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Keith Walker, 15 May 1980

‘A heart for every fate’: Byron’s Letters and Journals, Vol. 10, 1822-1823 
edited by Leslie Marchand.
Murray, 239 pp., £8.95, March 1980, 0 7195 3670 7
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... her father and brother, occupied separate apartments in the same house. About a mile down the hill Mary Shelley occupied herself by making fair copies of Don Juan. (Byron’s convenience is our loss, because he made many further revisions and improvements in the early cantos, in copying them himself.) With Mary Shelley was ...

The Cow Bells of Kitale

Patrick Collinson: The Selwyn Affair, 5 June 2003

... looked for a position of some kind but without success. A deal was struck with his elder brother, Gordon, a leading Anglican theologian and Dean of Winchester, who took possession of the title deeds of the farm and offered them a loan. But the condition was that Helen was to take over. Her husband was to follow her instructions, even obey her orders. She ...

At Dulwich

Alice Spawls: Vanessa Bell, 18 May 2017

... following the death of her father in 1904 had lived in much greater freedom with her siblings in Gordon Square. She married Clive Bell in 1907; when she painted Sydney-Turner her first son, Julian, was a few months old. Almost all the most important things in her life were yet to happen though, and they happen in the other paintings that make up the first ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: Dining Out, 4 June 1998

... Howard Davies is appointed chairman-designate of ‘SuperSIB’ (or, as it is later christened by Gordon Brown, the Financial Services Authority), as much to his surprise as everyone else’s. He had been on his way to South America in his capacity as deputy governor of the Bank of England, having just been involved in that same capacity in seeking a ...

To the Great God Pan

Laura Jacobs: Goddess Isadora, 24 October 2013

My Life: The Restored Edition 
by Isadora Duncan.
Norton, 322 pp., £12.99, June 2013, 978 0 87140 318 6
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... in a unique family situation. She was born in 1877 in California, the fourth and last child of Mary Dora Gray and Joseph Charles Duncan, who divorced when she was a baby. Her father was a poet, editor, banker and ladies’ man who made and lost four fortunes and died in a shipwreck. ‘All my childhood,’ she writes, ‘seemed to be under the black shadow ...

Gilded Drainpipes

E.S. Turner: London, 10 June 1999

The London Rich: The Creation of a Great City from 1666 to the Present 
by Peter Thorold.
Viking, 374 pp., £25, June 1999, 0 670 87480 9
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The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches: Style and Status in Victorian and Edwardian Architecture 
by Mordaunt Crook.
Murray, 354 pp., £25, May 1999, 0 7195 6040 3
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... desolation – as I like to think – by ordering his redcoat militia to fire on the mob in the Gordon Riots, had another claim to notice. As a sheriff of London, Sir Barnard Turner was instrumental in abolishing Tyburn as a place of execution. In so doing he ended the tumultuous turnout of ruffians, whores and honest citizens who cheered, or execrated, the ...

Big Head

John Sutherland, 23 April 1987

Thackeray’s Universe: Shifting Worlds of Imagination and Reality 
by Catherine Peters.
Faber, 292 pp., £12.95, January 1987, 0 571 14711 9
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... out of her ‘Select Bibliography’.) All three are, self-confessedly, dwarfed by the late Gordon Ray’s authoritative two-volume biography, Thackeray, The Uses of Adversity (1955) and Thackeray, The Age of Wisdom (1958). Not to labour the point, the story of Thackeray’s life (one of the great Victorian closed books) is no longer much of a ...

Scrapbook

Edward Pearce, 26 July 1990

A Sparrow’s Flight: Memoirs 
by Lord Hailsham.
Collins, 463 pp., £17.50, July 1990, 0 00 215545 1
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... and about the son who without affectation loved his father. The account of his second wife Mary is the finest thing in the book. Again the real feelings are out. He loved and was loved by his wife, and in a cruel accident she died. He quotes C.S. Lewis very aptly: ‘Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the ...

On the Pitch

Emma John, 4 August 2022

... some truth in this: the Scotland v. England matches were organised by the impresario Alec Gordon, and the players were a mix of young ballet dancers and rep actresses from the Princess’s Theatre in Edinburgh. Women’s football as organised by women in this era was more interesting. Nettie Honeyball and Lady Florence Dixie began recruiting for their ...

Fallen Women

Patricia Highsmith, 21 June 1984

‘Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son’: The Story of Peter Sutcliffe 
by Gordon Burn.
Heinemann, 272 pp., £9.95, May 1984, 0 434 09827 2
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... Gordon Burn gives us no comment of his own on the story he has to tell – just the facts: no speculation as to why Peter Sutcliffe behaved as he did, just the events, the family life, anecdotes that may or may not be pertinent, the pubs and their atmosphere. And we go back, or rather from the beginning of the book we go forward – from Sutcliffe’s grandparents on both sides ...

Peripheries

Charles Rzepka, 21 March 1991

The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the 19th Century 
by Susan Manning.
Cambridge, 270 pp., £32.50, May 1990, 0 521 37237 2
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... a major work that would seem tailor-made for her thesis, such as Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, her command of Scottish and American fiction is sure and precise, and the parallels she draws between Calvinistic and provincial thinking are, with few exceptions, just. But are these resemblances aetiologically significant? Do they show puritanism to ...

Street Wise

Pat Rogers, 3 October 1985

Hawksmoor 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Hamish Hamilton, 218 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 241 11664 3
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Paradise Postponed 
by John Mortimer.
Viking, 374 pp., £9.95, September 1985, 0 670 80094 5
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High Ground 
by John McGahern.
Faber, 156 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 571 13681 8
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... fixed his eyes before his feet, Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hour With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. The novel at a crucial point reaches the same mood as well as the identical locale; and Stetson’s corpses ‘planted last year in your garden’ are likewise mimicked in the ...

Diary

Mary Hawthorne: Remembering Joseph Mitchell, 1 August 1996

... some 20 in all – including two superb profiles. One of them was of a woman named Mazie P. Gordon, ‘a bossy, yellow-haired blonde’ who ran the Venice movie theatre, just off the Bowery. ‘She is profoundly uninterested in moving pictures and is seldom able to sit through one,’ Mitchell writes of her. ‘ “They make me sick,” she says.’ But ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: You had better look out, 10 December 1998

... now, by extension, included. Subsequently, in a similar conversation with the Oxford sociologist Gordon Marshall, Gordon (who is as authentically Scottish as Alastair) describes watching the 1966 World Cup Final on a flickering black and white TV in a pub in a West Highland village. He was one of perhaps a dozen out of ...

Lachrymatics

Ferdinand Mount: British Weeping, 17 December 2015

Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears 
by Thomas Dixon.
Oxford, 438 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 0 19 967605 7
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... impossible to pin tears down.’ Dixon directs the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. Keats might have thought this rather like a Department for Unweaving the Rainbow. Dixon is no dry-eyed Dryasdust. He confesses that he himself is liable to weep at operas and soap operas, at the triumphs and disasters of Wimbledon and ...

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