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Plato Made It Up

James Davidson: Atlantis at Last!, 19 June 2008

The Atlantis Story: A Short History of Plato’s Myth 
by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, translated by Janet Lloyd.
Exeter, 192 pp., £35, November 2007, 978 0 85989 805 8
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... we must contend with some alternative popular contenders. In 1909, the archaeologist K.T. Frost wrote a letter to the Times arguing that Plato’s Atlantis was the Minoan civilisation. The Minoans sacrificed bulls just like the Atlanteans and Crete has cliffs just like Atlantis. Moreover, just like Atlantis, the Minoan palace at Knossus was built on a ...

A Short History of the Trump Family

Sidney Blumenthal: The First Family, 16 February 2017

... exposed his thin skin. For him, Manhattan has always been the opposite of what home was for Robert Frost, ‘the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’ Wa-a-a-a-h!Winning the presidency was never a deep desire, more a branding scheme that spun out of control, but Trump has tried to turn his victory into a means to ...

The natives did a bunk

Malcolm Gaskill: The Little Ice Age, 19 July 2018

A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America 
by Sam White.
Harvard, 361 pp., £23.95, October 2017, 978 0 674 97192 9
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... Le Roy Ladurie, whose Times of Feast, Times of Famine was published in 1971. A decade later, Robert Rotberg and Theodore Rabb published a trailblazing volume of essays, Climate and History, their mission to explore ‘an exciting frontier for reading and research’. Recently, the geologist Gifford Miller and his team at the University of ...

The New Narrative

John Kerrigan, 16 February 1984

The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse 
edited by Iona Opie and Peter Opie.
Oxford, 407 pp., £8.95, September 1983, 0 19 214131 7
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Time’s Oriel 
by Kevin Crossley-Holland.
Hutchinson, 61 pp., £4.95, August 1983, 0 09 153291 4
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On Gender and Writing 
edited by Michelene Wandor.
Pandora, 166 pp., £3.95, September 1983, 0 86358 021 1
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Stone, Paper, Knife 
by Marge Piercy.
Pandora, 144 pp., £3.95, September 1983, 9780863580222
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The Achievement of Ted Hughes 
edited by Keith Sagar.
Manchester, 377 pp., £27.50, March 1983, 0 7190 0939 1
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Ted Hughes and Paul Muldoon 
Faber, £6.95, June 1983, 0 571 13090 9Show More
River 
by Ted Hughes and Peter Keen.
Faber, 128 pp., £10, September 1983, 0 571 13088 7
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Quoof 
by Paul Muldoon.
Faber, 64 pp., £4, September 1983, 0 571 13117 4
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... poetry today’ – should have told John Haffenden in an interview for Viewpoints that he found Robert Frost’s fable of imagined unlived lives, ‘The Road Not Taken’, exemplary. If Fenton’s distinction between the narrative kinds is just, so is the note of regret and rebellion that he strikes in the phrase ‘deliberately excluded from ...

Wives, Queens, Distant Princesses

John Bayley, 23 October 1986

The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
by Molly Lefebure.
Gollancz, 287 pp., £15.95, July 1986, 0 575 03871 3
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Jane Welsh Carlyle 
by Virginia Surtees.
Michael Russell, 294 pp., £12.95, September 1986, 0 85955 134 2
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... with a never-failing air of disinterested benevolence, and in the sacred name of friendship. Robert Southey, Sam’s great friend, Sara’s brother-in-law, another promising young man in the media, had already rumbled the Wordsworths. ‘Wordsworth and his sister,’ he was later to observe ‘who pride themselves on having no selfishness, are of all ...

‘I intend to support white rule’

Ian Hamilton: Allen Tate, 24 May 2001

Allen Tate: Orphan of the South 
by Thomas Underwood.
Princeton, 447 pp., £21.95, December 2000, 0 691 06950 6
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... mother also made a somewhat pitiable fuss of her Virginia roots and claimed to be descended from Robert E. Lee. When her marriage began to fall apart, she made it her mission to educate Allen and his brothers in the details of her family history, taking them repeatedly on visits to ancestral sites and introducing them to ancient relatives. On one ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: In Guy Vaes’s Footsteps, 21 May 2020

... library. Convalescence was transformed by a gift from his cousin, a copy of The Suicide Club by Robert Louis Stevenson.These glimpses were a romance of the road. Adolfo was feeding me titbits from twice translated interviews. But his portrait of Vaes, so decisively sketched, fired my selective misreading. The fiction of our weary march is that ...

