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Wire him up to a toaster

Seamus Perry: Ordinary Carey, 7 January 2021

A Little History of Poetry 
by John Carey.
Yale, 303 pp., £14.99, March 2020, 978 0 300 23222 6
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... written in a long and distinguished career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal confidences, especially relating to mental illness ...

Victory by Simile

Andrea Brady: Phillis Wheatley’s Evolution, 4 January 2024

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence 
by David Waldstreicher.
Farrar, Straus, 480 pp., £24, March 2023, 978 0 8090 9824 8
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... to the Wheatleys, Phillis began writing out of ‘curiosity’ and acquired small Latin. She knew Homer in Pope’s translations, and her poetry indicates some learning in geography and history. She continued writing in her ‘leisure Moments’ without any intention of publishing, or so the preface to her book later claimed. She was ...

Fellow Genius

Claude Rawson, 5 January 1989

The Poems of John Oldham 
edited by Harold Brooks and Raman Selden.
Oxford, 592 pp., £60, February 1987, 0 19 812456 2
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... at p. 37, ll. 407ff.; Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ at p. 58, ll. 26ff.; Homer, Pliny and Boileau (and Addison and Johnson) on pygmies and cranes at p. 181, ll. 266ff. (also p. 328, ll. 159ff.); Boileau’s ‘De Paris au Pérou, du Japon jusqu’à Rome’ (also a source of Johnson’s ‘China to Peru’) at p. 340; the menstrual ...

Cinematically Challenged

Adam Mars-Jones, 19 September 1996

The Cinema of Isolation 
by Martin Norden.
Rutgers, 385 pp., $48, September 1994, 0 8135 2103 3
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... contemplate. Yet it is striking that there is one area where the film-makers made the character of Homer Parrish less functional than the actor who played him. Russell could put on his prostheses by himself, and wasn’t helpless without them. Could anything signal more clearly the reassuring fact – in this context – of impotence? The character’s ...

Wilderness of Tigers

Michael Neill: Shakespeare’s Latin, 19 March 2015

Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity 
by Colin Burrow.
Oxford, 281 pp., £16.99, September 2013, 978 0 19 968479 3
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... version of the Parallel Lives, and is likely to have kept up with the publication of Chapman’s Homer. Successive chapters of Burrow’s book explore Shakespeare’s engagement with Ovid, Virgil, Plautus and Terence, Seneca and Plutarch, as well as his not inconsiderable acquaintance with the major works of Cicero, Horace, Juvenal and Lucan, among ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Did in 2015, 7 January 2016

... you expect when they rain bricks down on me all day.’ 5 June. Finish Adam Nicolson’s book on Homer, The Mighty Dead, which is occasionally over-rich but very enjoyable. It ends as the Odyssey ends with Odysseus’ return to Ithaca and the slaughter of Penelope’s suitors and the hanging of her maids, scenes of such horror they alienate whatever sympathy ...

Frameworks of Comparison

Benedict Anderson, 21 January 2016

... Mimesis, an extraordinary account of the history of ‘representation’ in the West from Homer to Proust. Our favourite class was a joint seminar on the fiction of Indonesia’s great writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who was then still in one of Suharto’s gulags. Careful, close reading of fiction with a group of excellent students was quite new to ...

What most I love I bite

Matthew Bevis: Stevie Smith, 28 July 2016

The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith 
edited by Will May.
Faber, 806 pp., £35, October 2015, 978 0 571 31130 9
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... Collected Poems had none), and is attentive to Smith’s range of allusion – Homer, Pindar, Seneca, Catullus, Wither, Young, Blake, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Eliot and many more. May’s interest in Smith’s performances makes you want to return to her recordings, gets you to think about the kind of life her voice ...

In His Pink Negligée

Colm Tóibín: The Ruthless Truman Capote, 21 April 2005

The Complete Stories 
by Truman Capote.
Random House, 400 pp., $24.95, September 2004, 0 679 64310 9
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Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote 
edited by Gerald Clarke.
Random House, 487 pp., $27.95, September 2004, 0 375 50133 9
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... of Myrt Clare’s mother, Mrs Truitt? Is it Sadie? (Myrt Clare was the postmistress.) And when did Homer Clare die?’ Soon afterwards, he needed to know the name of the secretary in the sheriff’s office. On 26 March 1961 he wrote again: ‘In Reno, when the policeman spotted the car, and recognised the licence number, how did he know it was the car?’ On ...

