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Old Flames

Peter Parsons, 10 January 1983

The Latin Sexual Vocabulary 
by J.N. Adams.
Duckworth, 272 pp., £24, September 1982, 9780715616482
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Ovid: The Erotic Poems 
translated by Peter Green.
Penguin, 450 pp., £2.95, November 1982, 0 14 044360 6
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Women’s Life in Greece and Rome 
by Mary Lefkowitz and Maureen Fant.
Duckworth, 294 pp., £24, September 1982, 0 7156 1434 7
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Heroines and Hysterics 
by Mary Lefkowitz.
Duckworth, 96 pp., £8.95, September 1982, 0 7156 1518 1
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... have gone for good. The same is true of the ancient world in general. That emerges clearly from Mary Lefkowitz’s and Maureen Fant’s spirited anthology. Women’s Life is the title – a feminist would prefer Men on Women’s Life. It is rare to hear a woman speak; rarer still for her to speak as a woman. Beyond that, there are all the usual difficulties ...

Whose Greece?

Martin Bernal, 12 December 1996

Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History 
by Mary Lefkowitz.
Basic Books, 222 pp., $24, February 1996, 0 465 09837 1
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Black Athena Revisited 
edited by Mary Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers.
North Carolina, 544 pp., £14.75, September 1996, 0 8078 2246 9
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... errors. It is such autodidacts who tend today to monopolise the label ‘Afrocentrist’. Mary Lefkowitz’s concern, or obsession, with Afrocentrism emerged suddenly in 1991, when she wrote a review of my book Black Athena for the New Republic. As a professor of classics, she was appalled to discover that people were writing books and teaching that ...

Breeds of New Yorker

Christine Smallwood: ‘The Group’ Revisited, 11 February 2010

A Fortunate Age 
by Joanna Smith Rakoff.
Scribner, 399 pp., $26, April 2009, 978 1 4165 9077 4
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The Group 
by Mary McCarthy.
Virago, 448 pp., £7.99, December 2009, 978 1 84408 593 4
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... story, and everything else in A Fortunate Age, follows a template: the novel is a rewriting of Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963), which charted the lives of eight members of the Vassar class of 1933 in the years after graduation. More than a decade before she wrote The Group, McCarthy published an essay in Holiday magazine called ‘The Vassar ...

Talking about Manure

Rosemary Hill: Hilda Matheson’s Voice, 25 January 2024

Hilda Matheson: A Life of Secrets and Broadcasts 
by Michael Carney and Kate Murphy.
Handheld, 260 pp., £13.99, September 2023, 978 1 912766 72 7
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... The WPS was a wartime force that was expected to disband at the Armistice but its commandant, Mary Allen, carried on, despite being arrested in 1921 for wearing police uniform. The CCWO connected women operating in male-dominated professions, providing practical as well as moral support, and Astor and Matheson were equally active on the home front. The ...

Four-Day Caesar

Mary Beard: Tacitus and the Emperors, 22 January 2004

Tacitus: Histories I 
edited by Cynthia Damon.
Cambridge, 324 pp., £17.99, December 2002, 0 521 57822 1
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... They usually wring their hands and lament the impossibility of their task in a preface. Kenneth Wellesley, for example, in his introduction to the Penguin Histories, talks of his ‘guilt and remorse’, and fears – not unreasonably – that he may ‘prove to have butchered his victim’. But, apologies over, they get down to business, smoothing out the ...

Leaping on Tables

Norman Vance: Thomas Carlyle, 2 November 2000

Sartor Resartus 
by Thomas Carlyle, edited by Rodger Tarr and Mark Engel.
California, 774 pp., £38, April 2000, 0 520 20928 1
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... ranging from The Nemesis of Faith (1849) by his disciple and too frank biographer J.A. Froude to Mary Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888). The German setting and European (and occasionally Asian and African) frame of reference seem to make this a cosmopolitan rather than an English or Scottish text. It was translated into Dutch in 1880 and into German and Polish ...

They Supped with the King

Bee Wilson: Mistresses, 6 January 2011

Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman 
by Elizabeth Abbott.
Duckworth, 510 pp., £20, 0 7156 3946 3
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... and painting her fingernails’. She referred to her liaison with Shawn simply as ‘our life’. Mary Wollstonecraft had mistresses in mind when she wrote of the ‘passions’ of men placing women ‘on thrones’. In Wollstonecraft’s view, such passions gave women a power of sorts, but they were adored rather than loved, and woman ‘is quickly scorn’d ...

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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... in biro – in other people’s books. She turned up once at the house of a friend, the novelist Mary Wesley, travelling with just two carrier bags of her things. Wesley mentioned that she had been reading Simone Weil, and the next morning found Coleman ‘sitting in bed wearing a fisherman’s jersey busily defacing Miss Weil’s Letter to a ...

