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Spruce

John Bayley, 2 June 1988

A.E. Housman: Collected Poems and Selected Prose 
edited by Christopher Ricks.
Allen Lane, 528 pp., £18.95, April 1988, 0 7139 9009 0
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... the same Biblical punning is more heavy-handed, as in the jingle about ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Mary Jane’ of the Salvation Army, who ‘tumbled off the platform in the station/And was cut in little pieces by the train’. Mary Jane, the train is through yer:         Hallelujah. Hallelujah! We will gather up the ...

Australian Circles

Jonathan Coe, 12 September 1991

The Tax Inspector 
by Peter Carey.
Faber, 279 pp., £14.99, September 1991, 0 571 16297 5
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The Second Bridegroom 
by Rodney Hall.
Faber, 214 pp., £13.99, August 1991, 9780571164820
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... downright sinister, appears to have its closest affinities with recent cinematic exports such as Jane Campion’s Sweetie and John Ruane’s Death in Brunswick. (Particularly the latter, since in this novel Carey has made a brave and largely successful attempt to reflect the diversity of Australia’s immigrant culture, with all its attendant conflicts and ...

I’ll do the dishes

Sophie Lewis: Mothers’ Work, 4 May 2023

Essential Labour: Mothering as Social Change 
by Angela Garbes.
Harper Wave, 222 pp., £20, May 2022, 978 0 06 293736 0
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... would be looked after in the ‘noisy area’, next to the carpenters and blacksmiths). Jane Sophia Appleton designed kitchenless cities where everyone would be provided with free cooked meals. Alexandra Kollontai proposed the mass roll-out of co-operative childcare centres. In more recent decades, Frances Gabe thought about how to build ...

Fielding in the dock

Claude Rawson, 5 April 1990

Henry Fielding: A Life 
by Martin Battestin and Ruthe Battestin.
Routledge, 738 pp., £29.50, October 1989, 0 415 01438 7
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New Essays 
by Henry Fielding, edited by Martin Battestin.
Virginia, 604 pp., $50, November 1989, 0 8139 1221 0
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The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding. The True Patriot, and Related Writings 
edited by W.B. Coley.
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An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings 
edited by Malvin Zirker.
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The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register Office 
by Henry Fielding, edited by Bertrand Goldgar.
Oxford, 446 pp., £50, December 1988, 0 19 818511 1
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Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels of Henry Fielding and the Feminist Debate 1700-1750 
by Angela Smallwood.
Harvester, 230 pp., £35, March 1989, 0 7108 0639 6
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... study.) Two important correspondences in particular have recently come to light: one with James Harris of Salisbury, the author of Hermes, whom Johnson called ‘a prig, and a bad prig’, but who was a warm friend to Fielding, lent him money sometimes, and wrote an unpublished essay on his ‘Life and Genius’; the other concerned with Fielding’s legal ...

Born to Lying

Theo Tait: Le Carré, 3 December 2015

John le Carré: The Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Bloomsbury, 652 pp., £25, October 2015, 978 1 4088 2792 5
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... of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy legal barrage, after circulating an allegedly libellous proposal for his book. ‘I didn’t ...

Junk Mail

Jeremy Harding, 23 September 1993

The Letters of William Burroughs, 1949-1959 
edited by Oliver Harris.
Picador, 472 pp., £17.50, August 1993, 0 330 33074 8
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... shameless faker’ – a view later revised – and his ‘dungaree-wearing Lizzie wife’, Jane, whose own arrangement was the mirror-image of Burroughs’s with Joan. There is also Auden’s secretary Alan Ansen, who gets no credit here for working on the Naked Lunch manuscript with Ginsberg. Auden himself is briskly invoked (‘Auden say I am a ...

Entanglements

V.G. Kiernan, 4 August 1983

The Working Class in Modern British History: Essays in Honour of Henry Pelling 
edited by Jay Winter.
Cambridge, 315 pp., £25, February 1983, 0 521 23444 1
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The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830-60 
edited by James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson.
Macmillan, 392 pp., £16, November 1982, 0 333 32971 6
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Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of 19th-Century Working Class Autobiography 
by David Vincent.
Methuen, 221 pp., £4.95, December 1982, 0 416 34670 7
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... even the worst. What kind of further improvement workers were looking for is considered by José Harris in the light of local inquiries for a survey commissioned by Beveridge and carried out by G.D.H. Cole in 1941-42. It seems that the man in the street’s hopes were less ambitious than the Beveridge Plan which followed: there is no evidence that ...

