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Diary

A.J. Ayer: More of A.J. Ayer’s Life, 22 December 1983

... is that it carries with it the occupancy of a large house with extensive gardens running down to a lake known as Occam’s Pond. Having rejoiced in the beauty of northern New England in the autumn, I had qualms about its winter climate, since the area around Hanover, on the borders of New Hampshire and Vermont, contains the principal ski resorts of the United ...

At the Pool

Inigo Thomas, 21 June 2018

... Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida is enormous. So is its pool, which you could say is more of a lake. When Madonna stayed there in the early 1990s, she apparently insisted on having the pool to herself, less for the swimming perhaps, and more because as a material goddess she could. I went to a book party at the hotel years ago (the American Booksellers ...

Then place my purboil’d Head upon a Stake

Colin Burrow: British and Irish poetry, 7 January 1999

Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse 1625-1660 
edited by Peter Davidson.
Oxford, 716 pp., £75, July 1998, 0 19 818441 7
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... and to pluck. Consider this delicious morsel of anonymity, ‘On a Lady Sleeping’, plucked by Peter Davidson from BL MS Add. 25,707: Calmely as the mornings soft teares shedd Upon some rose or Violet bedd May your slumbers fall upon you All your thoughts sit easy on you Gently rocking heart and eyes With their tuneful Lullabyes There are no firm ...

Noisomeness

Keith Thomas: Smells of Hell, 16 July 2020

Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times 
by Robert Muchembled, translated by Susan Pickford.
Polity, 216 pp., £17.99, May, 978 1 5095 3677 1
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The Clean Body: A Modern History 
by Peter Ward.
McGill-Queen’s, 313 pp., £27.99, December 2019, 978 0 7735 5938 7
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... smell’; they would end up, he said, in hell, in ‘a stinking dungeon’ and a ‘loathsome lake that burns with fire and brimstone for ever’.For the well to do, the usual way of dealing with body odour was to conceal it under one of several available perfumes. In the 16th century the most fashionable were musk, a strong-smelling substance secreted by ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2009, 7 January 2010

... not been known to come up so far, as they can’t negotiate the waterfall and the weir before the lake. 21 January. Working in the BBC Studio at Maida Vale I don’t watch President Obama’s inauguration and am astonished when I see on the news in the evening the vast concourse of people gathered in Washington. I don’t read any official estimates of the ...

The Importance of Being Ernie

Ferdinand Mount, 5 November 2020

Ernest Bevin: Labour’s Churchill 
by Andrew Adonis.
Biteback, 352 pp., £20, July, 978 1 78590 598 8
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... Birrell didn’t listen, but Bevin persuaded the city council to put men to work constructing a lake in Eastville Park, known for years afterwards as ‘Bevin’s Lake’. In 1917, sitting on a committee to plan postwar reconstruction, he fiercely opposed any return to the gold standard. After the war, again unlike ...

Subjects

Craig Raine, 6 October 1983

Peter Porter: Collected Poems 
Oxford, 335 pp., £12.50, March 1983, 0 19 211948 6Show More
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... concerned.’ If the treatment of subject-matter is every-thing, we should not be too worried when Peter Porter tells us, referring to his family, that they are ‘quite without distinction’. In this, he is at one with Elizabeth Bishop and Tony Harrison, the former a great poet. However, like Elizabeth Bishop, Porter feels the immediate force of Lowell’s ...

Weimarama

Richard J. Evans, 8 November 1990

Male Fantasies Vol. I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History 
by Klaus Theweleit, translated by Chris Turner, Erica Carter and Stephen Conway.
Polity, 517 pp., £35, May 1987, 0 7456 0382 3
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Male Fantasies Vol. II: Male Bodies: Psychoanalysing the White Terror 
by Klaus Theweleit, translated by Chris Turner, Erica Carter and Stephen Conway.
Polity, 507 pp., £35, September 1989, 0 7456 0556 7
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... is naked. Her nakedness assaults him with a sudden glowing shudder, a gust of wind across a placid lake. He says nothing, but with a jolt his breath rushes into his blood, filling it with pearls of pure, quivering bubbles, a gushing froth, just as the blood of men shot in the lungs leaves them lying yellow and silent like corpses, while the blood spurts ...

