Bryan Appleyard

Bryan Appleyard is a freelance journalist. His latest book, Richard Rogers: A Biography, is reviewed by Peter Campbell in this issue.

In qualified praise of Stephen Vizinczey

Bryan Appleyard, 24 July 1986

There is nothing enigmatic about Stephen Vizinczey. He has views, he shouts, cajoles, threatens and sneers. He worships Kleist and Stendhal, loathes William Styron and Sainte-Beuve, is conspicuously silent about Flaubert and seems to have a love-hate relationship with Nabokov. He delights in summoning up his rhetoric of loathing for the Nazis and the Mafia and in distilling hard, frequently paradoxical conclusions from his insights. ‘Cowards are dangerous,’ he hisses in a review of Gitta Sereny’s book on the Nazis, Into that Darkness, and, at the end of the same review: ‘the safety of the state depends on cultivating the imagination.’ On the autobiography of a Mafia boss he says: ‘The book exudes moral insanity in the way most modern fiction does.’ Reviewing Kate Millett, he observes: ‘erection-anxiety is the main source of evil in the world.’

His Father The Engineer

Ian Hacking, 28 May 1992

There’s widespread distrust of science and technology abroad in (at least) the prosperous English-speaking countries. It shows up where it hurts most. I don’t mean in lack of national...

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Yesterday

Frank Kermode, 27 July 1989

‘The immediate past can frequently seem very distant and very alien; that strangeness can only be perceived through the medium of the present.’ Thus Bryan Appleyard, conscious of the...

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The New Lloyd’s

Peter Campbell, 24 July 1986

Richard Rogers’s new Lloyd’s building in London has begun business, to predictable complaints. A Guardian journalist asking for off-the-cuff comments from underwriters found them...

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