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Sunny Days

Michael Howard, 11 February 1993

Never Again: Britain 1945-51 
by Peter Hennessy.
Cape, 544 pp., £20, September 1992, 0 224 02768 9
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Churchill on the Home Front 1900-1955 
by Paul Addison.
Cape, 493 pp., £20, November 1992, 0 224 01428 5
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... Franks, Edwin Plowden, Robert Hall, Edward Bridges, Alec Cairncross, Edward Hall-Patch, Richard Hopkins and Roger Makins, to name only a few of the ‘mandarins’ who served the Labour Government so loyally. Therein lay the problem, however. They did what their Labour masters wanted, and did it very well. Nationalisation apart (and few of them objected to ...

A chemistry is performed

Deborah Friedell: Silicon Valley Girl, 7 February 2019

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup 
by John Carreyrou.
Picador, 320 pp., £9.99, March 2019, 978 1 5098 6808 7
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... of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war; William Perry, the former US secretary of defence; James Mattis, Trump’s future first secretary of defence, who thought that Theranos blood tests would be a ‘game changer’ in battlefield medicine. Naturally, all those men would be useful when it came to winning defence contracts. Fortune put her on its ...

Don’t try this at home

Gavin Francis: Adrenaline, 29 August 2013

Adrenaline 
by Brian Hoffman.
Harvard, 298 pp., £18.95, April 2013, 978 0 674 05088 4
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... the secreted substance. The leaders were an academic pharmacologist – John Jacob Abel at Johns Hopkins University – and an industrial chemist called Jokichi Takamine who was working in New York for the pharmaceutical company Parke-Davis. Takamine won by being the first to identify – and name – adrenaline, but confusingly Parke-Davis chose to drop the ...

Washed in Milk

Terry Eagleton: Cardinal Newman, 5 August 2010

Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint 
by John Cornwell.
Continuum, 273 pp., £18.99, May 2010, 978 1 4411 5084 4
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... spending much of his time in the 1850s in Dublin establishing a university there. Gerard Manley Hopkins would teach at the place for a miserable four years, and James Joyce, who considered Newman the finest prose stylist in English, would become a student at its successor institution, University College, Dublin. Cornwell ...

One word says to its mate

Claire Harman: W.S. Graham, 4 October 2001

The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters of W.S. Graham 
edited by Michael Snow and Margaret Snow.
Carcanet, 401 pp., £12.95, November 1999, 1 85754 445 5
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... his anxieties about being an ill-educated ‘peasant’. Nevertheless he seized on Heraclitus, Hopkins and James Joyce in particular in his one year as a student and developed demanding tastes in music, literature and art. Graham became a farm-labourer in Galway, travelled with a fair and worked on the docks in Dublin to ...

All the girls said so

August Kleinzahler: John Berryman, 2 July 2015

The Dream Songs 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 427 pp., £11.99, October 2014, 978 0 374 53455 4
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77 Dream Songs 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 84 pp., £10, October 2014, 978 0 374 53452 3
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Berryman’s Sonnets 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 127 pp., £10, October 2014, 978 0 374 53454 7
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The Heart Is Strange 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 179 pp., £17.50, October 2014, 978 0 374 22108 9
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Poets in their Youth 
by Eileen Simpson.
Farrar, Straus, 274 pp., £11.50, October 2014, 978 0 374 23559 8
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... poem started or where it’s headed but quickly catches up, regardless. If you hear Gerard Manley Hopkins in there you’re hearing correctly, with the stressed syllables at the poem’s beginning clustered together to suggest frenzy and urgency. The syntax is often described as ‘broken’ or ‘crumpled’. Dashes and ellipses indicate discontinuity of ...

The Poetry of John Ashbery

John Bayley, 2 September 1982

Shadow Train 
by John Ashbery.
Carcanet, 50 pp., £3.25, March 1982, 0 85635 424 4
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... reality’. Such poetry invented the self as Keats invented his lovers in their winter castle, or Hopkins the wreck of the Deutschland, or Milton the loss of Paradise: it was indeed a comparable feat of inventive artifice. By contrast, Ashbery’s poetry, warmly admired by Bloom, perfectly illustrates Bloom’s own thesis that ‘the meaning of a poem is ...

