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Why did we not know?

Ian Jack: Who is hoarding the land?, 23 May 2019

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain 
by Brett Christophers.
Verso, 394 pp., £20, November 2018, 978 1 78663 158 9
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... share of public housing of any advanced economy outside the Communist bloc’. An overwhelmingly urban, rent-paying population had lost its connection to land and a feeling for what it could do. Nobody quoted Mark Twain: ‘Buy land, they’re not making it any more.’ Nobody explained, as Christophers does here, that land is an ideal vehicle for the ...

From the Motorcoach

Stefan Collini: J.B. Priestley, 19 November 2009

English Journey 
by J.B. Priestley.
Great Northern Books, 351 pp., £25, July 2009, 978 1 905080 47 2
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... haste, none enjoying much success. The income from a collaborative work with the much better known Hugh Walpole enabled him to embark on a more ambitious third novel, The Good Companions, published in 1929. Its huge sales, together with those of Angel Pavement the following year, transformed his life. He became wealthy, sought after by publishers, loved by a ...

Kermode and Theory

Hayden White, 11 October 1990

An Appetite for Poetry: Essays in Literary Interpretation 
by Frank Kermode.
Collins, 242 pp., £15, November 1989, 0 00 215388 2
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... back to the basics of literary criticism, and he aligns himself with similarly inclined critics (Hugh Kenner, John Hollander, Richard Poirier, Lionel Trilling, and above all Empson) who use theory, when they use it at all, for the most part to clear the ground for attentive reading. The phrase which serves as the title of the collection is taken from Paul ...

Scottish Men and Scottish Women

Jenny Turner, 27 June 1991

The Burn 
by James Kelman.
Secker, 244 pp., £13.99, April 1991, 0 436 23286 3
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Blood 
by Janice Galloway.
Secker, 179 pp., £12.99, March 1991, 0 436 20027 9
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... be at stake. ‘An address to a city ... anthropomorphises beyond the personal conflict on which urban trade is actually based,’ and ‘does so by leaving the streets clear of those whose opinions, if actually listened to, might spoil the image of a healthy and unified “body” politic ... the poet is a spectator at someone else’s experience, be that ...

Time to think again

Michael Neve, 3 March 1988

Benjamin Disraeli: Letters 1838-1841 
edited by M.G Wiebe, J.B. Conacher, John Matthews and M.S. Millar.
Toronto, 458 pp., £40, March 1987, 0 8020 5736 5
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Salisbury: The Man and his Policies 
edited by Lord Blake and Hugh Cecil.
Macmillan, 298 pp., £29.50, May 1987, 0 333 36876 2
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... V. The core of the Tory intellectualism of Salisbury is democracy’s opposite: pessimistic, anti-urban, openly seeking class conflict in order to strengthen the hand of authority and the ancien régime. Salisbury was skilled in questions of international affairs, and in matters of Church politics, admirably discussed by A.N. Porter and E.D. Steele. Other ...

Anglophobe Version

Denton Fox, 2 February 1984

The New Testament in Scots 
translated by William Laughton Lorimer.
Canongate, 476 pp., £17.50, October 1983, 0 900025 24 7
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Scotland and the Lowland Tongue 
edited by J. Derrick McClure.
Aberdeen University Press, 256 pp., £17, September 1983, 0 08 028482 5
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... stolidity ... obsol.’. Kenneth Burlay, in his dispassionate and frequently very funny piece on Hugh Mac-Diarmid’s predecessors and contemporaries (‘An Awkward Squad’), shows how poets, too, sometimes felt obliged to adopt a humble persona when writing in Scots. The poets, like Lorimer, were faced with difficulties in using Scots: some of them used ...

If you don’t swing, don’t ring

Christopher Turner: Playboy Mansions, 21 April 2016

Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics 
by Beatriz Preciado.
Zone, 303 pp., £20.95, October 2014, 978 1 935408 48 2
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Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny 
by Holly Madison.
Dey Street, 334 pp., £16.99, July 2015, 978 0 06 237210 9
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... Without you​ ,’ Hugh Hefner said to the Playmates he’d assembled for a party to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Playboy, ‘I’d have been the publisher of a literary magazine.’ Hefner founded Playboy in 1953 with a loan from his mother, who had hoped he’d become a missionary. The 27-year-old secured the rights to a previously unpublished nude of Marilyn Monroe, her skin flushed against red velvet, for $500 from a calendar company in Chicago ...

