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Diary

Anne Enright: Mrs Robinson Repents, 28 January 2010

... were the early days of the Troubles. In 1971 Peter Robinson became politicised when his friend Harry Beggs was killed by an IRA bomb. He was an early member of the DUP founded by the magnificent fundamentalist preacher Ian Paisley. Their first child, Jonathan, was born, and Iris was brought low by post-natal depression. She sought relief in her local ...

Prophet in a Tuxedo

Richard J. Evans: Walter Rathenau, 22 November 2012

Walther Rathenau: Weimar’s Fallen Statesman 
by Shulamit Volkov.
Yale, 240 pp., £18.99, April 2012, 978 0 300 14431 4
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... at Freienwalde, as well as constructing a neoclassical villa to his own design in Berlin. Count Harry Kessler, a close acquaintance, thought the villa tasteless and snobbish, full of ‘dead Bildung, petty sentimentality and stunted eroticism’. The novelist Joseph Roth, by contrast, said Rathenau ‘lived wonderfully, among great books and rare ...

What did he think he was?

Tom Shippey: Ælfred the Great, 10 May 2018

Ælfred’s Britain: War and Peace in the Viking Age 
by Max Adams.
Head of Zeus, 509 pp., £9.99, May 2018, 978 1 78408 031 0
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... from heaven was to be allowed to rally the levies of the south-western counties at Ecgberht’s Stone (which Adams locates at Penselwood in Somerset), before beating the Vikings at the Battle of Edington in May 878 and imposing on them a treaty and a boundary, which – for once, and for a while – they respected. This started the long process of ...

A Peece of Christ

Charles Hope: Did Leonardo paint it?, 2 January 2020

Leonardo da Vinci 
at the Louvre, until 24 February 2020Show More
Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered 
by Carmen Bambach.
Yale, 2350 pp., £400, July 2019, 978 0 300 19195 0
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The Last Leonardo: The Secret Lives of the World’s Most Expensive Painting 
by Ben Lewis.
William Collins, 396 pp., £20, April 2019, 978 0 00 831341 8
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Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ and the Collecting of Leonardo in the Stuart Courts 
by Margaret Dalivalle, Martin Kemp and Robert Simon.
Oxford, 383 pp., £35, November 2019, 978 0 19 881383 5
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... was supposedly not for sale, nor why he provided a PR contact (who, it seems, now works for Harry and Meghan). According to Lewis, Simon and Parish began to look for buyers soon after the exhibition closed.Lewis interviewed the five external scholars consulted by the National Gallery in 2008, all of whom figured in Simon’s list. According to him, two ...

Self-Management

Seamus Perry: Southey’s Genius for Repression, 26 January 2006

Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793-1810 
edited by Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts.
Pickering & Chatto, 2624 pp., £450, May 2004, 1 85196 731 1
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... the poem that, officially, Southey took a dim view of the fatalism he believed to be ‘the corner-stone of Mahometry’; but in the play-space of poetry nothing excited him more. The only really foolish characters in the poem are Thalaba’s opponents, who ceaselessly try to stop him as though they inhabited a universe of normal moral luck and stood the ...

Illuminating, horrible etc

Jenny Turner: David Foster Wallace, 14 April 2011

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace 
by David Lipsky.
Broadway, 320 pp., $16.99, 9780307592439
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The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel 
by David Foster Wallace.
Hamish Hamilton, 547 pp., £20, April 2011, 978 0 241 14480 0
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... published and when David Lipsky conducted a book-length five-day interview with him for Rolling Stone, now published as Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. He didn’t want the pressure, he said, of depending on publishers for advances: ‘I fear that pain more than I want the money.’ He found publicity ‘toxic’ and mistrusted the ...

A feather! A very feather upon the face!

Amit Chaudhuri: India before Kipling, 6 January 2000

The Unforgiving Minute 
by Harry Ricketts.
Chatto, 434 pp., £25, January 1999, 0 7011 3744 4
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... of a craftsman.   Incident by incident in the beautiful story he identified on the blurred stone ...   Here was the devout Asita, the pendant of Simeon in the Christian story, holding the Holy Child on his knee while mother and father listened; and here were incidents in the legend of cousin Devadatta. Here was the wicked woman who accused the ...

