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Sublime Propositions

John Summerson, 17 March 1983

John Soane: The Making of an Architect 
by Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey.
Chicago, 408 pp., £25, November 1982, 0 226 17298 8
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... Hall, a charming house certainly, but one that might have been designed by any loyal pupil of Wyatt or Holland. The value of the book is in detailed, well-wrought episodes rather than in narrative outline and there is a good deal to be said for this way of handling the material. The illustrations are liberal, well-chosen and admirably arranged and the ...

Diary

Stephen Smith: What about Somalia?, 11 February 1993

... not so much doctoring the spin as applying snake oil to it, said: ‘This may be Dodge City, but Wyatt is in town.’ According to this model, it seems that the marshals from out of town would sooner shoot it out with ‘the bandits’ than, say, take advantage of superior numbers and firepower to encourage them to throw down their guns and come out with ...

Imbalance

Michael Hofmann: The Charm of Hugo Williams, 22 May 2003

Collected Poems 
by Hugo Williams.
Faber, 288 pp., £20, September 2002, 0 571 21233 6
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... writing now, his work would sit reasonably well with that of a thousand or two thousand years ago: Wyatt, Wang Wei, Propertius, Sappho. He is a plain-spoken metaphysical, purveying a teary elegance, clarity in confusion, insouciant reflection, irreducible unguardedness. There are many places one might begin with Hugo ...

Remember the Yak

Michael Robbins: John Ashbery, 9 September 2010

Planisphere 
by John Ashbery.
Carcanet, 143 pp., £12.95, December 2009, 978 1 84777 089 9
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... wife. Richard took unto him the Lady Anne, who was played by Nan Grey, though she actually married Wyatt (John Sutton) after they escaped from the Tower, or the Castle. In the end Richard killed just about everybody, except Mord, who got thrown off a cliff by somebody, a fitting end to a miserable career. Other poets stand in line for places at poetry’s ...

Skeltonics

Helen Cooper: The maverick poetry of John Skelton, 14 December 2006

John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak 
by Jane Griffiths.
Oxford, 213 pp., £50, February 2006, 9780199273607
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... most significant poet in the 130 years between the death of Chaucer and the flourishing of Thomas Wyatt; but it has to be said that the competition for the top ranking south of the Scottish border is not very fierce, and until the 1930s such a judgment would have struck most people as bizarre. His poetry had come to be little regarded within fifty years of ...

Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Sonnet

Barbara Everett: The Sonnets, 8 May 2008

... needs to be borne in mind. There are a lot of 16th-century sonnets. But, if we except Sir Thomas Wyatt’s magnificent though sometimes stumbling work, many of these are paper poems, manifestations of a particular moment in Tudor court culture. Some of this sonnet-writing, Sidney’s in particular, is highly accomplished; some is haunting, such as ...

Unmuscular Legs

E.S. Turner, 22 August 1996

The Dictionary of National Biography 1986-1990 
edited by C.S. Nicholls.
Oxford, 607 pp., £50, June 1996, 0 19 865212 7
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... was the Plantagenet survivor already mentioned, the 15th Earl of Huntingdon, but, says Woodrow Wyatt, he was ‘politely resolute in avoiding inconvenience to himself’. When his second wile proposed that her father should live with them he said nothing but quietly packed his bags ready to move out. This was the man of multiple talents who painted a mural ...

Mexxed Missages

Elaine Showalter: A road trip through Middle America, 4 November 2004

... tourist industry centred on the Wild West and its outlaw heroes – you don’t forget that Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday once walked the streets of Tombstone, Arizona. But no one seems to be walking the streets of Tulsa, Oklahoma, with their used-car lots, pawn shops and bail bond offices. Tulsa even has a Right Wing Restaurant (chicken, I guess), and ...

