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Lyrics and Ironies

Christopher Ricks, 4 December 1986

The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony 
by D.J. Enright.
Oxford, 178 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 19 212253 3
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Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric 
by Donald Davie.
Cambridge, 76 pp., £15, September 1986, 0 521 32264 2
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... themselves than as furnishing the perfect polemical points de repère; over the years the poems of Christopher Middleton, of J.H. Prynne, and of C.H. Sisson, have all found themselves not so much constituting the grounds of Davie’s argument as figuring in it. But Milosz is too stubborn and faceted to be functionalised, even in the most high-minded way, and ...

A Pound a Glimpse

Daniel Smith: Epilepsy, 16 November 2017

A Smell of Burning: The Story of Epilepsy 
by Colin Grant.
Cape, 242 pp., £16.99, August 2016, 978 0 224 10182 0
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The End of Epilepsy? A History of the Modern Era of Epilepsy, 1860-2010 
by Dieter Schmidt and Simon Shorvon.
Oxford, 208 pp., £39.99, September 2016, 978 0 19 872590 9
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... to the genre, it was born out of anguish. When Grant was in his twenties, his teenage brother, Christopher, the youngest, most loved member of the family, began to have seizures. At first, Christopher’s seizures took the form of fainting spells. One moment he would be upright, the next on the floor, unconscious. Grant ...

Winner’s History

Howard Erskine-Hill, 20 August 1981

Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution 
by Christopher Hill.
Weidenfeld, 100 pp., £5.95, October 1980, 0 297 77780 7
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The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 
by Christopher Hill.
Nelson, 296 pp., £5.95, September 1980, 0 17 712002 9
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... some good things, and some both great and good, undoubtedly came out of the period 1640-60 which Christopher Hill calls ‘the English Revolution’. What came out, however, was not necessarily originated by the period. It is a nice problem to distinguish causation from succession. In 12 short and easygoing chapters, originally the Merle Curti Lectures at ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: Reagan and Rambo, 3 October 1985

... debate. It is a very rare night that does not feature some strong footage from the Cape of Good Hope, usually succeeded by some strenuous punditry. American networks easily make up in technological sweetness what they have abandoned by way of political depth, and some real feats have been accomplished. By satellite, and by the deft use of separate studios ...

Exact Walking

Christopher Hill, 19 June 1980

Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 
by R.T. Kendall.
Oxford, 252 pp., £12.50, February 1980, 0 19 826716 9
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... suggest, appealed especially to the middling sort above the poverty line, some of whom could hope to prosper by hard work, frugality and good luck. They needed what Dr Kendall calls a voluntarist theology, of the type that Beza and Perkins gave them and Calvin did not. So far as literate members of congregations are concerned, I think we must stress the ...

Australia’s Nineties

Clive James, 15 July 1982

Christopher Brennan: A Critical Biography 
by Axel Clark.
Melbourne, 358 pp., £20, May 1980, 0 522 84182 1
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... No Australian poet before Christopher Brennan was fully conscious of the artistic problem posed by isolation from Europe, and no Australian poet since has been fully disabled by it. Brennan’s life and death dramatised the problem once and for all. It was and is a true problem, not just a difficulty. Brennan, whether he wanted to or not, lived the problem to the full, and thereby, on everybody else’s behalf, got it out into the open ...

On Saving the Warburg

Charles Hope, 4 December 2014

... finally replied, he did not refer to our suggestions at all. We then sought advice from Christopher McCall QC, who confirmed that our concerns were justified. Only then did the university show the deed to its in-house legal adviser, after which both parties agreed to approach the Charity Commission for guidance. At the end of 2008, the commission ...

Major and Minor

Frank Kermode, 6 June 1985

The Oxford Companion to English Literature 
edited by Margaret Drabble.
Oxford, 1155 pp., £15, April 1985, 0 19 866130 4
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... wordage as Day-Lewis and a lot less than Maugham. From Australia we have Patrick White but not Christopher Brennan or A.D. Hope. Elsewhere one notes the ample presence of D. Lessing and the absence of D. Jacobson; his near-namesake Roman Jakobson is in, and said to be still alive, though alas he is not. Why Auerbach and ...

Solitary Reapers

Christopher Salvesen, 5 June 1980

The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840 
by John Barrell.
Cambridge, 179 pp., £15, March 1980, 0 521 22509 4
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... had seen the evening star set over a poor man’s cottage, and connected it with the hope of human happiness’. It was, he admitted, a pastoral definition and he could offer others less romantic. But his ability to harmonise his radicalism and his imagination is instructive. To make a point about the late paintings of Gainsborough, Dr Barrell ...

Oh, Lionel!

Christopher Hitchens, 3 December 1992

P.G. Wodehouse: Man and Myth 
by Barry Phelps.
Constable, 344 pp., £16.95, October 1992, 9780094716209
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... and the reticent minor public schoolboy, because only by brooding on such connections can we hope to save the idea of English humour from the drawing-room and saloon-bar conscription that is eternally levied upon it by bland, Loamshire wits like Mr ...

Doofus

Christopher Tayler: Dave Eggers, 3 April 2003

You Shall Know Our Velocity 
by Dave Eggers.
Hamish Hamilton, 350 pp., £16.99, February 2003, 0 241 14228 8
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... about the morality of their largesse. Perhaps they’re paying for docility or spreading false hope? Perhaps their motives aren’t as pure as they’d imagined? Typically, they try to divert themselves from such questions with elaborate schemes for getting rid of the cash anonymously: in Senegal, for instance, they tape up a wad of notes, scrawl ‘Here I ...

Hindsight Tickling

Christopher Tayler: Disappointing sequels, 21 October 2004

The Closed Circle 
by Jonathan Coe.
Viking, 433 pp., £17.99, September 2004, 0 670 89254 8
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... one’), along with some suitably cryptic allusions and some asides about the inadvisability of hope. Coe’s attempts to imitate the master’s way with cliché don’t really come off – he didn’t have the resources to reproduce Beckett’s ‘no bone to pick with graveyards’ stuff – but the book raises some laughs when the humour is less ...

Prophetic Chronoscape

Abigail Green: Brandenburg-Prussian Power, 19 March 2020

Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich 
by Christopher Clark.
Princeton, 295 pp., £25, January 2019, 978 0 691 18165 3
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... As gravity bends light, so power bends time,’ Christopher Clark writes. The ‘temporal turn’, which has recently become fashionable among historians, looks at the interplay between an individual’s subjective experience of the world and the temporal systems that surround them. These systems are generated, on the one hand, by the infrastructure of modernity – clocks, railways, the internet – and, on the other, by ideas about stasis and change, and the past, present and future ...

Runagately Rogue

Tobias Gregory: Puritans and Others, 25 August 2011

The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570-1640 
by Christopher Haigh.
Oxford, 284 pp., £32, September 2009, 978 0 19 921650 5
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... man can certtainely know in this World, whether hee shall bee saved, or damned: but all men must hope well, and be of a good beliefe.’ ‘Nay, we must go further than hope well,’ Theologus replies. ‘We may not venture our salvation upon uncertaine hopes. As, if a man should hope it ...

Poor Jack

Noël Annan, 5 December 1985

Leaves from a Victorian Diary 
by Edward Leeves and John Sparrow.
Alison Press/Secker, 126 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 436 24370 9
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... me, I can remember them very well.’ They had in fact been sitting there for longer perhaps than Christopher Isherwood knew. In June 1849 Edward Leeves, an elderly expatriate, driven out of Venice by the Austrian bombardment, made his way to London. There he met Jack Brand, a trooper in the Blues. A month later Leeves went to Scotland to stay with the ...

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