Coming of age in Wiltshire

Nell Dunn, 21 November 1985

Everything to lose: Diaries 1945-1960 
by Frances Partridge.
Gollancz, 383 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 575 03549 8
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... crackles softly and flicks tongues of light into the outer fringes of my field of vision. The frost has made Minnie very skittish, but she has tired herself out and lies glossy and extended on the sofa, while Ralph is taking notes for a review about Nelson. Happiness. And again: perhaps I do not look after him well enough. I resolved this morning to ...

Sea Creatures

Peter Campbell, 23 July 1987

Sidney Nolan: Such is life 
by Brian Adams.
Hutchinson, 275 pp., £16.95, June 1987, 0 09 168430 7
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Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures 
by John Wilmerding.
Viking, 208 pp., £25, September 1987, 9780670817665
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Faces 1966-1984 
by David Hockney and Marco Livingstone.
Thames and Hudson, 96 pp., £8.95, June 1987, 0 500 27464 9
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... Ford, Pennsylvania. The compositions are sparse, and often uneasily balanced. His paintings and Robert Frost’s poetry describe similar landscapes and characters. Frost has been better respected by critics, but Wyeth has advocates among the directors of famous American public galleries, and their patrons. The Helga ...

Toss the monkey wrench

August Kleinzahler: Lee Harwood’s risky poems, 19 May 2005

Collected Poems 
by Lee Harwood.
Shearsman, 522 pp., £17.95, May 2004, 9780907562405
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... to be their best and most enduring. Fulcrum also published two important early collections by Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg’s Ankor Wat and, most significantly, two volumes by Lorine Niedecker, North Central and My Life by Water, and George Oppen’s Collected Poetry. Of British poets, apart from Bunting, Montgomery published four collections by Roy ...

Wobbly, I am

John Kerrigan: Famous Seamus, 25 April 2024

The Letters of Seamus Heaney 
edited by Christopher Reid.
Faber, 820 pp., £40, October 2023, 978 0 571 34108 5
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... could have changed his sensibility, but, despite contact and correspondence with the likes of Robert Lowell, he remained a visitor, too busy to look beyond the clichés. Writing to David Hammond from Salt Lake City airport in 1987, he notes the snowcapped Rockies and the big open sky of the West but says that this ‘domain of magnificent romance’ has ...

The Last Georgian

John Bayley, 13 June 1991

Edmund Blunden: A Biography 
by Barry Webb.
Yale, 360 pp., £18.50, December 1990, 0 300 04634 0
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... and Blunden’s poetry lacks it absolutely. Any good poet can write poems to order – Eliot or Frost or Larkin with equal facility –but Blunden’s poetry, like that of many of its 18th-century models, seems written as if to order all the time. There is no inner tension, no feeling incommunicable in any other way, as there is in Eliot or Edward ...

Sydpolarfarer

Chauncey Loomis, 23 May 1985

The Norwegian with Scott: Tryggve Gran’s Antarctic Diary 1910-1913 
edited by Geoffrey Hattersley-Smith, translated by Ellen Johanne McGhie.
HMSO, 258 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 11 290382 7
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... and nothing at all about the antagonism that at times should have dominated his awareness: that of Robert Falcon Scott towards Gran himself. Perhaps during the expedition Gran unconsciously censored that awareness, or perhaps in his youthful naivety he did not even have it. Gran at 21 was the youngest man to join the expedition. The great polar traveller ...

Regrets, Vexations, Lassitudes

Seamus Perry: Wordsworth’s Trouble, 18 December 2008

William Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’: A Casebook 
edited by Stephen Gill.
Oxford, 406 pp., £19.99, September 2006, 0 19 518092 5
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... had had the experience but missed the meaning; and now here was Coleridge to supply it. When in ‘Frost at Midnight’ Coleridge imagined an ideal childhood for his infant son, it was a Wordsworthian childhood imagined in a fantasy Cumbria (he had, as yet, never been to the real place): But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy ...

Roman Wall Blues

Peter Parsons, 17 May 1984

Vindolanda: The Latin Writing-Tablets 
by A.K. Bowman and J.D. Thomas.
Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 157 pp., £16.50, November 1983, 0 907764 02 9
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The Christians as the Romans saw them 
by Robert Wilken.
Yale, 214 pp., £12.95, February 1983, 0 300 03066 5
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The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul 
by Wayne Meeks.
Yale, 299 pp., £15, June 1983, 0 300 02876 8
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Life in Egypt under Roman Rule 
by Naphtali Lewis.
Oxford, 239 pp., £15, August 1983, 0 19 814848 8
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... from concentrated brine), and ‘axle grease’, the pork fat which you used to cook food or treat frost-bite. The tablets themselves represent another tribute to self-sufficiency. Writing on wood was common enough in the Greco-Roman world. Normally, to judge from the survivals and from the comments of their literary users, the flat surface of the tablet held ...

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