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The pleasure of not being there

Peter Brooks, 18 November 1993

Benjamin Constant: A Biography 
by Dennis Wood.
Routledge, 321 pp., £40, June 1993, 0 415 01937 0
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Isabelle de Charrière (Belle de Zuylen): A Biography 
by C.P Courtney.
Voltaire Foundation, 810 pp., £49, August 1993, 0 7294 0439 0
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... soul. Years later Balzac would produce a telling portrait of the self-torturing romantic loves of George Sand, Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult in the (relatively little-read) novel, Béatrix. It’s hard to know who could have done justice to the upper-class intellectual-bohemian melodrama played out in and around Coppet – perhaps Goethe’s troubling ...

A Pair of Yellow Gloves

Tim Parks: Stendhal’s ‘Italian Chronicles’, 19 October 2017

Italian Chronicles 
by Stendhal, translated by Raymond MacKenzie.
Minnesota, 344 pp., £20.99, May 2017, 978 1 5179 0011 3
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... friends’ shortcomings, or their own transgressions. ‘I don’t think he was bad at heart,’ George Sand remarked of Beyle’s habitual cynicism and constant obscenities, ‘he made too much effort to seem so.’ Above all, Beyle wished to be free to feel, to give himself up to ‘agreeable passions’. Free to love and to make love. To other ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: The biography of stuff, 5 July 2001

... of the drug is possible, would you set about getting it authorised? Who would you ask? George W. – ‘W’ in this instance standing for ‘When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible’ – Bush? Or perhaps the Queen, within yards of whom, the Evening Standard was shocked to report, other representatives of the supra-legal ...

Sun-Dappled Propaganda

Bee Wilson: ‘On Chapel Sands’, 21 November 2019

On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons 
by Laura Cumming.
Chatto, 301 pp., £16.99, July 2019, 978 1 78474 247 8
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... thirteen, Cumming’s mother, Betty Elston – born in 1926 – was much photographed. Her father, George, a travelling salesman who sold industrial soap, was forever making her pose for shots which he would capture with his Box Brownie. There are black and white snaps of a three-year-old Betty on the beach at Chapel Sands, near the small Lincolnshire village ...

Short Cuts

Marina Warner: The Flood, 6 March 2014

... I face More of the epic would be discovered under the sand as time went on. In 1990 Stephanie Dalley added more lines to her edition from newly recovered pieces, but most of what’s left has probably been smashed in the course of the Iraq wars. It seems proper that a place of fire and dust, its skin scarred by warfare, should be the origin of the story of the Flood today: devastation in negative, flood and drought bound together ...

Desperately Seeking Susan

Terry Castle: Remembering Susan Sontag, 17 March 2005

... malefactors: the Outers of Sontag.At other times she was less vehement, and would assume a dreamy, George Sand-in-the-1840s look. ‘I’ve loved men, Terry; I’ve loved women . . .’ she would begin, with a deep sigh. What did the sex of the person matter, after all? Think of Sand herself with Chopin and Marie ...

Homer and Virgil and Broch

George Steiner, 12 July 1990

Oxford Readings in Vergil’s ‘Aeneid’ 
edited by S.J. Harrison.
Oxford, 488 pp., £45, April 1990, 0 19 814389 3
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... but not quite to arrive, not to be found in his city ... but to fall before his time on the barren sand (4.620), in Stoic terminology sometimes proficiens but never perfectus.’ In tune with recent trends, the Readings dwell on the second or Iliad half of Virgil’s Aeneid. Inevitably, this chronicle of savage warfare and political imbroglios has occupied a ...

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Hugh Barnes, 21 February 1985

So Much Love 
by Beryl Reid.
Hutchinson, 195 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 0 09 155730 5
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Knock wood 
by Candice Bergen.
Hamish Hamilton, 223 pp., £9.95, October 1984, 9780241113585
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... Sir Richard Attenborough is the common factor. Bergen was his co-star in a film called The Sand Pebbles, shot on location in the Far East. Out of hours, while the other actors, Steve McQueen amongst them, were busy getting drunk and chasing women, Dickie (bless him) was ‘acquiring art and informing himself on the island’s politics, making ...
... his faith with his politics made him one of the most famous thinkers in the pre-1848 world; from George Sand, who refused to stand for election to the French National Assembly on the grounds that as long as women remained ‘under the tutelage and the dependency of a man’ they could not be free political agents, to the Roman popular tribune Angelo ...

Summarising Oneself

Julian Barnes: Degas’s Vanity, 19 November 2020

The Letters of Edgar Degas 
edited by Theodore Reff.
Wildenstein Plattner Institute, 1464 pp., £150, June, 978 0 9988175 1 4
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... quickly. ‘Nothing in art must look like an accident, even movement,’ he wrote in 1886; while George Moore reports him as saying: ‘No art is less spontaneous than mine. Of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament, I know nothing.’ At the same time, he was always experimenting, pushing the form – whether it was painting or monotype or even ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: The smothering of Babylon, 3 February 2005

... Polish forces that have occupied the site since US troops handed over to them in September 2003. Sand bags have been filled with deposits ‘containing shards, bones etc’. Gravel has been brought in from elsewhere to make car parks and helicopter landing pads, contaminating the archaeological record. Fuel has leaked into the ground. Nine of the moulded ...

Diary

Tom Paulin: Summer in Donegal, 16 September 1999

... It’s a place I’ve known since early childhood: mysterious and very beautiful, like the sand dunes across the estuary, running along the edge of the Atlantic. The marram grass in front is broken by one huge hollowed-out dune like a great natural amphitheatre, except it must be the work of the tribe who lived there in the sixth century. That ...

At the Royal Academy

John-Paul Stonard: Léon Spilliaert, 16 April 2020

... coast as a place of stillness and isolation. The town meets the shore uneasily at Ostend – vast sand flats stretch out beyond the grandeur of the Kursaal and the Galeries royales, both built in the time of Leopold II. These structures, particularly the pillared arcade of the Galeries royales, are the most animate elements in Spilliaert’s images. The ...

English Proust

Christopher Prendergast, 8 July 1993

In Search of Lost Time 
by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright.
Chatto, £15, November 1992, 0 7011 3992 7
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... than Scott Moncrieff’s. For example, the question of mother is also related to the question of George Sand. When Maman, in the famous good-night-kiss scene, reads François le Champi to her agitated son, the latter is calmed by the presence in Sand’s text of ‘des expressions tombées en désuétude et redevenues ...

At the Gay Hussar

John Sutherland, 20 August 1981

One and Last Love 
by John Braine.
Eyre Methuen, 175 pp., £6.50, June 1981, 0 413 47990 0
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Sweetsir 
by Helen Yglesias.
Hodder, 332 pp., £6.95, August 1981, 9780340270424
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On the Yankee Station 
by William Boyd.
Hamish Hamilton, 184 pp., £7.95, July 1981, 0 241 10426 2
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Byzantium endures 
by Michael Moorcock.
Secker, 404 pp., £6.95, June 1981, 0 436 28458 8
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Heavy Sand 
by Anatoli Rybakov, translated by Harold Shuckman.
Allen Lane, 380 pp., £7.95, June 1981, 0 7139 1343 6
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... her.’ Unawed, the couple make sophisticated table-talk about their fellow guests: ‘That’s George Melly. And there’s Lord Longford!’    ‘Not together? That would make the mind boggle.’    ‘No, at separate tables.’ It adds ‘sparkle’ to life, the narrator complacently observes, and ‘it can only happen in the metropolis.’ It ...

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