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Grass Green Stockings

Eleanor Hubbard: A Spinster’s Accounts, 21 March 2013

The Business and Household Accounts of Joyce Jeffreys, Spinster of Hereford, 1638-48 
edited by Judith Spicksley.
Oxford, 413 pp., £90, March 2012, 978 0 19 726432 4
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... didn’t prevent her from being visited by an admirer or two. In 1641, she gave a shilling to Mr Tom Aston and Mr Dick Gravell, who, she wrote, ‘cam to be my valantine’. As a single woman, she couldn’t attend female neighbours who were giving birth, but she would send money to midwives and nurses. When her niece produced twins, Jeffreys stood as ...

The Road to West Egg

Thomas Powers, 4 July 2013

Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of ‘The Great Gatsby’ 
by Sarah Churchwell.
Virago, 306 pp., £16.99, June 2013, 978 1 84408 766 2
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The Great Gatsby 
directed by Baz Luhrmann.
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... station of George Wilson, slow-witted husband of Myrtle, with whom Daisy Buchanan’s husband, Tom, is having an affair in the novel. A straight shot west across Manhattan from the Queensboro Bridge would take Fitzgerald (as it does the central characters of Gatsby on the fatal day) to the Plaza Hotel. What Churchwell brings to Gatsby most successfully are ...

Do what you wish, du Maurier

E.S. Turner, 31 March 1988

Maxwell 
by Joe Haines.
Macdonald, 525 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 356 17172 8
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Maxwell: The Outsider 
by Tom Bower.
Aurum, 374 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 948149 88 4
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Maxwell: A Portrait of Power 
by Peter Thompson and Anthony Delano.
Bantam, 256 pp., £12.95, February 1988, 0 593 01499 5
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Goodbye Fleet Street 
by Robert Edwards.
Cape, 260 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 224 02457 4
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... the simplifier, ‘that the poor boy from Solotvino, whose daily bread often depended on the charity of others, is now returning the wealth he has helped to create to the professionals who supported him; to help find peace in the country which is the Jewish national home; to the young who need the chance he had to make for himself; and to promoting for ...

The Stuntman

David Runciman: Richard Branson, 20 March 2014

Branson: Behind the Mask 
by Tom Bower.
Faber, 368 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 0 571 29710 8
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... oligarch. This is not to say that where they are bad, he is good. If even half the things in Tom Bower’s new biography are true, Branson is far from being good. He is playing the same game as his Russian counterparts, but it’s the looking-glass version. Where they do their best to avoid the glare of publicity, he thrives on it. The oligarchs who got ...

Dephlogisticated

John Barrell: Dr Beddoes, 19 November 2009

The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr Beddoes and His Sons of Genius 
by Mike Jay.
Yale, 294 pp., £20, April 2009, 978 0 300 12439 2
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... to admit to potential backers how much it depended on his faith and hope as well as on their charity, he was too good a scientist to deny that his belief in the benefits of pneumatic therapy was an educated guess, not much more than a hunch. At times he seemed to be asking for funds simply in order to have the chance to find out whether there was ...

It isn’t the lines

Bee Wilson: Paul Newman’s Looks, 16 February 2023

Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man 
by Paul Newman, edited by David Rosenthal.
Century, 320 pp., £25, October 2022, 978 1 5291 9706 8
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The Last Movie Stars 
directed by Ethan Hawke.
HBO/CNN
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... to argue that Newman and Woodward were ‘the last movie stars’ at a moment when the 60-year-old Tom Cruise has just had the first $100 million opening of his career, for Top Gun: Maverick, in which he not only acted but performed many of the most dangerous stunts. How would you describe Tom Cruise (or Will Smith or Johnny ...

Rudy Then and Rudy Now

James Wolcott, 16 February 2023

Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor 
by Andrew Kirtzman.
Simon and Schuster, 458 pp., £20, September 2022, 978 1 9821 5329 8
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... York’s Inner Circle Dinner is an annual rite for the city’s political class, a boozy black-tie charity event filling the Hilton Hotel’s grand ballroom with hundreds of politicians, reporters, lobbyists and assorted government hacks and bottom-feeders. It’s a celebratory affair, with fat-bellied reporters and government spokespeople warbling off-key in ...

