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Rigging and Bending

Simon Adams: James VI & I, 9 October 2003

The Cradle King: A Life of James VI & I 
by Alan Stewart.
Chatto, 438 pp., £20, February 2003, 0 7011 6984 2
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... execution, were alarmed to discover that the greatest of the Scottish Catholic peers, George Gordon, Sixth Earl of Huntly, was rapidly becoming his chief confidant. In 1588 James arranged Huntly’s marriage to Henrietta Stuart, daughter of his former favourite the Duke of Lennox, thus admitting him into the wider royal family. In the following ...

Downhill from Here

Ian Jack: The 1970s, 27 August 2009

When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies 
by Andy Beckett.
Faber, 576 pp., £20, May 2009, 978 0 571 22136 3
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... parties as the nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million working days were lost to strikes in 1979, mainly during ...

No Light on in the House

August Kleinzahler: Richard Brautigan Revisited, 14 December 2000

An Unfortunate Woman 
by Richard Brautigan.
Rebel Inc, 110 pp., £12, July 2000, 1 84195 023 8
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Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-70 
by Richard Brautigan.
Rebel Inc, 146 pp., £6.99, June 2000, 1 84195 027 0
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You Can't Catch Death 
by Ianthe Brautigan.
Rebel Inc, 209 pp., £14.99, July 2000, 1 84195 025 4
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... making an appearance. Brautigan came from the Pacific Northwest, born in Tacoma, Washington in the winter of 1935. His childhood seems to have been appalling and he was reluctant to discuss it. He never knew his father, who, in turn, never knew of his son until reading his death notice. His mother was no bargain either, at one point abandoning Brautigan and ...

Pseud’s Corner

John Sutherland, 17 July 1980

Duffy 
by Dan Kavanagh.
Cape, 181 pp., £4.95, July 1980, 0 224 01822 1
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Moscow Gold 
by John Salisbury.
Futura, 320 pp., £1.10, March 1980, 0 7088 1702 5
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The Middle Ground 
by Margaret Drabble.
Weidenfeld, 248 pp., £5.95, June 1980, 0 297 77808 0
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The Boy Who Followed Ripley 
by Patricia Highsmith.
Heinemann, 292 pp., £6.50, April 1980, 0 434 33520 7
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... his writing self. One notes, in support of this, the prominence in the novels of heroes like Gordon Comstock who break with their stultifying families. And it is interesting, in the light of the works reviewed here, that Patricia Highsmith also seems to have been one of those who felt the need to rename herself before going on to make a name for herself ...

Populist Palatial

Rosemary Hill: The View from Piccadilly, 4 March 2021

London’s West End: Creating the Pleasure District, 1800-1914 
by Rohan McWilliam.
Oxford, 400 pp., £30, September 2020, 978 0 19 882341 4
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Survey of London: Volume 53, Oxford Street 
edited by Andrew Saint.
Paul Mellon Centre, 421 pp., £75, April 2020, 978 1 913107 08 6
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... they were merely operating on different principles. Selfridges escaped unscathed because Harry Gordon Selfridge was known to be in favour of the vote.Much of McWilliam’s book is devoted to the theatres, always the beating heart of the West End, the brightest of the bright lights. At the beginning of his account only the patent theatres, principally ...

The Way Things Are and How They Might Be

Tony Judt and Kristina Božič: An Interview, 25 March 2010

... who were most active in this choice were the most powerful people in Europe: Merkel, Sarkozy and Gordon Brown. With the new constitution of the EU two possibilities were opened. Because the executive power was largely dependent on how the representatives were chosen and who they were the executive power could be either very strong or very weak. We went for ...

Bury that bastard

Nicole Flattery, 5 March 2020

Actress 
by Anne Enright.
Cape, 264 pp., £16.99, February, 978 1 78733 206 5
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... Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950) is the most recognisable, though I prefer Myrtle Gordon in John Cassavetes’s Opening Night (1977). Myrtle, played by Gena Rowlands, is in the twilight of her career and bent on sabotaging the play for which she’s currently rehearsing. She drinks too much; is haunted by a woman with a striking resemblance to ...

