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AB Fab

Ian Penman: Anthony Burgess heads south, 8 October 2026

Tremor of Intent 
by Anthony Burgess.
Galileo, 252 pp., £10.99, February, 978 1 915530 70 7
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“... of Irish Catholic parents – Anthony was his confirmation name, after St Anthony of Padua, patron saint of lost things – and he attended the Bishop Bilsborrow elementary school in Moss Side before going on to Xaverian College in Rusholme, a Roman Catholic grammar school for boys. Xaverian is where Burgess wrote his first poetry in the early 1930s, and it is ...”

Bourgeois Stew

Oliver Cussen: Alexis de Tocqueville, 16 November 2023

The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville 
by Olivier Zunz.
Princeton, 443 pp., £22, November, 978 0 691 25414 2
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Travels with Tocqueville beyond America 
by Jeremy Jennings.
Harvard, 544 pp., £34.95, March, 978 0 674 27560 7
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“... trying to establish ‘phalansteries’ that would render the division of labour obsolete. The Saint-Simonians in Ménilmontant were seeking a fusion of free love with the ‘fraternal’ ideals of medieval Christianity and the productive capacities of modern industry. New thinking was accompanied by new forms of community and collective action. Excluded ...”

MacDiarmid and his Maker

Robert Crawford, 10 November 1988

MacDiarmid 
by Alan Bold.
Murray, 482 pp., £17.95, September 1988, 0 7195 4585 4
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A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle 
by Hugh MacDiarmid, edited by Kenneth Buthlay.
Scottish Academic Press, 203 pp., £12.50, February 1988, 0 7073 0425 3
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The Hugh MacDiarmid-George Ogilvie Letters 
edited by Catherine Kerrigan.
Aberdeen University Press, 156 pp., £24.90, August 1988, 0 08 036409 8
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Hugh MacDiarmid and the Russian 
by Peter McCarey.
Scottish Academic Press, 225 pp., £12.50, March 1988, 0 7073 0526 8
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“... work by established names like John Buchan, as well as by newcomers like Grieve and his brother Andrew, whose verse (as Bold points out) Grieve later viciously attacked. Eventually, Andrew would break permanently with Christopher, describing him (with some justice) as ‘megalomaniac’. By 1920, Grieve was employed as a ...”

Not bothered

E.S. Turner, 29 August 1991

The Bachelor Duke: William Spencer Cavendish, Sixth Duke of Devonshire, 1790-1858 
by James Lees-Milne.
Murray, 234 pp., £19.95, March 1991, 0 7195 4920 5
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“... rectitude overtook him and at one time he became, in Joseph Paxton’s words, a ‘ranting saint’. He was a great territorial magnate and a patron of the arts, but never a mover and shaker. He has not hitherto been accorded a biography, other than in Violet Markham’s Paxton and the Bachelor Duke. The DNB gives him less space than it devotes to many ...”

Diary

Andrew Brighton: On Peter Fuller, 7 November 1991

“... with John Tagg in Peter’s remarks on Althusserian splinter groups, ‘many of which question Saint Louis Althusser’s total banishment of the human subject. Even the most psychotic amongst us sometimes gets that hint that we exist as a limited, physical organism, subject to birth, bodily existence and death.’ Looking back, I think that Peter’s ...”

Wide-Angled

Linda Colley: Global History, 26 September 2013

The French Revolution in Global Perspective 
edited by Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt and William Max Nelson.
Cornell, 240 pp., £16.50, April 2013, 978 0 8014 7868 0
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“... Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved in France’s richest Caribbean colony than to the inhabitants of Paris, James didn’t so much decentre the French Revolution as locate its ...”

The Untreatable

Gavin Francis: The Spanish Flu, 25 January 2018

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World 
by Laura Spinney.
Jonathan Cape, 352 pp., £20, June 2017, 978 1 910702 37 6
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“... find work to support the family. Emilio died in 2011 aged 101. When I told a friend, the writer Andrew Greig, that I was writing this piece, he told me that his father, born in 1899, came down with Spanish flu while on leave from the war in France. ‘His convalescence delayed his return to the front, where his battalion was all but wiped out,’ ...”