Most Himself

Matthew Reynolds: Dryden, 19 July 2007

The Poems of John Dryden: Vol. V 1697-1700 
edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins.
Longman, 707 pp., £113.99, July 2005, 0 582 49214 9
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Dryden: Selected Poems 
edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins.
Longman, 856 pp., £19.99, February 2007, 978 1 4058 3545 9
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... Catholic (The Hind and the Panther). Historical chronicle (Annus Mirabilis). Translation: from Homer, Juvenal, Persius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Chaucer and others; and of the complete works of Virgil. And then there are the massed and (except All for Love) rather mediocre plays which took up most of his time and earned much of his money: heroic tragedies (The ...

Don’t break that fiddle

Tobias Gregory: Eclectic Imitators, 19 November 2020

Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity 
by Colin Burrow.
Oxford, 470 pp., £36.99, May 2019, 978 0 19 883808 1
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How the Classics Made Shakespeare 
by Jonathan Bate.
Princeton, 361 pp., £15.99, October 2020, 978 0 691 21014 8
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... Books, articles, whole careers have been devoted to studying particular cases: Virgil imitating Homer, or Renaissance humanists imitating Cicero, or English Romantics imitating Milton, or modern novelists trying not to imitate Joyce. A historian of imitation has to survey this vast body of scholarship without becoming overwhelmed.This is the challenge Colin ...

Speak for yourself, matey

Adam Mars-Jones: The Uses of Camp, 22 November 2012

How to Be Gay 
by David Halperin.
Harvard, 549 pp., £25.95, August 2012, 978 0 674 06679 3
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... that perception, thereby creates a basis for community.’ That’s not quite how it works in ‘Homer’s Phobia’, from Season Eight of The Simpsons, first broadcast in 1997. John Waters provides the voice of a dealer in ‘collectibles’ who admires the family’s style, assuming it’s knowingly camp. Even Homer’s ...

Bravo l’artiste

John Lanchester: What is Murdoch after?, 5 February 2004

The Murdoch Archipelago 
by Bruce Page.
Simon and Schuster, 580 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 7432 3936 9
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Rupert Murdoch: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Media Wizard 
by Neil Chenoweth.
Crown Business, 416 pp., $27.50, December 2002, 0 609 61038 4
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Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed up Big Media 
by Michael Wolff.
Flamingo, 381 pp., £18.99, January 2004, 0 00 717881 6
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... in his favour. He also gets credit for his own appearance on the programme, in the episode where Homer and his buddies go to the Super Bowl. ‘I’m billionaire tyrant Rupert Murdoch,’ said billionaire tyrant Rupert Murdoch. Opinions differ as to the most egregious headline ever published by one of Murdoch’s papers. ‘GOTCHA!’, published on the first ...

Unwritten Masterpiece

Barbara Everett: Dryden’s ‘Hamlet’, 4 January 2001

... it has warmth. The warmth is audible in another Dedication, that to the Examen Poeticum: ‘Homer forms and equips those ungodly man-killers, whom we poets, when we flatter them, call heroes: a race of men who can never enjoy quiet in themselves, ‘till they have taken it from all the world.’ His own heroes, Almanzor and Aureng-Zebe, are in this line ...

Ten Thousand Mile Mistake

Thomas Powers: Robert Stone in Saigon, 18 February 2021

Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone 
by Madison Smartt Bell.
Doubleday, 588 pp., £27, March 2020, 978 0 385 54160 2
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The Eye You See With: Selected Non-Fiction 
by Robert Stone, edited by Madison Smartt Bell.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pp., £20.99, April 2020, 978 0 618 38624 6
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‘Dog Soldiers’, A Flag for Sunrise’, Outerbridge Reach’ 
by Robert Stone, edited by Madison Smartt Bell.
Library of America, 1216 pp., £35, March 2020, 978 1 59853 654 6
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... was a Greek or a Jew, had been killed by a bomb in Shanghai in 1937, even that his given name was Homer – are hearsay, most of them floated by Gladys one day, taken back the next. ‘I really don’t know who he was,’ Stone told a researcher in the late 1970s. He added that his mother didn’t seem much interested in men. Stone half-believed that his own ...

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