The Best Stuff

Ian Jack: David Astor, 2 June 2016

David Astor: A Life in Print 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 400 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 0 224 09090 2
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... than acting on the stage’ in the description of the political contacts-man and Astor consigliere Tom Jones, using words of the sort that later stuck like labels to Waldorf’s son David wherever he went. Waldorf’s wife, whom he met on an Atlantic crossing, was the opposite. Variously compared to a gnat, a grasshopper and a Chinese cracker, Nancy Langhorne ...

So Very Silent

John Pemble: Victorian Corpse Trade, 25 October 2012

Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and Its Trade in the Dead Poor, c.1834-1929 
by Elizabeth Hurren.
Palgrave, 380 pp., £65, December 2011, 978 0 230 21966 3
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Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor 
by Ruth Richardson.
Oxford, 370 pp., £16.99, February 2012, 978 0 19 964588 6
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... fit, old or young – would face a stark alternative: the workhouse, or a choice between beggary, charity, crime and starvation. And life in the workhouse was intended to be less pleasant (‘less eligible’) than the life of the lowest-paid workers outside, with convict labour for the fit, and loss of voting rights, confiscation of personal ...

Prussian Blues

Fredric Jameson, 17 October 1996

Ein weites Feld 
by Günter Grass.
Steidl, 784 pp., DM 49.80, August 1995, 3 88243 366 3
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... the property rights, of the allegedly consanguine state that has taken its poorer cousin in out of charity ... As for literature after reunification, George Steiner thought there could be none anyway after Hitler; but he had in mind the bureaucratic degeneration of the language. The question reactivates the matter of tradition, and of the framework in which ...

On Teesside

Joanna Biggs, 21 October 2010

... only four places each year: a very small dent in Middlesbrough’s 30 per cent youth unemployment. Tom Blenkinsop, newly elected Labour MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, showed a similar sort of anxiety about the UK’s industry when I spoke to him at Westminster on the first day back after Parliament’s summer break. He emerged from behind the ...

Diary

David Bromwich: President-Speak, 10 April 2008

... spirit – and in his last speeches: the Second Inaugural (‘with malice toward none; with charity for all’), and the speech on reconstruction that followed it. Yet Lincoln opposed slavery without reservation. He believed that the imposition of slavery – not only on black people but on the manners, the morale and the laws of a society based on ...

Diary

Rosemary Dinnage: Evacuees, 14 October 1999

... was mentioned during the service. The stress was on forgiveness (rather than on the gratitude for charity with which I grew familiar – ‘Haven’t you been lucky! Such a wonderful opportunity! And while we were struggling on over in England’). Who should be forgiven in the case of the City of Benares: the Admiralty, who may not have made clear the ...

Shaggy Fellows

David Norbrook, 9 July 1987

A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After 
by David Perkins.
Harvard, 694 pp., £19.95, April 1987, 0 674 39946 3
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Collected Poems 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Penguin, 207 pp., £3.95, September 1985, 0 14 008383 9
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The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill 
by Henry Hart.
Southern Illinois, 305 pp., $24.95, January 1986, 0 8093 1236 0
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... of Perkins’s preferences, the other two are Thom Gunn and C.H. Sisson). In the opposing camp, Tom Paulin provoked an indignant response in this journal in 1985 when he indicted Hill for his reactionary and derivative ‘kitsch feudalism’. Hill’s admirers responded with extreme defensiveness, representing Paulin’s intrusion of politics into the realm ...

Religion, grrrr

Rachel Aviv: The Scientology Mythos, 26 January 2012

The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion 
by Hugh Urban.
Princeton, 268 pp., £19.95, September 2011, 978 0 691 14608 9
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... definition of religion itself.’ In Britain, Scientology is not recognised as a religion or as a charity, but it is a not-for-profit organisation and as such is exempt from VAT. Only the Royal Navy officially designates it a religion. Urban takes no position on whether or not Scientology should qualify as a religion; he argues that religion is a form of ...

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