Ian Britain
Ian Britain is a historian, biographer and former editor of Meanjin. His latest book, The Making of Donald Friend: Life & Art was published in August this year by Yarra and Hunter Arts Press.
Loyalty and love she lavished free On lowly friends and well-born, Like Murdoch, Melba and like me, She was marvellously Melbourne
The ‘she’ is actress Coral Browne (1913-1991); the ‘me’ is Barry Humphries; the quatrain is from Humphries’ eulogy – or elegy – A Chorale for Coral, which was ‘Very Privately Printed’ in 1992 after her funeral. In his memoirs More Please, which c ... (read more)
A full-blown history of sperm can’t be too long in the coming given the current academic vogue for studies of the body, and the huge spurt of curiosity prompted a few years ago by the appearance of a couple of tell-tale stains on the dress of a White House intern. It is possible the subject (or the object) first came into its own as a more than private matter when, nearly a hundred years ago, Ly ... (read more)
Philistinism and anti-intellectualism enjoy each other’s company so much that it can be bracing to be reminded that it is possible to be both an intellectual and a philistine. That, at least, was a charge levelled at the British Fabians by some former members of the Fabian Society – and by some historians too quick to take those apostates at their word. The Fabians had unimpeachable intellectu ... (read more)
The quirky kind of pleasure’ provided by coincidence; the ‘rightness’, whether logical or poetic, of connections between seemingly unconnected people, particularly connections that are inadvertent or may remain unknown to the people concerned; the ‘pleasing symmetry’, in retrospect, of various experiences we share with another human being, even when the experiences concerned were painful ... (read more)
Taboo – or not taboo? That is the question you soon start asking yourself if you bother with the text of this book and its purported revelations on the subject of ‘male beauty’. It is a stimulating question, but you end up wondering if the publishers, at least, mean you to go to such bother when they’ve hardly gone to any themselves, in the way of editing, to ensure some cogency in their c ... (read more)
My edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1979) defines ‘dictionary’ in two ways: ‘1. A book dealing with the individual words of a language … so as to set forth their orthography, pronunciation, signification and use … arranged, in some stated order, now, in most languages, alphabetical …’; ‘2. By extension: A book of information or reference on any subject or branch of knowled ... (read more)
PANACHE. Both in its literal meaning (a plume of feathers) and its more familiar extended one, the term might have been invented for stage critic extraordinaire Kenneth Tynan as plausibly as for Robert Helpmann, one of last century’s most flamboyant and versatile stage practitioners. The illegitimate Tynan’s middle name was Peacock (the surname of his Birmingham father). Helpmann (born plain R ... (read more)
With the greatest novels, you can plunge into them anywhere and still savour their greatness; it is recognisable on every page. You won’t need to have read the two earlier volumes of these edited diaries to recognise that same quality throughout the third – and I mean novelistic greatness, of which all the great diaries (from Samuel Pepys’s to James Lees-Milne’s) partake in important ways. ... (read more)
Angus Trumble, who died suddenly last October, was a towering figure with a slight sideways tilt to his head. In his famously dandyish attire he might have stepped out of a Max Beerbohm cartoon, and appropriately so given his expertise in Victorian and Edwardian art. Trumble’s latest, and last, subject also chimes with one of Beerbohm’s earliest literary ventures, ‘A Defence of Cosmetics’, ... (read more)