Bravo l’artiste

John Lanchester: What is Murdoch after?, 5 February 2004

The Murdoch Archipelago 
by Bruce Page.
Simon and Schuster, 580 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 7432 3936 9
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Rupert Murdoch: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Media Wizard 
by Neil Chenoweth.
Crown Business, 416 pp., $27.50, December 2002, 0 609 61038 4
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Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed up Big Media 
by Michael Wolff.
Flamingo, 381 pp., £18.99, January 2004, 0 00 717881 6
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... and bigger bets, makes News Corp close to being a company with no ‘there’ there. From Woodrow Wyatt’s journals for 1986, quoted in The Murdoch Archipelago: Wednesday 1 October. A message to speak to Downing Street urgently. The Prime Minister wanted me to know before the official announcement . . . that Duke Hussey was to be the new chairman [of the ...

Sixtysomethings

Paul Addison, 11 May 1995

True Blues: The Politics of Conservative Party Membership 
by Paul Whiteley, Patrick Seyd and Jeremy Richardson.
Oxford, 303 pp., £35, October 1994, 0 19 827786 5
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Frustrate Their Knavish Tricks: Writings on Biography, History and Politics 
by Ben Pimlott.
HarperCollins, 417 pp., £20, August 1994, 9780002554954
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... Kennedy and De Gaulle to Harold Macmillan (‘a music-hall turn way past his best’), Woodrow Wyatt (‘always a bounder and a cad’) and George Brown (‘an alcoholic for whom the twin obsessions of drink and politics were two attempts to escape from some inner grief’). The aim of biography, he writes, is to understand an individual life by describing ...

Absolutely Bleedin’ Obvious

Ian Sansom: Will Self, 6 July 2006

The Book of Dave 
by Will Self.
Viking, 496 pp., £17.99, June 2006, 0 670 91443 6
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... the English translations of the Psalms – reading Tyndale, Coverdale, Milton, Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Francis Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw and the inspired committee-work of the Authorised Version – one immediately notices that the biblical texts are really quite vile, and that the poets’ ‘personal agendas’ seem almost without exception ...

Powered by Fear

Linda Colley: Putting the navy in its place, 3 February 2005

The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649-1815 
by N.A.M. Rodger.
Allen Lane, 907 pp., £30, September 2004, 0 7139 9411 8
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... known: from Mrs Constance Pley of Weymouth, who supplied the navy with sailcloth, to Mrs Ann Wyatt, who built the warship Cumberland. To this extent, the Royal Navy was a microcosm of its home society, a by-product and reflection of its shifting economy, politics and population. But what of the navy and the world beyond Britain? Here Rodger takes a ...

Steaming Torsos

J. Hoberman, 6 February 1997

Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film 
by Lee Clark Mitchell.
Chicago, 352 pp., £23.95, November 1996, 0 226 53234 8
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... successful Dances with Wolves and the 1994 fiasco of his even more self-regarding and costly Wyatt Earp. Where the Western once proposed an entire moral universe, it is now no more than a few chunks of narrative revolving around the solar majesty of the lead. Is it extinct? As Mitchell points out, ‘almost the moment the Western’ – or, at least, The ...

Dream Ticket

Peter Shore, 6 October 1983

The Diary of Hugh Gaitskell 1945-1956 
by Philip Williams.
Cape, 720 pp., £25, September 1983, 0 224 01911 2
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... and Major Mayhew, Major Blackburn, Captain Chetwynd, Major Freeman, Mr Brown, Mr Gaitskell, Major Wyatt, Mr Durbin, Mr Willmott, Major Younger and Major Wells duly contributing, and the Chancellor summing up at the end. It would never have occurred to Gaitskell to say, as Wilson did – because he, Wilson, only hoped it was true – that ‘Labour is the ...

Anglophobe Version

Denton Fox, 2 February 1984

The New Testament in Scots 
translated by William Laughton Lorimer.
Canongate, 476 pp., £17.50, October 1983, 0 900025 24 7
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Scotland and the Lowland Tongue 
edited by J. Derrick McClure.
Aberdeen University Press, 256 pp., £17, September 1983, 0 08 028482 5
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... first part of ‘Lo what it is to love’, a poem in the Egerton MS (1535-7), usually ascribed to Wyatt, was by Alexander Scott, a Scots poet known to have been alive in the 1580s. I will gladly let him have the last word, for what it is worth. His insults, though, did seem to me to fall below the usual high Scots standards. But where, it might be asked, does ...

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