical: he prefers to build his case patiently, historically, in solid empirical ...

Mulberrying

Andrew Gurr, 6 February 1986

Forms of Attention 
by Frank Kermode.
Chicago, 93 pp., £9.95, September 1985, 0 226 43168 1
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Shakespeare: A Writer’s Progress 
by Philip Edwards.
Oxford, 204 pp., £12.50, January 1986, 0 19 219184 5
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Shakespeare’s Lost Play: ‘Edmund Ironside’ 
edited by Eric Sams.
Fourth Estate, 383 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 947795 95 2
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Such is my love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets 
by Joseph Pequigney.
Chicago, 249 pp., £16.95, October 1985, 0 226 65563 6
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Shakespeare Survey 38: An Annual Survey of Shakespearian Study and Production 
edited by Stanley Wells.
Cambridge, 262 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 521 32026 7
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The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama 
by Catherine Belsey.
Methuen, 253 pp., £13.95, September 1985, 0 416 32700 1
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... of the ‘salmons in both’ variety. The connections are chiefly with Titus Andronicus and I Henry VI, but Sams finds significant parallels as far away as Pericles: both plays have a scene in which a letter is read out. What, says Sams after citing a page and a half of similar parallels, could be more Shakespearean? Confidence in Sams’s case is not ...

Through Trychay’s Eyes

Patrick Collinson: Reformation and rebellion, 25 April 2002

The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village 
by Eamon Duffy.
Yale, 232 pp., £16.95, August 2001, 0 300 09185 0
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... dear middle-age these noodles praise’, when, ‘you’ll say, once all believed,’ from Henry VIII to the ploughman with his paternoster. So it was not a book above and beyond criticism. How ‘traditional’ was this traditional religion (a question Duffy himself asked)? Did Duffy succeed in convincing us that ‘superstition’ was an ...

He wants me no more

Tessa Hadley: Pamela Hansford Johnson, 21 January 2016

Pamela Hansford Johnson: Her Life, Works and Times 
by Wendy Pollard.
Shepheard-Walwyn, 500 pp., £25, October 2014, 978 0 85683 298 7
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... of social status; Amy’s family were vaguely theatrical – her father had been a manager for Henry Irving – and thought of themselves approvingly as ‘bohemians’, too good to marry into ‘trade’ (though Amy’s mother was from a family of grocers). The large brick terraced house in Clapham belonged to Amy’s family and its hallway was hung with ...

Conrad’s Complaint

Frank Kermode, 17 November 1983

The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Vol. I: 1861-1897 
edited by Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies.
Cambridge, 446 pp., £19.50, September 1983, 0 521 24216 9
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... a hundred-odd to Galsworthy, the same quantity to Ford Madox Ford, ‘several dozen’ to Thomas Wise, an unspecified but obviously vast number to the agent Pinker, and so on. Moreover, the core collection of Jean-Aubry is unreliable, because of ‘unprofessional editing and omissions’, the latter caused by an understandable desire not to give ...

Advice for the New Nineties

Julian Symons, 12 March 1992

HMS Glasshouse 
by Sean O’Brien.
Oxford, 56 pp., £5.99, November 1991, 0 19 282835 5
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The Hogweed Lass 
by Alan Dixon.
Poet and Printer, 33 pp., £3, September 1991, 0 900597 39 9
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Collected Poems 
by Les Murray.
Carcanet, 319 pp., £18.95, November 1991, 0 85635 923 8
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... killed off by the war the vacuum was filled by the extravagant romanticism associated with Dylan Thomas, George Barker and Edith Sitwell. Less than a decade later, with those roses seen as over-blown, Robert Conquest was deploring ‘the omission of the necessary intellectual component from poetry’, gathering several disparate writers under one ...

Anxious Pleasures

James Wood: Thomas Hardy, 4 January 2007

Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 486 pp., £25, October 2006, 0 670 91512 2
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... and then harden around us as the lost hours progress and we feel their unfreedom accrete. Henry James was snooty about Hardy, but I wonder how James would have done, if given as a kind of literary test a cow’s udder to describe? Admirably, no doubt, with his usual lyrical paradox of oddly precise euphemism, but certainly without the solidity of ...

Like Hell

Thomas McKeown, 1 October 1981

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings 
translated by Eisei Ishikawa and David Swain.
Hutchinson, 706 pp., £20, August 1981, 0 09 145640 1
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... wartime provided welcome relief from the routine of their ordinary lives. (The sombre figures in Henry Moore’s drawings do not reflect accurately the quality of life in air-raid shelters.) The economic consequences of the bombing in World War Two were less obvious and were often overestimated by those who might have been expected to be well-informed. I was ...

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