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Weirdo Possible Genius Child

Daniel Soar: Max Porter, 23 May 2019

Lanny 
by Max Porter.
Faber, 213 pp., £12.99, March 2019, 978 0 571 34028 6
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... magic. I saw it a decade ago at the Royal Court, with Mark Rylance playing Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, the big, impossible man who lives in a caravan in the woods and talks his heart out to strays and dropouts, meaning everything he says, loving everything he hears, living at a pitch of absolute charisma. As the play opens, Rylance-as-Rooster lopes over ...

I really mean like

Michael Wood: Auden’s Likes and Dislikes, 2 June 2011

The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose Vol. IV, 1956-62 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 982 pp., £44.95, January 2011, 978 0 691 14755 0
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... writing on Shakespeare, there are wonderful remarks on Don Quixote, extraordinary essays on Byron, Dickens, Ibsen, Frost, Marianne Moore, D.H. Lawrence; but when Auden wants to evoke ‘a parable of agape’, or ‘Holy Love’, he talks about Bertie Wooster’s relation to Jeeves. Bertie in his blithering is a comic model of humility, and his reward is ...

Half-Finished People

Thomas Meaney: Germany Imagines Hellas, 11 October 2012

The Tyranny of Greece over Germany 
by E.M. Butler.
Cambridge, 351 pp., £23.99, March 2012, 978 1 107 69764 5
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... expeditions to Greece and Anatolia. There were no German philhellenes to match Shelley and Byron, for whom the modern Greeks were live people, not the ethereal playthings they were for Hölderlin. Goethe turned down several invitations to visit Greece; he never intended to write a ‘Greek Journey’ to match his Italian Journey and thought he had ...

Shandying It

John Mullan: Sterne’s Foibles, 6 June 2002

Laurence Sterne: A Life 
by Ian Campbell Ross.
Oxford, 512 pp., £25, March 2001, 0 19 212235 5
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... hesitations, interruptions – but without finality. Its nearest equivalent, in this respect, is Byron’s Don Juan, another triumph of digressiveness. ‘I meant it for a poetical Tristram Shandy,’ Byron said of his great comic poem, thinking of how it might be fitted around, and make material of, his life. Tristram ...

Diary

Elaine Mokhtefi: Panthers in Algiers, 1 June 2017

... was hearing. Rahim, aka Clinton Smith, had escaped from prison in California with a fellow inmate, Byron Booth, in January 1969. They had hijacked a plane to Cuba and joined up with Cleaver. Not long after sending Cleaver off to Algiers, the Cubans packed off Rahim and Booth too.Cleaver told me that Rahim had stolen the Panthers’ money and was planning to ...

Populist Palatial

Rosemary Hill: The View from Piccadilly, 4 March 2021

London’s West End: Creating the Pleasure District, 1800-1914 
by Rohan McWilliam.
Oxford, 400 pp., £30, September 2020, 978 0 19 882341 4
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Survey of London: Volume 53, Oxford Street 
edited by Andrew Saint.
Paul Mellon Centre, 421 pp., £75, April 2020, 978 1 913107 08 6
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... A generation of great actors met a generation of great critics, including Hazlitt, Coleridge and Byron, and the London theatre was a centre of literary and intellectual life as never before or since. In an auditorium without dimmable lights or sound amplification, everything depended on intense intimacy between players and audience. Drury ...

Scoops and Leaks

Neal Ascherson: On Claud Cockburn, 24 October 2024

Believe Nothing until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism 
by Patrick Cockburn.
Verso, 293 pp., £25, October, 978 1 80429 075 0
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... In remote Carpathian Ruthenia, he had met yet another intrepid young woman reporter, Patricia Byron, who at 24 had already led an expedition to make a language map of the Congo. This liaison turned out to be permanent, a marriage which lasted until Cockburn’s death in 1981.The Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939 stunned the world, knocking the bottom out of ...

