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How’s the Empress?

James Wood: Graham Swift, 17 April 2003

The Light of Day 
by Graham Swift.
Hamish Hamilton, 244 pp., £16.99, February 2003, 0 241 14204 0
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... an exceptional narrative craftsman, adept at dangling sinister, wormy facts (in this he resembles Ian McEwan, a writer temperamentally close). George tells us, eventually, that he was pushed out of his job as a detective for over-zealous interviewing procedures, that he is divorced, and that his daughter has recently come out to him as a lesbian. If the novel ...

Reduced to Ashes and Rubbage

Jessie Childs: Civil War Traumas, 3 January 2019

Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil Wars 
edited by David Appleby and Andrew Hopper.
Manchester, 247 pp., £80, July 2018, 978 1 5261 2480 7
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... help if we knew where the original bodies were buried. In the first section of Battle-Scarred, Ian Atherton and Stuart Jennings highlight the astonishing scarcity of major civil war burial sites. Two, maybe three, mass graves have been scientifically excavated (they disagree over the identification of a recent big find in York). Parish registers offer few ...

Martian Arts

Jonathan Raban, 23 July 1987

Home and Away 
by Steve Ellis.
Bloodaxe, 62 pp., £4.50, February 1987, 9781852240271
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The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper 
by Blake Morrison.
Chatto, 48 pp., £4.95, May 1987, 0 7011 3227 2
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The Frighteners 
by Sean O’Brien.
Bloodaxe, 64 pp., £4.50, February 1987, 9781852240134
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... In 1972 the final issue of Ian Hamilton’s Review was given over to a symposium on ‘The State of Poetry’. Only fifteen years on, it has the flavour of a yellowed historical document. The symposium’s tone is embattled: it finds enemies and traitors on every bookshelf, with the whole future of English poetry threatened by sinister forces ...

Howl

Adam Mars-Jones, 21 September 1995

Fullalove 
by Gordon Burn.
Secker, 231 pp., £14.99, August 1995, 0 436 20059 7
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... of his own hollowness. In this sentence, for instance: ‘I loved [my family] in a bred-in-the-bone, sentimental sense, but I didn’t know them any more than I knew the people whose lives I crashed or greased my way into most weeks of the year, whatever I might have preferred to believe.’ Or this one: ‘Without intending to I have put together a yellow ...

That Ol’ Thumb

Mike Jay: Hitchhiking, 23 June 2022

Driving with Strangers: What Hitchhiking Tells Us about Humanity 
by Jonathan Purkis.
Manchester, 301 pp., £20, January, 978 1 5261 6004 1
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... sign. Like innumerable other bygones – the last milk bottle on a doorstep, the last rag and bone cart – it’s a sight that disappeared without fanfare. Growing up in West London close to the M4 I would see hitchhikers all the time, and by my late teens I was one of them. The first ride out of town usually dropped me at a motorway service station in ...

Eels in Their Pockets

Nick Richardson: Poaching, 17 December 2015

The Last English Poachers 
by Bob Tovey and Brian Tovey, with John McDonald.
Simon & Schuster, 288 pp., £16.99, May 2015, 978 1 4711 3567 5
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... memoirs and wistful outsider essays. Black Bill, who appears in the Country Life journalist Ian Niall’s Poacher’s Handbook (1950), is a perfect specimen. He has a black, tousled beard and an over-large jacket and can charm partridges from their roosts with a brass whistle. He also uses raisins to catch pheasants like Danny’s dad in Roald Dahl’s ...

Diary

Paul Laity: Henry Woodd Nevinson, 3 February 2000

... Henry Woodd Nevinson is one of my heroes, the sort of person I dream of being. The champion crusader of Edwardian journalism, he filed pro-Revolutionary articles from Russia in 1905, and pro-Nationalist pieces from India. He won an exhausting battle to expose forced labour on the cocoa plantations of Portuguese Angola. Celebrated as a war correspondent, he started off wanting to fight, and picked up his pen only when he couldn’t persuade his Radical friends to join him in setting up a legion of volunteers to help Greece in its war against Turkey ...

