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If everybody had a Wadley

Terry Castle: ‘Joe’ Carstairs, the ‘fastest woman on water’, 5 March 1998

The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of ‘Joe’ Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water 
by Kate Summerscale.
Fourth Estate, 248 pp., £12.99, August 1997, 1 85702 360 9
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... mid-rank demigods and unicorn-people (T.E. Lawrence, Wittgenstein, Che Guevara, Greta Garbo, Edith Sitwell, JFK, Maria Callas, Howard Hughes, Andy Warhol, Glenn Gould, the late Princess of Wales) down to minor bog-sprites such as Eartha Kitt, Cher or Quentin Crisp. (Such lists are infinitely expandable.) What links each of these disparate individuals is ...

Republican King

Philippe Marlière: François Mitterrand, 17 April 2014

Mitterrand: A Study in Ambiguity 
by Philip Short.
Bodley Head, 692 pp., £30, November 2013, 978 1 84792 006 5
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... and the Cité musicale de la Villette, the Opéra Bastille and the Zénith, a large concert hall, were commissioned; the Musée Picasso was opened at the Hôtel Sale and the grand projet for the renovation of the Louvre was launched. The franc came under attack as soon as the socialists took power and in March 1983, two years – and several ...

Mushroom Cameo

Rosemary Hill: Noël Coward’s Third Act, 29 June 2023

Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 634 pp., £30, March 2023, 978 1 4746 1280 7
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... eleven of her most popular illustrated tales, including Jeremy Fisher and The Flopsy Bunnies, and Edith Nesbit, who had more or less invented the children’s adventure story, published The Railway Children. Nesbit’s work was shaped by memories of her unhappy childhood and in her novels the cheerful Bastable children offer readers some compensation for the ...

He wants me no more

Tessa Hadley: Pamela Hansford Johnson, 21 January 2016

Pamela Hansford Johnson: Her Life, Works and Times 
by Wendy Pollard.
Shepheard-Walwyn, 500 pp., £25, October 2014, 978 0 85683 298 7
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... women novelists’; the New York Times Book Review compared her favourably with Virginia Woolf; Edith Sitwell said that she and Emily Brontë were the two great woman novelists, and so on. Her career was well established even before she married Snow, and they became a significant double act, acclaiming each other’s masterpieces; for decades she was a ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: My 2006, 4 January 2007

... in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have ...

I am not a world improver

Christopher Turner: Building Seagram, 6 February 2014

Building Seagram 
by Phyllis Lambert.
Yale, 306 pp., £45, January 2013, 978 0 300 16767 2
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Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography 
by Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst.
Chicago, 493 pp., £25, April 2013, 978 0 226 15145 8
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... embroiled in a scandal, a court case over the costs of the house he’d built for the physician Edith Farnsworth, sixty miles south-west of Chicago. It is rumoured that they had an affair, which may have coloured their spectacular falling out and the resulting court case (from which Schulze and Windhorst have discovered transcripts). The Farnsworth ...

Maaaeeestro!

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Gabriel García Márquez, 27 August 2009

Gabriel García Márquez: A Life 
by Gerald Martin.
Bloomsbury, 668 pp., £25, October 2008, 978 0 7475 9476 5
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... announced, ‘the crowd rose as the most famous man on earth made his way down to the front of the hall.’ Only Fidel Castro and the pope, he remarks, were missing from the list of ‘superstars’ who might have been there. How did a novelist, even a Nobel Prize-winning and bestselling one, come to occupy such a position? Was it testimony to the power of ...

Baffled at a Bookcase

Alan Bennett: My Libraries, 28 July 2011

... which I suppose was handy for the courts, still functioning across the road in the town hall with the whole complex – town hall, library, courts – an expression of the confidence of the city and its belief in the value of reading and education, and where you might end up if they were neglected. It’s a High ...

Wall Furniture

Nicholas Penny: Dickens and Anti-Art, 24 May 2012

... pictures do not commemorate great thoughts or deeds, or render nature in the poetry of landscape, hall, or hut, but are of one voluptuous cast – mere shows of form and colour – and no more? Is it that the books have all their gold outside, and that the titles of the greater part qualify them to be companions of the prints and pictures? Is it that the ...

Rah, Rah, Cheers, Queers

Terry Castle: On Getting Married, 29 August 2013

... at least sort of. In August 2008 we managed to sneak in and tie the knot at San Francisco City Hall during the very brief legal window that opened in May that year (after the California Supreme Court ruled that the existing state ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional) and ended – abruptly – in November, when Proposition 8, a rogue right-wing ...

The Grey Boneyard of Fifties England

Iain Sinclair, 22 August 1996

A Perfect Execution 
by Tim Binding.
Picador, 344 pp., £15.99, May 1996, 0 330 34564 8
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... never-never land of Peter Ackroyd’s English Music. He shares with Ackroyd a love of music-hall, or its wilder sibling, the Punch and Judy show. On one level, that is what A Perfect Execution is. An exhibition in a tent or a glass box at the end of the pier. Pantomime horror, like the female hanging that opens Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse ...

Laertes has a daughter

Bee Wilson: The Redgraves, 6 June 2013

The Redgraves: A Family Epic 
by Donald Spoto.
Robson, 361 pp., £25, November 2012, 978 1 84954 394 1
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The House of Redgrave: The Lives of a Theatrical Dynasty 
by Tim Adler.
Aurum, 336 pp., £20, July 2012, 978 1 84513 623 9
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... the cast crowded into his dressing room bearing flowers. He rang up the grande dame of the theatre Edith Evans, with whom he was having one of his rare heterosexual affairs, to say how happy he was: ‘God bless Rachel and Vanessa always.’ He then celebrated some more at Le Moulin d’Or in Soho before repairing to ...

Seedy Equations

Adam Mars-Jones: Dealing with James Purdy, 18 May 2023

James Purdy: Life of a Contrarian Writer 
by Michael Snyder.
Oxford, 444 pp., £27, January, 978 0 19 760972 9
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... literary career comes with its own creation myth. He had been making no headway until in 1956 Edith Sitwell read a privately printed book of his stories and, ravished, threw herself into finding him a publisher and an audience. In one version of the event, Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, the book Purdy sent from America to Italy, made the last stage of ...

Tit for Tat

Margaret Anne Doody, 21 December 1989

Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology 
edited by Roger Lonsdale.
Oxford, 555 pp., £20, September 1989, 0 19 811769 8
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... and Letty and all Jump and skip and caper and brawl     Frisk in the drawing-room, romp in the hall, Susan and Charlotte and Letty and all.     Hark! the fiddle each gay spirit moves; See, the beaux have all drawn on their gloves.    Mr Archer will dance,    And Jack Hobland will prance,    And Jack Shirley’ll advance,    If my Lady ...

My Castaway This Week

Miranda Carter: Desert Island Dreams, 9 June 2022

... left-wing outliers like Tony Benn, Eric Hobsbawm, Arthur Scargill, John Pilger and Stuart Hall. She set about coaxing – and sometimes wrestling – as much emotion and revelation from her castaways as she could, using the unthreatening stimulus of music, and the intimacy created by two people in a dingy little radio studio. She tried to ensure ...

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