No One Leaves Her Place in Line

Jeremy Harding: Martha Gellhorn, 7 May 1998

... researching the effects of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration for the head of the agency, Harry Hopkins; fifty years later in Britain, she watched the gap between the rich and the poor widen again, and she railed against the spirit of Thatcherism. Two days before she died, at the age of 89, she was denouncing the Clinton Administration’s plans, with ...

Malfunctioning Sex Robot

Patricia Lockwood: Updike Redux, 10 October 2019

Novels, 1959-65: ‘The Poorhouse Fair’; ‘Rabbit, Run’; ‘The Centaur’; ‘Of the Farm’ 
by John Updike.
Library of America, 850 pp., £36, November 2018, 978 1 59853 581 5
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... of wife-swapping in New England against the backdrop of the Vietnam War sinks my heart like a stone to the riverbed of my body; even so, I can say with reasonable assurance that the book is bad. Something chants behind the prose, even when it’s good: waste, waste, waste, waste. Sodden somehow, as if the sad Old Fashioned that Janice was drinking at the ...

Secrets are best kept by those who have no sense of humour

Alan Bennett: Why I turned down ‘Big Brother’, 2 January 2003

... Hopkins, who taught there. A propos Henry VII, what happened between 1485 and 1500? How did bold Harry Tudor of Bosworth Field turn into the crabbed penny-pinching accountant that is his usual representation? 24 March. A film beginning with a man being shepherded through a darkened hall; glimpses of paintings, a shaft of light on a plaster ceiling, the gleam ...

Diary

E.P. Thompson: On the NHS, 7 May 1987

... into hospital at once. It seems that I was quite ill (a ‘very severe’ case). I had lost three stone and was dehydrated. It had taken six weeks to gain admission to hospital and I felt as if I was going down like the westering sun. I went into the surgical ward and waited on a drip for 72 hours for an operation. It seems that Nature has provided us with ...

Pseud’s Corner

John Sutherland, 17 July 1980

Duffy 
by Dan Kavanagh.
Cape, 181 pp., £4.95, July 1980, 0 224 01822 1
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Moscow Gold 
by John Salisbury.
Futura, 320 pp., £1.10, March 1980, 0 7088 1702 5
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The Middle Ground 
by Margaret Drabble.
Weidenfeld, 248 pp., £5.95, June 1980, 0 297 77808 0
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The Boy Who Followed Ripley 
by Patricia Highsmith.
Heinemann, 292 pp., £6.50, April 1980, 0 434 33520 7
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... writes under the buckskin-evoking pseudonyms of George G. Gilman, Charles R. Pike, Thomas H. Stone. Like his compatriots ‘John G. MeLaglen’ and J.T. Edson, Harknett has ‘appreciation societies’ devoted to his pseudonymous personae. (‘J.T.’, incidentally, the biggest seller of them all, claims his name is genuine. It’s a happy ...

Gielgud’s Achievements

Alan Bennett, 20 December 1979

An Actor and his Time 
by John Gielgud.
Sidgwick, 253 pp., £8.95
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... am Mrs Sabawala,’ an Indian admirer announces. ‘My house on Malabar Hill is a sermon in stone. Lunch with me tomorrow.’ He takes part in a gala at the Foreign Office to celebrate the visit of the French President in March 1939: ‘It was a tremendous affair, the last of its kind before the war and I could not help referring to it afterwards as the ...

Fetch the Chopping Knife

Charles Nicholl: Murder on Bankside, 4 November 2021

... on Bull Wharf, east of Queenhithe; the other at Beech’s shop on Lambert Hill. Merry’s servant, Harry, absconds in fear and spends the night in a hayloft in Three Cranes Yard, while Merry takes Beech’s dismembered body across the river to the Paris Gardens and dumps it in a ditch. On this errand he would have landed on the South Bank at the Falcon ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2019, 2 January 2020

... and chips, tea and bread and butter 1/9), with Schofields slightly higher up the scale. There was Harry Ramsden’s at Guiseley, where we would often have just chips when we went hiking across the fields to Burley in Wharfedale. What I don’t recall is any longing for food (or for elaborate food) that coloured the everyday. On the contrary, what sticks in ...

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