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Carry on up the Corner Flag

R.W. Johnson: The sociology of football, 24 July 2003

Ajax, the Dutch, the War: Football in Europe during the Second World War 
by Simon Kuper.
Orion, 244 pp., £14.99, January 2003, 0 7528 5149 7
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Broken Dreams: Vanity, Greed and the Souring of British Football 
by Tom Bower.
Simon and Schuster, 342 pp., £17.99, February 2003, 9780743220798
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... is pure ‘Carry on up the Corner Flag’. Later, Kuper interviews the Preston North End winger Tom Finney about the Cup Final of 1941, when Preston beat Arsenal. Wasn’t it odd, he asks, to play the final in bombed-out London? ‘I wasn’t all that interested in the war when I was playing,’ Finney answers. ‘I was only 18. And the main concern was to ...

The Trouble with Trott

Gabriele Annan, 22 February 1990

A Good German: Adam von Trott zu Solz 
by Giles MacDonogh.
Quartet, 358 pp., £17.95, January 1990, 0 7043 2730 9
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... by his treasonable démarches in England and America before the war, and in Sweden, Switzerland, Holland and Turkey during it. He knew the death he faced would be peculiarly horrible. What he did he did for his country. He was a patriot. But was he also a nationalist? Grant Duff thought so, and their friendship came to grief over their differences. But the ...

Daddy, ain’t you heard?

Mark Ford: Langston Hughes’s Journeys, 16 November 2023

Let America Be America Again: Conversations with Langston Hughes 
edited by Christopher C. De Santis.
Oxford, 339 pp., £32, August 2022, 978 0 19 285504 6
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... were peripatetic. In 1924, after a second working voyage across the Atlantic, he jumped ship in Holland and made his way to Paris, where he eked out a living as a sous-chef cum plongeur. Stays in Cuba, in Haiti, in the Soviet Union (where he spent ten months in 1932-33) and in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War allowed him to connect his own experiences of ...

Ancient Greek Romances

Peter Parsons, 20 August 1981

... In 1834, T.B. Macaulay left Holland House to unaccustomed silences, and set sail for Madras, where he was to save £30,000 and draft the penal code. Indian leisure inspired him to reread Greek. Thucydides, Euripides, Demosthenes, all got good marks. Fiction came off less well. Macaulay was a great reader of novels (to his father’s and Clapham’s distress); the Governor-General’s court wept over his copy of Clarissa ...

New Model Criticism

Colin Burrow: Writing Under Cromwell, 19 June 2008

Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham 
by Blair Worden.
Oxford, 458 pp., December 2007, 978 0 19 923081 5
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... of a hyperactive highlighter pen. When he asks, rhetorically, ‘Did Marvell, in [describing] Holland “As but th’off-scouring of the British sand”, recall Nedham’s description in 1650 of Scotland, a “country which sticks like a scab upon the fair body of this unfortunate island?”’, the only possible answer is ‘no’. But although one can ...

Agh, Agh, Yah, Boo

David Wheatley: Ian Hamilton Finlay, 4 December 2014

Midway: Letters from Ian Hamilton Finlay to Stephen Bann, 1964-69 
edited by Stephen Bann.
Wilmington Square, 426 pp., £25, May 2014, 978 1 905524 34 1
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... of 1941; expulsion from Glasgow School of Art for organising a student strike; travels through Holland with the Non-Combatant Corps; working as a shepherd with a dog called Finn MacCool; and the destruction of all his paintings at the end of the 1950s. This was followed by a stay on Rousay in Orkney, an island promoted to Finlay’s paradise lost when he ...

Our chaps will deal with them

E.S. Turner: The Great Flap of 1940, 8 August 2002

Dad’s Army: The Story of a Classic Television Show 
by Graham McCann.
Fourth Estate, 304 pp., £7.99, August 2002, 1 84115 309 5
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... wars showed how to ‘brew up’ a tank with the aid of Molotov cocktails. Also at Osterley, Tom Wintringham, who had commanded a battalion of the International Brigade in Spain, taught that ‘two or three determined men with a length of tram line or stout iron bar can often [sic] put a tank out of action’ (by thrusting it between track and ...

Trust the Coroner

John Bossy: Why Christopher Marlowe was probably not a spy, 14 December 2006

Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy 
by Park Honan.
Oxford, 421 pp., £25, October 2005, 0 19 818695 9
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... say, been carrying Buckhurst’s letters we should understand how, later on, he knew his way about Holland and Zeeland; and we might get a jolt when we remembered that Buckhurst in his younger days had been Thomas Sackville, joint author of the original English blank-verse tragedy, Gorboduc. He had also been recommended for a translation of Lucan’s epic ...

Why edit socially?

