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Bear, Bat, or Tiny King?

Deborah Friedell: The Rorschach Test, 2 November 2017

The Inkblots 
by Damion Searls.
Simon and Schuster, 406 pp., £20, February 2017, 978 1 4711 3041 0
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... and those who focus on details are pedantic and unimaginative. The images are mostly black and white, but some cards have a little red in them, and the last three cards are psychedelic. Rorschach’s example of a ‘colour response’ – when what a subject sees is determined by colour instead of form – would be thinking that a particular red blot looks ...

Consider the Narwhal

Katherine Rundell, 3 January 2019

... The mother plaits and twists her hair into a long braid and the two go out to harvest passing white whales; the son binds her with ropes to one of the whales, and it drags her into the sea. According to Rasmussen, ‘she did not come back, and was changed into a narwhal … and from her the narwhals are descended.’ One of the earliest written accounts ...

Antique Tears

Kate Retford: Consumptive Chic, 3 December 2020

The Age of Undress: Art, fashion and the classical ideal in the 1790s 
by Amelia Rauser.
Yale, 215 pp., £35, March, 978 0 300 24120 4
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... panniers and stomachers. Frankland’s watercolour for 1793 captured the vogue for long folds of white fabric and a body beneath that was clearly no longer tightly corseted.In The Age of Undress, Amelia Rauser examines the fashion that burned brightly, if briefly, at the end of the 18th century. The trend was highly revealing. Breasts had already been on ...

Country Life

David Cannadine, 5 November 1981

The Victorian Countryside 
edited by G.E. Mingay.
Routledge, 380 pp., £25, July 1981, 0 7100 0734 5
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... of the landscape and on patterns of population growth and migration. R.J. Olney and Alan Gilbert investigate those two bastions of the English landed establishment, the county constituencies and the Church of England; and Messrs Howell, Gray and Cullen survey agriculture, tenurial relations and politics on the Celtic fringe. Finally, the view shifts ...

Blimey

Gillian Darley: James Stirling, 7 September 2000

Big Jim: The Life and Work of James Stirling 
by Mark Girouard.
Pimlico, 323 pp., £14, March 2000, 9780712664226
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... The recently opened Gilbert Collection at Somerset House includes a vast number of objects made by a meticulous technique of inlay known as micromosaic, in which tiny fragments of glass are assembled to form a picture – not always in the best possible taste. Mark Girouard’s biography of James Stirling is constructed by a similar procedure, an astonishing accumulation of small details, asides and memories building up to a portrait ...

On the Edge

David Sylvester, 27 April 2000

A New Thing Breathing: Recent Work 
by Tony Cragg.
Tate Gallery Liverpool
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... an artist of genius, Tony Cragg. If there’s another among that generation in Britain, it must be Gilbert and George, a pair of classic hedgehogs: everything they’ve done depends from that marvellous wheeze they had as students that a couple of artists could be living sculptures. Cragg is a fox, with a flow of invention that is dazzling and frightening in ...

At the Courtauld

Esther Chadwick: Jonathan Richardson, 10 September 2015

... 1736 A small selection of astonishing self-portrait drawings, on view at the Courtauld’s new Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery until 20 September, shows how, after he had turned 61, Richardson compiled a visual diary, regularly scrutinising his appearance by means of mirrors and from all angles, bewigged and unwigged, frontally and in ...

At the David Parr House

Eleanor Birne: There are two histories here, 7 November 2019

... interior of All Saints Church and Queen’s Old Hall; in London, he worked on the mansions of the Gilbert Scott, Flower and Howard families. He bought 186 Gwydir Street in 1886 with money he’d saved in his post office account and, with his wife, Mary Jane, and their three children, lived there until he died, in 1927. Transforming the interior of his own ...

Boudoir Politics

Bee Wilson: Lola Montez, 7 June 2007

Lola Montez: Her Life and Conquests 
by James Morton.
Portrait, 390 pp., £20, January 2007, 978 0 7499 5115 3
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... must have been Lola Montez.’ Admirers mentioned her air of refinement, her tapered fingers and white hands, her duchessy way of carrying herself. The Morning Post praised her ‘almost faultless’ foot and ankle. Some people spoke adoringly of her ‘mice teeth’, an attribute whose charms have not survived. Some of Lola’s other features were more ...

Unsluggardised

Charles Nicholl: ‘The Shakespeare Circle’, 19 May 2016

The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography 
edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells.
Cambridge, 358 pp., £18.99, October 2015, 978 1 107 69909 0
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... where his artisan father practised his trade as a glover and ‘whittawer’ – a worker of white leather, typically kidskin, and thus a producer of those ‘kid gloves’ still proverbial for their softness. The product was upmarket but the production of it messy and pungent. When Shakespeare mentions a man with a ‘great round beard, like a ...

On Hope Mirrlees

Clair Wills, 10 September 2020

... the contemporary everyday); it has been called a model for Jacob’s Room (in its experiments with white space on the page), for Mrs Dalloway (as an account of a woman’s journey across a city in the course of a single day) and for Orlando (in its coded lesbian poetics). It has been celebrated as the first Cubist work in English, the first introduction for ...

Acrimony

Nina Auerbach: Feminists Fall Out, 6 July 2000

Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century 
by Susan Gubar.
Columbia, 237 pp., £16, February 2000, 0 231 11580 6
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... of lesbianism. Oh dear!’ Subsequent disclaimers never quite dispel the image of a cosy knot of white, straight, successful academic feminists disoriented by the encroachment of angry self-defining outsiders. From this parochial perspective, Gubar’s essays on African American art and lesbian writing come to seem like a tit-for-tat appropriation of the ...

Reconstruction

Christopher Beha: Jeffrey Eugenides, 6 October 2011

The Marriage Plot 
by Jeffrey Eugenides.
Fourth Estate, 406 pp., £20, October 2011, 978 0 00 744129 7
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... were rebelling against.’ Eugenides studied at Brown with John Hawkes and at Stanford with Gilbert Sorrentino, exacting experimentalists who were ‘against order on the whole and against storytelling’. By setting much of his new novel at Brown in the early 1980s, Eugenides returns to the time of the fall; by committing the novel unblinkingly to the ...

The Common Touch

Paul Foot, 10 November 1994

Hanson: A Biography 
by Alex Brummer and Roger Cowe.
Fourth Estate, 336 pp., £20, September 1994, 1 85702 189 4
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... these matters his new partner, who has stayed with him for the whole of his business life, Gordon White, boasted to a Sunday Mirror gossip columnist: ‘Why should I marry? I don’t need anyone to look after me. I’ve got a good housekeeper to darn my socks, sew on my buttons and cook my meals.’ White managed to ...

‘Someone you had to be a bit careful with’

David Sylvester: Gallery Rogues, 30 March 2000

Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser 
by Harriet Vyner.
Faber, 317 pp., £20, October 1999, 0 571 19627 6
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... that I could need £100. I’d go down there and he still wouldn’t pay me, and yet he’d have a white Rolls Royce with a chauffeur sitting outside waiting to take him wherever he wanted to go. But who says he paid the chauffeur? Not settling debts is hardly unheard of in Old Etonians. But Robert was a first-generation Etonian, and might conceivably have ...

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