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Top Grumpy’s Top Hate

Robert Irwin: Richard Aldington’s Gripes, 18 February 1999

Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: A Cautionary Tale 
by Fred Crawford.
Southern Illinois, 265 pp., £31.95, July 1998, 0 8093 2166 1
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Lawrence the Uncrowned King of Arabia 
by Michael Asher.
Viking, 419 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 670 87029 3
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... fought. In this he was echoed by his admirer and biographer, the military historian, Basil Liddell Hart, although an anonymous reviewer of Anthony Nutting’s Lawrence of Arabia: The Man and the Motive in the TLS was to mock this notion that all wars could be won by adopting Lawrence’s tactics: ‘No one ever defeated an enemy by avoiding him: all that can ...

Short Cuts

Jeremy Harding: ‘Inside the Dream Palace’, 6 February 2014

... a perfect host. By the end the question is, who haven’t we encountered? We bump into Whitman, Hart Crane, all the Abstract Expressionists, Herbert Huncke plus any given Beat, all of the New York School, Bob Dylan, Nico, John Cale, Lou Reed, Malcolm McLaren, Patti Smith and Mapplethorpe, William Eggleston, and … hang on, here’s Walker Evans. And ...

Whapper

Norman Page, 8 January 1987

Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton 
by Flora Fraser.
Weidenfeld, 410 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 297 78895 7
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Loving Emma 
by Nigel Foxell.
Harvester, 201 pp., £8.95, March 1986, 0 7108 1056 3
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... her celebrity. By the age of 16 Emy Lyon had become, with a touch of novelistic symbolism, Emily Hart. She was also pregnant, ‘thrown over by a rich lover’, and desperate until she found another protector. There is by now an odd ambiguity in Emma’s status: like Moll Flanders, she is available for sexual exploitation because that is the only way in ...

Cheers

John Lanchester, 8 March 1990

The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer 
by Tom Dardis.
Abacus, 292 pp., £3.99, February 1990, 0 349 10143 4
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... to deal with the American writer’s life through the alter ego of unprolific Jewish novelist Henry Bech, here attending a party: Like a fuzzy sock being ejected by the tumble drier there was flung towards Bech the shapeless face of Vernon Klegg, the American Kafka, whose austere minimalist renderings of kitchen spats and dishevelled mobile homes were ...

Overflow

Frank Kermode: John Updike, 21 January 1999

Beck at Bay: A Quasi-Novel 
by John Updike.
Hamish Hamilton, 241 pp., £16.99, January 1999, 0 241 14027 7
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... of the Rabbit series; this new book is the third of a sequence about the New York Jewish novelist Henry Bech. As it carries him into his seventies it may be that this is the last of Bech, as Rabbit at Rest was presumably the last of Rabbit, but as long as the real author is alive, fertile and motile, one cannot be sure. Bech is a strange antitype, a funhouse ...

Beastliness

Harry Ricketts, 16 March 1989

Rudyard Kipling 
by Martin Seymour-Smith.
Macdonald, 373 pp., £16.95, February 1989, 0 356 15852 7
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... Speculation, Leon Edel remarks in his one-volume life of Henry James, is ‘the stock-in-trade of all biographers’. But if all biographers speculate, some do so more scrupulously and convincingly than others. Edel, for instance, is both meticulous and plausible. The same can hardly be said of Martin Seymour-Smith in his new critical biography of Kipling ...

Persons Aggrieved

Stephen Sedley, 22 May 1997

... In 1992 the Law Lords tried to square this circle in a major constitutional case, Pepper v. Hart, by permitting resort to ministerial explanations given to Parliament in order to clear up intractable obscurities in statutes. In doing this the House had to assume that Parliamentary answers, usually given in committee, sometimes given under pressure and ...

Terrible to be alive

Julian Symons, 5 December 1991

Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life 
by William Pritchard.
Farrar, Straus, 335 pp., $25, April 1990, 0 374 24677 7
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Randall Jarrell: Selected Poems 
edited by William Pritchard.
Farrar, Straus, 115 pp., $17.95, April 1990, 0 374 25867 8
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... Carlos Williams he said that ‘even his good critical remarks sound as if they had been made by Henry Ford’; of Edith Sitwell’s then fashionable poems that they ‘sound as if Madame Blavatsky had written them for a Society of Latterday Druids’. In a sonnet series by Conrad Aiken ‘any similarity between the poems and reality is purely ...

