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The Whole Bustle

Siobhan Kilfeather, 9 January 1992

The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing 
edited by Seamus Deane.
Field Day Publications/Faber, 4044 pp., £150, November 1991, 0 946755 20 5
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... The editors of the Field Day Anthology make large claims for its importance as ‘the most comprehensive anthology of Irish writing ever published’. These three volumes, totalling over four thousand pages and spanning a historical period of fifteen hundred years, bring into print an impressive range and variety of writings from a number of languages, periods and genres, and their publication is a major event in Irish studies ...

Who has the gall?

Frank Kermode: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 8 March 2007

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 
translated by Bernard O’Donoghue.
Penguin, 94 pp., £8.99, August 2006, 0 14 042453 9
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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 
translated by Simon Armitage.
Faber, 114 pp., £12.99, January 2007, 978 0 571 22327 5
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... of these benefits Gawain faithfully confers on the lord, embracing him when he returns from the field. The blend of brutal hunt and subtle seduction is described with extraordinary power and delicacy. Gawain remembers his vow of chastity but, against his will, accepts the lady’s present: a magic girdle which will protect him when the Green Knight ...

At the Hayward

Peter Campbell: Dan Flavin, 23 February 2006

... the most famous and impressive was the lighting of the entirety of the spiral-ramped rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum – daylight was not excluded as it is at the Hayward.) On one level, Flavin’s installations are exercises in simple geometry. The possible configurations of standard tubes and colours – even those of plain white ones ...

Let us breakfast in splendour

Charles Nicholl: Francis Barber, 16 July 2015

The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir 
by Michael Bundock.
Yale, 282 pp., £20, May 2015, 978 0 300 20710 1
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... when Boswell pays an early visit to Bolt Court and Johnson barks ‘briskly’ from his bed: ‘Frank, go and get coffee and let us breakfast in splendour.’ And he is there late at night, when Boswell is too tired and tanked-up and talked-out to go back to his lodgings, and is settled into the spare room ‘by honest Francis with a most civil ...

Concini and the Squirrel

Peter Campbell, 24 May 1990

Innumeracy 
by John Allen Paulos.
135 pp., £12.95, November 1989, 0 670 83008 9
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The Culture of Print 
edited by Roger Chartier.
351 pp., £35, September 1989, 0 7456 0575 3
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Symbols of Ideal Life 
by Maren Stange.
Cambridge, 190 pp., £25, June 1989, 0 521 32441 6
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The Lines of My Hand 
by Robert Frank.
£30, September 1989, 0 436 16256 3
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... project for the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. The need to adapt the material gathered in the field to the needs of the picture magazines ‘mandated a new graphic rhetoric. Familiar documentary elements were used in the Thirties to create realistic, yet visually appealing images ... formal complexity as well as radical content was suppressed in the ...

Diary

David Kaiser: Aliens, 8 July 2010

... she rang to ask: ‘Do you agree with Stephen Hawking?’ That’s usually an easy question to field. On topics ranging from the behaviour of black holes to the structure of the early universe, a safe answer is yes. But that wasn’t what my mother wanted to know. She wanted to know whether I agreed with the recently retired Lucasian Professor of ...

Our Fault

Frank Kermode, 11 October 1990

Our Age: Portrait of a Generation 
by Noël Annan.
Weidenfeld, 479 pp., £20, October 1990, 0 297 81129 0
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... This partiality, however qualified, is surprising in an author who surveys the rest of his immense field with such independence of judgment. Nothing escapes his interest: achievements and failures in economics, philosophy, anthropology, history, literature, are knowledgeably and briskly surveyed. There are inevitably some off-the-cuff judgments that provoke ...

Improving the Plays

Frank Kermode, 7 March 1996

Shakespeare at Work 
by John Jones.
Oxford, 293 pp., £35, December 1995, 0 19 811966 6
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... SHALLOW: O, Sir John, do you remember since we lay all night in the Windmill in Saint George’s Field? SIR JOHN: No more of that, good Master Shallow, no more of that. SHALLOW: Ha, ’twas a merry night! And is Jane Nightwork alive? SIR JOHN: She lives, Master Shallow. The italicised words, found in the Folio, are not in the Quarto of Henry ...

Outrageous Game

Frank Kermode: Ishiguro’s Nightmares, 21 April 2005

Never Let Me Go 
by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Faber, 263 pp., £16.99, March 2005, 0 571 22411 3
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... to Tommy for the next few days. Then one lunchtime I spotted him on the edge of the South Playing Field practising his football . . . I went over and sat down on the grass behind him, putting my back against a fence post. This couldn’t have been long after that time I’d shown him Patricia C’s calendar and he’d marched off, because I remember we ...

Lost Boys

Andrew O’Hagan, 8 June 1995

... at the top of their power. They stood for pain. The stone on my other side was in memory of ‘Frank Cyril Nicholson, who died January 13th 1897, aged 14 years’. It was a cool day, very quiet at times, then some horn or deep engine on the dual carriageway would break in. Frank Cyril died after 14 years; died, it ...

The Ramsey Effect

Kieran Setiya, 18 February 2021

Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers 
by Cheryl Misak.
Oxford, 500 pp., £25, February 2020, 978 0 19 875535 7
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... music and painting with mathematics, economics and philosophy, the person you end up with is Frank Plumpton Ramsey. A fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, Ramsey was born in 1903 and died before he turned 27, having done extraordinary work in all three fields. He is revered by academics, his influence evinced by the almost comical range of ideas named ...

At the Barbican

John-Paul Stonard: ‘Postwar Modern’, 23 June 2022

... Born in Hungary, Cordell had arrived in Britain after the war with her husband, the composer Frank Cordell, and soon became part of the London scene. She was the only female painter in the Independent Group, a band of artists, architects and designers who hung out at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on Dover Street. She made her name in the ...

Canons

Frank Kermode, 2 February 1984

Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism 
by James Barr.
Oxford, 181 pp., £13, June 1983, 0 19 826323 6
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Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth 
by Edmund Leach and D. Alan Aycock.
Cambridge, 170 pp., £15, September 1983, 0 521 25491 4
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... that may be modernised, possibly with some help from secular literary criticism. In that field, books which may, by analogy, be called canonical, are given special sorts of attention. The whole idea of literary canons, undogmatic though it must be, is at present under attack by those who regard it as arbitrary or authoritarian, and wish to end the ...

Montgomeries

David Fraser, 22 December 1983

Monty. Vol. II: Master of the Battlefield 1942-1944 
by Nigel Hamilton.
Hamish Hamilton, 863 pp., £12.95, October 1983, 0 241 11104 8
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Decision in Normandy: The Unwritten Story of Montgomery and the Allied Campaign 
by Carlo D’Este.
Collins, 555 pp., £12.95, October 1983, 0 00 217056 6
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... There were and there remain two extremes of opinion about Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, as well as a large number of intermediate positions. At one end of the scale are those who judge him a competent if somewhat pedestrian professional soldier who usually managed by good fortune to decline battle unless the odds were overwhelmingly in his favour, a general apt to forfeit the fruits of victory by excessive caution; an unimaginative commander with a very inflated view of his own talents and achievements, who was as conceited as he was uncharitable; an ill-mannered egocentric with a strong streak of unkindness ...

On Michael O’Brien

August Kleinzahler: Michael O’Brien, 16 February 2017

... Editions, an imprint O’Brien set up in order to get out his own work and that of his friend Frank Kuenstler; no one else was interested in publishing it. Kuenstler, an experimental film-maker as well as a poet, was a significant influence: he seems to have encouraged the cinematic qualities in O’Brien’s poetry. Kuenstler’s short film El Atlantis ...

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