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O Wyoming Whipporwill

Claire Harman: George Barker, 3 October 2002

The Chameleon Poet: A Life of George Barker 
by Robert Fraser.
Cape, 573 pp., £25, February 2002, 0 224 06242 5
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... the book as a fantasy of incestuous marriage. Alanna is pregnant by a husband who has left her; Edward is a poet immobilised after an accident. As her pregnancy progresses, Alanna’s lyricism becomes feverish; ‘Edward, Rock in an ocean of delirium, succour me! Secure me with your stark arms, male hard arms, which bend ...

Jousting for Peace

Thomas Penn: Henry VIII meets Francis I, 17 July 2014

The Field of Cloth of Gold 
by Glenn Richardson.
Yale, 288 pp., £35, November 2013, 978 0 300 14886 2
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... ambitious project. Its guiding spirit was Henry’s ‘angel-tongued’ lord chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the man in whom, as the Venetian ambassador put it, ‘the whole power of the state is really lodged’. In war-ravaged 15th-century Europe, an old idea began to gain new impetus: the dream of a unified Christendom, bound together by its one ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: A Quick Bout of Bardiness, 6 June 2002

... in a bit of avant-garde transvestite theatre. The Queen, obviously, would play the King; and Edward, who after all has a theatrical background, could make an excellent Cordelia. Sven-Göran Eriksson should direct; and if Tony Blair is too busy to play the Fool, perhaps Martin Amis, who has been tentatively sticking up for the Royals in the New ...

Done for the State

John Guy: The House of York, 2 April 2020

The Brothers York: An English Tragedy 
by Thomas Penn.
Penguin, 688 pp., £12.99, April, 978 0 7181 9728 5
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Richard III: The Self-Made King 
by Michael Hicks.
Yale, 388 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 0 300 21429 1
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... on Palm Sunday, he took the throne from the weak, ineffectual Henry VI and was crowned King Edward IV.Usurpers were plentiful in the 15th century. Edward’s claim was by lineal descent from Edward III, and was a strong one if you ignored the deposition of Richard II in 1399. In the ...

Purgatory be damned

Diarmaid MacCulloch: The Dissolution of the Monasteries, 17 July 2008

The Last Office: 1539 and the Dissolution of a Monastery 
by Geoffrey Moorhouse.
Weidenfeld, 283 pp., £25, March 2008, 978 0 297 85089 2
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... was to condemn the monastic life as useless. One of Henry’s leading courtiers and fixers was Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and he was up to his neck in dissolving monasteries, while being one of the crustiest traditionalists among the peerage. Such men could view what was happening as a structural adjustment in Church and Commonwealth, with the ...

Short Cuts

Inigo Thomas: The Hudson Plane Crash, 11 February 2010

... well-paid occupation it was before 1978 when Jimmy Carter deregulated the aviation industry (with Edward Kennedy’s help) and the monopoly airlines had on their most profitable routes was lost. Sullenberger and Skiles have to hold down second jobs to make ends meet. It’s also a less glamorous profession – there’s so little for a pilot to do in the ...

Brattishness

Colin Burrow: Henry Howard, 11 November 1999

Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life 
by W.A. Sessions.
Oxford, 448 pp., £60, March 1999, 9780198186243
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... Fitzroy. Howard blood was blue enough to pose a threat to the succession, as Surrey’s uncle Thomas discovered when he was imprisoned in 1536 after a rash engagement to Lady Margaret Douglas, who also had royal blood. Surrey was unimaginably grand, but was also not unjustly described by John Barlowe, Dean of Westbury as ‘the most foolish proud boy that ...

Poetry to Thrill an Oyster

Gregory Woods: Fitz-Greene Halleck, 16 November 2000

The American Byron: Homosexuality and the Fall of Fitz-Greene Halleck 
by John W.M. Hallock.
Wisconsin, 226 pp., £14.95, April 2000, 0 299 16804 2
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... inch the sleeping beauty, he wakes up. Although Halleck explicitly lays claim to the influence of Thomas Gray (‘I borrow music from the Muse of Gray’), his Grayness keeps veering off uneasily into the tones of Alexander Pope (‘And I – a victim to love’s cruel dart,/Went – to the Opera – with a broken heart!’) – in this case, the satirical ...

Spurning at the High

Edward Pearce: A poet of Chartism, 6 November 2003

Ernest Jones, Chartism and the Romance of Politics 1819-69 
by Miles Taylor.
Oxford, 290 pp., £45, January 2003, 0 19 820729 8
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... to be filled. The Chartist leader, Feargus O’Connor, had fallen out with his court minstrel, Thomas Cooper, who kept asking embarrassing questions about the alleged mismanagement of funds, when Jones’s Chartist Songs and Fugitive Pieces appeared late in 1846. Some of these, for all their dramatic gestures, had real force. On the lealands slept the ...

