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Pulp

Scott Bradfield, 14 December 1995

Jim Thompson Omnibus: The Getaway, The Killer inside Me, The Grifters, Pop. 1280 
Picador, 570 pp., £7.99, November 1995, 3 303 34288 1Show More
Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson 
by Robert Polito.
Knopf, 543 pp., $30, October 1995, 0 394 58407 4
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... Jim Thompson never actually claimed to write capital-L Literature, but today, nearly twenty years after his death, many of his admirers are making the claim for him. Born in a sheriff’s apartment over the Caddo County Jail in Oklahoma in 1906, Thompson, like many good American boys, grew up to be a lot like his father ...

Secretly Sublime

Iain Sinclair: The Great Ian Penman, 19 March 1998

Vital Signs 
by Ian Penman.
Serpent’s Tail, 374 pp., £10.99, February 1998, 1 85242 523 7
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... will chase without worrying too much what he is writing about. One of those elephantine Hunter S. Thompson, self-cannibalising careers that define the point where it all went wrong, where the floating signifier began to get above itself and spit like a snake. Penman’s value lies in the way he occupies this clerical post, as reporter, commentator, without ...

Monster Doss House

Iain Sinclair, 24 November 1988

The Grass Arena 
by John Healy.
Faber, 194 pp., £9.95, October 1988, 0 571 15170 1
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... from her black pimps. He is offering us that species of dead-end fate-tale perfected by the late Jim Thompson, himself – like so many journeymen of hard-boiled or proletarian literature – no stranger to the bottle. The liberal press have tended to receive this book as startling intelligence brought back from some impenetrable other world. It is ...

Isle of Dogs

Iain Sinclair, 10 May 1990

Pit Bull 
by Scott Ely.
Penguin, 218 pp., £4.99, March 1990, 0 14 012033 5
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... but I was left, at the finish, with a feeling of nostalgia for the psychopathic ‘humour’ of a Jim Thompson or the more exuberant culture spread of Charles Willeford’s Cockfighter. Fate should hurt, it should embrace more than a spoiled romance. The affair at the heart of this novel must be with ‘Alligator’, the stinking pit bull, the sunken mud ...

The Cadaver Club

Iain Sinclair, 22 December 1994

Original Sin 
by P.D. James.
Faber, 426 pp., £14.99, October 1994, 0 571 17253 9
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Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 282 pp., £14.99, September 1994, 1 85619 507 4
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The Hidden Files: An Autobiography 
by Derek Raymond.
Warner, 342 pp., £5.99, December 1994, 0 7515 1184 6
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Not till the Red Fog Rises 
by Derek Raymond.
Little, Brown, 248 pp., £15.99, December 1994, 0 316 91014 7
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... without breaking the skin. Red Fog has all the modest desperation of the best American pulps, Jim Thompson, David Goodis. Depression literature. Orphan books written to be abandoned. Dream logic without the luxury of revision. Even the cover illustration is pastiche Gold Medal: it doesn’t illustrate anything in the book, but gloats over a top-heavy ...
Joseph Conrad: A Biography 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Murray, 320 pp., £20, July 1991, 0 7195 4910 8
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Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper 
by Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan.
Oxford, 218 pp., £30, August 1991, 9780198117858
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... by the sea striking her astern or amidships?’ That was one of the easier ones. When Captain Thompson – ‘motionless, remote and enigmatical’ – piled on the agony with fog, a lee-shore and a lost anchor cable, Conrad explained that he would ‘back the bow anchor and tail the heaviest hawser on board on the end of the chain before letting go, and ...

Sea-shells and Tigers

Philip Kitcher, 18 March 1999

Life’s Other Secret: The New Mathematics of the Living World 
by Ian Stewart.
Penguin, 320 pp., £20, June 1998, 0 7139 9161 5
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... was echoed a century after her (fictitious) life by the unorthodox biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, whose mathematical investigations of the living world were collected in On Growth and Form, published in 1917. Although they have excited the admiration of some important thinkers, including Alan Turing and the biologists John Tyler Bonner and Stephen ...

