Frank Brownlow

Latest by Frank Brownlow in Chronicles

• Reviews

  May 2018

  Thank You, Auden!

  With the publication of volumes V and VI, the Princeton edition of W.H. Auden’s collected prose is complete in almost 5,000 pages, covering over 45 years of a writing life.

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• Reviews

  September 2017

  Still Unexplained

  Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), dean of St. Patrick’s Church of Ireland cathedral in Dublin, was a most remarkable man.

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• Correspondence

  May 2016

  Sharia, Not Shakespeare

  When Allardyce Nicholl, then professor of English at Birmingham University, founded the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1951, he intended from the beginning that it should have an international flavor.

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• Reviews

  February 2016

  Kidnapped

  Aldersey-Williams is obsessed, he says, with Browne, a fascinating combination of writer and protoscientist who, he believes, is “insufficiently known and unjustly neglected” by literary people and scientists alike.

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• Reviews

  November 2015

  The Incomparable Max

  Back in 1965, reviewing Lord David Cecil’s life of Beerbohm, W.H. Auden wrote that Beerbohm’s kind of “pure” essay, written “only to produce aesthetic satisfaction,” was a genre “to which no reader under sixty can bring himself to attend.”

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• Reviews

  August 2015

  My Only Light

  One of the things that James VI of Scotland liked about becoming James I of England—apart from the money—was that as head of the Church of England he would never be bossed about by a Scotch Calvinist minister again.

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• Reviews

  May 2015

  The Academic Shakespeareans

  The last 30 years or so have seen a remarkable shift in the understanding of English religious history at the time of the Reformation.

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• Reviews

  April 2015

  Mismatch

  Philip Larkin, the poet-librarian of Hull University, died December 2, 1985, over 29 years ago. In the years since Andrew Motion published the first biography (1993), and Anthony Thwaite published both the first complete edition of the poems (1989) and the first collection of letters (1992), a small industry has grown up devoted to the poet.

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• Reviews

  November 2014

  Speaking as an Irishman

  If the best advice one can give an aspiring writer of prose is to study the best models, then Jonathan Swift’s prose, as a lot of people who should know agree, provides the best model of all in English.

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• View

  September 2014

  The Left’s Long March

  On June 2, FOX News’s The Five were discussing the Harvard commencement speech of ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg, in which he pointed out that something like 95 percent of the faculty had supported Obama.

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• Reviews

  December 2012

  An Epic Bogosity

  The standard histories of English literature give Edmund Spenser top-drawer ranking with Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, and there is no denying the power of his idiosyncratic style at its best or his appeal to other poets with epic ambitions. Nonetheless, he has never been popular.

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• Reviews

  October 2012

  An Unruly Character

  While in prison awaiting trial, he converted to Catholicism, a dangerously countercultural thing to do in the England of 1598.

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• View

  February 2010

  Of Genes, Vowels, and Violence

  Why do the British speak English and not a variety of Welsh? Philip Jenkins, having fallen under the sway of a Harvard medieval historian, Michael McCormick, believes it is because the invading Germans of the fifth and sixth centuries killed all the Celtic-speaking male Britons in what is now England.

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• Reviews

  October 1999

  Exterminating Fantasies

  What do we make of these contradictions between received opinion and apparent fact? Apparently, nothing.

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• Reviews

  August 1998

  The Leading Man

  On June 16,1956, Ted Hughes married Sylvia Plath in London. He was a recent graduate of Cambridge University, working for the J. Arthur Rank Organization; she, a Smith College graduate at Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship.

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• Reviews

  December 1997

  A Life in Themes

  By any assessment, W.B. Yeats was an extraordinary man who led a more active and varied life than most poets.

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• Reviews

  August 1997

  A Bard, By Any Other Name . . .

  Story-telling is a feature of all societies. If the world is to make sense, if we are to live together in families, cities, nations, if we are to do our daily work, if life is to be livable at all, we must tell each other stories.

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• Reviews

  March 1997

  Recoil and Revulsion

  Back in the 1950's and 60's, when Malcolm Muggeridge was one of the resident personalities of British television, all over Britain people used to wonder what the origins of such a bizarre figure might be.

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• Reviews

  February 1997

  Bring Me a Grape

  What a peculiar, in some respects downright weird little world this fascinating biography introduces us to. Imagine a very clever, very plain, very spoiled little boy, born at the turn of the century into the intensely competitive upper-middle or lower-aristocratic class in Britain.

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• Reviews

  May 1995

  Johnson in His Time

  Every well-read person used to know Johnson's Lives of the Poets, and, knowing that collection, knew who Richard Savage was—or at least knew who Richard Savage told people he was.

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