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Diary

Colm Tóibín: Alone in Venice, 19 November 2020

... grumbling about the lighting of paintings in Venice for some time. These include John Ruskin and Henry James, who, Mamoli Zorzi writes, ‘fell in love with the paintings in San Rocco despite not being able to see them properly’. Ruskin wrote that the three halls in San Rocco were ‘so badly lighted, in consequence of the admirable arrangements of the ...

Diary

Ruth Dudley Edwards: Peddling Books, 21 January 1988

... a bookshop and publishing-house in Vigo Street. Named after that extremely respectable figure Sir Thomas Bodley – scholar, diplomat and founder of the Bodleian – the firm quickly and almost accidentally became synonymous with beautifully-produced, often wickedly illustrated, rather decadent publications. Lane, described by a colleague as being one who ...

Demob

Robert Morley, 7 July 1983

Downing Street in Perspective 
by Marcia Falkender.
Weidenfeld, 280 pp., £10.95, May 1983, 0 297 78107 3
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... politics. At times we can almost hear her repeating Mrs Irving’s fateful question: ‘How long, Henry, are you going on making a fool of yourself?’ The great actor got out of the hansom cab and went his own way, but Harold gave Mary a date and stuck to it. One of the most perspicacious of the book’s chapters is devoted to an examination of leading ...

Walking backward

Robert Taubman, 21 August 1980

Selected Works of Djuna Barnes 
Faber, 366 pp., £5.50, July 1980, 0 571 11579 9Show More
Black Venus’s Tale 
by Angela Carter.
Next Editions/Faber, 35 pp., £1.95, June 1980, 9780907147022
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The Last Peacock 
by Allan Massie.
Bodley Head, 185 pp., £5.95, April 1980, 0 370 30261 3
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The Birds of the Air 
by Alice Thomas Ellis.
Duckworth, 152 pp., £6.95, July 1980, 0 7156 1491 6
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... the reader. T. S. Eliot seems to have made use of him, with some tidying-up, for the part of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly in The Cocktail Party. There’s an extravagance typical of the book in the use of words too forcible for the thought they contain, and epigrams are particularly apt to show this up: ‘Love is the first lie; wisdom the last,’ or ‘In ...

Internal Combustion

David Trotter, 6 June 1996

The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. Vol. III: 1900-1910 
edited by Thomas Pinney.
Macmillan, 482 pp., £50, December 1995, 9780333637333
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... The result was what Ezra Pound called ‘Kipling’s “Bigod, I-know-all-about-this” manner.’ Henry James became acquainted with the first Lanchester when it broke down outside his house in Rye, in October 1902. The same vehicle conveyed him, a year later, on a return visit to the Kipling establishment at Bateman’s, in Sussex. During this period James ...

Wacky

Christopher Tayler: Multofiction, 8 January 2004

Set This House in Order 
by Matt Ruff.
Flamingo, 496 pp., £12, October 2003, 0 00 716423 8
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... ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. So wrote Henry Jekyll in Stevenson’s novel. Unlike 19th-century duality, however, modern multiple personality hasn’t been much dealt with in literary fiction. It has flourished on talk shows, in movies and soaps, but in print its main vehicle has been the dramatic ...

How one has enjoyed things

Dinah Birch: Thackeray’s daughter, 2 December 2004

Anny: A Life of Anne Thackeray Ritchie 
by Henrietta Garnett.
Chatto, 322 pp., £18.99, January 2004, 0 7011 7129 4
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... Browning, Monckton Milnes, Ruskin, Katie Collins, Arthur Munby, George Eliot, the Carlyles, Henry Cole. Some of these, like the Carlyles, were handed down from the old days, sanctified with the reflected glamour of the past. Anny was fond of Jane Carlyle, but sometimes lost patience with Thomas. ‘At this moment I am ...

The Daughter Who Hated Her

Frank Kermode: Doris Lessing, 17 July 2008

Alfred and Emily 
by Doris Lessing.
Fourth Estate, 274 pp., £16.99, May 2008, 978 0 00 723345 8
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... kind proper to an artist. In The Golden Notebook and elsewhere, she mentions her admiration for Thomas Mann and for the idea of the philosophical novel, now, she believes, an impossibility; but even so she thinks one can still claim to be serious. Her right to make that claim is supported by her permanent interest in the world’s wickedness and ...

Thus were the British defeated

Colin Munro: ‘Tipu’s Tiger’, 4 January 2018

... man called Munro, went ashore to hunt deer on Saugor Island. Another member of the party, Captain Henry Conran, described what followed in a letter to a friend: About half past three we sat down on the edge of the jungle, to eat some cold meat sent us from the ship, and had just commenced our meal, when Mr Pyefinch and a black servant told us there was a fine ...

At the Royal Academy

Nicola Jennings: Spain and the Hispanic World, 30 March 2023

... Black Legend, which characterised Spain as a country of cruel and unenlightened Catholic zealots. Thomas Eakins visited Spain in 1869, followed later by John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and others, bringing back visual and written descriptions of a country they thought both colourful and charming. The ‘Spanish craze’ reached epidemic proportions in the ...

On the Red Carpet

David Thomson, 7 March 2024

... There’s your big six. Now get a life. When he wins (with his wife and producer Emma Thomas at his side), the engagingly modest Nolan will roll out the speech he knows by heart, about the Bomb as the great adventure and turning point of modern times, the exhilarating teamwork that gave us the big bang, and so on. The same attitude gave us ...

Sweet Sin

J.P. Stern, 5 August 1982

Marbot 
by Wolfgang Hildesheimer.
Suhrkamp, 326 pp., May 1981, 3 518 03205 4
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... of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely reciprocated by English authors, goes back at least to the time of Herder and Goethe. Here is the Göttingen physicist and aphorist, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, writing in 1776, a quarter of ...

Drugs, anyone?

Seamus Perry: George Meredith, 18 June 2015

Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads 
by George Meredith, edited by Criscillia Benford and Rebecca Mitchell.
Yale, 390 pp., £40, April 2015, 978 0 300 17317 8
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... it a strain: ‘He is not an easy man to be yourself with,’ Robert Louis Stevenson confessed to Henry James, ‘there is so much of him, and the veracity and the high athletic intellectual humbug are so intermixed.’ Hardy wrote loyally after Meredith’s death that ‘His words wing on – as live words will,’ but this was not to become the standard ...

A Moustache Too Far

Danny Karlin: Melville goes under, 8 May 2003

Herman Melville: A Biography. Vol. II: 1851-91 
by Hershel Parker.
Johns Hopkins, 997 pp., £31, May 2002, 0 8018 6892 0
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... decades of American Independence, to its rise in the Revolution. Both Melville’s grandfathers, Thomas Melvill and Peter Gansevoort, were Revolutionary heroes – Thomas for being among the Sons of Liberty who defied the colonial tax-gatherers in the Boston Tea Party in 1773, Peter for withstanding a British siege in 1777 ...

Burke and Smith

Karl Miller, 16 October 1980

Sydney Smith 
by Alan Bell.
Oxford, 250 pp., £9.95, October 1980, 0 19 812050 8
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Burke and Hare 
by Owen Dudley Edwards.
Polygon, 300 pp., £7.95, August 1980, 0 904919 27 7
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... Great wits don’t always readily agree, and there was another on the scene in the person of Henry Cockburn, whose career and reputation show several points of similarity with Smith’s: the two did not quarrel, but he was to have more to do with Cockburn’s friend Jeffrey, editor of the Review. Jeffrey’s cockiness and scepticism were chided and ...

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