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Holy Terrors

Penelope Fitzgerald, 4 December 1986

‘Elizabeth’: The Author of ‘Elizabeth and her German Garden’ 
by Karen Usborne.
Bodley Head, 341 pp., £15, October 1986, 0 370 30887 5
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Alison Uttley: The Life of a Country Child 
by Denis Judd.
Joseph, 264 pp., £15.95, October 1986, 0 7181 2449 9
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Richmal Crompton: The Woman behind William 
by Mary Cadogan.
Allen and Unwin, 169 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 04 928054 6
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... Elizabeth puts up against her husband, the Man of Wrath. His potato-pickers, she notes, get a mark and a half a day. ‘The women get less, not because they work less, but because they are women and must not be encouraged.’ Her delight in the weather and the forests would go for nothing without her calm, dry, outrageous defence of herself as a ...

Who knew?

Norman Stone, 20 November 1980

The Terrible Secret 
by Walter Laqueur.
Weidenfeld, 262 pp., £8.95, September 1980, 0 297 77835 8
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... else, came, indirectly, from British readings of top-secret German codes; Anthony Read and David Fisher, in their Operation Lucy, show very well how deviously that system worked, so that top-secret information could be divulged where it mattered, without the source being disclosed or even suspected by the recipient. Whatever the case, Riegner’s report was ...

Smorgasbits

Ian Sansom: Jim Crace, 15 November 2001

The Devil's Larder 
by Jim Crace.
Viking, 194 pp., £12.99, September 2001, 0 670 88145 7
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... whimsies, prose-poems, jokes and good advice, wrapped up in pastry parcels. Imagine M.F.K. Fisher deboned, gutted, sliced, rolled around in flour and filo, and cooked in the oven at Gas Mark 7. Crace offers up his stories on a plate: ‘Here is a question for your guests, next time you dine with new acquaintances at ...

Toxic Sausages

Chris Power: ‘Life Is Everywhere’, 25 January 2024

Life Is Everywhere 
by Lucy Ives.
Peninsula, 452 pp., £12.99, April 2023, 978 1 913512 29 3
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... sense.Le Guin takes her cue from Woman’s Creation (1975), a book by the anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher, which argues that early humans survived mostly by foraging and gathering rather than hunting. From this Le Guin develops her ‘carrier bag theory of evolution’, putting forward the idea that the first cultural device was probably a container rather ...

The Trouble with HRH

Christopher Hitchens, 5 June 1997

Princess Margaret: A Biography 
by Theo Aronson.
O’Mara, 336 pp., £16.99, February 1997, 1 85479 248 2
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... for a marriage of any member of the family who was younger than 25. After the quarter-century mark had been reached, things became simpler. All that was required was the consent of the British and Dominion Parliaments. But the year was 1953, and there was a Coronation on the way, and Canon 107 of the Church of England’s 1603 doctrines expressly forbade ...

The ‘R’ Word

Adam Smyth: For the Love of the Binding, 4 November 2021

Book Ownership in Stuart England 
by David Pearson.
Oxford, 352 pp., £69.99, January, 978 0 19 887012 8
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... which is as pleasant perhaps as any in the World’. Perhaps most intriguing, as described in Mark Purcell’s The Country House Library (2017), is the earl of Northumberland’s ‘Paradise’ room on the visitor-discouraging top floor of the Chapel Tower at Wressle Castle in East Yorkshire. Here the earl seems to have sat and read in something like an ...

Diary

Tim Dee: Twitching, 11 March 2010

... also has the intensity of first love. For some men, nothing else – human or otherwise – will mark their lives to such an extent. Jeremy Mynott’s Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience is an attempt to put birdwatching back into birding, to reconnect the obsession with rarity and listing to a world that thinks more humanly about ...

The People’s Goya

Nicholas Penny: A Fascination with Atrocity, 23 September 2004

Goya 
by Robert Hughes.
Harvill, 429 pp., £25, October 2003, 1 84343 054 1
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... Xavier, was not active as a painter. He does not mention the debate which has led to a question-mark being placed over both the most famous painting by Goya in London (the portrait of Doña Isabel de Porcel in the National Gallery) and the most famous one in New York (the Majas on a Balcony in the Metropolitan Museum).Doña Isabel was acquired for the ...