Women of Quality

E.S. Turner, 9 October 1986

The Pebbled Shore 
by Elizabeth Longford.
Weidenfeld, 351 pp., £14.95, August 1986, 0 297 78863 9
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Leaves of the Tulip Tree 
by Juliette Huxley.
Murray, 248 pp., £7.95, June 1986, 9780719542886
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Enid Bagnold 
by Anne Sebba.
Weidenfeld, 317 pp., £15, September 1986, 0 297 78991 0
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... work, Juliette, who had come on a bit, suggested it should be retitled ‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’, an idea which Lawrence liked but his publishers resisted. Trouble began when Julian on a voyage to Africa met a pretty American girl in the ever-fatal Red Sea. It was to be no passing fancy and he demanded that his wife should rise to the ...

Like a Lullaby

Jenny Diski: Can you imagine dying?, 9 April 2015

... in a favourite dark place (I’ve always longed to be behind those deep red velvet curtains where Jane Eyre sits on the window seat, leafing through Bewick’s History of British Birds), or lying awake playing mind games in bed, you find out quite quickly that the imagination comes to an end in a deeply unsatisfactory answer to the question being put. Even ...

Lethal Pastoral

Paul Keegan: Housman’s Lethal Pastoral, 17 November 2016

Housman Country: Into the Heart of England 
by Peter Parker.
Little, Brown, 446 pp., £25, June 2016, 978 1 4087 0613 8
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... at the helm. A biographer can but do as Housman exhorts in one of his blasphemous squibs: ‘Mary-Jane the train is through yer:/Hallelujah, Hallelujah!/We will gather up the fragments that remain.’ In Housman Country, Peter Parker does it by writing the life and times not of the man but of his most famous book: the growing pains of A Shropshire Lad, the ...

Shakespeare the Novelist

John Sutherland, 28 September 1989

The Vision of Elena Silves 
by Nicholas Shakespeare.
Collins, 263 pp., £11.95, September 1989, 0 00 271031 5
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Billy Bathgate 
by E.L. Doctorow.
Macmillan, £11.95, September 1989, 0 333 51376 2
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Buffalo Afternoon 
by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.
Hamish Hamilton, 535 pp., £12.95, August 1989, 0 241 12634 7
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The Message to the Planet 
by Iris Murdoch.
Chatto, 563 pp., £13.95, October 1989, 0 7011 3479 8
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... Billy informs us that, enriched with Schultz’s millions, he ‘made the leap’ to Townsend Harris High School in Manhattan for exceptional students, then the ‘even higher leap’ to an Ivy League college ‘which I would be wise not to name’. He went on to serve his country as an officer in World War Two. ‘Who I am in my majority,’ he ...

Talking about Manure

Rosemary Hill: Hilda Matheson’s Voice, 25 January 2024

Hilda Matheson: A Life of Secrets and Broadcasts 
by Michael Carney and Kate Murphy.
Handheld, 260 pp., £13.99, September 2023, 978 1 912766 72 7
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... affair with his wife, Vita Sackville-West, based a character in his novel Public Faces on her. ‘Jane Campbell’ is described as ‘girlish’ and viewed in the discomforting terms that presumably went through the minds of her male colleagues. ‘How tight, how trim, her skirt around those little thighs … swinging her hips a little with … her girl-guide ...

Who was David Peterley?

Michael Holroyd, 15 November 1984

... Harvest has been overlooked by Mr Graves (who uses the evidence of commentators such as Frank Harris): but who can doubt that the non-existent Peterley was among the audience at the Senate House that May afternoon in 1933, and that we are reading an exact, first-hand account from this invisible man? Housman rose, placed a brown-covered small octavo ...

Diary

Inigo Thomas: My Father, Hugh Thomas, 15 June 2017

... whom I’d recently come across – an uncle of the man whose Life I am working on, Tomás Harris. Antonio Rodríguez de León was the civilian governor of Córdoba at the beginning of the Civil War; in the 1920s, he had worked with Lorca to revive flamenco in Andalusia; and he was one of the poets and actors known as the Generación del 27 – the ...

Eat butterflies with me?

Patricia Lockwood, 5 November 2020

Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor 
by Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy.
Penguin, 576 pp., £12.99, November, 978 0 14 139838 9
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... hunched over a legal pad, sweating lightly, pressing Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (Jared Harris) to admit that a sentence about a character paring his fingernails was inspired by James Joyce. Admit it he does not: ‘The phrase you quote is an unpleasant coincidence.’ Cumberbatch’s sweating intensifies. His jumper has been nibbled by the only ...

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