The Devil upon Two Sticks

Charles Nicholl: Samuel Foote, 23 May 2013

Mr Foote’s Other Leg: Comedy, Tragedy and Murder in Georgian London 
by Ian Kelly.
Picador, 462 pp., £18.99, October 2012, 978 0 330 51783 6
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... greeted with a gleeful salvo of puns and bon-mots, an echo of which can be heard in the title of Ian Kelly’s splendid new biography. Ever the theatrical opportunist, he was soon back onstage, with a new prosthesis and two new comedies fit for purpose: The Lame Lover, in which he played the lecherous Sir Luke Limp; and The Devil upon Two Sticks, a satire on ...

Vigah

Elizabeth Drew: JFK, 20 November 2003

John F. Kennedy: An Unfinished Life 1917-63 
by Robert Dallek.
Allen Lane, 838 pp., £25, September 2003, 0 7139 9737 0
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... Here is Dallek’s depiction of Kennedy’s health at an early point in his Presidency: The bone loss and destruction in his lower back from steroids had been the source of back pain since at least 1940. And while the 1954 surgery that his Addison’s disease had made so risky had given him some limited relief, he continued to live with almost constant ...

Jingoes

R.W. Johnson: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War, 6 May 2004

The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War 
by Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw.
Cambridge, 379 pp., £45, May 2003, 0 521 82453 2
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... secretary of the day, Lord Harcourt, tried to warn the cabinet that ‘we could never take the bone out of the dog’s mouth’ – and indeed, Namibia remained South African until 1990. For Smuts this was just a start. From the early 1920s on, he tried to coax Rhodesia into the Union and dispatched missions to report on the situation in Kenya and ...

Holy Boldness

Tom Paulin: John Bunyan, 16 December 2004

Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent 
by Richard Greaves.
Stanford, 693 pp., £57.50, August 2002, 0 8047 4530 7
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Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan 
by Michael Davies.
Oxford, 393 pp., £65, July 2002, 0 19 924240 2
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The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ 
by Isabel Hofmeyr.
Princeton, 320 pp., £41.95, January 2004, 0 691 11655 5
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... many years ago, ‘The Triumph of the Word of God in the Life and Literature of John Bunyan’, Ian Paisley praised this ‘dreamer and penman’ for his ‘strong doctrinal’ preaching, his opposition to the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, the enormous crowds he drew, and for his prose style. This ‘poor unschooled tinker’ became, Paisley ...

Lost Jokes

Alan Bennett, 2 August 1984

... invented the phrase ‘snobbery with violence’ to describe the school of Sapper and Buchan (and Ian Fleming, for that matter), but then I was told it had been used before, but where and in what circumstances I have forgotten. The form of Forty Years On is more complicated than I would dream of attempting now. It is a play within a play in which the ...

The Last London

Iain Sinclair, 30 March 2017

... before the stalls of sloganised T-shirts, photocopies of graffiti, leather bags, is called Rag & Bone. No Steptoe operation this, but a retail gallery with three beautifully folded sweaters on a plain table, daring you to search for a price tag.In the fugue of London walking, real feet on unreal ground, we have to deal with that sense of ...

Humans

Richard Poirier, 24 January 1985

Slow Learner 
by Thomas Pynchon.
Cape, 204 pp., £8.50, January 1985, 0 224 02283 0
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... favourites of those who like to suppose that his meanings can be pinned down if only readers will bone up on such things as thermodynamics – a subject about which Pynchon, while majoring in English at Cornell, learned something in his courses on engineering physics. It is a story in which Meatball Mulligan is giving a frantic and exhausting three-day ...

Glaswegians

Andrew O’Hagan, 11 May 1995

... off the west of Ireland. A fair number of Scots manned the ship during the closing months of 1940: Ian Affleck used to work in Kalac’s Cycle and Motor Store in Forfar, and felt he’d been born to help power a ship such as this, named after his own town. Angus McInnes’s father had been a fisherman on the Isle of Harris; Angus had sailed with Forfar since ...

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