Deadly Eliza

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: ‘The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors’, 1 November 2001

The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors 
by William Dean Howells et al.
Duke, 416 pp., £13.50, November 2001, 0 8223 2838 0
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Publishing the Family 
by June Howard.
Duke, 304 pp., £13.50, November 2001, 0 8223 2771 6
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... through the generations. But what with the refusal of some writers to join the enterprise – Mark Twain was an early dropout – and the work schedule of others, the engenderer was compelled to get the family under way. No sooner had he done so, however, than he was upstaged by an ‘old-maid aunt’: a character whom Howells had originally relegated to ...

Squeegee Abstracts

Malcolm Bull: Gerhard Richter’s Dialectic, 10 August 2023

Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History 
by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.
MIT, 661 pp., £40, September 2022, 978 0 262 54353 8
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... realism of the Living with Pop exhibition had turned into something else: capitalist realism in Mark Fisher’s sense of the term – not the realistic presentation of capitalism but the recognition that capitalism is the only reality that can ever be imagined. Although the October paintings refer to the German crisis of 1977, they were painted in the ...

Larks

Patricia Craig, 19 September 1985

But for Bunter 
by David Hughes.
Heinemann, 223 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 434 35410 4
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Bunter Sahib 
by Daniel Green.
Hodder, 272 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 340 36429 7
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The Good Terrorist 
by Doris Lessing.
Cape, 370 pp., £9.50, September 1985, 0 224 02323 3
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Unexplained Laughter 
by Alice Thomas Ellis.
Duckworth, 155 pp., £8.95, August 1985, 0 7156 2070 3
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Polaris and Other Stories 
by Fay Weldon.
Hodder, 237 pp., £8.95, August 1985, 0 340 33227 1
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... Anthony Eden and put him down on paper as Harry Wharton. (In fact, this isn’t too wide of the mark. Charles Hamilton has left a record of how he went about the business of assembling his characters, picking up a podgy frame here, a pair of loud trousers there.) The author of But for Bunter, indeed, has a lot of fun selecting later celebrities with whom to ...

Reconstituted Chicken

Philip Kitcher, 2 October 1997

This is Biology 
by Ernst Mayr.
Harvard, 340 pp., £19.95, April 1997, 9780674884687
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... details shows us why the same phenomenon is to be expected in other years as well. Since R.A. Fisher’s work on selection for sex ratios, we’ve had a better explanation. Fisher pointed out that if the sex ratio in a species like ours departs from one to one at the time of sexual maturity there will be a selective ...

Flight of Snakes

Tessa Hadley: Emily Holmes Coleman, 7 September 2023

The Shutter of Snow 
by Emily Holmes Coleman.
Faber, 171 pp., £9.99, February, 978 0 571 37520 2
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... poem she never finished (as well as pursuing an affair with a local teenager she calls ‘the Fisher Boy’). ‘Just now I can think of nothing but writing because I have found myself,’ she decided.I have been thwarted for so long. When I am sufficiently sure of my genius, and when its results are worth reading, I will turn to life … I would like ...

‘Just get us out’

Ferdinand Mount, 21 March 2019

... on tracks that would in due course lead to the execution of almost all concerned – Boleyn, More, Fisher, Cromwell and Cranmer himself – and in the longer run to the religious wars that were to convulse Europe for nearly two centuries, and later still to the breakaway of Ireland from the United Kingdom, which was followed by two civil wars, in the first and ...

Too Proud to Fight

David Reynolds: The ‘Lusitania’ Effect, 28 November 2002

Wilful Murder: The Sinking of the ‘Lusitania’ 
by Diana Preston.
Doubleday, 543 pp., £18.99, May 2002, 0 385 60173 5
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Lusitania: Saga and Myth 
by David Ramsay.
Chatham, 319 pp., £20, September 2001, 1 86176 170 8
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Woodrow Wilson 
by John Thompson.
Longman, 288 pp., £15.99, August 2002, 0 582 24737 3
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... Both Diana Preston and David Ramsay deal briskly and effectively with this. Churchill and Jackie Fisher, the First Sea Lord, were preoccupied with the escalating political crisis over Gallipoli. The absence of British naval escorts for the Lusitania in the war zone reflected the generally accepted view that a liner’s best defence against U-boats lay in its ...

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