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Noticing and Not Noticing

John Mullan: Consciousness in Austen, 20 November 2014

The Hidden Jane Austen 
by John Wiltshire.
Cambridge, 195 pp., £17.99, April 2014, 978 1 107 64364 2
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... over her own want of presence of mind’, and we sense the denial of feelings hidden from herself. John Wiltshire’s finely observed study of Jane Austen’s six completed novels is all about the way she conjures characters’ hidden feelings. His title might lead you to expect some revelation of Austen’s private passions but, while knowledgable about her ...

The Shoreham Gang

Seamus Perry: Samuel Palmer, 5 April 2012

Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer 
by Rachel Campbell-Johnston.
Bloomsbury, 382 pp., £25, June 2011, 978 0 7475 9587 8
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... their way through the corn just over his left shoulder – and undisturbed, too, by an insomniac shepherd who pipes to his sheep in a nearby field of standing sheaves, sitting beneath a tree shaped like a lollipop. ‘The Valley Thick with Corn’ (1825). Altogether these might not sound like the ingredients of a very satisfactory work of art; but the ...

In the Shady Wood

Michael Neill: Staging the Forest, 22 March 2018

The Shakespearean Forest 
by Anne Barton.
Cambridge, 185 pp., £75, August 2017, 978 0 521 57344 3
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... in the topic had first been excited by her reading of Ben Jonson’s Robin Hood play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem surprising that The Shakespearean Forest is not a longer book, but Barton became almost blind as a result of macular degeneration and was forced to abandon her work. When ...

Burke and Smith

Karl Miller, 16 October 1980

Sydney Smith 
by Alan Bell.
Oxford, 250 pp., £9.95, October 1980, 0 19 812050 8
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Burke and Hare 
by Owen Dudley Edwards.
Polygon, 300 pp., £7.95, August 1980, 0 904919 27 7
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... atrocity to atrocity, in one of their series of imaginary conversations, the Noctes Ambrosianae. John Wilson (‘Christopher North’) appears to have been responsible for the horribly inflammatory discussion of the subject there, and to have scripted the contributions assigned to the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. One ...

Short Cuts

Anahid Nersessian: At the UCLA Encampment, 23 May 2024

... who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023.Alareer wrote his doctoral dissertation on John Donne. On YouTube, you can find him lecturing, in English, to his students at the Islamic University of Gaza. One lecture begins with a discussion of Horace’s Ars Poetica and the idea that a work of art must delight as well as instruct. ‘The term ...

Henry and Hamlet

Barbara Everett, 22 February 2024

... especially in its literary/dramatic forms, has been a story of kings.) With the exception of King John and Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s English history plays have survived not as one series but two. The first works its way from Henry VI to Richard III. The second turns back into the past to cover the prequel reigns from Richard II to Henry V. It is hard to ...

I’m not a happy poet

John Butt: Lorca, 1 April 1999

Lorca: A Dream of Life 
by Leslie Stainton.
Bloomsbury, 568 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 7475 4128 0
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... brilliance, but his work lacks an important ingredient: thought. The same could be said of the shepherd-poet Miguel Hernández, admired in Spain but ignored elsewhere. Lorca’s some-time lover Luis Cernuda could have mounted a serious poetic challenge, but he suddenly rejected Modernism, and his poetry, always lugubrious, became prosaic and ...

Whipping the wicked

Peter Clarke, 17 April 1980

The Optimists: Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism 
by Ian Bradley.
Faber, 301 pp., £12.50, January 1980, 0 571 11495 4
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... Most of the great positive evils of the world,’ John Stuart Mill asserted in 1863, ‘are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced to within narrow limits.’ This sort of confidence in the reality and efficacy of progress now seems to set the 19th century distinctively apart from our own ...