Unmaking mysteries

Mark Ridley, 1 September 1983

Pluto’s Republic 
by Peter Medawar.
Oxford, 351 pp., £12.50, October 1982, 1 921777 26 5
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... birds and fresh pastures of the fields of Elysium rather than in Pluto’s republic. Such are Jim Watson, despite his childish understanding of science; J.B.S. Haldane, despite his political ineptitude; and D’Arcy Thompson. But more importantly, Medawar uses unscientific ideas to explore his own philosophy of ...

Death in Belgravia

Rosemary Hill, 5 February 2015

A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan 
by Laura Thompson.
Head of Zeus, 422 pp., £20, November 2014, 978 1 78185 536 2
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... studies of the case and what it reveals about postwar Britain and its social structure. Thompson’s book is a mixture of all of these and the result is persuasive and revealing in some parts, absurd and tasteless in others. Yet it is a compelling read. The story doesn’t pall because it has become a myth and myths change with time. As the Lucan ...

Frameworks of Comparison

Benedict Anderson, 21 January 2016

... under the uninspiring aegis of the British Communist Party. The founders of NLR were Edward Thompson, the great radical historian of rural and working-class England, and the Jamaican social thinker Stuart Hall, who would later become known as one of the founders of cultural studies. The Young Turks had only affection and respect for Hall, but relations ...

My Little Lollipop

Jenny Diski: Christine Keeler, 22 March 2001

The Truth at Last: My Story 
by Christine Keeler and Douglas Thompson.
Sidgwick, 279 pp., £16.99, February 2001, 0 283 07291 1
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... glorified knocking shop with overpriced drinks and rooms to rent upstairs’, Keeler met a Major Jim Eynan. He wanted to go to bed with her in the afternoons, she says, ‘and, for nearly two years, he often did. Ours was a commercial situation for Jim always advanced me some money for rent or helped out financially in ...

Smarter, Happier, More Productive

Jim Holt: ‘The Shallows’, 3 March 2011

The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember 
by Nicholas Carr.
Atlantic, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2010, 978 1 84887 225 7
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... replacement for it. ‘I’ve almost given up making an effort to remember anything,’ says Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired, ‘because I can instantly retrieve the information online.’ David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, writes: ‘I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realised the ...

Short Cuts

Nick Richardson: The Classic Apocalypse, 7 January 2021

... Cotton Mather in 1736, Charles Wesley in 1794, Mother Shipton in 1881, Pierre Lachèze in 1900 and Jim Jones in 1967. The end of the great plague of 2020 may be in sight, but doomsday predictions come thick and fast these days. The ‘sixth mass extinction event’, the election of Donald Trump, the Mayan calendar cataclysm of 2012, the ‘clash of ...

Scoop after Scoop

Ian Jack: Chapman Pincher’s Scoops, 5 June 2014

Dangerous to Know: A Life 
by Chapman Pincher.
Biteback, 386 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 1 84954 651 5
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... whom one has been in open conflict.’ In an essay published in the New Statesman in 1978, E.P. Thompson took a different view, imagining Pincher as ‘a kind of official urinal in which, side by side, high officials of MI5 and MI6, sea lords, permanent under-secretaries, Lord George-Brown, chiefs of the air staff, nuclear scientists, Lord Wigg and ...

Hope in the Desert

Eric Foner: Democratic Party Blues, 12 May 2022

What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party 
by Michael Kazin.
Farrar, Straus, 396 pp., $35, March, 978 0 374 20023 7
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... Jennings Bryan, published in 2006, which attempted to rescue its protagonist from what E.P. Thompson in a different context called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. (Condescension regarding Bryan emanates from secular urban liberals who know him only from his condemnation of the theory of evolution in the notorious Scopes Trial of 1925, not ...

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