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Blood All Over the Grass

Ewan Gibbs: On the Miners’ Strike, 2 November 2023

Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85 
by Robert Gildea.
Yale, 469 pp., £25, August, 978 0 300 26658 0
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... of the 20th century. In The Enemy Within, an account of the 1984-85 strike he co-edited, Raphael Samuel claimed that over decades the Scottish and Welsh coalfields produced men with their ‘own distinctive version of militancy – more “educated”, more communist, more statesman-like’ than their English counterparts. One possible expression of this ...

Meaningless Legs

Frank Kermode: John Gielgud, 21 June 2001

Gielgud: A Theatrical Life 1904-2000 
by Jonathan Croall.
Methuen, 579 pp., £20, November 2000, 0 413 74560 0
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John G.: The Authorised Biography of John Gielgud 
by Sheridan Morley.
Hodder, 510 pp., £20, May 2001, 0 340 36803 9
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John Gielgud: An Actor’s Life 
by Gyles Brandreth.
Sutton, 196 pp., £6.99, April 2001, 0 7509 2752 6
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... sometimes ungenerous Olivier, the invariably envious Wolfit and the amiable but rather straitlaced Richardson. And of course both books have to deal with the crisis of 1953. Gielgud was arrested for soliciting, and although Morley and his publishers claim to have dealt for the first time fully, frankly and sympathetically with this episode there is a perfectly ...

Taking it up again

Margaret Anne Doody, 21 March 1991

Henry James and Revision 
by Philip Horne.
Oxford, 373 pp., £40, December 1990, 0 19 812871 1
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... who has elsewhere vigorously defended reading the revised version (or versions) of a novel. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa seems to me infinitely improved in its third edition. Am I inconsistent? First, why do novelists revise? Is it a common practice? Well, of course it is: any novelist will revise and revise a book before publication. To the ...

Jane Austen’s Latest

Marilyn Butler, 21 May 1981

Jane Austen’s ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ 
edited by Brian Southam.
Oxford, 150 pp., £7.95, March 1981, 0 19 812637 9
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... a complete new play, apparently Jane Austen’s version of a work she had admired from childhood, Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. It was actually a discovery only in a manner of speaking, since the manuscript was never properly lost. It had been handed down among the descendants of Jane Austen’s niece Anna Lefroy, born Anna Austen in ...

Clubs of Quidnuncs

John Mullan, 17 February 2000

The Dunciad in Four Books 
by Alexander Pope, edited by Valerie Rumbold.
Longman, 456 pp., £55, August 1999, 0 582 08924 7
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... leaving us the traces of both original irritation and original inspiration. In his Life of Pope, Samuel Johnson told a story that has fixed Pope’s masochistic appetite for the mockery and abuse which were the lot of the embattled satirist. Johnson had heard the son of Pope’s friend Jonathan Richardson give an account ...

A Laugh a Year

Jonathan Beckman: The Smile, 18 June 2015

The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris 
by Colin Jones.
Oxford, 231 pp., £22.99, September 2014, 978 0 19 871581 8
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... across the Channel. The first of these was the cult of sensibility, fuelled by the translation of Samuel Richardson’s novels. Weeping and smiling became evidence of sincerity and authenticity. The partition between emotion and its expression came down, and a person’s true self was supposedly revealed. If the face painted a picture of the soul, then ...

A Walnut in Sacrifice

Nick Richardson: How to Cast a Spell, 7 November 2024

The Grimoire Encyclopedia: Volume 1 
by David Rankine.
Hadean Press, 739 pp., £39.99, April 2023, 978 1 914166 36 5
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The Grimoire Encyclopedia: Volume 2 
by David Rankine.
Hadean Press, 660 pp., £39.99, April 2023, 978 1 914166 37 2
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Art of the Grimoire 
by Owen Davies.
Yale, 256 pp., £25, October 2023, 978 0 300 27201 7
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... in its best-known edition: the Key of Solomon, as assembled in 1889 from a number of sources by Samuel MacGregor Mathers of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Key of Solomon represents the invocation of spirits as a perilous activity to be attempted only by the most devout. It requires a nine-day period of preparation, during which body and soul are ...

Mother and Tata

Stephen W. Smith: The Mandelas, 21 March 2024

Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage 
by Jonny Steinberg.
William Collins, 550 pp., £25, May 2023, 978 0 00 835378 0
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... doubts about her paternity by calling the girl Zindziswa – the name given by the Xhosa poet Samuel Mqhayi to his own daughter after similar misgivings. When he went underground, Mandela asked a distant relative, 26-year-old Brian Somana, ‘to be Winnie’s infrastructure’ in his absence. By August 1962, when Mandela was arrested, Somana had become ...