Muck

Nicholas Penny, 3 November 1983

Constable: The Painter and his Landscape 
by Michael Rosenthal.
Yale, 255 pp., £15.95, April 1983, 0 300 03014 2
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Constable’s England 
by Graham Reynolds.
Weidenfeld, 184 pp., £12.95, September 1983, 0 297 78359 9
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... incentive to pretend that they were not fictions at all. There is good evidence, well presented by John Barrell in his dicussion of Gainsborough in The Dark Side of the Landscape, that increasing comfort was derived in the late 18th century from the belief that the hard-working, honest, loyal, loving families clustered around cottage doors which were admired ...

Toss the monkey wrench

August Kleinzahler: Lee Harwood’s risky poems, 19 May 2005

Collected Poems 
by Lee Harwood.
Shearsman, 522 pp., £17.95, May 2004, 9780907562405
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... publishers in the 1960s. The one anomaly in Harwood’s bibliography is his inclusion, along with John Ashbery and Tom Raworth, in Volume 19 of the Penguin Modern Poets series, published in 1971. The groupings that Penguin came up with in this admirable series tended to be hit or miss. But the combination of Ashbery, Harwood and Raworth is an interesting ...

Paliography

John Sutherland, 15 September 1988

The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins 
by William Clarke.
Allison and Busby, 239 pp., £14.95, August 1988, 0 85031 960 9
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Wilkie Collins: Women, Property and Propriety 
by Philip O’Neill.
Macmillan, 238 pp., £27.50, September 1988, 9780333421994
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... in the early 1860s, his eye wandered to a younger woman, Martha Rudd, the daughter of a Norfolk shepherd. Martha was Caroline’s opposite: slow-witted, docile, virginal and a peasant. After the success of The Woman in White Wilkie was a £5000-a-title author, and could afford expensive vices. He persuaded his innocent Norfolk girl to come to London where ...

One Enormous Room

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Council of Trent, 9 May 2013

Trent: What Happened at the Council 
by John O’Malley.
Harvard, 335 pp., £20, January 2013, 978 0 674 06697 7
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... Church of the Latin Rite, not least that section which remained loyal to the bishop of Rome. John O’Malley illustrates the room in his superb new history of the Council of Trent: the nave of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Trent, a bishopric in the foothills of the Dolomites. In that grand setting, seated on an amphitheatre specially erected for ...

Everything is over before it begins

A.D. Nuttall: Milton criticism, 21 June 2001

How Milton Works 
by Stanley Fish.
Harvard, 616 pp., £23.95, June 2001, 0 674 00465 5
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... are only the steam which obscures the Mirror of Truth.’ Such is Fish’s description of John Milton, the most obstinately argumentative of all English poets, the most heroically strenuous in matters of the mind, the indefatigable compiler of arguments and corroborative materials, whose watchword, all his life, was ‘freedom’. In an age when the ...

Praise Yah

Eliot Weinberger: The Psalms, 24 January 2008

The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary 
by Robert Alter.
Norton, 518 pp., £22, October 2007, 978 0 393 06226 7
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... the Jedi Master we’re in. That sinking feeling hits bottom as early as Psalm 23: The LORD is my shepherd,             I shall not want. In grass meadows He makes me lie down (And, almost needless to say, for ‘He restoreth my soul,’ Alter has ‘My life He brings back.’) The incessant inversion, combined with the predilection for ...

Vertigo

Richard Rudgley: Plant obsessions, 15 July 1999

The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession 
by Susan Orlean.
Heinemann, 348 pp., £12.99, April 1999, 0 434 00783 8
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The Tulip 
by Anna Pavord.
Bloomsbury, 438 pp., £30, January 1999, 0 7475 4296 1
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Plants of Life, Plants of Death 
by Frederick Simoons.
Wisconsin, 568 pp., £27.95, September 1998, 0 299 15904 3
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... turns. At first it seems as if it is going to be a biographical account of the trickster figure of John Laroche, one of the thieves in question. Laroche is an obsessive collector, having been through passionate affairs with turtles, fossils and tropical fish before committing himself to orchids – at least for some of the time Orlean knew him. It is at a ...

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