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British Worthies

David Cannadine, 3 December 1981

The Directory of National Biography, 1961-1970 
edited by E.T. Williams and C.S. Nicholls.
Oxford, 1178 pp., £40, October 1981, 0 19 865207 0
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... and royals (Princess Marina, Queen Victoria Eugénie, the Princess Royal). Vera Brittain, Ivy Williams (‘the first woman to be called to the English bar’) and Rachel Crowdy (she ‘belonged to a generation when women had to possess very obvious strength of character if they were to attain recognition’) are the only women who might be described as ...

I myself detest all Modern Art

Anne Diebel: Scofield Thayer, 9 April 2015

The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer 
by James Dempsey.
Florida, 240 pp., £32.50, February 2014, 978 0 8130 4926 7
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... Moore (who joined the staff in 1924 and succeeded Thayer as editor), Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Pound and Kenneth Burke. And despite Thayer’s distaste for high modernism (Pound’s Cantos were ‘silly’, Joyce’s later work ‘unreadable’), he resolved to print what few others would touch. He was especially kind to Cummings, who had been ...

What is it about lemons?

Thomas Nagel: Barry Stroud, 20 September 2001

The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour 
by Barry Stroud.
Oxford, 228 pp., £19.99, January 2000, 0 19 513388 9
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... ambition which has dominated philosophy since the 17th century – that of reaching what Bernard Williams calls an ‘absolute conception of reality’. The aim is to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the world, consistent with modern science, which distinguishes between what exists objectively, independent of our minds, and what is merely subjective ...

What did she do with those beds?

Thomas Keymer: Eliza Haywood, 3 January 2013

A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood 
by Kathryn King.
Pickering and Chatto, 288 pp., £60, June 2012, 978 1 85196 917 3
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... official dogma. Haywood had links by this time with known Jacobites like the Welsh MP Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, whose Tory programme King sees as ‘close to representing Haywood’s own political feelings’. Yet in the so-called ‘Goring pamphlet’ that finally got her arrested in 1749, written in the voice of ‘one of the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber to ...

At the Ashmolean

Rosemary Hill: The Capture of the Westmorland, 19 July 2012

... Italiano, latino e francese’ by Annibale Antonini (1770) The most important fixer was Thomas Jenkins, who began as a dealer, became a banker and ended up as de facto British consul in Rome. His name is everywhere in the exhibition, one of the largely forgotten figures whose importance it recovers. Elsewhere the story is in parts familiar. There ...

His Own Sort of Outsider

Philip Clark: Tippett’s Knack, 16 July 2020

Michael Tippett: The Biography 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 750 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4746 0602 8
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... William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all. Whether Tippett ever entered the pantheon, or even deserves to, remains an open question for some. His Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1939) might slot seamlessly into a concert programme of English string pieces like ...

Peripheries

Charles Rzepka, 21 March 1991

The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the 19th Century 
by Susan Manning.
Cambridge, 270 pp., £32.50, May 1990, 0 521 37237 2
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... of Calvinist attitudes in the writings of David Hume, Jonathan Edwards, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Far from a mechanical application of rigid doctrinal categories, Manning’s thoughtful critique shows how contradictory attitudes can arise out of, and in reaction to, a common adherence to absolutes. Her ...

Dictionaries

Randolph Quirk, 25 October 1979

Collins Dictionary of the English Language 
by P. Hanks, T.H. Long and L. Urdang.
Collins, 1690 pp., £7.95
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... something of an oversimplification, but not all that much. The tradition is rich and unbroken: in Thomas Elyot’s Latin dictionary of 1538 we find aedificium ‘building’, in Bullokar’s English dictionary of 1616 the minimally anglicised edifice ‘a building’, in the 1979 Collins edifice ‘a building’. For all their bright newness, dictionaries of ...

