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He speaks too loud

David Blackbourn: Brecht, 3 July 2014

Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life 
by Stephen Parker.
Bloomsbury, 704 pp., £30, February 2014, 978 1 4081 5562 2
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... at Munich University; the following year he served briefly as an orderly, first in an amputation ward, then in a ward for sexually transmitted diseases, which provided material for the scurrilous work that was becoming his trademark. He knew which side he was on during the revolutionary upheavals at the end of the war ...

Nationalities

John Sutherland, 6 May 1982

Headbirths, or The Germans are dying out 
by Günter Grass, translated by Ralph Manheim.
Secker, 136 pp., £6.95, March 1982, 0 436 18777 9
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The Skating Party 
by Marina Warner.
Weidenfeld, 180 pp., £6.95, April 1982, 0 297 78113 8
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Sour Sweet 
by Timothy Mo.
Deutsch, 252 pp., £7.95, April 1982, 0 233 97365 6
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At Freddie’s 
by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Collins, 182 pp., £6.50, March 1982, 0 00 222064 4
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... level, there is rivalry among two of Freddie’s pupils to fill the part of Prince Arthur in King John. One boy is crude but magnetic and destined for stardom; the other is finer-grained, a true Thespian. Their opposition is less interesting than Fitzgerald’s sharply accurate evocation of an old-style West End production of Shakespeare, footlights and ...

After High Tea

John Bayley, 23 January 1986

Love in a Cool Climate: The Letters of Mark Pattison and Meta Bradley 1879-1884 
by Vivian Green.
Oxford, 269 pp., £12.95, November 1985, 0 19 820080 3
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... George Eliot borrowed it for the marriage of Dorothea and Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch; Mrs Humphry Ward gave a vivid picture of Pattison as Squire Wendover in Robert Elsmere, a Victorian best-seller; and Rhoda Broughton, the novelist who knew the Rector best, produced a cruel portrait in her slight and perfunctory novel Belinda. But this, alas, only ...

Ways of Being Interesting

Theo Tait: Ian McEwan, 11 September 2014

The Children Act 
by Ian McEwan.
Cape, 215 pp., £16.99, September 2014, 978 0 224 10199 8
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... a life-saving blood transfusion on the grounds that it was contrary to his faith. Mr Justice Ward, as he was then, gave the hospital leave to treat E against his will, declaring that the courts ‘should be very slow to allow an infant to martyr himself’. Where a child has sufficient intelligence and understanding to comprehend their medical ...

The Enlightened Vote

Stefan Collini: Ernest Renan, 19 December 2019

‘What Is a Nation?’ and Other Political Writings 
by Ernest Renan, translated and edited by M.F.N. Giglioli.
Columbia, 328 pp., £62, September 2018, 978 0 231 17430 5
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... of the 19th century. For example, his work made a deep impression on the young and precocious Mary Ward, later better known as Mrs Humphry Ward, author of the hugely successful Robert Elsmere (1888). Through the good offices of her uncle, Matthew Arnold, she met Renan in Paris, and thanks to the patronage of ...

Making saints

Peter Burke, 18 October 1984

Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom 1000-1700 
by Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell.
Chicago, 314 pp., £21.25, February 1983, 0 226 89055 4
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The Norman Conquest and Beyond 
by Frank Barlow.
Hambledon, 318 pp., £22, June 1983, 0 907628 19 2
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Miracles and the Medieval Mind 
by Benedicta Ward.
Scolar, 321 pp., £17.50, November 1983, 0 85967 609 9
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The Great Debate on Miracles: From Joseph Glanvill to David Hume 
by R.M. Burns.
Associated University Presses, 305 pp., £17.50, July 1983, 0 8387 2378 0
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Saints and their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History 
edited by Stephen Wilson.
Cambridge, 435 pp., £35, December 1983, 0 521 24978 3
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... this prosopographical approach to sanctity has become more and more popular. The American scholar John Mecklin studied the saint as a ‘culture type’ in 1941. In his book Altruistic Love (1951), the Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin refined Coulton’s analysis by investigating the social origins of some three thousand saints. He concluded that ‘the ...

Oh my oh my oh my

John Lanchester, 12 September 1991

Mao II 
by Don DeLillo.
Cape, 239 pp., £13.99, September 1991, 9780224031523
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Introducing Don DeLillo 
edited by Frank Lentricchia.
Duke, 221 pp., £28, September 1991, 0 8223 1135 6
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... Mao II was prompted in part by that famous picture of a terrified Salinger flinging up an arm to ward off a photographer.) In writing about Gray, DeLillo is, not for the first time, tackling an important contemporary American icon. His career has shown a consistent willingness to write about subjects in the forefront of popular consciousness: American ...

