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The Rainbow

Lawrence Gowing, 17 March 1983

Rubens and the Poetics of Landscape 
by Lisa Vergara.
Yale, 228 pp., £29, November 1982, 0 03 000250 8
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James Ward’s Gordale Scar: An Essay in the Sublime 
by Edward Nygren.
Tate Gallery, 64 pp., £2.95, November 1982, 0 905005 93 7
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... in the bottom left-hand corner. ‘It seemed such a marvellous place to have a rainbow!’ Patrick George, a considerable Rubenist, once said to me. But Lisa Vergara’s destination is the idyllic landscapes of the last years of his life – and they no longer show ‘phenomena’ in this sense. There are no catastrophes and no perils. Instead there is the ...

Not bothered

E.S. Turner, 29 August 1991

The Bachelor Duke: William Spencer Cavendish, Sixth Duke of Devonshire, 1790-1858 
by James Lees-Milne.
Murray, 234 pp., £19.95, March 1991, 0 7195 4920 5
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... and liked to think he had enjoyed a romantic friendship with Princess Charlotte, George IV’s daughter, whose royal blood rendered her inaccessible. They exchanged letters and gifts, but it amounted, we are told, to ‘little more than une amitié amoureuse’. The Duke wept when the Princess died in childbirth, but so did all England. In ...

Crossed Palettes

Ronald Paulson, 4 November 1993

Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in 18th-Century England 
by David Solkin.
Yale, 312 pp., £40, July 1993, 0 300 05741 5
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... There are two British world-class painters, Turner and Constable; but there are a number of others – at least as original and interesting as their contemporaries on the Continent – who created the English School of painting in the first two thirds of the 18th century. Starting with Hogarth, the first major native-born painter, they can be roughly divided into those who followed academic precepts, often slavishly but sometimes imaginatively (Reynolds, Wilson, Barry and West), and those whose paintings were, in important ways, anti-academic, or ‘English’: Hogarth himself, Zoffany, Wright of Derby, Stubbs, Gainsborough, Rowlandson and Blake ...

Above the kissing line

E.S. Turner, 28 January 1993

My Ascent of Mont Blanc 
by Henriette d’Angeville, translated by Jennifer Barnes.
HarperCollins, 132 pp., £17.99, December 1992, 0 00 215717 9
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Backwards to Britain 
by Jules Verne, translated by Janice Valls-Russell.
Chambers, 227 pp., £14.99, October 1992, 0 550 23000 9
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... an injustice by her ‘much-quoted remark’ that her motive had been to gain as much publicity as George Sand, who had scandalised Chamonix by turning up in her ‘ideologically significant male garb, accompanied by a youth dressed as a woman’. In her book Henriette’s explanation runs to waffle: ‘The soul has needs, as does the body, peculiar to each ...

Petting Cafés!

E.S. Turner: Wartime spivs and dodgers, 4 December 2003

An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War 
by Donald Thomas.
Murray, 429 pp., £20, July 2003, 0 7195 5732 1
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... destined to be hanged in 1946 for the lurid murders of young women (the wartime careers of John George Haigh, the ‘acid bath murderer’, and John Christie, the serial killer, are also noted). The 50,000 arrests claimed by the Army’s investigative branch were not for failure to salute, or to polish a bucket, but for the sorts of knavery all too current ...

Our chaps will deal with them

E.S. Turner: The Great Flap of 1940, 8 August 2002

Dad’s Army: The Story of a Classic Television Show 
by Graham McCann.
Fourth Estate, 304 pp., £7.99, August 2002, 1 84115 309 5
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... five miles up. By the war’s end the force, which at its peak had numbered 1,793,000, had won two George Crosses and 13 George Medals. A total of 1206 volunteers were either killed on duty or died from wounds. Piquant items from Graham McCann’s book about Dad’s Army have been widely quoted, notably the insistence by ...

‘Turbot, sir,’ said the waiter

E.S. Turner, 4 April 1991

After Hours with P.G. Wodehouse 
by Richard Usborne.
Hutchinson, 201 pp., £15.99, February 1991, 0 09 174712 0
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... unemployed as gardeners). Usborne the indefatigable has resolved to read more of a writer called George Ade, who had a pretty turn of phrase and may have influenced the master. His Knocking the Neighbours (1911) contains the following:    He had a temperature of 102 and his ears were hanging down. Also, during the period of coma, someone had extracted ...