Dear boy, I’d rather see you in your coffin

Jon Day: Paid to Race, 16 July 2020

To Hell and Back: An Autobiography 
by Niki Lauda.
Ebury, 314 pp., £16.99, February, 978 1 5291 0679 4
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A Race with Love and Death: The Story of Britain’s First Great Grand Prix Driver, Richard Seaman 
by Richard Williams.
Simon and Schuster, 388 pp., £20, March, 978 1 4711 7935 8
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... Other innovations have more immediate effects. When Lauda was driving for Brabham the designer Gordon Murray invented a ‘vacuum-cleaner car’ which used an engine cooling fan to suck air from beneath the chassis, pulling it down onto the track and allowing it to corner at much higher speeds. After Lauda drove it to victory in the Swedish Grand Prix it ...

A Hologram for President

Eliot Weinberger, 30 August 2012

... of St Steve Jobs, despite all those Apple sweatshops in Asia – but Mitt, as is often said, is Gordon Gecko, master of the universe of leveraged buyouts. Ordinary mortals have trouble understanding how it all works, but they can see the results: the closed factories, the tens of thousands of jobs lost, the ostentatious displays of wealth, the famous ...

Let’s to billiards

Stephen Walsh: Constant Lambert, 22 January 2015

Constant Lambert: Beyond the Rio Grande 
by Stephen Lloyd.
Boydell, 584 pp., £45, March 2014, 978 1 84383 898 2
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... to the Ashton ballet Apparitions (for which Lambert merely chose the late Liszt piano pieces for Gordon Jacob to orchestrate), as he does to Horoscope. He quotes in extenso a long programme note by Rubbra on Summer’s Last Will, as if to excuse himself from the task. And he remorselessly lists composers and performers and repertoire in concerts and ballet ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Where I was in 1993, 16 December 1993

... at supper in Giggleswick that, when I was a boy in Armley, the clothes horse was called the ‘winter edge’, actually the ‘winter hedge’. W. suggests, poetically, that it was because, laden with clothes, it would look like a hedge covered with snow. More plausibly, it was because in summer clothes could be spread ...

Lotti’s Leap

Penelope Fitzgerald, 1 July 1982

Collected Poems and Prose 
by Charlotte Mew, edited by Val Warner.
Carcanet/Virago, 445 pp., £9.95, October 1981, 0 85635 260 8
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... article ‘An Old Servant’: ‘as fixed a part of the Universe as the bath (cruelly cold in winter) into which she plunged us every morning, and the stars to which she pointed through the high window, naming some of them, in the evening sky’. But it was also this faithful servant who imprinted on Lotti’s mind the Evangelical sense of guilt and ...

Lesser Beauties Drowned

Tessa Hadley: Josephine Tey’s Claustrophobia, 1 December 2022

The Daughter of Time 
by Josephine Tey.
Penguin, 212 pp., £9.99, September 2022, 978 1 5291 5641 6
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... of novels and short stories published; but fame came to her through a play written under the name Gordon Daviot. Richard of Bordeaux, about Richard II, was a huge West End hit in the early 1930s; it made the name of the young John Gielgud, who also directed; Ffrangcon-Davies was Queen Anne. Tey never managed to follow up its crazy success; Ffrangcon-Davies ...

Politicians in a Fix

David Runciman: The uses of referendums, 10 July 2003

... in particular, without whose endorsement the assent of the people cannot be assured. If either Gordon Brown or Tony Blair needs to summon the British electorate out of their armchairs in order finally to see the other off, then he will. But otherwise we probably shouldn’t wait by the phone. The Daily Mail has taken advantage of this hiatus in the high ...

Her face was avant-garde

Christian Lorentzen: DeLillo’s Stories, 9 February 2012

The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories 
by Don DeLillo.
Picador, 211 pp., £16.99, November 2011, 978 1 4472 0757 3
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... In its winter issue of 1960, Epoch, a quarterly published at Cornell, carried ‘The River Jordan’, a story by ‘Donald R. DeLillo’. It tells of a day in the life of Emil Burke, a mad Manhattan septuagenarian who leads a storefront chapel called the Psychic Church of the Crucified Christ, with a congregation of four ...

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