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Sublime Propositions

John Summerson, 17 March 1983

John Soane: The Making of an Architect 
by Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey.
Chicago, 408 pp., £25, November 1982, 0 226 17298 8
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... This book is about the career of John Soane up to the age of 31. As Soane only started to build when he was 28, as all his important work was done after he was 35, as he practised architecture till his retirement at 80 and died at 83, it will be seen that the biographical coverage is likely to attract the dedicated specialist rather than the general reader ...

The Thief and the Trousers

Owen Bennett-Jones: John Stonehouse disappears, 21 April 2022

Stonehouse: Cabinet Minister, Fraudster, Spy 
by Julian Hayes.
Robinson, 384 pp., £25, July 2021, 978 1 4721 4654 0
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John Stonehouse, My Father: The True Story of the Runaway MP 
by Julia Stonehouse.
Icon, 384 pp., £10.99, May, 978 1 78578 819 2
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... information. He was acquitted. Frolik also named a Labour minister, the postmaster general, John Stonehouse – who, he said, had been recruited in the late 1950s after being compromised by a homosexual honeytrap on a trip to Prague. Instead of having Stonehouse prosecuted, Harold Wilson asked him to the Number Ten sitting room for a chat. The prime ...

Naming the Graces

Charles Hope, 15 March 1984

The Art of Humanism 
by Kenneth Clark.
Murray, 198 pp., £12.50, October 1983, 0 7195 4077 1
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The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art 
by Edgar Wind, edited by Jaynie Anderson.
Oxford, 135 pp., £25, January 1984, 0 19 817341 5
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... the discussion of Donatello, in particular, is marred by the fact that one crucial work, the St John in Venice, is misdated by 15 years. Even John Walker, in his preface, is hard put to find anything very remarkable in the text. The best he can do is to claim that ‘Italian 15th-century art needs an apologist like ...

‘Succession’

John Lanchester, 21 November 2019

... closeness.’ This storyline looks as if it is loosely based on Murdoch’s acquisition of Dow Jones, proprietor of the Wall Street Journal. Quite a few plot lines from Succession are like that, half-pinched from real life: where Rupert Murdoch appeared in front of a parliamentary committee to declare it ‘the most humble day of my life’ in response to ...

Knife and Fork Question

Miles Taylor: The Chartist Movement, 29 November 2001

The Chartist Movement in Britain 1838-50 
edited by Gregory Claeys.
Pickering & Chatto, £495, April 2001, 1 85196 330 8
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... produced similar collections of the writings of Thomas Paine and his contemporaries in the 1790s, John Thelwall, Robert Owen and the British Utopians, and the responsibility for producing a Chartist canon could not have fallen into better hands. Few scholars can match Claeys’s ability to render 19th-century radicalism and socialism coherent by locating ...

Tribute to Trevor-Roper

A.J.P. Taylor, 5 November 1981

History and Imagination: Essays in honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper 
edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden.
Duckworth, 386 pp., £25, October 1981, 9780715615706
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... most within my range. We start with Homer and who wrote his poems. This essay by Professor Lloyd-Jones demonstrates anew the difference between ancient and modern scholarship which we often forget. We modernists have our views constantly disturbed by the discovery of new evidence. Classical scholarship consists of looking at the same evidence from different ...

Saint Jane

D.A.N. Jones, 20 October 1983

The Good Father 
by Peter Prince.
Cape, 204 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 224 02131 1
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Mrs Pooter’s Diary 
by Keith Waterhouse and John Jensen.
Joseph, 208 pp., £7.95, October 1983, 0 7181 2339 5
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Dandiprat’s Days 
by David Thomson.
Dent, 165 pp., £8.50, September 1983, 0 460 04613 6
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The Dream of a Beast 
by Neil Jordan.
Chatto, 103 pp., £6.95, October 1983, 0 7011 2740 6
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Squeak: A Biography of NPA 1978A 203 
by John Bowen and Eric Fraser.
Faber, 127 pp., £2.95, October 1983, 0 571 13170 0
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The Life and Times of Michael K 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Secker, 250 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 436 10297 8
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... boring Holloway to good old Peckham on the south side of the river, nearer the centre of things. John Jensen’s illustrations match Weedon Grossmith’s very neatly. Carrie thought the Pooters’ house rather too near the railway line, and deemed her husband’s jolly friend, Gowing, a touch too bibulous: to express her point of view, Jensen has embellished ...