Mysteries of Kings Cross

Iain Sinclair, 5 October 1995

Vale Royal 
by Aidan Dun.
Goldmark, 130 pp., £22.50, July 1995
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... and Shakespeare and Donne, through Milton and Blake and Keats, to David Jones, Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, to Lee Harwood’s Cable Street, Bill Griffiths’s Whitechapel and Brian Catling’s The Stumbling Block. London infected its interpreters, soliciting contributions to an open-ended project. The names of the poets were the stanzas of a ...

On Philip Terry

Colin Burrow, 13 July 2017

... its feet.’ Others ping around emptiness, or bring out the potential for rewriting William Carlos Williams in the form’s short lines: ‘the dog/barks at/the red/lawnmower/Is it/time/for lunch?’ The flat long lines of the top and bottom of the quennet give the effect of a long Essex horizon, around which an eye may dart and pick out things in their ...

Heat in a Mild Climate

James Wood: Baron Britain of Aldeburgh, 19 December 2013

Benjamin Britten: A Life in the 20th Century 
by Paul Kildea.
Allen Lane, 635 pp., £30, January 2013, 978 1 84614 232 1
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Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music 
by Neil Powell.
Hutchinson, 512 pp., £25, January 2013, 978 0 09 193123 0
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... consciously controlled professional technique. It was a struggle away from everything Vaughan Williams seemed to stand for.’ Vaughan Williams taught composition at the RCM, but Britten bypassed him anyway. Since the age of 14 he had been having lessons with Frank Bridge; his mother would take him to London in the ...

The Cadaver Club

Iain Sinclair, 22 December 1994

Original Sin 
by P.D. James.
Faber, 426 pp., £14.99, October 1994, 0 571 17253 9
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Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 282 pp., £14.99, September 1994, 1 85619 507 4
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The Hidden Files: An Autobiography 
by Derek Raymond.
Warner, 342 pp., £5.99, December 1994, 0 7515 1184 6
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Not till the Red Fog Rises 
by Derek Raymond.
Little, Brown, 248 pp., £15.99, December 1994, 0 316 91014 7
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... project was a live one, working hard, after paying its respects, to defuse the purple excesses of Thomas De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts. This is P.D. James at her best; the fastidious dabbling in horror, the forensic eye finding order in chaos. Now, 22 years later, with the oven-ready blockbuster, Original Sin, she returns to ...

Knives, Wounds, Bows

John Bayley, 2 April 1987

Randall Jarrell’s Letters 
edited by Mary Jarrell.
Faber, 540 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 571 13829 2
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The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore 
edited by Patricia Willis.
Faber, 723 pp., £30, January 1987, 0 571 14788 7
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... by the boundless optimism of these pieces, muted and delicate as they are. Praising William Carlos Williams especially as ‘not a repeater of things secondhand’, she quotes Pound’s verdict that there could be an ‘age of awakening in America’ which would ‘overshadow the quattrocento’, since ‘our opportunity is greater than Leonardo’s’ and ...

Let’s to billiards

Stephen Walsh: Constant Lambert, 22 January 2015

Constant Lambert: Beyond the Rio Grande 
by Stephen Lloyd.
Boydell, 584 pp., £45, March 2014, 978 1 84383 898 2
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... greatest symphonist since Beethoven, had no interest in folksong (though he studied with Vaughan Williams and liked and respected him), adored jazz for its virtuosity and instrumental sound but had little patience with most of the so-called symphonic jazz of the 1920s. The key to this apparent ragbag of a pantheon is that Lambert had come to music from ...

Saved by the Ant’s Fore-Foot

David Trotter: Pound’s Martyrology, 7 July 2005

The Pisan Cantos 
by Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Sieburth.
New Directions, 159 pp., $13.95, October 2003, 9780811215589
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Poems and Translations 
by Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Sieburth.
Library of America, 1363 pp., $45, October 2003, 1 931082 41 3
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... birds on the wire: and as for the solidity of the white oxen in all this perhaps only Dr Williams (Bill Carlos) will understand its importance, its benediction. He wd/ have put in the cart. There is poetry in the white oxen (all the more, perhaps, for the cart’s omission), and humility. The poet, as Read put it, ‘contemplates the world of nature ...

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