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The Thought of Ruislip

E.S. Turner: The Metropolitan Line, 2 December 2004

Metro-Land: British Empire Exhibition Number 
by Oliver Green.
Southbank, 144 pp., £16.99, July 2004, 1 904915 00 0
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... was rebellion and it was saved for Metroland and the nation. World War One inevitably left its mark. Our ‘flying men’, it seems, did nothing to enhance property values on the Chiltern slopes. The Rothschild estate of Halton was ‘transformed into a vast camp of hutments, which played sad havoc with the beauty of the hillside towards Tring, and this ...

Gas-Bags

E.S. Turner: The Graf Zeppelin, 15 November 2001

Dr Eckener’s Dream Machine: The Historic Saga of the Round-the-World Zeppelin 
by Douglas Botting.
HarperCollins, 356 pp., £17.99, September 2001, 0 00 257191 9
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... resist borrowing for an epigraph John Masefield’s tribute to the great sailing ships: ‘They mark our passage as a race of men,/Earth will not see such ships as these again.’ This lively book is a zeppelin history which concentrates on the round-the-world voyage of the Graf Zeppelin in 1929. Anyone who supposes that Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was a ...

Like a Manta Ray

Jenny Turner: The Entire History of Sex, 22 October 2015

The Argonauts 
by Maggie Nelson.
Graywolf, 143 pp., £23, May 2015, 978 1 55597 707 8
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... of pure wildness’, Nelson writes, whereas sometimes she thinks her own sentences do no more than mark that wildness’s grave. Being by trade a poet of plain language – William Carlos Williams would be another hero, also George Oppen, also Eileen Myles – Nelson finds her artistic focus drawn in two main directions. On the one hand, she crafts her words ...

Constable’s Weather

David Sylvester, 29 August 1991

... by the one and reading a poem by the other, as there is, perhaps, between looking at a picture by Turner and reading a poem by Shelley. Wordsworth is limpid, reflective, precisely evocative of the joy or panic the poet has experienced in the face of given phenomena and of the mark this has left upon him; he essentially ...

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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... their ‘emoluments’ tucked under their napkins, but we are not told the rate for the job. To mark her feat Henriette was given a signed certificate of the type which today is earned merely by sitting in an aircraft as it passes over the Equator. My Ascent of Mont Blanc has been a long time on the way to the printers. Though no literary masterpiece, it is ...

Morality in the Oxygen

E.S. Turner: Tobogganing, 14 December 2000

How the English Made the Alps 
by Jim Ring.
Murray, 287 pp., £19.99, September 2000, 0 7195 5689 9
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Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps 
by Fergus Fleming.
Granta, 398 pp., £20, November 2000, 1 86207 379 1
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... Horace Benedict de Saussure, who made the ascent the following year, with a young Englishman, Mark Beaufoy, hard on his heels. The insouciant Beaufoy, later a militia colonel and distinguished astronomer, admitted to wearing little more than the equivalent of a pair of pyjamas. The wars with Revolutionary France discouraged Alpinism, but by Byron’s day ...

Seeing through Fuller

Nicholas Penny, 30 March 1989

Theoria: Art and the Absence of Grace 
by Peter Fuller.
Chatto, 260 pp., £15, November 1988, 0 7011 2942 5
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Seeing through Berger 
by Peter Fuller.
Claridge, 176 pp., £8.95, November 1988, 1 870626 75 3
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Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain. Vol. IX: Since the Second World War 
edited by Boris Ford.
Cambridge, 369 pp., £19.50, November 1988, 0 521 32765 2
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Ruskin’s Myths 
by Dinah Birch.
Oxford, 212 pp., £22.50, August 1988, 9780198128724
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The Sun is God: Painting, Literature and Mythology in the 19th Century 
edited by J.B. Bullen.
Oxford, 230 pp., £27.50, March 1989, 0 19 812884 3
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Artisans and Architects: The Ruskinian Tradition in Architectural Thought 
by Mark Swenarton.
Macmillan, 239 pp., £35, February 1989, 0 333 46460 5
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... and are especially active, like the Surrealists, on the beaches. Tony Cragg, recently awarded the Turner Prize, made his name with relief murals composed of ‘beach-worn ship-refuse, plastic bottles, lids, frisbees, old toys, plastic milk crates’. For Waldemar Januszczak these were didactic – ‘one of the things they were about was the indisposability ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: John Martin, 20 October 2011