Raining

Donald Davie, 5 May 1983

Later Poems 
by R.S. Thomas.
Macmillan, 224 pp., £7.95, March 1983, 0 333 34560 6
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Thomas Hardy Annual, No 1 
edited by Norman Page.
Macmillan, 205 pp., £20, March 1983, 0 333 32022 0
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Tess of the d’Urbervilles 
by Thomas Hardy, edited by Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell.
Oxford, 636 pp., £50, March 1983, 0 19 812495 3
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Hardy’s Love Poems 
by Thomas Hardy, edited by Carl Weber.
Macmillan, 253 pp., £3.95, February 1983, 0 333 34798 6
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The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy. Vol. I: Wessex Poems, Poems of the Past and the Present, Time’s Laughingstocks 
edited by Samuel Hynes.
Oxford, 403 pp., £19.50, February 1983, 0 19 812708 1
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... At the end of a recent and refreshingly untypical poem R.S. Thomas, recalling his sea-captain father, addresses him where he lies in his grave:               And I, can I accept your voyages are done; that there is no tide high enough to float you off this mean shoal of plastic and trash? We have heard something like this before, in more reverberant metre: But thrown upon this filthy modern tide And by its formless spawning fury wrecked ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Bio Insecurity, 5 November 2009

... Is Exporting Fear, Globalising Risk and Making Us All Less Secure (Chicago, £19), Lynn Klotz and Edward Sylvester make a compelling case for a radical and immediate change in America’s biosecurity policy. Since 9/11, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the US government has spent $50 billion on its biodefence programme: Klotz ...

Floreat Eltona

David Starkey, 19 January 1984

Tudor Rule and Revolution: Essays for G.R. Elton from his American Friends 
edited by DeLloyd Guth and John McKenna.
Cambridge, 418 pp., £27.50, February 1983, 0 521 24841 8
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Essays on Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government. Vol III: Papers and Reviews 1973-1981 
by G.R. Elton.
Cambridge, 512 pp., £27.50, March 1983, 0 521 24893 0
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Which road to the past? Two Views of History 
by Robert William Fogel and G.R. Elton.
Yale, 136 pp., £9.95, September 1983, 0 300 03011 8
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... and the constitution, and that this revolution was planned, legislated and executed by one man: Thomas Cromwell. He is similarly fixed in his methods. Now, as always, Elton believes in the self-sufficiency of the record. All the historian is required to do is to approach the evidence with an open mind, study it faithfully, and write up his results ...

Vendlerising

John Kerrigan, 2 April 1987

The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry 
edited by Helen Vendler.
Faber, 440 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 571 13945 0
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Selected Poems 
by John Ashbery.
Carcanet, 348 pp., £16.95, April 1986, 0 85635 666 2
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The Poetry Book Society Anthology 1986/87 
edited by Jonathan Barker.
Hutchinson, 94 pp., £4.95, November 1986, 0 09 165961 2
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Two Horse Wagon Going By 
by Christopher Middleton.
Carcanet, 143 pp., £5.95, October 1986, 0 85635 661 1
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... loam, / Darkened with Celts’ and Saxons’ blood’, composed in an idiom which melds Yeats and Edward Thomas. Times, or places, have changed since the poet of ‘Bone Dreams’ pushed ‘past philology and kennings’ in a retaliatory ‘invasion of England’. Still more fascinating is the case of a writer who leaves England for America ...

From the Motorcoach

Stefan Collini: J.B. Priestley, 19 November 2009

English Journey 
by J.B. Priestley.
Great Northern Books, 351 pp., £25, July 2009, 978 1 905080 47 2
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... of the 20th century there were several related attempts, by writers such as Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas, to identify ‘England’ with ‘the countryside’ (largely for an urban readership), while the interwar decades tended to throw up more quizzical searches for ‘the real England’, assumed to have been submerged by the shoddy detritus of ...

Conrad’s Complaint

Frank Kermode, 17 November 1983

The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Vol. I: 1861-1897 
edited by Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies.
Cambridge, 446 pp., £19.50, September 1983, 0 521 24216 9
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... in smaller collections containing his correspondence with one or more persons – for example, Edward Garnett, William Blackwood and Cunninghame Graham. Early letters to Polish friends and relations have been translated, and a series of about a hundred to Marguerite Poradowska appeared in the original French. However, it seems that ‘more than a third of ...

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