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A Kind of Greek

Jeremy Harding: Frank Thompson, 7 March 2013

A Very English Hero: The Making of Frank Thompson 
by Peter Conradi.
Bloomsbury, 419 pp., £18.99, August 2012, 978 1 4088 0243 4
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... he was large and clumsy – and his own wish to fight on Frank’s behalf, blinded with tears, small fists flying left and right. Both boys survived; Frank went on to Winchester as a scholar, but Edward was thought to be dim and was dispatched to Kingswood (founder John Wesley), where his father had been. It was an odd time in the public schools, major and ...

A Peacock Called Mirabell

August Kleinzahler: James Merrill, 31 March 2016

James Merrill: Life and Art 
by Langdon Hammer.
Knopf, 913 pp., £27, April 2015, 978 0 375 41333 9
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... own, he wasn’t much of a teacher, but was a delightful presence. One of his students that term, Stephen Yenser, became not only a lifelong friend but one of Merrill’s very best readers, and co-editor, with J.D. McClatchy, of an excellent though overlong 2008 Selected Poems. Reading Merrill at length can feel like being trapped in endless rooms full of ...

Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings

Jerry Fodor: The Case against Natural Selection, 18 October 2007

... confronted our hunter-gatherer forebears thirty thousand years or so ago; problems that arise for small populations trying to make a living and to reproduce in an ecology of scarce resources. But, arguably, that kind of mind doesn’t work very well in third millennium Lower Manhattan, where there’s population to spare and a Starbucks on every block, but ...

An Element of Unfairness

Ross McKibbin: The Great Education Disaster, 3 July 2008

... board schools), voluntary or ‘aided’ schools (mostly Anglican or Catholic) and a comparatively small number of preparatory schools which ‘prepared’ their students for public school entrance. There were four kinds of secondary school: public, direct-grant (which received state funding from Whitehall on condition that they took a proportion of their ...

Slashed, Red and Dead

Michael Hofmann: Rilke, To Me, 21 January 2021

... one must discriminate. They are trash, husks of people spat out by fate … [How] did that small grey woman come to stand for a quarter of an hour beside me before a shop window while showing me an old, long pencil that protruded with infinite slowness from her filthy, closed hands? I acted as if I were looking at the goods displayed and didn’t ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Where I was in 1993, 16 December 1993

... of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde Park. Avedon’s assistants bustle round with lights, Avedon himself scarcely bothering to look through the lens, just enquiring from ...

Hare’s Blood

Peter Wollen: John Berger, 4 April 2002

The Selected Essays of John Berger 
edited by Geoff Dyer.
Bloomsbury, 599 pp., £25, November 2001, 0 7475 5419 6
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... In 1948, Gear, then based in Paris, had exhibited with Réalités Nouvelles and, along with Stephen Gilbert, had also become one of only two British founding members of the CoBrA group, whose significance has been aptly characterised by Chris van der Heijden: ‘in the midst of the darkness of the Cold War the colours of CoBrA take on a special ...

Let’s consider Kate

John Lanchester: Can we tame the banks?, 18 July 2013

... it is easy. We need two things from our banks. One of them is to keep lending money, especially to small businesses, which are essential as the engine of economic activity – the route out of the state we’re in. The government has poured unprecedented amounts of money into the economy in an attempt to get it moving. It’s done so through quantitative ...
... the dynamite bomb seemed tiny in proportion to its capacity to do harm; it could fit easily into a small bag or even a pocket. Using the pages of the Irish World, Ford and O’Donovan Rossa collected more than $20,000 within a year. Even those among the nationalist Irish-American groups who supported the idea of a bombing campaign in Britain viewed with ...

Places Never Explained

Colm Tóibín: Anthony Hecht, 8 August 2013

The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht 
edited by Jonathan Post.
Johns Hopkins, 365 pp., £18, November 2012, 978 1 4214 0730 2
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... boy who never finished the third grade, just below me; if I stretch out my left hand I can touch a small dark pleasant Italian, about five feet high; with my right hand I can touch somebody who came from I don’t know where, but he’s just been here two weeks while his wife had a baby boy. ‘In the evenings,’ Jarrell added, ‘I mostly write poetry or ...

Ten Bullets to One, Twenty to Another

Thomas Meaney: Sri Lanka, 2 February 2017

Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World 
by Steven Kemper.
Chicago, 480 pp., £31.50, January 2015, 978 0 226 19907 8
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Tamil: A Biography 
by David Shulman.
Harvard, 416 pp., £25, September 2016, 978 0 674 05992 4
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The Seasons of Trouble: Life amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War 
by Rohini Mohan.
Verso, 368 pp., £16.99, October 2015, 978 1 78168 883 0
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... Ernest Goonetilleke, the first native governor-general, said. This was a point of pride. Don Stephen Senanayake, the country’s first prime minister, remarked: ‘There has been no rebellion in Ceylon, no non-cooperation movement and no fifth column. We were among the peoples who gave full collaboration while Britain was hard-pressed.’ After ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: The Plutocrat Tour, 7 July 2022

... shirt, was alone at the bar. A couple of non-performative locals, supporting players, drank at a small table beside a wall of boxing memorabilia and photographs of scenes from the lost London. The subversive lock-in was migratory, coming down the Lea Valley and heading for the river. The key point of difference with the ethical profit-spreaders in Great ...

Fed up with Ibiza

Jenny Turner: Sybille Bedford, 1 April 2021

Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life 
by Selina Hastings.
Chatto, 432 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 1 78474 113 6
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... total lack of formal education. So she started writing about the law instead, in pieces about the Stephen Ward and Lady Chatterley trials for Esquire, Jack Ruby for Life, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial for the Saturday Evening Post. ‘The law, the workings of the law, the daily application of the law to people and situations, is an essential element in a ...

Theory of Texts

Jerome McGann, 18 February 1988

Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts: The Panizzi Lectures 1985 
by D.F. McKenzie.
British Library, 80 pp., £10, December 1986, 0 7123 0085 6
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... was first published in the Morning Chronicle in March 1812, anonymously. The poem caused a small uproar at the time, but when he re-published it in February 1814 under his own name (among a group of short poems he printed with The Corsair) the effect was explosive. The ‘meaning’ of the poem had changed with the change of format and its attendant ...

How do you spell Shakespeare?

Frank Kermode, 21 May 1987

William Shakespeare. The Complete Works: Original-Spelling Edition 
edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor.
Oxford, 1456 pp., £75, February 1987, 9780198129196
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William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 
edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor.
Oxford, 1432 pp., £25, October 1986, 0 19 812926 2
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... which Oxford-modern resolves by printing ‘busil’est’ – an emendation duly defended in Stephen Orgel’s excellent single-play Oxford version2 (‘my thoughts of Miranda are most active when I am busiest at my work’). The Oxford-original gives ‘busielest’ as what the compositor or possibly the scribe misread or wrongly divided in an attempt ...

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