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Love of His Life

Rosemarie Bodenheimer: Dickens, 8 July 2010

Charles Dickens 
by Michael Slater.
Yale, 696 pp., £25, September 2009, 978 0 300 11207 8
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... view of such occasions. Michael Slater notes his ‘embarrassment’ and ‘irritation’ at the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations of 1864: always for Dickens the best way for a writer or any other artist to be remembered was not through biographies, unless they redounded as much to the honour of the art concerned as did Forster’s Goldsmith, nor ...

Act like Men, Britons!

Tom Shippey: Celticity, 31 July 2008

The History of the Kings of Britain 
by Geoffrey of Monmouth, edited by Michael Reeve, translated by Neil Wright.
Boydell, 307 pp., £50, November 2007, 978 1 84383 206 5
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The History of the Kings of Britain 
by Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Broadview, 383 pp., £8.99, January 2008, 978 1 55111 639 6
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... being turned into Latin verse. Geoffrey’s story worked through to Holinshed and on to Spenser, Shakespeare and Dryden. It gave us Cymbeline, Lear and Old King Cole, as well as Merlin. But has there ever been a definitive text? It survives with four different dedications, to three different people, singly or paired, and sorting that out is only the start of ...

Darling, are you mad?

Jenny Diski: Ghost-writing for Naim Attallah, 4 November 2004

Ghosting 
by Jennie Erdal.
Canongate, 270 pp., £14.99, November 2004, 1 84195 562 0
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... very good reason, Wittgenstein, Auster, Nabokov, Barnes, McEwan, Spinoza, Amis, Aristotle, Zeno, Shakespeare, Pasternak, Banville, Dostoevsky, Frost, Cervantes, Updike, Beckett, Chekhov (and others) make guest appearances with paraphrased words of wisdom, or just words. Erdal does not wear her reading lightly. She has a penchant for the altered cliché ...

A Wonder and a Scandal

Peter Campbell: Titian, 5 April 2001

Titian: The Complete Paintings 
by Filippo Pedrocco and Maria Agnese Chiari Moreto Weil.
Thames and Hudson, 336 pp., £50, March 2001, 0 500 09297 4
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... in terms of life-likeness, on what Titian achieved in the first decades of the 16th century. William Rossetti compared Titian to Shakespeare – both were universal geniuses, both loyal to their home towns. A deeper resemblance is the impossibility in either case of identifying a coherent character, a voice in the ...

Choke Point

Patrick Cockburn: In Dover, 7 November 2019

... or the Maison Dieu, an extraordinary medieval hospice, restored by the great Victorian architect William Burges, which turns out to be open only on Wednesdays. To take in the impressive view from the Western Heights, visitors must first locate a narrow path leading from a nondescript car park to a disused gun platform; they don’t do so in droves. There are ...

‘Kek kek! kokkow! quek quek!’

Barbara Newman: Chaucer’s Voices, 21 November 2019

Chaucer: A European Life 
by Marion Turner.
Princeton, 599 pp., £30, April 2019, 978 0 691 16009 2
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... who played his cards close to his chest. This is one reason there are so many Chaucers. As with Shakespeare, any ‘reading’ of the man is a thinly disguised reading of his work. Turner offers instead a tapestry of interwoven tales. She traces Chaucer’s poetic development by examining his sources – French, Italian and Latin – and discusses the ...

Break your bleedin’ heart

Michael Wood: Proust’s Otherness, 4 January 2024

Swann’s Way 
by Marcel Proust, translated by James Grieve.
NYRB, 450 pp., £16.99, June, 978 1 68137 629 5
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The Swann Way 
by Marcel Proust, translated by Brian Nelson.
Oxford, 430 pp., £9.99, September, 978 0 19 887152 1
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... and the plainer In Search of Lost Time taken on.There is more. In 2013, the first volume of William C. Carter’s ‘revised, annotated’ version of Scott Moncrieff’s work appeared from Yale. Four other volumes of the set are now also available, with one still to come. Carter speaks of Scott Moncrieff’s ‘missteps’, and of his style being ‘at ...

