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Each of us is a snowball

Susannah Clapp: Squares are best, 22 October 2020

Square Haunting 
by Francesca Wade.
Faber, 422 pp., £20, January, 978 0 571 33065 2
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... a more general difficulty: that of setting up a new order in the old vocabulary of Leavis and Stephen I-think-continually-of-those-who-were-truly-great Spender. Charlotte Mew, who was born on the edge of the square (and rather surprisingly does have a plaque), might have prompted some different adjectives. I wish Wade ...

Seventy Years in a Colourful Trade

Andrew O’Hagan: The Soho Alphabet, 16 July 2020

Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia 
by Darren Coffield.
Unbound, 364 pp., £25, April 2020, 978 1 78352 816 5
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... everybody, not least the barmen, spoke exactly like her. ‘I don’t know why they call her Spender,’ Muriel said of the poet in his scampering years, before he became Sir Stephen. ‘She never puts her hand in her pocket.’ Members felt that drinking anywhere else wasn’t really drinking. Coffield’s book is a ...

Brief Encounters

Andrew O’Hagan: Gielgud and Redgrave, 5 August 2004

Gielgud's Letters 
edited by Richard Mangan.
Weidenfeld, 564 pp., £20, March 2004, 0 297 82989 0
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Secret Dreams: A Biography of Michael Redgrave 
by Alan Strachan.
Weidenfeld, 484 pp., £25, April 2004, 0 297 60764 2
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... felt completely unselfconscious.’ Then there is Tommy or Tommie or Tony Hyndman, also a lover of Stephen Spender’s (who calls him Jimmy Younger in World within World) and a character in T.C. Worseley’s autobiographical novel Fellow Travellers (Worseley calls him Harry Watson). But Strachan’s intention is always to give Redgrave the benefit of his ...

It’s Finished

John Lanchester: The Banks, 28 May 2009

... I’m going to tremendous, Basil Fawltyish lengths to avoid being introduced to Sir Stephen Spender,’ whose collected poems he had just given an unglowing review. ‘Tremendous, Basil Fawltyish lengths’: that phrase stuck with me. It comes to mind when I look at Anglo-Saxon attempts to address the crises in their respective financial ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... Fornes had it at her sparky fingertips. As an artist she was the real McCoy, Sontag’s friend Stephen Koch observed: ‘Not a pretend one, and not a critic, and not a discussant, and not a graduate student making notes.’ She was, in short, a natural. When it came to sex and art and many basic day-to-day activities, Sontag wasn’t a natural, being ...

The Excursions

Andrew O’Hagan, 16 June 2011

... Hamilton was against my saying so, but I feel there was something good there from time to time, in Spender. Like that poem about the aeroplane …HEANEY: ‘The Landscape Near an Aerodrome’.MILLER: That’s right.O’HAGAN: About the plane descending to the feminine land, lulled into miles of softness.MILLER: Yes, he could be good, when not in his ‘I think ...

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