A Moustache Too Far

Danny Karlin: Melville goes under, 8 May 2003

Herman Melville: A Biography. Vol. II: 1851-91 
by Hershel Parker.
Johns Hopkins, 997 pp., £31, May 2002, 0 8018 6892 0
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... be typical of the middlebrow culture whose laureate was Longfellow and whose critical arbiter was James Russell Lowell, and from which Melville, unlike Henry James or Whitman, could not escape. Melville’s doomed attempt, in the late 1840s, to make himself into a country squire at Arrowhead, his farm in the ...

Why aren’t they screaming?

Helen Vendler: Philip Larkin, 6 November 2014

Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love 
by James Booth.
Bloomsbury, 532 pp., £25, August 2014, 978 1 4088 5166 1
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... convey another aspect of Larkin the man, but from those quoted, a less interesting one.) And now James Booth, who teaches English at Hull, and has already written two books on the poet (Philip Larkin: Writer, 1992, and Philip Larkin: The Poet’s Plight, 2005), has composed a brief for the defence of Larkin the man (whom he knew slightly at the ...

Art’s Infancy

Arthur C. Danto, 22 April 1993

The Mind and its Depths 
by Richard Wollheim.
Harvard, 214 pp., £19.95, March 1993, 9780674576117
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Psychoanalysis, Mind and Art: Perspectives on Richard Wollheim 
edited by Jim Hopkins and Anthony Savile.
Blackwell, 383 pp., £40, October 1992, 0 631 17571 7
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... have hit upon without benefit of the largely psychoanalytic philosophy he developed in his William James lectures of 1982, published as The Thread of Life, and elsewhere. There may seem to be an initial danger of circularity, in that those meanings would be invisible to someone not privy to the psychology enlisted to explain them. My sense, however, is that ...

I want to be the baby

Kasia Boddy: Barthelme’s High Jinks, 18 August 2022

Collected Stories 
by Donald Barthelme, edited by Charles McGrath.
Library of America, 1004 pp., £40, July 2021, 978 1 59853 684 3
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... one reason he slotted so well into its pages. His heroes were the great humourists of the 1940s, James Thurber and S.J. Perelman, and, like them, he often wrote of beleaguered men who struggle with a world that seems to be ...

Subject, Spectator, Phantom

J. Hoberman: The Strangest Personality Ever to Lead the Free World, 17 February 2005

Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief 
by Mark Feeney.
Chicago, 422 pp., £19.50, November 2004, 0 226 23968 3
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... material for such distinguished hams as Jason Robards, Rip Torn, Philip Baker Hall and Anthony Hopkins. Feeney contends that Nixon had a unique capacity among US presidents for constructing narratives around himself. He renames Nixon’s memoir, Six Crises, ‘Six Star Turns’, and notes that its subject ‘presents himself throughout as if he were an ...

Half-Fox

Seamus Perry: Ted Hughes, 29 August 2013

Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar 
edited by Keith Sagar.
British Library, 340 pp., £25, May 2013, 978 0 7123 5862 0
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Ted and I: A Brother’s Memoir 
by Gerald Hughes.
Robson, 240 pp., £16.99, October 2012, 978 1 84954 389 7
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... wrapped up in themselves; and so it is nice to learn from Reid that the young Hughes loved James Thurber. ‘Alright, have it your way: you heard a seal bark,’ exasperated wife complains to anxious husband in the marital bed, while from behind the headboard a seal, unseen by both, looks attentively at something we shall never see. Thurber’s ...

His and Hers

Matthew Reynolds: Robert Browning, 9 October 2008

The Poems of Robert Browning. Vol. III: 1847-61 
edited by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin and Joseph Phelan.
Longman, 753 pp., £100, November 2007, 978 0 582 08453 7
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... and so is Browning’ – expresses a view shared by admirers such as George Eliot and Henry James, doubters like Carlyle and Hopkins, and a chorus of others. But the history of poetry is a history of revolutions in what counts as poetry. Today, Browning’s density, his chattiness, his specificity, his preference for ...

Closing Time

Thomas Laqueur, 18 August 1994

How We Die 
by Sherwin Nuland.
Chatto, 278 pp., £15.99, May 1994, 0 7011 6169 8
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... modes of death and the sensations of dying’: the survey conducted between 1900 and 1904 at Johns Hopkins University Hospital by Sir William Osler, one of the founders of modern clinical medicine and perhaps the most distinguished physician of his time. He found – based on reports by his colleagues and students – that while 90 out of about five hundred ...

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