Monasteries into Motorways

Isabel Hilton: The Destruction of Lhasa, 7 September 2006

Lhasa: Streets with Memories 
by Robert Barnett.
Columbia, 219 pp., £16, March 2006, 0 231 13680 3
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... who wrote about Lhasa in the early 18th century, and, in the 20th century, Sir Charles Bell and Hugh Richardson, British scholars and diplomats who both spoke Tibetan, and two Austrian mountaineers, Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter, who landed there for several years after escaping from British internment in India during World War Two. For most ...

Killing Stones

Keith Thomas: Holy Places, 19 May 2011

The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland 
by Alexandra Walsham.
Oxford, 637 pp., £35, February 2011, 978 0 19 924355 6
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... their own sacred topography. The driving force was the cult of martyrs and the building of urban churches to contain their relics. It set in motion a long process by which Catholic Christianity would construct a new geography of the sacred. By the later Middle Ages, the European landscape was dotted with thousands of churches, chapels and ...

Appreciating Paisley

Charles Townshend, 22 January 1987

God save Ulster: The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism 
by Steve Bruce.
Oxford, 308 pp., £15, November 1986, 0 19 827487 4
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Children of Wrath: Political Violence in Northern Ireland 
by Michael MacDonald.
Polity, 194 pp., £19.50, September 1986, 0 7456 0219 3
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... on Bruce’s dust-wrapper – rather than of preachers like Henry Cooke and ‘Roaring’ Hugh Hanna, men outside the establishment, is symptomatic of the distortion. In fact, liberals would certainly be happier with Paisley if he were a politician bent on power and thus forced to battle, and compromise, for mainstream support. The salient point about ...

English Butter

David Trotter, 9 October 1986

Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920 
edited by Robert Colls and Philip Dodd.
Croom Helm, 378 pp., £25, June 1986, 0 7099 0849 0
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The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement 
by Michael Rosenthal.
Collins, 335 pp., £15, August 1986, 0 00 217604 1
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Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? 
by Richard Symonds.
Macmillan, 366 pp., £29.50, July 1986, 0 333 40206 5
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... cowardice of British troops at Majuba Hill had revealed the physical and moral degeneracy of the urban population. ‘The disgrace in itself is unspeakable.’ His literary experiments connected with attempts to regenerate the Imperial race by purifying its language, by conserving an essentially and eternally English (Anglo-Saxon) speech. ‘A great work by ...

Swank and Swagger

Ferdinand Mount: Deals with the Pasha, 26 May 2022

Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East 
by Jonathan Parry.
Princeton, 453 pp., £35, April, 978 0 691 18189 9
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... by Ernest Gellner in Plough, Sword and Book: ‘all these features seem highly congruent with an urban bourgeois lifestyle and with commercialism’; Islam was in fact ‘closer in many ways to the ideals and requirements of modernity than those of any other world religion’. Parry does not mention Urquhart’s particular enthusiasm for the Turkish ...

The analyst is always right

Mark Ford: Tessimond and Spencer, 17 November 2011

Collected Poems with Translations from Jacques Prévert 
by A.S.J. Tessimond.
Bloodaxe, 188 pp., £10.95, November 2010, 978 1 85224 857 4
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Complete Poetry, Translations and Selected Prose 
by Bernard Spencer.
Bloodaxe, 351 pp., £15, February 2011, 978 1 85224 891 8
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... rather prided himself on being ‘out of key with his time’, to quote from the first line of ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, and in his letter to Tessimond observes that the young poet ‘must be very much out of the world to have invoked me … from oltre tomba’. Tessimond’s neglect, both in his lifetime and since, is generally put down to his being ...

Madder Men

Hal Foster: Richard Hamilton on Richard Hamilton, 24 October 2019

Richard Hamilton: Introspective 
by Phillip Spectre.
König, 408 pp., £49, September 2019, 978 3 88375 695 0
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... and of coming across brand names like Pan Yan Pickle at the shops (no rustic themes for this urban artist). For all his traditional training in anatomy and perspective, Hamilton was committed to modern life from the start. At 15, attracted by the building’s abstract façade, he asked for a job at Reimann Studios, an art school cum design company ...

Boys will be soldiers

Brian Harrison, 20 October 1983

Sure and Stedfast: A History of the Boys’ Brigade, 1883-1984 
edited by John Springhall.
Collins, 304 pp., £10, June 1983, 0 00 434280 1
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... their highly-prized virtues of personal discipline and self-improvement, and for offering the urban teenage boy something better than a life of street-corner lounging. In addition to the difficulties of childhood history, these three authors have had to confront the difficulty involved in writing collaborative ‘official’ history for a diverse ...

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