Love in the Ruins

Nicolas Tredell, 8 October 1992

Out of the Rain 
by Glyn Maxwell.
Bloodaxe, 112 pp., £6.95, June 1992, 1 85224 193 4
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Body Politic 
by Tony Flynn.
Bloodaxe, 60 pp., £5.95, June 1992, 1 85224 129 2
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Red 
by Linda France.
Bloodaxe, 80 pp., £5.95, June 1992, 1 85224 178 0
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Red-Haired Android 
by Jeremy Reed.
Grafton, 280 pp., £7.99, July 1992, 9780586091845
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Leaf-Viewing 
by Peter Robinson, with an essay by Peter Swaab.
Robert Jones, 36 pp., £9.95, July 1992, 0 9514240 2 5
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... In Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, the Prince found by the River Thames ‘a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber’. Of course, the truth of the ancient state, like the truth of the British state at the turn of the 19th century, was not necessarily a wholly savoury one ...

If my sister’s arches fall

Laura Jacobs: Agnes de Mille, 6 October 2016

Dance to the Piper 
by Agnes de Mille.
NYRB, 368 pp., £11.99, February 2016, 978 1 59017 908 6
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... Oklahoma! revolutionised Broadway. The composer Richard Rodgers had just left his lyricist Lorenz Hart for Oscar Hammerstein II, and the new team realised that the usual dance razzmatazz wasn’t going to be right for a show about cowboys and farmers at the turn of the century. Before Rodeo, de Mille, who was in her late thirties, had been about to quit dance ...

Diary

Richard Shone: Lydia Lopokova’s Portraits, 23 June 2022

... in a Land Rover up Firle Beacon for an ‘airing’, or take her to lunch at the White Hart in Lewes or the Cavendish Hotel in Eastbourne. I would sometimes see this curious couple on the farm track – receiving a genial acknowledgment from Logan and a look of puzzlement from the tiny, swathed figure beside him, only just able to see out of the ...

On the Red Carpet

David Thomson, 7 March 2024

... and its fathers weren’t just the Hungarian geniuses but Americans like FDR, the secretary of war Henry Stimson and General Leslie Groves, who is always presented in the legend as a head-scratching by-the-book manager (played in the movie by Matt Damon). In the battle against tyranny the Bomb was harbinger of all the secret projects to come in the new ...

Money Man

Michael Neill: Shakespeare in Company, 6 February 2014

Shakespeare in Company 
by Bart van Es.
Oxford, 357 pp., £25, February 2013, 978 0 19 956931 1
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... guise of a dramatic poet: an ‘upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you’. Partly as a result of this document, we are used to thinking of Shakespeare as a player turned writer; van Es, however, observing the absence of ...

Yuh wanna play bad?

Christopher Tayler: Henry Roth, 23 March 2006

Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth 
by Steven Kellman.
Norton, 372 pp., $16.99, September 2005, 0 393 05779 8
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Call It Sleep 
by Henry Roth.
Picador US, 462 pp., $15, July 2005, 0 312 42412 4
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... For a long time, Henry Roth’s silence was considered one of the most resonant in modern American literature. Ralph Ellison and J.D. Salinger were his only competition. When Call It Sleep (1934), Roth’s first novel, became a bestseller, thirty years after it first appeared, reporters found him scraping a living in Maine, gloomily slaughtering ducks and geese with equipment he’d made out of parts scavenged from discarded washing-machines ...

Fade to Greige

Elaine Showalter: Mad for the Handcuff Bracelets, 4 January 2001

A Dedicated Follower of Fashion 
by Holly Brubach.
Phaidon, 232 pp., £19.95, October 1999, 9780714838878
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Fashion Today 
by Colin McDowell.
Phaidon, 511 pp., £39.95, September 2000, 0 7148 3897 7
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Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender and Society in Clothing 
by Diana Crane.
Chicago, 294 pp., £19, August 2000, 0 226 11798 7
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Historical Fashion in Detail: The 17th and 18th Centuries 
by Avril Hart and Susan North.
Victoria & Albert Museum, 223 pp., £19.95, October 2000, 1 85177 258 8
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Don We Now Our Gay Appalrel: Gay Men’s Dress in the 20th Century 
by Shuan Cole.
Berg, 224 pp., £42.99, September 2000, 1 85973 415 4
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The Gallery of Fashion 
by Aileen Ribeiro.
Princeton, 256 pp., £60, November 2000, 0 691 05092 9
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Giorgio Armani 
by Germano Celant and Harold Koda.
Abrams, 392 pp., £40, October 2000, 0 8109 6927 0
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... only 28 had more than one set of clothes. In contrast, the clothing of the aristocracy, as Avril Hart and Susan North show in their study of 17th and 18th-century costume detail, was costly, elaborate, lavish in craft and ornamentation. Once fabric and clothing were mass produced, they became matters of choice rather than class. For the past hundred ...

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