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Wedded to the Absolute

Ferdinand Mount: Enoch Powell, 26 September 2019

Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain 
by Paul Corthorn.
Oxford, 233 pp., £20, August 2019, 978 0 19 874714 7
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... nobody, not even Oswald Mosley or Richard Nixon, was capable of radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated Enoch way down the table where he couldn’t catch his glittering eye. There is only one passage in ...

Ti tum ti tum ti tum

Colin Burrow: Chic Sport Shirker, 7 October 2021

Along Heroic Lines 
by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 330 pp., £20, April, 978 0 19 289465 6
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... the villain within a hero by turning, for instance, Tony Blair MP into ‘I’m Tory Plan B’ or Harold Wilson into ‘Lord Loinwash’. He gives my edition of the Sonnets some genial stick for emphasising their oral and performative aspects (I was just trying to get people to read them), rather than dwelling on how their letters dance into different visible ...

The Person in the Phone Booth

David Trotter: Phone Booths, 28 January 2010

... time been 16, and pregnant. Babalola had taken her home, lent her to his friends, then fallen in love with her, and married her. Janet does not feature extensively in Adah’s story; she is there primarily as an image of a person in a phone box. Her introduction into it opens that story out: to new dangers, but also to the potential for change, in Adah and ...

Puzzled Puss

John Lahr: Buster Keaton’s Star Turn, 19 January 2023

Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life 
by James Curtis.
Knopf, 810 pp., £30, February 2022, 978 0 385 35421 9
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... Boy, which he shot in one take. ‘From the first day on I hadn’t a doubt that I was going to love working in the movies. I did not even ask what I’d be paid to work in Arbuckle’s slapstick comedies. I didn’t much care,’ Keaton said. He went on: ‘I’d fallen in love with the movies – with the cameras, with ...

Death by erosion

Paul Seabright, 11 July 1991

Medical Choices, Medical Chances: How patients, families and physicians can cope with uncertainty 
by Harold Bursztajn, Richard Feinbloom, Robert Hamm and Archie Brodsky.
Routledge, 456 pp., £12.99, February 1991, 0 415 90292 4
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Examining doctors: Medicine in the 1900s 
by Donald Gould.
Faber, 148 pp., £12.99, June 1991, 0 571 14360 1
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Some Lives! A GP’s East End 
by David Widgery.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 248 pp., £15.95, July 1991, 1 85619 073 0
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... was met by progressively more invasive medical procedures. Too much treatment and not enough love eventually killed him, about as unpleasantly as could be imagined. The authors discuss this case, not as an isolated if appalling error of judgment, but as a symptom of a much deeper failing in the medical profession. The quest for certainty: more tests mean ...

Revenges

Ronald Fraser, 7 February 1991

Gorbals Voices, Siren Songs 
by Ralph Glasser.
Chatto, 209 pp., £13.95, April 1990, 0 7011 3445 3
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A Place for Us 
by Nicholas Gage.
Bantam, 419 pp., £14.95, February 1990, 0 593 01515 0
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The Hidden Damage 
by James Stern.
Chelsea, 372 pp., £17.95, February 1990, 1 871484 01 4
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... By the end of his time at the university he had camouflaged his origins sufficiently to fool Harold Laski, who suggested that he go into social work to get to know the working class. The present, and last, volume of Glasser’s autobiography covers his post-Oxford, post-war years. It begins with his marriage to an anti-semitic middle-class English ...

How to do the life

Lorna Sage, 10 February 1994

Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World 
by Carol Brightman.
Lime Tree, 714 pp., £20, July 1993, 0 413 45821 0
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... college.’ She was already (McCarthy, that is) shacking up at weekends with actor and dramatist Harold Johnsrud in New York, a sign of sophistication way beyond most of her socially smarter peers in the class of ’33. (She had ‘no family ... to please’, one of them pointed out thirty years later, when The Group revived the gossip: ‘She appeared to be ...

Brideshead Revered

David Cannadine, 17 March 1983

The Country House 
by James Lees-Milne.
Oxford, 110 pp., £4.50, November 1982, 0 19 214139 2
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English Country Houses and Landed Estates 
by Heather Clemenson.
Croom Helm, 244 pp., £15.95, July 1982, 0 85664 987 2
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The Last Country Houses 
by Clive Aslet.
Yale, 344 pp., £15, October 1982, 0 300 02904 7
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... meant more than beauty, opulence was preferred to taste, and wealth mattered more than lineage. Harold Nicolson explained: Edwardians were vulgar to a degree. They lacked style. They possessed only the hard glitter of their own electric light: a light which beat down pitilessly upon courtier, ptarmigan, bridge scores, little enamel boxes and plates of ...
Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered 
by William Pritchard.
Oxford, 186 pp., £14.95, March 1985, 0 19 503462 7
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... for his first book, A Boy’s Will, which appeared early in 1913. He attended the opening of Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury, where he met F.S. Flint, who sent him a book of his poems. The poetry was, in Pritchard’s phrase, ‘rich in inexpressible yearnings’ – the sort of writing Frost could not abide. He nonetheless found a way to ...

