John Stubbs

Coy Poet

Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon

By

Yale University Press 352pp £25 order from our bookshop

Late one night in December 1671, a band of soldiers fell upon a man outside his London lodgings. He was ambushed returning from a late supper. Having beaten and pinned him to the ground, the troopers made a point of disfiguring him – slitting his nose – before neighbours and passers-by drove them away. The victim, Sir John Coventry, was an MP. Shortly before the incident, he had made an unwise, if well-received, joke in the Commons about the salacious tendencies of Charles II. The king, it seemed, made his feelings on the matter clear in the street.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • ‘At every waking moment Barbara Hepworth was aware of herself as a woman paving the way in a man’s world’ From the… ,
    • The entertaining Howard Jacobson is in conversation with Prof John Mullan at the Queen’s Park Book Festival on Sund… ,
    • 'A modest and retiring man, Thompson spent his life describing apple varieties and recommending the best – Ribston… ,
    • 'Macfarlane is a poet with the instincts of a thriller writer, an autodidact in botany, mycology, geology and palae… ,
    • 'Some scholars attribute Shakespeare’s pre-eminence to four centuries of propaganda and not to the fact that Hamlet… ,
    • RT : We would appreciate any retweets ,
    • We've just stumbled on a gem from the LR archive. The emoluments page from May 1995, in which one reviewer asked to… ,
    Follow Us