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Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Did in 2015, 7 January 2016

... through Volume II of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher, noting that it recycles Graham Turner’s mendacious interview with me and other so-called artists and intellectuals in which we are supposed to have dismissed Mrs T. out of snobbery. This was the thesis Turner had come along anxious to prove and bore scant relation to the interview ...

The Education of Philip French

Marilyn Butler, 16 October 1980

Three Honest Men: Edmund Wilson, F.R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling 
edited by Philip French.
Carcanet, 120 pp., £6.95, July 1980, 0 85635 299 3
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F.R. Leavis 
by William Walsh.
Chatto, 189 pp., £8.95, September 1980, 0 7011 2503 9
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... story of scholarly detective-work, the Washington Post standard investigation by John Carter and Graham Pollard in the 1930s into the literary forgeries perpetrated by two eminent men of the literary establishment, Thomas Wise and H. Buxton Forman. What seems most significant about that story, apart from its being half a century old, is that Carter and ...

Bard of Friendly Fire

Robert Crawford: The Radical Burns, 25 July 2002

Robert Burns: Poems 
edited by Don Paterson.
Faber, 96 pp., £4.99, February 2001, 0 571 20740 5
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The Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns 
edited by Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg.
Canongate, 1017 pp., £40, November 2001, 0 86241 994 8
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... of his work. At its most extreme, this results in the two and a half page poem ‘To Robert Graham of Fintry, Esq.’ being followed by an eight-page essay which goes into such matters as plagiarism in Coleridge. The essay is a good, sharp-eyed one, but it belongs elsewhere. Paterson confines his own comments to his introduction, and earlier Burns ...

Cute, My Arse

Seamus Perry: Geoffrey Hill, 12 September 2019

The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 148 pp., £20, April 2019, 978 0 19 882952 2
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... but its undistinguished replacement serves only to exemplify what has gone awry, in particular Graham Sutherland’s vast tapestry of Christ in Glory, which portrays an ‘ill-favoured Creator presiding over a universe of subservient matter, seemingly intended for the investiture of Sepp Blatter and his spiritual kindred’. (Remember him?) There is an ...

Diary

Andrew Brighton: On Peter Fuller, 7 November 1991

... nonsense and agreed with their own mindlessly reasonable practice. Edward Lucie-Smith even seemed to claim personal credit for setting Fuller on the right course: In Fuller’s early, hard-line Marxist days … I once told him that I would respect his criticism more a. if he wrote in a better style, and b. if he showed some sign of a sense ...

Unreasoning Vigour

Stefan Collini: Ian Watt, 9 May 2019

Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic 
by Marina MacKay.
Oxford, 228 pp., £25, November 2018, 978 0 19 882499 2
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... a wary distance’. One of the things we learned from Freud, according to the literary critic Graham Hough, is to see ‘what might appear to be a rather perverse literary device’ as meeting an unobvious need: ‘The elaboration of a raw personal situation into a form in which it can be more readily accepted is not a matter of evasiveness or ...

Balzac didn’t dare

Tom Crewe: Origins of the Gay Novel, 8 February 2024

... as ‘natural children’ (Emma is unimaginable without one such product of ‘vice’, Harriet Smith). Either way, Austen must have been aware of the possibility she was leaving open. The historian Seth Stein LeJacq has calculated that her brothers Francis and Charles, both of whom became admirals, served on at least ten naval sodomy trials between ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1998, 21 January 1999

... film stars I had queued as a boy to see at the Picturedrome on Wortley Road. Here were Alexis Smith, Eve Arnold, Charles Boyer, and Tarzan’s Jane (and Mia Farrow’s mother) Maureen O’Sullivan. The four of us from Beyond the Fringe had been invited as a unit and Dudley Moore had been prevailed on (may even have volunteered) to play the piano. With ...

Gaelic Gloom

Colm Tóibín: Brian Moore, 10 August 2000

Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist 
by Denis Sampson.
Marino, 344 pp., IR£20, October 1998, 1 86023 078 4
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... Hepburn was to play the lead. (It was never used; many years later the role was played by Maggie Smith.) Moore wrote to Friel: ‘I know this sounds un-Ulster and extreme, but as it is much easier for me to say it in print than to your face, I am first among your many admirers.’ The correspondence contains a great deal of the banter which passes for ...

The Excursions

Andrew O’Hagan, 16 June 2011

... the most part, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘But after the Stockholm intervention, a certain Jackie Graham of the local grocery shop in Bellaghy wanted to open a Heaney Museum. ‘“It’ll be good for you and good for us,” he said.’ Seamus didn’t stand in his way and made sure some manuscripts and posters were put into the fellow’s hands. It’s the ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Didn’t Do in 2007, 3 January 2008

... whoops. This quickly became standard and a customary feature of live shows today, particularly Graham Norton’s, with the audience readily entering into the subterfuge, knowing that they are part of the event as they would be at a pop concert. It’s not a big step, therefore, from helping the show along in this way to manipulating competition results to ...

The Strange Death of Municipal England

Tom Crewe: Assault on Local Government, 15 December 2016

... by nearly 50 per cent since 2010, revealed unpopular plans to remove youth services, Iain Duncan Smith was derisive: If you look at the successful local authorities, they are the people who have worked out what the vitally important things are that they do, and have managed to get through this process without savaging the things that really matter. My only ...

Bournemouth

Andrew O’Hagan: The Bournemouth Set, 21 May 2020

... allowed to visit the house. ‘It was no uncommon experience,’ Stevenson’s first biographer, Graham Balfour, wrote, ‘for a visitor who had come to Bournemouth specially to see him, to find himself put to the door, either on the ground of having a cold, to the contagion of which it was unsafe for Stevenson to be exposed, or because his host was already ...

Festival of Punishment

Thomas Laqueur: On Death Row, 5 October 2000

Proximity to Death 
by William McFeely.
Norton, 206 pp., £17.95, January 2000, 0 393 04819 5
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Death Row: The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment 
edited by Bonnie Bobit.
Bobit, 311 pp., $24.95, September 1999, 0 9624857 6 4
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... Florida from 150 years of racial discrimination’. The judge issued a stay. But Governor Bob Graham, a former opponent of the death penalty, who, McFeely suggests, balanced his progressive policies on race with toughness on crime, refused clemency. Graham’s behaviour was typical of the new South. Bill Clinton’s ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... political land-grab. Your browser does not support html5 video. Councillor Kim Taylor-Smith, deputy leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council from September 2017, is asked if the government has been helpful.Headlines seem like wisdom to those who rely on them. ‘Fire Victims Left in Lurch by Chaotic Relief Effort’, ‘Grenfell: The Net Closes ...

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