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Flour Fixated

Bee Wilson, 24 September 2020

Amber Waves: The Extraordinary Biography of Wheat 
by Catherine Zabinski.
Chicago, 246 pp., £18, August 2020, 978 0 226 55371 9
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... productive individuals may also hold the genes for greater tolerance to abnormal rainfall or late frost or fungal pathogens.’ For the past 170 or so years, however, mainstream wheat breeding has aimed at getting rid of this biodiversity by selecting seed that has certain consistent traits, such as yield or disease resistance. ‘Much of the effort behind ...

Ruined by men

Anthony Thwaite, 1 September 1988

The Truth about Lorin Jones 
by Alison Lurie.
Joseph, 294 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 7181 3095 2
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Latecomers 
by Anita Brookner.
Cape, 248 pp., £10.95, August 1988, 0 224 02554 6
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Where the rivers meet 
by John Wain.
Hutchinson, 563 pp., £12.95, June 1988, 9780091736170
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About the Body 
by Christopher Burns.
Secker, 193 pp., £10.95, August 1988, 0 436 09784 2
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Stories 
by Elizabeth Jolley.
Viking, 312 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 670 82113 6
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... cold and inconsiderate. One begins to see parallels with Lawrance Thompson’s quest for Robert Frost: as Thompson, at first a hero-worshipper, dredged deeper into the material that eventually became his big biography, the hero began more and more to take on the lineaments of a monster. When she set out on her quest for the truth, Polly already knew who ...
Goldenballs 
by Richard Ingrams.
Private Eye/Deutsch, 144 pp., £4.25
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... before he had been provoked either by libel or ‘sustained vilification’. It started at David Frost’s house in July 1975 when Frost (who told the story to Peter Jay) introduced Goldsmith to Wilson and Falkender. Since both Goldsmith and Wilson had, at different times, declared that the Eye was dedicated to the ...

Seen through the Loopholes

David Simpson: ‘War at a Distance’, 11 March 2010

War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime 
by Mary Favret.
Princeton, 262 pp., £18.95, January 2010, 978 0 691 14407 8
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... from my sight’. This superimposition of destructive masses on an empty, rural space is the mark of wartime consciousness. A similar act of imagination allows Favret to find in the picturesque ambience of William and Thomas Daniell’s painting The Bridge at Serinagur (first exhibited in 1800) an allegory (indeed a history) of the fragile human form in ...

In a Dry Place

Nicolas Tredell, 11 October 1990

On the Look-Out: A Partial Autobiography 
by C.H. Sisson.
Carcanet, 234 pp., £14.95, October 1989, 0 85635 758 8
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In Two Minds: Guesses at Other Writers 
by C.H. Sisson.
Carcanet, 296 pp., £18.95, September 1990, 0 85635 877 0
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... of Chas S. was one of its main achievements’ (see Letters to an Editor, edited by Mark Fisher). It certainly helped to suggest that the senior servant of the Crown might also be an honourable servant of the Muse. In the Second World War, Sisson served the Crown not as a civil servant but as a common soldier. He tells this soldier’s tale in ...

Derridiarry

Richard Stern, 15 August 1991

... things were in bloom. ‘Is that the way you arrange your lectures?’ I asked. ‘Begin them in frost and end with bloom?’ ‘Ah yes,’ he said, twinkling. ‘It’s the way I like to program them.’ Meanwhile he had difficulty lighting his pipe; finally he put it back in the raincoat.I told him that the Palevsky of the auditorium was the inventor of ...

Making sense

Denis Donoghue, 4 October 1984

A Wave 
by John Ashbery.
Carcanet, 89 pp., £4.95, August 1984, 9780856355479
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Secret Narratives 
by Andrew Motion.
Salamander, 46 pp., £6, March 1983, 0 907540 29 5
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Liberty Tree 
by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 78 pp., £4, June 1983, 0 05 711302 5
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111 Poems 
by Christopher Middleton.
Carcanet, 185 pp., £5.95, April 1983, 0 85635 457 0
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New and Selected Poems 
by James Michie.
Chatto, 64 pp., £3.95, September 1983, 0 7011 2723 6
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By the Fisheries 
by Jeremy Reed.
Cape, 79 pp., £4, March 1984, 0 224 02154 0
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Voyages 
by George Mackay Brown.
Chatto, 48 pp., £3.95, September 1983, 0 7011 2736 8
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... Wave’ bears comparison with ‘Self-Portrait’, but doesn’t rise to its extraordinary mark: mainly because the work of art, Parmigianino’s self-portrait, forces Ashbery to recognise ways of feeling, knowing and being which don’t coincide with his own, and the recognition drives his common voice beyond itself. There are many passages in ‘A ...

Boys will be girls

Clive James, 1 September 1983

Footlights! A Hundred Years of Cambridge Comedy 
by Robert Hewison.
Methuen, 224 pp., £8.95, June 1983, 0 413 51150 2
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... If the publishers thought they were going to get the kind of sputtering firework that one of David Frost’s script associates might help him deliver into a tape-recorder, they haven’t. This is a book meant to be read and even kept. Indeed it might have more keepers than readers, since a probable majority of buyers will be the people mentioned in the ...