No Rain-Soaked Boots

Toril Moi: On Cristina Campo, 24 October 2024

‘The Unforgivable’ and Other Writings 
by Cristina Campo, translated by Alex Andriesse.
NYRB, 269 pp., £16.99, February, 978 1 68137 802 2
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... writers whose style she admired. She also championed Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams. She did some work for Italian radio and wrote a few prefaces, mostly for works by religious figures.One such preface, to a 1966 edition of Weil’s Waiting for God, caused an uproar. Although Campo had long been an admirer of Weil, her ...

The Price

Dan Jacobson: The concluding part of Dan Jacobson’s interview with Ian Hamilton, 21 February 2002

... that way. After all, Larkin the librarian –No, I don’t think one can.Or Eliot the publisher. William Shakespeare engaged very successfully with the workaday world.Of course.As for your ‘Lives of the Poets’, which you’ve just finished, can you tell me which of the poets are in it?Well, they’re pretty much the ones you’d expect. They are all ...

Love in a Dark Time

Colm Tóibín: Oscar Wilde, 19 April 2001

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde 
edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Fourth Estate, 1270 pp., £35, November 2000, 1 85702 781 7
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... Two days later, Gide wrote once more to his mother: ‘One sees characters like this in a Shakespeare play. And Wilde! Wilde!! What more tragic life is there than his! If only he were more careful – if he were capable of being careful – he would be a genius, a great genius … I am happy to have met him in such a distant place, though even Algiers ...

On the Darwinian View of Progress

Amartya Sen, 5 November 1992

... between Malthus’s invocation of nature to recommend social inaction, in contrast with, say, William Godwin’s active interventionism. In fact, Malthus was a true guru of evolutionary theory. Darwin explains in The Origin that, in part, his theory ‘is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole of animal and vegetable ...

Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer

Julian Barnes: ‘Madame Bovary’, 18 November 2010

Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways 
by Gustave Flaubert and Lydia Davis.
Penguin, 342 pp., £20, November 2010, 978 1 84614 104 1
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... she was Gustave’s lover; certainly, she gave him English lessons. ‘In six months, I will read Shakespeare like an open book,’ he boasted; and together they translated Byron’s ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ into French. (Back in 1844, Flaubert claimed to his friend Louis de Cormenin that he had translated Candide into English.) In May 1857, Flaubert ...

East Hoathly makes a night of it

Marilyn Butler, 6 December 1984

The Diary of Thomas Turner 1754-1765 
edited by David Vaisey.
Oxford, 386 pp., £17.50, November 1984, 0 19 211782 3
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John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings 
edited by Eric Robinson.
Oxford, 185 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 19 211774 2
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John Clare: The Journals, Essays, and the Journey from Essex 
edited by Anne Tibble.
Carcanet, 139 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 0 85635 344 2
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The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare 
edited by Margaret Grainger.
Oxford, 397 pp., £35, January 1984, 0 19 818517 0
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John Clare and the Folk Tradition 
by George Deacon.
Sinclair Browne, 397 pp., £15, February 1983, 0 86300 008 8
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... English village. On Thursday 27 December 1756 two of Turner’s neighbours, Thomas Fuller and William Piper, arrived uninvited and stayed smoking and drinking (‘sponging,’ their host records bitterly) until they began to quarrel, because Tho. Fuller told that which in my opinion was really true, viz., Master Piper, being lavish of his professions of ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Selling my hair on eBay, 6 January 2022

... it’s The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my ...

Tolerant Repression

Blair Worden, 10 May 1990

Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal 
by Tom Mayer.
Cambridge, 326 pp., £32.50, April 1989, 0 521 36104 4
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Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII 
by Alistair Fox.
Blackwell, 317 pp., £35, September 1989, 0 631 13566 9
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The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Portraits at the Court of Henry VIII 
by Retha Warnicke.
Cambridge, 326 pp., £14.95, November 1989, 0 521 37000 0
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English Travellers Abroad 1604-1667 
by John Stoye.
Yale, 448 pp., £12.95, January 1990, 0 300 04180 2
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... an alternative tradition in Henrician historiography, and not only on the Catholic side. Beside Shakespeare’s tribute to Henry stands Sir Walter Ralegh’s protest: ‘if all the pictures and patterns of a merciless prince were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king.’ To the 17th-century republicans ...

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