Dear Poochums

Michael Wood: Letters to Véra, 23 October 2014

Letters to Véra 
by Vladimir Nabokov, edited and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd.
Penguin, 798 pp., £30, September 2014, 978 0 14 119223 9
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... German and French (one book in English), and becomes a leading literary figure of the emigration. Mary appears in 1926, King, Queen, Knave in 1928, The Defence in 1929, The Eye in 1930, Glory in 1931, Laughter in the Dark in 1932, Despair in 1934, Invitation to a Beheading in 1935, most of The Gift in 1937. He doesn’t get a job in Paris or London, but he ...

Heroes

Pat Rogers, 6 November 1986

Hume and the Heroic Portrait: Studies in 18th-Century Imagery 
by Edgar Wind, edited by Jaynie Anderson.
Oxford, 139 pp., £29.50, May 1986, 0 19 817371 7
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Augustan Studies: Essays in honour of Irvin Ehrenpreis 
edited by Douglas Lane Patey and Timothy Keegan.
University of Delaware Press, 270 pp., £24.50, May 1986, 9780874132724
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The 18th Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1700-1789 
by James Sambrook.
Longman, 290 pp., £15.95, April 1986, 0 582 49306 4
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... prose and verse. Apt to the commemorative theme is a rather gentle, musing discussion by Mary Lascelles of ‘Some Patterns in Epitaph and Elegy’. Miss Lascelles argues that epitaphs inhabited a kind of communal realm where free borrowing was possible without acknowledgment. She instances a quotation from Johnson in the epitaph for a vicar choral ...

Strange Little Woman

Ferdinand Mount: First and Only Empress, 22 November 2018

Empress: Queen Victoria and India 
by Miles Taylor.
Yale, 388 pp., £25, August 2018, 978 0 300 11809 4
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Eastern Encounters: Four Centuries of Paintings and Manuscripts from the Indian Subcontinent 
by Emily Hannam.
Royal Collections Trust, 256 pp., £45, June 2018, 978 1 909741 45 4
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Splendours of the Subcontinent: A Prince’s Tour of India 1875-76 
by Kajal Meghani.
Royal Collections Trust, 216 pp., £29.95, March 2017, 978 1 909741 42 3
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... the right to approach the monarch directly on all sorts of embarrassing questions. The rapacious Wellesley and his successors arrogated the right to approve or disapprove the dynastic succession in the so-called native states and, if they did not fancy the heir, to plump another one on the throne. When the Marquis of Hastings egged on the nawab of Oudh ...

His Own Dark Mind

Clare Bucknell: Rescuing Lord Byron, 30 November 2023

Byron and the Poetics of Adversity 
by Jerome McGann.
Cambridge, 214 pp., £19.99, December 2022, 978 1 009 23295 1
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Reading Byron: Poems – Life – Politics 
by Bernard Beatty.
Liverpool, 266 pp., £90, January 2023, 978 1 80085 462 8
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Byron’s ‘Don Juan’: The Liberal Epic of the 19th Century 
by Richard Cronin.
Cambridge, 248 pp., £85, June 2023, 978 1 009 36623 6
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... meet, where a list of vanished public names (‘Where’s Brummell? Dished. Where’s Long Pole Wellesley? Diddled./Where’s Whitbread? Romilly? Where’s George the Third?’) can shift into a remembrance of names significant to the poet: ‘Where are the Lady Carolines and Franceses?’ Since incongruence is a fact of life (as well as of the poem), the ...

Seventeen Million Words

Richard Poirier, 7 November 1985

The Inman Diary: A Public and Private Confession 
edited by Daniel Aaron.
Harvard, 1661 pp., £35.95, March 1986, 0 674 45445 6
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... as not cajole them into bed. Some nearby colleges did not approve, but his wife, who had attended Wellesley, not only befriended but recruited some of his female attendants. Such a household required a sizeable yearly income, which was supplied, not without grumpy conditions, by his wealthy family in Atlanta, where he was born, and later by trust funds. It ...

Dastardly Poltroons

Jonathan Fenby: Madame Chiang Kai-shek, 21 October 2010

The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China 
by Hannah Pakula.
Weidenfeld, 787 pp., £25, January 2010, 978 0 297 85975 8
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... in the world. After her American education – she went to various schools in the US and then to Wellesley – she returned to Shanghai, where she bridled at the restrictions imposed by her highly conservative mother. She ingratiated herself with a number of key players on the political scene, such as Zhang Xueliang, the ‘Young Marshal’ warlord of ...

Meringue-utan

Rosemary Hill: Rosamund Lehmann’s Disappointments, 8 August 2002

Rosamond Lehmann 
by Selina Hastings.
Chatto, 476 pp., £25, June 2002, 0 7011 6542 1
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... forces with his wife, who suddenly seemed rather a splendid person, to try and get him back. Mary Day-Lewis, however, knew it was hopeless and had anyway had enough. ‘I just wondered which of us was going to have Cecil if we did get him back,’ she remarked afterwards, with no more enthusiasm than if he were a lost canary. After that, Lehmann’s love ...

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