In the Workshop

Tom Paulin: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 22 January 1998

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 672 pp., £23.50, December 1997, 0 674 63712 7
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Shakespeare's Sonnets 
edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones.
Arden, 503 pp., £7.99, September 1997, 1 903436 57 5
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... be equally true of its paraphrasable content.’ Taking issue with a recent editor of the Sonnets, John Kerrigan, she points to his lack of interest in the linguistic variation in sonnet 129, and says he takes ‘a single-minded expository view of the poem, as though it were a self-consistent sermon’. For Vendler, the verbal imagination’s true intent is ...

I do a deal right away

Ben Jackson: Yuppie Traders, 16 March 2023

Are We Rich Yet? The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain 
by Amy Edwards.
California, 364 pp., £25, June 2022, 978 0 520 38546 7
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... were sponsored by the London Stock Exchange). The chairman of the Wider Share Ownership Council, John Harvey-Jones, provided a blurb for Investor: ‘I am delighted to acknowledge its contribution to the wider understanding, in an enjoyable way, of the opportunities for wider share ownership.’ Bankers and traders were ...

Don’t flush the fish

John Whitfield: The End of the Coral Reef?, 3 July 2008

Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise 
by Steve Jones.
Abacus, 242 pp., £8.99, July 2008, 978 0 349 12147 5
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A Reef in Time: The Great Barrier Reef from Beginning to End 
by J.E.N. Veron.
Belknap, 289 pp., £22.95, February 2008, 978 0 674 02679 7
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... are going to find their habitat disappearing, as warmer climates rise up to engulf them. And Steve Jones and J.E.N. Veron warn that climate change may well bring about the end of coral reefs – if overfishing, disease, invading species and pollution don’t get them first. The surface waters of the open tropical ocean are poor in nutrients and almost lifeless ...

Diary

Frank Kermode: Being a critic, 27 May 1999

... got their first chance in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon Gray, Dan Jacobson; but even they arrived by what might be called the bohemian route. There are of course other ways in; anybody can see how much space the dons occupy in the respectable papers and magazines. Many moved in by routes that did ...

Why aren’t they screaming?

Helen Vendler: Philip Larkin, 6 November 2014

Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love 
by James Booth.
Bloomsbury, 532 pp., £25, August 2014, 978 1 4088 5166 1
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... of Larkin’s life were still unavailable, especially most of the letters written to Monica Jones, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, who was his closest companion and lover, but never wife. The publication, in 2010, of Letters to Monica, edited by Anthony Thwaite, changed the earlier impression of Larkin’s mind and personality, especially the ...

Opprobrious Epithets

Katrina Navickas: The Peterloo Massacre, 20 December 2018

Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre 
by Jacqueline Riding.
Head of Zeus, 386 pp., £25, October 2018, 978 1 78669 583 3
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... without representation’ became a political demand for liberty, changed everything. Major John Cartwright (who was later to advise the Manchester radicals) and Thomas Paine were influenced by the American programme in their arguments for domestic reform, Take Your Choice! and Common Sense. Yet it was the French Revolution that made the working classes ...

Sour Notes

D.A.N. Jones, 17 November 1983

Peter Hall’s Diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle 
edited by John Goodwin.
Hamish Hamilton, 507 pp., £12.95, November 1983, 0 241 11047 5
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... Hall dictated more than a million words, he tells us, as source material for future historians. To John Goodwin, his trusty press officer, he has allotted the task of anthologising some quarter-million of those words. Goodwin has been his word processor. This book is an example of information technology. The dictator was surprised (he tells us in his ...

Hong Pong

Thomas Jones: John Lanchester, 25 July 2002

Fragrant Harbour 
by John Lanchester.
Faber, 299 pp., £16.99, July 2002, 0 571 20176 8
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... First, let me declare a disinterest. John Lanchester and I are both involved, in different ways, with the London Review of Books, but otherwise have nothing to do with one another. Now that’s out of the way, onto the novels. Lanchester’s first, The Debt to Pleasure (1996), begins: ‘This is not a conventional cookbook’ – a more interesting way of saying that it is an unconventional novel ...

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