Six hands at an open door

David Trotter, 21 March 1991

Intertextual Dynamics within the Literary Group: Joyce, Lewis, Pound and Eliot 
by Dennis Brown.
Macmillan, 230 pp., £35, November 1990, 9780333516461
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An Immodest Violet: The Life of Violet Hunt 
by Joan Hardwick.
Deutsch, 205 pp., £14.99, November 1990, 0 233 98639 1
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... seems an adequate response, except perhaps the via negativa words of the male heir of Modernism, Samuel Beckett, and the myriad murmurings of Modernism’s literary daughters.’ The literary mothers of those literary daughters have generally been dismissed by or excluded from celebrations of Modernism. Recently, however, there has been a surge of interest ...

Un Dret Egal

David A. Bell: Political Sentiment, 15 November 2007

Inventing Human Rights: A History 
by Lynn Hunt.
Norton, 272 pp., £15.99, April 2007, 978 0 393 06095 9
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... Letters). Instead, Hunt draws attention to epistolary novels of private lives and loves, above all Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, and Rousseau’s Julie. These books received frenzied popular and critical acclaim, but not because they said anything about constitutions and rights, even allegorically. What they did do, according to Hunt, was to encourage ...

Heroes

Pat Rogers, 6 November 1986

Hume and the Heroic Portrait: Studies in 18th-Century Imagery 
by Edgar Wind, edited by Jaynie Anderson.
Oxford, 139 pp., £29.50, May 1986, 0 19 817371 7
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Augustan Studies: Essays in honour of Irvin Ehrenpreis 
edited by Douglas Lane Patey and Timothy Keegan.
University of Delaware Press, 270 pp., £24.50, May 1986, 9780874132724
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The 18th Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1700-1789 
by James Sambrook.
Longman, 290 pp., £15.95, April 1986, 0 582 49306 4
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... Wind contends that Reynolds can be aligned with the heroic, noble, Roman, grand-style figure of Samuel Johnson: a believer, albeit a troubled one. Hume, on the other hand, underwrites the art of Gainsborough – in his naturalness, distrust of the grandiose, bent towards particularity and rejection of authority. This is not argued through with great ...

Self-Hugging

Andrew O’Hagan: A Paean to Boswell, 5 October 2000

Boswell's Presumptuous Task 
by Adam Sisman.
Hamish Hamilton, 352 pp., £17.99, November 2000, 0 241 13637 7
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James Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’: Research Edition: Vol. II 
edited by Bruce Redford and Elizabeth Goldring.
Edinburgh, 303 pp., £50, February 2000, 0 7486 0606 8
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Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author 
by Lawrence Lipking.
Harvard, 372 pp., £11.50, March 2000, 0 674 00198 2
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Dr Johnson's London 
by Liza Picard.
Weidenfeld, 362 pp., £20, July 2000, 0 297 84218 8
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... with Flemish exactness from every other sentence he chose to write down.Boswell’s biography of Samuel Johnson is a call-to-arms for all makers of literary lives, and Adam Sisman, previously a biographer of A.J.P. Taylor, has taken on a genuine task, a presumptuous task indeed, to write a biography of the biography, in the hope of casting light on the very ...

The night that I didn’t get drunk

Claude Rawson, 7 May 1987

Boswell: The English Experiment 1785-1789 
edited by Irma Lustig and Frederick Pottle.
Heinemann, 332 pp., £30, February 1987, 0 434 08130 2
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The Converse of the Pen: Acts of Intimacy in the 18th-Century Familiar Letter 
by Bruce Redford.
Chicago, 252 pp., £21.25, January 1987, 0 226 70678 8
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Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson 
by Alvin Kernan.
Princeton, 357 pp., £19.70, February 1987, 0 691 06692 2
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... enough) ... that Mr Parr had called,’ an odd subconscious aggression, perhaps, against Samuel Parr, ‘the Whig Dr Johnson’, with whom as it happens he dined later in the volume, and who himself spoke of writing a life of Johnson. Boswell apparently never saw M.C. again and the callous frivolity both of his behaviour and of his report is capped ...

Closets of Knowledge

Frank Kermode: Privacy, 19 June 2003

Privacy: Concealing the 18th-Century Self 
by Patricia Meyer Spacks.
Chicago, 248 pp., £25.50, May 2003, 0 226 76860 0
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... deplored by anxious parents, especially parents of girls, as the source of dangerous imaginings. Richardson, Rousseau and Sterne are important here, but so are a troop of female writers: Jane Austen, here delicately analysed, but also Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, Frances Burney and others. Dr Johnson remarked that the ‘call for books’ had greatly ...

The Reptile Oculist

John Barrell, 1 April 2004

... Lords Eldon, Liverpool and Sidmouth. There were fellow poets such as Felicia Hemans, Tom Moore, Samuel Rogers, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman ...

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