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The Undesired Result

Gillian Darley: Betjeman’s bêtes noires, 31 March 2005

Betjeman: The Bonus of Laughter 
by Bevis Hillier.
Murray, 744 pp., £25, October 2004, 0 7195 6495 6
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... a tour in India when, resounding across his hotel dining-room, he heard the unmistakable tones of Lady Betjeman. Richards had an eager group of fifteen people while Penelope was struggling to secure the attention of forty middle-aged American women. She had contributed articles on Indian art to the AR in the 1930s, but with children, houses and for a while a ...

Like ink and milk

John Bayley, 10 September 1992

‘Sons and Lovers’: The Unexpurgated Text 
by D.H. Lawrence, edited by Helen Baron and Carl Baron.
Cambridge, 675 pp., £70, September 1992, 0 521 24276 2
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D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885-1912 
by John Worthen.
Cambridge, 464 pp., £14.95, September 1992, 0 521 43221 9
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‘Sons and Lovers’ 
by Michael Black.
Cambridge, 126 pp., £19.95, September 1992, 0 521 36074 9
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... quick infallible prose shows us how and why. They are the exact opposite of Mellors and Lady Chatterley. Nothing could be less portentous than Mr Noon. And Worthen is surely right in taking Mr Noon as the index of Lawrence’s true feelings and responses at the time, and in telling the reader his grounds for doing so. By the time of The Rainbow and ...

I want my wings

Andrew O’Hagan: The Last Tycoons, 3 March 2016

West of Eden: An American Place 
by Jean Stein.
Cape, 334 pp., £20, February 2016, 978 0 224 10246 9
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... a wonderful story about being taken around by Jack: I went to the command performance of My Fair Lady in London with him. We didn’t have to go through customs – the FBI took us right through, because Hoover was his buddy. And, because my great-grandfather was from the aristocracy, Jack started introducing me as ...

Getting the Undulation

Benjamin Lytal: Willa Cather’s Letters, 20 February 2014

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather 
edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout.
Knopf, 715 pp., £24, April 2013, 978 0 307 95930 0
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... what Cather called ‘love letters’ from young men struck by the September-May romance of A Lost Lady. And she lived, according to some posthumous critics, as a closeted homosexual. Cather had many potential reasons for forbidding publication of her letters. Willa Cather in New Hampshire in 1917. Reading them suggests a more general anxiety. ‘There ...

The Last Intellectual

Rosemary Hill: The Queen Mother’s Letters, 6 December 2012

Counting One’s Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother 
edited by William Shawcross.
Macmillan, 666 pp., £25, October 2012, 978 0 230 75496 6
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... Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in August 1900, the youngest daughter and ninth of ten children of Lord and Lady Glamis. When she was four her father inherited the earldom of Strathmore and she became Lady Elizabeth. The Strathmores had houses in London and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ...

What ho, Giotto!

Julian Symons, 7 February 1991

Stanley Spencer 
by Kenneth Pople.
Collins, 576 pp., £25, January 1991, 0 00 215320 3
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... He showed an early talent for art, and was sent to the Slade through the benevolence of a local Lady Bountiful. He emerged from it in 1912, an almost dwarfish figure a couple of inches over five feet and weighing less than seven stone, already aspiring to the religious past and intent to identify it in terms of Cookham ’ s scenes and people. Spencer later ...

Farewell Hong Kong

Penelope Fitzgerald, 24 February 1994

The Mountain of Immoderate Desires 
by Leslie Wilson.
Weidenfeld, 374 pp., £15.99, February 1994, 0 297 81371 4
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... they are both gone for ever. A tiresome old savant is killed by taking a Pill of Immortality. A lady missionary is about to shoot herself when a poisonous spider comes out of a crack ‘where it had been hibernating all winter’, bites her, and causes her to drop her gun. But these goings-on are not nearly enough for Leslie Wilson, who has combined them ...

Diary

A.J.P. Taylor: Enough about Politics, 15 April 1982

... Navy, which still dominates Plymouth though it has now few ships. Dominant personality is still Lady Astor, with Isaac Foot as runner-up. The television series on Lady Astor is not widely applauded in Plymouth and I, too, do not much like visiting-card television: historical characters dragged in for the sake of their ...
... all be a lot wiser – and sadder too, quite likely. Either we shall have found out that the Iron Lady is impregnable or she herself will have been found out. Margaret Thatcher is the favourite politician of those who like an exciting life. Her maxim in politics – she has claimed it as Thatche’s Law – is that the unexpected always happens. Certainly ...

Romeo and Tito

Penelope Gilliatt, 5 June 1980

... bank to put the money into my Tito fund, muttering left-wing slogans against the bullying gracious lady of the Orient. I saw her as shrouded in jewels, but not in my five shillings. By the time I was fifteen, when I had considerably added to the fund by writing a radio play on a typewriter swiped every night from my school’s secretarial department, the ...

The Secret of Bishop’s Stortford

Dan Jacobson, 22 November 1979

... the bed, next to one of the twisted barley-sugar posts that held up the canopy. At that point the lady who had admitted us saw that we were going to make a long stay, and left us to our own devices. We went through all the rooms, each one of which (roughly speaking) is devoted to a particular phase in his career, from his days as a schoolboy cricketer in the ...

Mole

Salman Rushdie, 4 February 1982

Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro 
by A.J. Langguth.
Hamish Hamilton, 366 pp., £12.50, October 1981, 0 241 10678 8
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... have invented a name like Loona Bimberton. It takes an infallible ear for dialogue to ‘hear’ Lady Carlotta, pretending to be a governess in ‘The Schartz-Metterklume Method’, announcing: ‘I shall talk French four days of the week and Russian in the remaining three.’ ‘Russian? My dear Miss Hope, no one in the house speaks or understands ...

Signor Cock

Roy Porter, 25 June 1987

Intercourse 
by Andrea Dworkin.
Secker, 259 pp., £10.95, June 1987, 0 436 13961 8
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... filthy abuse pouring out of this diatribe against sex and men to see that Andrea Dworkin is a sick lady. It’s one long hysterical denunciation of sexual intercourse as really bad news for women. The way she rants on is of course the give-away symptom of sexual frustration. Clearly she can’t be getting enough of it – not surprising for someone overweight ...

A Word Like a Bullet

Michael Hofmann: Heinrich Böll, 18 July 2019

The Train Was on Time 
by Heinrich Böll, translated by Leila Vennewitz.
Penguin, 108 pp., £8.99, April 2019, 978 0 241 37038 4
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... German Pen, then of International Pen; and when the novels The Clown (1963), Group Portrait with Lady (1971), The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974) and The Safety Net (1979) appeared. Some complained: what did the German film industry have against him, churning out film adaptations of his books in its slavish way, but the way I knew him was through one of ...

Simply too exhausted

Christopher Hitchens, 25 July 1991

Edwina Mountbatten: A Life of Her Own 
by Janet Morgan.
HarperCollins, 509 pp., £20, July 1991, 0 00 217597 5
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... Astonished office-workers found themselves being ferried by Edwina, in the Hispano, and Ainsworth, Lady Louis’s chauffeur, in the Rolls. Edwina had no strong opinions about the rights and wrongs of the Strike. Unlike Dickie, who blamed Communist agitators, she was simply anxious that London should not wind down and stop. Any tincture of amusement here is ...

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