Heroes of Our Time

Karl Miller, 19 May 1988

The Monument 
by T. Behrens.
Cape, 258 pp., £11.95, May 1988, 0 224 02510 4
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The Passion of John Aspinall 
by Brian Masters.
Cape, 360 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 0 224 02353 5
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... C.B.A. Behrens – a character out of Lermontov. Lermontov, for his part, was a character out of Byron, and so was Pechorin, the ‘hero of our time’ in Lermontov’s novel of 1839, one of those people ‘who are fated to attract all kinds of unusual things’. Pechorin is a cold-hearted, stylish fatalist, experimentalist, existentialist and divided man, a ...

Only in the Balkans

Misha Glenny: The Balkans Imagined, 29 April 1999

Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination 
by Vesna Goldsworthy.
Yale, 254 pp., £19.95, May 1998, 0 300 07312 7
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Imagining the Balkans 
by Maria Todorova.
Oxford, 270 pp., £35, June 1997, 9780195087505
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... perceptions and prejudices by tracing the development of Balkan images in English literature from Byron through The Prisoner of Zenda, Dracula, Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy and beyond. It is thoroughly enjoyable to read and peppered with hilarious or hair-raising quotations from some of Britain’s most admired authors. A literary critic, Goldsworthy ...

Cold Sweat

Alan Bennett, 15 October 1981

Forms of Talk 
by Erving Goffman.
Blackwell, 335 pp., £12, September 1981, 0 631 12788 7
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... into ever shallower entries, perhaps to evade his admirers. I have just been reading Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, recently reissued with a nice introduction by Bruce Chatwin.† Byron’s splendid book is made rather than marred by his unrepentant snobbery. Chatwin, who travelled the same road thirty years ...
George Macaulay Trevelyan: A Memoir 
by Mary Moorman.
Hamish Hamilton, 253 pp., £9.95, April 1980, 0 241 10358 4
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Public and Private 
by Humphrey Trevelyan.
Hamish Hamilton, 208 pp., £8.95, February 1980, 0 241 10357 6
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... He really believed that it was worth redeeming Trento and Trieste. He came to feel Shelley and Byron would have approved of Italy’s imperialist war, and he saw the Austria of 1914 (with its universal franchise which Britain still lacked) in terms of the black legend of literary liberalism. Trevelyan had swallowed hook, line and sinker the attitudes of ...

When the going gets weird

A. Craig Copetas, 19 December 1991

Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream 
by Hunter S. Thompson.
Picador, 316 pp., £15.95, October 1991, 0 330 31994 9
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... of Mailer, Wolfe, Vidal, Buckley, Burroughs and Genet. The editors who followed Hayes, men like Byron Dobell and the late Don Erickson, carried on the tradition, ensuring that each new generation of editors understood that Esquire’s mandate was to remain on the cutting edge of journalism and literature. Although Hayes was long gone from Esquire by the ...

Off-Beat

Iain Sinclair, 6 June 1996

... His love of ‘blending his shit with the beauty of the Romantics’. ‘Blake, Shelley, Keats, Byron ... goody gumdrops.’ The Europe of the old gods is a lost, parallel culture. On opium Corso made an extraordinary collage of Paris – featured in the Whitney show – the same domes, in different sizes, piled on top of each other. ‘Ten Sacré ...

With a Da bin ich!

Seamus Perry: Properly Lawrentian, 9 September 2021

Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence 
by Frances Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 488 pp., £25, May 2021, 978 1 4088 9362 3
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... don’t pretend that I quite understand/My own meaning when I would be very fine,’ Byron said. There is good sense in the proposition that literary works often turn out different to what their originators thought they intended. That is, after all, only to say of writing what is true of any human action: intentions are a lot more complicated and ...

Talking about Leonidas

Alexander Clapp, 9 June 2022

The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe  
by Mark Mazower.
Allen Lane, 574 pp., £30, November 2021, 978 0 241 00410 4
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... with the story of the philhellenes rather than with the Greeks themselves. But for Mazower, Byron and the others are almost a sideshow to what was happening in Greek villages and ports and encampments. The narration of the conflict presents certain challenges: the Greek Revolution produced no Napoleon or Garibaldi, no figure on whom its fortunes ...

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