Christena Appleyard
Past Participants
A House Full of Daughters
By Juliet Nicolson
Chatto & Windus 325pp £14.99
Love Like Salt: A Memoir
By Helen Stevenson
Virago 289pp £14.99
Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Matter
By Diana Athill
Granta Books 144pp £12.99
Daughterhood is the subject matter of Juliet Nicolson’s tense, highly personal and beautifully written book. Nicolson is a historian and the daughter of the writer Nigel Nicolson. She spent much of her childhood in the magical surroundings of Sissinghurst. In her foreword, she shows that she is alert to any charges that the people who appear in this family history may be considered too privileged for their struggles to be taken seriously. ‘But’, she writes, ‘I wondered if wealth and class always amounted to privilege in a broader sense.’
Well, yes, it looks that way. Nicolson’s father wrote in his diary on the day she was born that when she was given a spoonful of water she accepted it ‘with the maturity of a marchioness sipping Cointreau’. Her grandmother Vita Sackville-West wrote in her diary, ‘And if she ever
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Paul Gauguin kept house with a teenage ‘wife’ in French Polynesia, islands whose culture he is often accused of ransacking for his art.
@StephenSmithWDS asks if Gauguin is still worth looking at.
Stephen Smith - Art of Rebellion
Stephen Smith: Art of Rebellion - Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux
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‘I have fond memories of discussing Lorca and the state of Andalusian theatre with Antonio Banderas as Lauren Bacall sat on the dressing-room couch.’
@henryhitchings on Simon Russell Beale.
Henry Hitchings - The Play’s the Thing
Henry Hitchings: The Play’s the Thing - A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare & Other Stories by Simon Russell Beale
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We are saddened to hear of the death of Fredric Jameson.
Here, from 1983, is Terry Eagleton’s review of The Political Unconscious.
Terry Eagleton - Supermarket of the Mind
Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson
literaryreview.co.uk