After-Lives

John Sutherland, 5 November 1992

Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography 
by Ian Hamilton.
Hutchinson, 344 pp., £18.99, October 1992, 0 09 174263 3
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Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy 
by Michael Millgate.
Oxford, 273 pp., £27.50, June 1992, 0 19 811276 9
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The Last Laugh 
by Michael Holroyd.
Chatto, 131 pp., £10.99, December 1991, 0 7011 4583 8
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Trollope 
by Victoria Glendinning.
Hutchinson, 551 pp., £20, September 1992, 0 09 173896 2
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“... Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton dwells exclusively on the author’s ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver. Surprisingly – for a study whose main concern is the suppression or revelation of intimate materials – he does not discuss the Stanislaus Joyce-Richard Ellmann connection which has ‘authoritatively’ warped posterity’s ...”

Mixed Up

Joanna Kavenna: In the génocidaire’s wake, 3 March 2005

The Optimists 
by Andrew Miller.
Sceptre, 313 pp., £16.99, March 2005, 9780340825129
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“... Andrew Miller’s first two novels, Ingenious Pain (1997) and Casanova (1998), were extended fantasies set in an imaginatively embellished 18th century. In his third novel, Oxygen (2001), Miller cast off the breeches and capes to write about a mother suffering from terminal cancer whose sons go to her house in the country to help nurse her ...”

The Biggest Rockets

Alex Ross: Gustav Mahler, 24 August 2000

Gustav Mahler. Vol. III. Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion (1904 to 1907) 
by Henry-Louis de La Grange.
Oxford, 1024 pp., £35, February 1999, 9780193151604
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The Mahler Companion 
edited by Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson.
Oxford, 652 pp., £50, May 1999, 0 19 816376 2
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“... from a tragic missed opportunity for Calvin Klein, is Mahler’s strength. He was not the sickly saint of popular myth: he was an athletic, aggressive man, undeserving of pity. Mahler’s rise to the top – both as conductor and as composer – was fast and furious. He liked to say that he was an exile three times over – as a Bohemian in Austria, as an ...”

The Nominee

Andrew O’Hagan: With the Democrats, 19 August 2004

“... as love in a Cold War climate. The earlier part involved Brittany, a large family house at Saint-Briac, and Berlin, where his father served as US Attorney. Kerry was the cosmopolitan, French-speaking child of high-hoping Americans, and he still gives the impression of being someone who has spent too many hours doing prep. At St Paul’s School in ...”

The Strange Case of Peter Vansittart

Martin Seymour-Smith, 6 March 1986

Aspects of Feeling 
by Peter Vansittart.
Peter Owen, 251 pp., £10.95, January 1986, 0 7206 0637 3
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“... singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel that he lacks the large audience he deserves. Yet the curious reader, anxious to gain more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may easily find himself defeated. He is not even ...”

Lust for Leaks

Neal Ascherson: The Cockburns of Cork, 1 September 2005

The Broken Boy 
by Patrick Cockburn.
Cape, 312 pp., £15.99, June 2005, 0 224 07108 4
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“... of the epidemic. A few days later, Patrick was joined in hospital by his nine-year-old brother, Andrew. Their older brother, Alexander, had felt the same headache and pricking in the fingers as their father but, like him, did not fall ill. Andrew seemed at first to be severely affected in his muscles, but eventually ...”

Cities of Fire and Smoke

Oliver Cussen: Enlightenment Environmentalism, 2 March 2023

Affluence and Freedom: An Environmental History of Political Ideas 
by Pierre Charbonnier, translated by Andrew Brown.
Polity, 327 pp., £19.99, July 2021, 978 1 5095 4372 4
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“... and the Mascarene islands. Functionaries like Pierre Poivre in Mauritius and Alexander Anderson in Saint Vincent combined Enlightenment ideas about agronomy and plant chemistry with a proto-Romantic appreciation of nature, and, above all, a sensitivity to the impact of capitalist agriculture on tropical island ecosystems. These fertile, fragile environments ...”

Why aren’t they screaming?

Helen Vendler: Philip Larkin, 6 November 2014

Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love 
by James Booth.
Bloomsbury, 532 pp., £25, August 2014, 978 1 4088 5166 1
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“... Twenty​ years ago, Andrew Motion, one of Philip Larkin’s literary executors, wrote a scholarly and comprehensive authorised biography of the poet, whom he had known well; it was subtitled ‘A Writer’s Life’. Motion informed his readers that some important ingredients of Larkin’s life were still unavailable, especially most of the letters written to Monica Jones, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, who was his closest companion and lover, but never wife ...”

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