The Stansgate Tapes

John Turner, 8 December 1994

Years of Hope: Diaries, Papers and Letters, 1940-62 
by Tony Benn, edited by Ruth Winstone.
Hutchinson, 442 pp., £25, September 1994, 0 09 178534 0
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... or hereditary politicians, and many, like Benn, were both. His father had fallen out with Lloyd George in December 1916, and drifted towards the Labour Party, which eventually made him Secretary of State for India in 1929-31 and, briefly, Secretary of State for Air in the Attlee Government. The Benn family were publishers (like the Macmillan family, though ...

Glooms

E.S. Turner, 23 February 1995

Edward Lear: A Biography 
by Peter Levi.
Macmillan, 362 pp., £20, January 1995, 0 333 58804 5
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... is well able to translate for us). Levi also knows enough about Greek literature to reveal that George Seferis wrote a book of limericks for a grandson and reminds us – though readers of this journal need no reminding – that the French had their limericks too. He is much exercised by Lear’s old person of Sparta, who had 25 sons and one daughter ...

Walking on Eyeballs

E.S. Turner: The history of gout, 7 January 1999

Gout: The Patrician Malady 
by Roy Porter and G.S. Rousseau.
Yale, 393 pp., £25, September 1998, 0 300 07386 0
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... be found in Humphry Clinker. Jane Austen admits no gouty males to her novels, not even in Bath. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch gout ‘becomes a symbol for an entire society’ and poor Dr Lydgate ends up miserably writing a treatise on the subject. The authors expected to find plenty about gout in Conrad, who suffered diabolically from the malady, but found ...

A Potent Joy

E.S. Turner, 4 July 1985

Hitler’s Rockets: The Story of the V-2s 
by Norman Longmate.
Hutchinson, 423 pp., £13.95, May 1985, 0 09 158820 0
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... old doodlebug’, which gave everyone a chance to bolt for cover when the engine cut out. George Orwell in Tribune said that what depressed him about V-2s was ‘the way they set people talking about the next war’, when no doubt rockets would be fired across the Atlantic. It was odd that no rocket dropped on the ‘square mile’ of the City of ...

Paddling in the Gravy

E.S. Turner: Bath’s panderer-in-chief, 21 July 2005

The Imaginary Autocrat: Beau Nash and the Invention of Bath 
by John Eglin.
Profile, 292 pp., £20, May 2005, 1 86197 302 0
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... as the Earl of Chesterfield said, ‘he was taken by many at a distance for a gilt garland.’ George Brummell, an equally famous beau of a later day, would have thought that irredeemably vulgar. Yet Bath, a city in the ascendant, needed someone like Nash. When the 18th century came in it was half spa, half pleasure resort. The haut ton found Tunbridge ...

Sydney’s Inferno

Jonathan Coe, 24 September 1992

The Last Magician 
by Janette Turner Hospital et al.
Virago, 352 pp., £14.99, June 1992, 1 85381 325 7
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Vinland 
by George Mackay Brown.
Murray, 232 pp., £14.95, July 1992, 0 7195 5149 8
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... Mess is one of the distinguishing features of Janette Turner Hospital’s writing, but also one of its abiding themes: and part of the reader’s difficulty has always been to decide how much of the mess is intention, and how much miscalculation. The characters in Borderline, her 1985 novel which has many formal similarities with The Last Magician (including an obsession with Dante), are all engaged in transgressing boundaries, whether willingly or not, and the title story of her collection Isobars makes explicit its preoccupation with ‘ideas of order’ imposed upon a messy and shifting reality Lines drawn on a map, she wrote in that story, are ‘talismanic’ and represent ‘the magical thinking of quantitative and rational people ...

Monstrous Millinery

E.S. Turner, 12 December 1996

British Military Spectacle: From the Napoleonic Wars through the Crimea 
by Scott Hughes Myerly.
Harvard, 336 pp., £23.50, December 1996, 0 674 08249 4
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... kind. Officers of crack regiments disliked postings to the social death of factory towns. Captain George Brummell, learning that his regiment, the Tenth Light Dragoons, was to be sent north, sought permission of his colonel, the Prince of Wales, to resign his commission: ‘Think, your Royal Highness – Manchester!’ To which the Prince replied: ‘Oh, by ...

The Female Accelerator

E.S. Turner, 24 April 1997

The Bicycle 
by Pryor Dodge.
Flammarion, 224 pp., £35, May 1996, 2 08 013551 1
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... of wheels to two, but tricycles and quadricycles were heavy going. A fetching illustration by George Cruikshank, dated 1819, shows two young women, each mounted on a Draisine-type Female Accelerator, taking grateful advantage of the breast-rests fitted above the handlebars to ease the strain of leaning forward while on the march. Such supports (if they ...

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