Besieged by Female Writers

John Pemble: Trollope’s Late Style, 3 November 2016

Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form 
by Frederik Van Dam.
Edinburgh, 180 pp., £70, January 2016, 978 0 7486 9955 1
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... and that if she wasn’t then she’d finally met her match. Robert Elsmere (1888) set Mrs Humphry Ward on Eliot’s vacant throne, and ten years later The Sorrows of Satan (1895) established Marie Corelli as heir apparent. Trollope would have been provoked by Woolf’s celebrated requirement for women writers. A room of one’s own and £500 a year wasn’t a ...

Topography v. Landscape

John Barrell: Paul Sandby, 13 May 2010

Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain 
Royal AcademyShow More
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... prolific: nobody could begin to say how many thousands of his pictures have survived, and how John Bonehill, the curator of this exhibition, decided on his final selection I can’t imagine. Sandby was also enormously versatile: he worked in watercolour, bodycolour (gouache) and oil, he etched, he was the first professional artist in Britain to work in ...

Lady This and Princess That

Joanna Biggs: On Buchi Emecheta, 7 March 2024

In the Ditch 
by Buchi Emecheta.
Penguin, 147 pp., £9.99, August 2023, 978 0 241 57812 4
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The Joys of Motherhood 
by Buchi Emecheta.
Penguin, 264 pp., £9.99, September 2022, 978 0 241 57813 1
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... novels’, she traced the change. Adah, an authorial stand-in, has woken up in the maternity ward with a rubber tube running into her nose, and her baby being cared for in the hospital nursery. While spending several days in recovery, she becomes curious – like Sylvia Plath collecting notes for the poem that will become ‘Tulips’ – about the other ...

Pain and Hunger

Tom Shippey, 7 December 1989

Health for Sale: Quackery in England 1660-1850 
by Roy Porter.
Manchester, 280 pp., £19.95, August 1989, 0 7190 1903 6
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Popular Errors 
by Laurent Joubert and Gregory David de Rocher.
University of Alabama Press, 348 pp., $49.95, July 1989, 0 8173 0408 8
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Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe 
by Piero Camporesi, translated by David Gentilcore.
Polity, 212 pp., £19.50, May 1989, 0 7456 0349 1
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Poisons of the Past: Molds, Epidemics and History 
by Mary Kilbourne Matossian.
Yale, 190 pp., £18, November 1989, 0 300 03949 2
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... The irony obviously is that it was not so easy, at least if you were interested in results. Joshua Ward (1685-1761) was widely regarded as a quack, and drawn as such by Hogarth, along with the Epsom bone-setter Sally Mapp, in The Company of Undertakers. But he put back George II’s dislocated thumb when the licensed physicians were all telling the King he had ...

‘I thirst for his blood’

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Henry James, 25 November 1999

Henry James: A Life in Letters 
edited by Philip Horne.
Penguin, 668 pp., £25, June 1999, 0 7139 9126 7
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A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art 
by Lyndall Gordon.
Chatto, 500 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6166 3
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... he was forever taking up his pen to spell out alternatives. A series of letters to Mrs Humphry Ward, several previously unpublished, make the process explicit. ‘I have been full to the brim of interest & admiration,’ he declared after finishing her Helbeck of Bannisdale in 1898: ‘The whole thing is done in a way to make the book run an immense chance ...

Howard’s End

John Sutherland, 18 September 1986

Redback 
by Howard Jacobson.
Bantam, 314 pp., £10.95, September 1986, 0 593 01212 7
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Coming from behind 
by Howard Jacobson.
Black Swan, 250 pp., £2.95, April 1984, 0 552 99063 9
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Peeping Tom 
by Howard Jacobson.
Black Swan, 351 pp., £2.95, October 1985, 0 552 99141 4
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... are three weeks’ massive priapism. The spiritual effect is longer-lasting. Lying in the sting ward of Wangaratta hospital, his testicles swollen to the size of melons, he now has the balls to tell a visiting princess of the blood royal exactly what satyriasis syndrome is (‘having a hard-on as long as a polo stick’). It is, for Leon, a momentous ...

Fading Out

John Redmond, 2 November 1995

The Ghost Orchid 
by Michael Longley.
Cape, 66 pp., £7, May 1995, 0 224 04112 6
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... not quite the chaos of Looking Glass chess but it remained a symbolic landscape, which was used to ward off chaos. The military theme in his work fits into this picture. Like Ted Hughes, one of his major influences, Longley had a father who fought in the First World War and the imagery of the Somme – corpses, helmets, gas-masks – keeps on turning up in his ...

So Very Silent

John Pemble: Victorian Corpse Trade, 25 October 2012

Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and Its Trade in the Dead Poor, c.1834-1929 
by Elizabeth Hurren.
Palgrave, 380 pp., £65, December 2011, 978 0 230 21966 3
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Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor 
by Ruth Richardson.
Oxford, 370 pp., £16.99, February 2012, 978 0 19 964588 6
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... How did he know? He never entered one. But he did spend a night in the ‘spike’, or casual ward (an annexe for tramps and vagrants), of a workhouse just outside London. Having shared the workhouse food and chatted with some of the inmates, he reported that the meal was ‘fit for a boa-constrictor’ and that the uniform was what was most ...

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