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Dreams of the Decades

Liz Jobey: Bill Brandt, 8 July 2004

Bill Brandt: A Life 
by Paul Delany.
Cape, 336 pp., £35, March 2004, 0 224 05280 2
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Bill Brandt: A Centenary Retrospective 
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... L.W. Brandt, came from a family of wealthy merchant bankers based in Hamburg; he had been born in London, where his own father had been running the English branch of the company, and was registered as a British subject. This brought complications when war broke out. At first the Brandts supported Germany: Delany’s book includes a photograph taken in ...

Genius in Its Pure State

Mark Ford, 22 May 1997

... This elaborate creation, we later find out, is the handiwork of Norbert Montalescot and his sister Louise; Louise has been imprisoned by the African King Talou VII for having had an affair with his chief enemy, Yaour, and her release depends on the Montalcscots’ completing this statue and a number of other appallingly ...

Happy in Heaven

Patrick O’Brian, 10 February 1994

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The Life and Death of the Little Prince 
by Paul Webster.
Macmillan, 276 pp., £17.99, September 1993, 0 333 54872 8
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... When he recovered he left the Air Force; and living in Paris had a hopeless, wounding affair with Louise de Vilmorin, who left him because he talked too much about ‘the sublime moments between heaven and earth’. Loquacity was a failing often mentioned by those who knew Saint-Exupéry, and it grew on him; but at this period he kept it in check well enough ...

Old Ladies

D.A.N. Jones, 20 August 1992

Dear Departed: A Memoir 
by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Maria Louise Ascher.
Aidan Ellis, 346 pp., £18, April 1992, 0 85628 186 7
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Anna, Soror 
by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Walter Kaiser.
Harvill, 256 pp., £7.99, May 1992, 0 00 271222 9
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That Mighty Sculptor, Time 
by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Walter Kaiser.
Aidan Ellis, 224 pp., £18, June 1992, 9780856281594
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Coming into the End Zone: A Memoir 
by Doris Grumbach.
Norton, 256 pp., £13.95, April 1992, 0 393 03009 1
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Anything Once 
by Joan Wyndham.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 178 pp., £15.95, March 1992, 9781856191296
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Within Tuscany 
by Matthew Spender.
Viking, 366 pp., £16.99, April 1992, 0 670 83836 5
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... Dutchman, a versatile but unambitious man who is driven, by the accidents of fate, to travel to London and to thinly settled America, before he meets a lonesome death in the Frisian Islands: the third section is about this man’s son, who becomes a boy actor, playing girls on Continental tours of Shakespeare’s plays. The plausibility is more than ...

‘You have a nice country, I would like to be your son’

Bee Wilson: Prince Bertie, 27 September 2012

Bertie: A Life of Edward VII 
by Jane Ridley.
Chatto, 608 pp., £30, August 2012, 978 0 7011 7614 3
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... was a serial army girlfriend, whom his friend Charles Carrington referred to as ‘a well known “London Lady” much run after by the Household Brigade’. She seduced Bertie while he was attending a military camp at the Curragh in Ireland. We know exactly when he first made love to her – and the second and third occasions – because he recorded it in an ...

Ravishing

Colm Tóibín: Sex Lives of the Castrati, 8 October 2015

The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds 
by Martha Feldman.
California, 454 pp., £40, March 2015, 978 0 520 27949 0
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Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage and Music in the Life of Atto Melani 
by Roger Freitas.
Cambridge, 452 pp., £22.99, May 2014, 978 1 107 69610 5
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... only in Italy, geographic heartland of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.’ While London warmed to castrati, and paid them fortunes, the English did not castrate their own. One contemporary of Handel’s commented on this: ‘You Englishmen complain that castrati are too costly, so that too much money ends up in Italian lands, but if you want ...

Audrey and Her Sisters

Wayne Koestenbaum, 18 September 1997

Audrey Hepburn 
by Barry Paris.
Weidenfeld, 454 pp., £20, February 1997, 0 297 81728 0
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... The new biography of Audrey Hepburn, by Barry Paris, a writer already praised for his books on Louise Brooks and Garbo, is an acute, tender-hearted and entertaining dish of Hepburn facts – he interviewed friends and family, and has a sharp eye for her film-work’s idiosyncrasies; more important, he offers a grid for dream inquiries into star ...