... visionary. But his designs for the reconstruction of London’s sewers are not something Blake or Turner would have taken on. The directors of our own cultural establishments have not given up the notion that there is a place for gatekeepers, but they are more curious and less severe than the directors of the Royal Academy were in Martin’s day. They need ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: Thomas Girtin, 22 August 2002

... Turner’s remark ‘Had Tom Girtin lived, I should have starved’ is as good a posthumous puff as any artist ever gave another. It’s printed on the back of Tate Britain’s Girtin catalogue. There it reads as a challenge. It puts you on your mettle as you walk past the many pictures whose original effect must be reconstructed from sheets that time has rendered curiously rusty or unnaturally blue ...

Englishmen’s Castles

Gavin Stamp, 7 February 1980

The Victorian Country House 
by Mark Girouard.
Yale, 470 pp., £14.95, September 1980, 0 300 02390 1
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The Artist and the Country House 
by John Harris.
Sotheby Parke Bernet, 376 pp., £37.50, November 1980, 0 85667 053 7
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National Trust Studies 1980 
edited by Gervase Jackson-Stops.
Sotheby Parke Bernet, 175 pp., £8.95, October 1980, 0 85667 065 0
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... in architecture, but country houses manage to secure a much wider, even popular, audience. Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House has actually become a best-seller – extraordinary in the field of architectural history – and its unprecedented success has encouraged Yale to issue as a companion volume a new edition of his earlier The ...

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 ...

At Dulwich

Alice Spawls: Vanessa Bell, 18 May 2017

... not in evidence here. The earliest exhibit at Dulwich is a small painting from 1908, Saxon Sydney-Turner at the Piano. It has something of Sargent’s slickness, though not put to quite the same effect (she liked filling in where he liked trailing off) and shows Sydney-Turner in profile at his instrument: the flair of his ...

If you don’t swing, don’t ring

Christopher Turner: Playboy Mansions, 21 April 2016

Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics 
by Beatriz Preciado.
Zone, 303 pp., £20.95, October 2014, 978 1 935408 48 2
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Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny 
by Holly Madison.
Dey Street, 334 pp., £16.99, July 2015, 978 0 06 237210 9
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... pool, and a grotto with whirlpool baths modelled on the caves at Lascaux. The Mansion Mark II was a gated Neverland and, in its decadence, utterly kitsch. There was no explicitly modern décor. As in Chicago, the LA Mansion served as a backdrop for Playboy shoots, with subscribers offered a peek through the bunny-shaped keyhole. But the ...

Stepping Stone to the New Times

Christopher Turner: Bauhaus, 5 July 2012

Bauhaus: Art as Life 
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... ideology around the globe (the curators resist the temptation to show how the émigrés left their mark on Britain). Many of the Bauhaus’s teachers emigrated to the US: Gropius and Breuer to the Harvard School of Design after a brief stint in London; Albers to Black Mountain College and Mies to the Institute of Technology in Chicago. In 1937, also in ...

Illuminating, horrible etc

Jenny Turner: David Foster Wallace, 14 April 2011

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace 
by David Lipsky.
Broadway, 320 pp., $16.99, 9780307592439
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The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel 
by David Foster Wallace.
Hamish Hamilton, 547 pp., £20, April 2011, 978 0 241 14480 0
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... infinitely dense thing. And that … had kind of exploded.’ He collaborated with his friend Mark Costello on Signifying Rappers (1990), an odd, fizzy book about ‘serious rap’ and ‘the “postmodern” inversion’. He started, and abandoned, a PhD at Harvard. He booked himself into hospital with suicidal thoughts. And then things started going ...

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