Keach and Shelley

Denis Donoghue, 19 September 1985

Shelley’s Style 
by William Keach.
Methuen, 269 pp., £18, April 1985, 9780416303209
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Ariel: A Shelley Romance 
by André Maurois and Ella D’Arcy.
Penguin, 252 pp., £1.95, September 1985, 0 14 000001 1
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... of perception and intuition’, as Keach refers to it, is at once the sign of its value and the mark of its mortality. The image always takes a route of evanescence. No wonder Shelley is especially tender toward sentiments which, as Arthur Symons wrote of a dance, ‘last only long enough to have been there’. An idealising stance has every virtue except ...

Cheesespreadology

Ian Sansom, 7 March 1996

Garbage 
by A.R. Ammons.
Norton, 121 pp., £7.50, February 1995, 0 393 31203 8
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Tape for the Turn of the Year 
by A.R. Ammons.
Norton, 205 pp., £8.95, February 1995, 0 393 31204 6
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Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow 
by August Kleinzahler.
Faber, 93 pp., £6.99, April 1995, 0 571 17431 0
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The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs 
by Charles Simic.
Michigan, 127 pp., £30, January 1996, 0 472 06569 6
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Frightening Toys 
by Charles Simic.
Faber, 101 pp., £6.99, April 1995, 0 571 17399 3
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The Ghost of Eden 
by Chase Twichell.
Faber, 78 pp., £6.99, April 1995, 0 571 17434 5
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... with those within the tradition whom he calls ‘visionary sceptics’, writers like Dickinson, Frost and Stevens, who have had a ‘lover’s quarrel’ with Emerson. According to Simic, ‘God died and we were left with Emerson. Some are still milking Emerson’s cow, but there are problems with that milk.’ The main problem with Emerson’s milk is that ...

Someone Else

Adam Phillips: Paul Muldoon, 4 January 2007

The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures on Poetry 
by Paul Muldoon.
Faber, 406 pp., £25, October 2006, 0 571 22740 6
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Horse Latitudes 
by Paul Muldoon.
Faber, 107 pp., £14.99, October 2006, 0 571 23234 5
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... can be; and it is not incidental that Muldoon has chosen to write about poets – Yeats, Hughes, Frost, Bishop, Dickinson, Stevie Smith, Lowell, Montale, Pessoa, Marianne Moore, H.D., Tsvetaeva, Arnold, Auden, Graves, Heaney, Day-Lewis – whose idiom is peculiarly distinctive (Day-Lewis being the possible exception, but Muldoon, characteristically ...

As Astonishing as Elvis

Jenny Turner: Ayn Rand, 1 December 2005

Ayn Rand 
by Jeff Britting.
Duckworth, 155 pp., £12.99, February 2005, 0 7156 3269 8
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... people in easy reach of Denver can choose between FROG (Front Range Objectivist Group), FROST (Front Range Objectivist Supper Talks) and FROLIC (Front Range Objectivist Laughter Ideas and Chow). Names pop up from website to website, agreeing and disagreeing, welcoming and banning, calling for papers, publishing books. There’s a whole community of ...

Martian Arts

Jonathan Raban, 23 July 1987

Home and Away 
by Steve Ellis.
Bloodaxe, 62 pp., £4.50, February 1987, 9781852240271
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The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper 
by Blake Morrison.
Chatto, 48 pp., £4.95, May 1987, 0 7011 3227 2
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The Frighteners 
by Sean O’Brien.
Bloodaxe, 64 pp., £4.50, February 1987, 9781852240134
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... wives again ...None of these poems will live in anyone’s memory for very long, but they mark a shift, barely imaginable fifteen years ago, to the homely, the territory of fiction and reportage, the tight traditional form. The genius loci of the scene is hymned, not without a dash of ambiguity, by Anthony Thwaite:When for forgotten poets we give ...

Singular Rebellions

Walter Nash, 19 May 1988

Scandal 
by Shusaku Endo, translated by Van Gessel.
Peter Owen, 237 pp., £11.95, April 1988, 0 7206 0682 9
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Hell Screen, Cogwheels, A Fool’s Life 
by Ryunosuke Akutagawa.
Eridanos, 145 pp., £13.95, March 1988, 0 941419 02 9
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Singular Rebellion 
by Saiichi Maruya, translated by Dennis Keene.
Deutsch, 412 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 233 98202 7
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... a personage regularly acknowledged by the deferential form of address, sensei. He has made his mark; and to prove it, he is about to be given a literary prize. Then, in the moment of fame, among the plaudits, the tributes of peers, enter a spoiler: a woman, tipsy, leering, with a raucous account of Suguro’s cavortings in the red-light district, to ...
Selected Poems 1964-1983 
by Douglas Dunn.
Faber, 262 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 571 14619 8
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Terry Street 
by Douglas Dunn.
Faber, 62 pp., £3.95, November 1986, 0 571 09713 8
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Selected Poems 1968-1983 
by Paul Muldoon.
Faber, 109 pp., £8.95, November 1986, 0 571 14603 1
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Essential Reading 
by Peter Reading and Alan Jenkins.
Secker, 230 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 436 40988 7
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Stet 
by Peter Reading.
Secker, 40 pp., £5.95, October 1986, 0 436 40989 5
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... Sash and curse the Pope of Rome.They held a pistol so hard against his foreheadthere was still the mark of an O when he got home.One of the finest poems, and typically tantalising, is the title poem from Why Brownlee left, about a man who vanishes into thin air one morning, leaving his team still harnessed to the plough:Shifting their weight from foot ...

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