Corkscrew in the Neck

Jacqueline Rose: Bad Summer Reading, 10 September 2015

The Girl on the Train 
by Paula Hawkins.
Doubleday, 320 pp., £12.99, January 2015, 978 0 85752 231 3
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Gone Girl 
by Gillian Flynn.
Weidenfeld, 512 pp., £8.99, September 2014, 978 1 78022 822 8
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... no future. She exists purely in the moment.’ It is during one of her repeated journeys into London that Rachel first catches sight through her train window of a woman, Megan, who rouses her curiosity, but later disappears and will subsequently be found murdered. Rachel was on the scene on the night of the crime: it is where she once lived, where ...

What’s the big idea?

Jonathan Parry: The Origins of Our Decline, 30 November 2017

The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914 
by Simon Heffer.
Random House, 912 pp., £30, September 2017, 978 1 84794 742 0
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... again may not – have died in flagrante with Queen Victoria’s ‘bohemian’ daughter Princess Louise. Politicians used smart dress to cover poor morals: Joseph Chamberlain sported a monocle and an orchid but behaved badly to the future Beatrice Webb. The Liberal prime minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman ate so much that he ballooned to twenty stone.The ...

Mrs Stitch in Time

Clive James, 4 February 1982

Lady Diana Cooper 
by Philip Ziegler.
Hamish Hamilton, 336 pp., £9.95, September 1981, 0 241 10659 1
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... Before the machine-guns started chattering the young men had all sat around in country houses and London drawing-rooms fancying themselves for their own brilliance. Privileged by birth, they allowed themselves the double privilege of tempering their philistine heritage with bohemian pursuits. But their puffed-up chests could not keep out bullets. Lady Diana ...

After the Vote

James Meek, 17 December 2015

... is important here. It was only once those interventions were well underway, not before, that the London attacks of 7 July 2005 took place. It doesn’t make sense for Cameron to argue that air attacks on Raqqa will help prevent IS attacks on London, when the recent attacks in Paris happened 14 months into an intensive ...

Adieu, madame

Terry Castle: Sarah Bernhardt, 4 November 2010

Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt 
by Robert Gottlieb.
Yale, 233 pp., £18.99, October 2010, 978 0 300 14127 6
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... VII; the artist-engraver Gustave Doré; and at least one woman, the trouser-wearing sculptor Louise Abbéma. Gottlieb refers to Abbéma, somewhat ungallantly, as ‘mannish’ and ‘monkeylike’, and it’s true, the pint-sized Louise wasn’t exactly an oil painting. Having Susan Boyle eyebrows didn’t help. But ...

Still Reeling from My Loss

Andrew O’Hagan: Lulu & Co, 2 January 2003

I Don't Want to Fight 
by Lulu.
Time Warner, 326 pp., £17.99, October 2002, 0 316 86169 3
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Billy 
by Pamela Stephenson.
HarperCollins, 400 pp., £6.99, July 2002, 0 00 711092 8
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Just for the Record 
by Geri Halliwell.
Ebury, 221 pp., £17.99, September 2002, 0 09 188655 4
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Learning to Fly 
by Victoria Beckham.
Penguin, 528 pp., £6.99, July 2002, 0 14 100394 4
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Right from the Start 
by Gareth Gates.
Virgin, 80 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 1 85227 914 1
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Honest 
by Ulrika Jonsson.
Sidgwick, 417 pp., £16.99, October 2002, 0 283 07367 5
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... had a growing client list and was making a real name for himself as a celebrity crimper and ‘top London hairdresser’ as the papers referred to him. I used to get annoyed with him for never being home. I wanted more of his attention. Following some bad times with the crimper and the loss of her record company, Lulu has found popularity again by singing ...

Why edit socially?

Marilyn Butler, 20 October 1994

Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, Vol. VII 
edited by Byron.
Oxford, 445 pp., £52.50, March 1993, 0 19 812328 0
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The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse 
edited by Jerome McGann.
Oxford, 832 pp., £25, April 1993, 0 19 214158 9
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... as, V, 327, 328; good intentions of, V, 372; in ancient Greece, I, 326, 450c; in Cadiz, V, 114; in London, V, 474, 493; in Venice, IV, 163, 541c; of Assyria, VI, 613c; of Bahylon, V, 445; of the historical Sardanapalus, VI, 624c; opera company members as, V, 230; Semiramis as, VI, 618c; wives as, V, 208    educated and ...

Madly Excited

John Bayley, 1 June 1989

The Life of Graham Greene. Vol. I: 1904-1939 
by Norman Sherry.
Cape, 783 pp., £16.95, April 1989, 0 224 02654 2
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... kind: whisky priest and puritan policeman present, as it were, love and honour; Scobie, his wife Louise and his girlfriend Helen afford a ready-made tableau like Orestes and Hermione and Andromaque. The complete arbitrariness available to the Classical stage is so cunningly naturalised that we hardly notice at first reading how the parts have been taken from ...

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