Leading the Labour Party

Arthur Marwick, 5 November 1981

Michael Foot: A Portrait 
by Simon Hoggart and David Leigh.
Hodder, 216 pp., £8.95, September 1981, 0 340 27600 2
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... stand for election to the Shadow Cabinet, and came sixth. Foot proved such a source of strength to Harold Wilson that in January 1972 he was promoted to Shadow Leader of the House with special responsibilities for fighting the Government over the Common Market. After Labour’s return to power in October 1974, Foot was first Employment Secretary under ...

Shaggy Fellows

David Norbrook, 9 July 1987

A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After 
by David Perkins.
Harvard, 694 pp., £19.95, April 1987, 0 674 39946 3
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Collected Poems 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Penguin, 207 pp., £3.95, September 1985, 0 14 008383 9
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The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill 
by Henry Hart.
Southern Illinois, 305 pp., $24.95, January 1986, 0 8093 1236 0
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... the songs of the saved. Or might, as Geoffrey Hill puts it, ‘harmonise strangely with the divine/Love’. The publication of Hill’s Collected Poems illustrates how consistently he has worried at the problem of how far poetic beauty can ‘suspend’ or redeem the weight of moral and political judgment. The question that has polarised his critics is whether ...

Wordsworth and the Well-Hidden Corpse

Marilyn Butler, 6 August 1992

The Lyrical Ballads: Longman Annotated Texts 
edited by Michael Mason.
Longman, 419 pp., £29.99, April 1992, 0 582 03302 0
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Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Literary Possession 
by Susan Eilenberg.
Oxford, 278 pp., £30, May 1992, 0 19 506856 4
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The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries 
by Nicholas Roe.
Macmillan, 186 pp., £35, April 1992, 0 333 52314 8
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... true spiritual revolution after the false, material and murderous revolution ushered in by 1789. Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller and Paul de Man see something profoundly representative in Wordsworth’s sudden retreat from the public to the private sphere – the threshold of modernity, the moment when the political and social goals of history become either ...

The Way of the Warrior

Tom Shippey: Vikings, 3 April 2014

Vikings: Life and Legend 
edited by Gareth Williams, Peter Pentz and Matthias Wernhoff.
British Museum, 288 pp., £25, February 2014, 978 0 7141 2337 0
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The Northmen’s Fury 
by Philip Parker.
Cape, 450 pp., £25, March 2014, 978 0 224 09080 3
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... a runic inscription: ‘Here sails the Sea-Brave (hafdjarfr).’ Viking ships were works of love as well as art. Ships and buildings, then, but also, on page after page and throughout the exhibition, hoards and weapons: axes, spearheads, swords and shields, helmets and ring mail. The smith clearly took as much pride in his work as the carpenter. The ...

Tea with Medea

Simon Skinner: Richard Cobb, 19 July 2012

My Dear Hugh: Letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and Others 
Frances Lincoln, 240 pp., £20, October 2011, 978 0 7112 3240 2Show More
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... guillotine, or his liking for Simenon’s novels, with Inspector Maigret imperturbably dissecting love and lust behind the net curtains of Paris. In The End of the Line (1997), which was completed days before his death, he implicitly connects his insights into the 1790s with his own recollections of the febrile atmosphere in Paris in the late 1930s, days of ...

Living It

Andrew O’Hagan: The World of Andy McNab, 24 January 2008

Crossfire 
by Andy McNab.
Bantam, 414 pp., £17.99, October 2007, 978 1 84413 535 6
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Strike Back 
by Chris Ryan.
Century, 314 pp., £17.99, October 2007, 978 1 84413 535 6
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... from kung fu movies and Oprah Winfrey.’ Wright introduces us to a cast that includes Corporal Harold James Trombley, a 19-year-old who sits in the back of a Humvee ‘waiting all day for permission to fire his machine gun’. And when he does fire, the thrill of the fight represents a kind of ecstasy for him. Wright reports that ‘every time’ Trombley ...

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