Anita Brookner

Anita Brookner a reader in the history of art at the Courtauld Institute in London, is the author of a study of David and of two novels, A Start in Life and Providence.

Precipitations fall thickly and heavily in Abel Gance’s Napoleon: snow in the courtyard of the college in Brienne, feathers from savaged pillows, rain and hail on the drums at the siege of Toulon, song-sheets fluttering down at the National Convention, confetti at the extraordinary Bal des Victimes, at which everyone present had to have lost a relative on the scaffold or to have been reprieved himself. This migraine-inducing technique, confined to a screen the size of an old-fashioned glass lantern slide, tests one’s nerve and endurance much as those of the recruits in the Army of Italy were tested before General Bonaparte, lanky, scarecrowish, hat planted sideways, won them to confidence, excitement and triumph. By the end of the day-long showing, the audience rose in a comparable mood of exaltation as the screen opened out onto an immense triple montage of red, white and blue, with a long last image of exploding galaxies.

Letter

Art and Revolution

18 December 1980

SIR: It is perhaps unfortunate that Jacques-Louis David’s erratic passage through the French Revolution should coincide with Professor Hampson’s more specialised knowledge of this period (LRB, 18 December 1980), or indeed that David’s aesthetic intentions and preoccupations should prove in many ways impermeable to a purely political interpretation.My book, which I would defend only as a general...

Wintry Lessons: Anita Brookner

Dinah Birch, 27 June 2002

Anita Brookner’s first novel appeared in 1981. Since then she has published it again, slightly altered, almost every year. It is a remarkable feat. Nor is it irrelevant to what she has to...

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Missing Mother: romanticism

Graham Robb, 19 October 2000

Trying to define Romanticism has always been a typically Romantic activity, especially in France. The word romantisme first appeared in the year of Napoleon’s coronation (1804) and soon...

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Living with a little halibut

John Bayley, 8 October 1992

The novel and story depend a good deal on mystery. Pip has great expectations – where do they come from? – but more important, who is Pip, and what is he after? Everyone can be made...

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Dreams of Avarice

Patrick Parrinder, 29 August 1991

‘The rich are different from us.’ ‘Yes – they have more money.’ Though it is Hemingway’s riposte that sticks in the memory, Scott Fitzgerald’s belief in...

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Dirty Jokes

Julian Symons, 13 September 1990

‘Julia died. I read it in the Times this morning... I never liked her, nor did she like me; strange, then, how we managed to keep up a sort of friendship for so long.’ The first...

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Looking for magic

Dinah Birch, 14 September 1989

It’s not long since the fairy story seemed the least political of genres. Not so today. A preoccupation with transformation and escape, coupled with a repudiation of the sober certainties...

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Ruined by men

Anthony Thwaite, 1 September 1988

Alison Lurie’s new novel is, among other things, an anthology of several characters from her earlier novels. Readers unfamiliar with these books need not be apprehensive, however: The Truth...

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Rachel and Heather

Stephen Wall, 1 October 1987

Anita Brookner’s novels have been preoccupied with women who feel themselves to be profoundly separate. This may be the result of either choice or necessity, or of stoically making a choice...

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Ladies

John Bayley, 4 September 1986

‘Old people were rather in fashion at the time. Every week one or the other of the quality Sunday papers included a feature on the elderly, and if it could be shown that they were being...

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Losers

Frank Kermode, 5 September 1985

So far as the evidence of five novels goes, Anita Brookner has one basic theme, which she varies with considerable and increasing technical resource. All five books are quite short, and all have...

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The Great Exhibition

John Sutherland, 6 September 1984

A prefatory note testifies that Empire of the Sun draws on its author’s observations as a young boy swept up by the Japanese capture of Shanghai, and his subsequent internment in Lunghua...

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Dear Sphinx

Penelope Fitzgerald, 1 December 1983

Ada Leverson (1862-1933) said she had learned about human nature in the nursery. A little brother got her to help him make a carriage out of two chairs, but when he was taken out in a real...

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Travelling

Elaine Jordan, 21 April 1983

The 19th-century novel was the great forum for writing about life – from sanitation to the condition of women, from politics to love. All the novels reviewed here are very much of the 20th...

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Submission

Robert Taubman, 20 May 1982

The voices in A Chain of Voices are those of 30 characters, Boer farmers and their hired labourers and slaves, in the Cape in the early 19th century. The voices are ‘all different yet all...

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Fatalism

Graham Hough, 16 July 1981

The four novels before us are all highly original, but they tend to confirm an old popular belief – that there are two sexes and that there are some differences between them. All end sadly,...

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Art and Revolution

Norman Hampson, 18 December 1980

In what her publishers claim to be the first monograph in English on David, Dr Brookner explains that she sees her book as a ‘preparation’ for more specialised studies at present...

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