Point of Principle

Michael Irwin, 2 April 1981

The Country 
by David Plante.
Gollancz, 159 pp., £6.95, March 1981, 0 575 02938 2
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The Radiant Future 
by Alexander Zinoviev, translated by Gordon Clough.
Bodley Head, 287 pp., £7.50, March 1981, 0 370 30219 2
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Farewell to Europe 
by Walter Laqueur.
Weidenfeld, 310 pp., £6.50, March 1981, 0 297 77870 6
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... the past, guarded exchanges of confidence. The parents are persuaded to come on a trip to the lake for tea. Daniel and his brother Albert help the old man complete a table that he had undertaken to make for another of his sons. The story then goes back some twenty years to a weekend party at which the whole family was assembled. The sons have come to the ...

At Tate Modern

Hal Foster: ‘Surrealism beyond Borders’, 26 May 2022

... and geographic borderlines’. The usual narrative of Surrealism, the curators argue, tends to peter out around 1939, when many European artists were forced to flee the coming war. With pieces from the 1920s to the 1980s, Surrealism beyond Borders blows right past this date, with the implication that, when it comes to such international movements, the ...

On Reichenau Island

Irina Dumitrescu, 26 September 2024

... series of early medieval missionaries who travelled from afar to preach, educate and build around Lake Constance and along the Rhine. According to one popular myth, Reichenau Abbey was founded by a monk called Pirmin who arrived with his men in 724. Reichenau had fertile soil, good irrigation and abundant woodland and vineyards, but it was also infested by ...

True Grit

David Craig, 8 February 1996

Wainwright: The Biography 
by Hunter Davies.
Joseph, 356 pp., £16.99, October 1995, 0 7181 3909 7
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... she shooed them out of the house: ‘Everybody out,’ she cried, ‘he’s back!’ His son Peter shared Wainwright’s walks when he was a boy. Touching black and white snapshots show him neatly dressed, standing alone in a green trod between limestone walls, dutifully consulting a map. In his fifties he had to retire early, joints swollen with ...

Badmouthing City

William Fitzgerald: Catullus, 23 February 2006

The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition 
translated by Peter Green.
California, 339 pp., £15.95, September 2005, 0 520 24264 5
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... Peter Green’s splendid new translation of Catullus makes quite a substantial volume: more than three hundred pages in all, with an introduction, parallel text in Latin and English, notes, glossary and index. Such treatment doesn’t feel quite right for this ‘new witty booklet, all fresh-polished with abrasive’, as Catullus describes the book he dedicates to Cornelius Nepos in poem 1 ...

‘You think our country’s so innocent?’

Adam Shatz: Polarised States of America, 1 December 2022

... people, he said, were responsible for the increase in crime); and Kari Lake, a former newscaster and liberal Buddhist who remade herself as a Maga warrior and was widely hailed as a future party leader.There were, of course, disappointments. Tim Ryan, a working-class populist who ran a strong campaign in red Ohio, lost by 6.6 points ...

Things

Karl Miller, 2 April 1987

The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories 
by Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert.
Oxford, 504 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 19 214163 5
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The Ghost Stories of M.R. James 
by Michael Cox.
Oxford, 224 pp., £12.45, November 1986, 9780192122551
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Supernatural Tales 
by Vernon Lee.
Peter Owen, 222 pp., £10.95, February 1987, 0 7206 0680 2
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The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural 
edited by Jack Sullivan.
Viking, 482 pp., £14.95, October 1986, 0 670 80902 0
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Ghostly Populations 
by Jack Matthews.
Johns Hopkins, 171 pp., £11.75, March 1987, 0 8018 3391 4
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... Governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw sees her first ghost, that of the wicked valet Peter Quint, the words she uses to describe the event – which initially persuades her that her ‘imagination’ has ‘turned real’, in the person of her handsome employer – are words in which Hamlet is remembered. ‘It was plump, one afternoon, in the ...

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