Marilyn Butler, 20 October 1994

Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, Vol. VII 
edited by Byron.
Oxford, 445 pp., £52.50, March 1993, 0 19 812328 0
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The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse 
edited by Jerome McGann.
Oxford, 832 pp., £25, April 1993, 0 19 214158 9
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... Where the Californian school endow lectures with the multimedia pleasures of an evening with Tom Lehrer or Jools Holland, McGann’s style at the lectern as on the page gets nearer to George Eliot reading her works. Yet the Foucauldian Californians are programmed pessimists, who find the individualism, colour and ...

Foodists

John Bayley, 25 February 1993

A History of Food 
by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, translated by Anthea Bell.
Blackwell, 801 pp., £25, December 1992, 0 631 17741 8
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... he was eating when he read them: La Nouvelle Héloise with pain au beurre and a pot of coffee, Tom Jones with a roasted partridge. The contents of Rat’s picnic basket contains the world of The Wind in the Willows; the aroma of a bubble and squeak prepared by the gaoler’s daughter cheered up Toad in his prison cell; bacon and broad beans and a macaroni ...

Heart-Stopping

Ian Hamilton, 25 January 1996

Not Playing for Celtic: Another Paradise Lost 
by David Bennie.
Mainstream, 221 pp., £12.99, October 1995, 1 85158 757 8
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Achieving the Goal 
by David Platt.
Richard Cohen, 244 pp., £12.99, October 1995, 1 86066 017 7
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Captain’s Log: The Gary McAllister Story 
by Gary McAllister and Graham Clark.
Mainstream, 192 pp., £14.99, October 1995, 9781851587902
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Blue Grit: The John Brown Story 
by John Brown and Derek Watson.
Mainstream, 176 pp., £14.99, November 1995, 1 85158 822 1
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Kicking and Screaming: An Oral History of Football in England 
by Rogan Taylor and Andrew Ward.
Robson, 370 pp., £16.95, October 1995, 0 86051 912 0
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A Passion for the Game: Real Lives in Football 
by Tom Watt.
Mainstream, 316 pp., £14.99, October 1995, 1 85158 714 4
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... There are several sardonic contributions here from members of the 1947-8 England team that beat Holland 8-0. Italy 4-0 and Portugal 10-0. For such triumphs the England players got a £10 appearance fee and a third-class train ticket home. And maybe a ‘well done’. Just around the corner lay the 1953 defeat by Hungary, and a new epoch for English ...

Only More So

Rosemary Hill: 1950s Women, 19 December 2013

Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties 
by Rachel Cooke.
Virago, 368 pp., £18.99, October 2013, 978 1 84408 740 2
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... would read or go back to work.’ ‘Architecturally politicised’, the Smithsons sent Simon to Holland Park comprehensive, designed for the London County Council by Leslie Martin. ‘It was chaos,’ he remembers. He was bullied and his parents’ way of life embarrassed him, though later, he says, he came to see that his childhood had been ...

Anglo-America

Stephen Fender, 3 April 1980

The London Yankees: Portraits of American Writers and Artists in England, 1894-1914 
by Stanley Weintraub.
W.H. Allen, 408 pp., £7.95, November 1979, 0 491 02209 3
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The Americans: Fifty Letters from America on our Life and Times 
by Alistair Cooke.
Bodley Head, 323 pp., £5.95, October 1979, 0 370 30163 3
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... is whether such a concatenation represents a cultural phenomenon or a happy accident of the kind Tom Stoppard plays with in Travesties, about Zurich in 1916. It’s worth recalling that all the characters in that play were ‘taken from history’, including the narrator and master of ceremonies, Henry Carr: but as Carr says of one of the more illustrious of ...

Supersellers

John Sutherland, 8 November 1979

The Devil’s Alternative 
by Frederick Forsyth.
Hutchinson, 479 pp., £5.95
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The Four Hundred 
by Stephen Sheppard.
Secker, 374 pp., £5.25
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... The narrative of The Devil’s Alternative shuttles between Washington, London, Moscow and Holland. Understandable indulgence is shown by these British authors to non-British readers. Forsyth, for example, will routinely insert parenthetic guide-book material for the ignorant, but commercially valued, foreigner: ‘At home on the outskirts of ...

Angry or Evil?

Michael Wood: Brecht’s Poems, 21 March 2019

The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht 
translated by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine.
Norton, 1286 pp., £35, December 2018, 978 0 87140 767 2
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... various attempts at repair fail and the ship limps back to Hamburg – it has to be towed from Holland – and is scrapped. The last words of the poem are       Any child, we thought Could see that our wages had Really been too niggardly. Kuhn and Constantine tell us that ‘less than half of [Brecht’s] output of poems was published by the time of ...

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