Peter Campbell

The photographs of Louise Brooks in Lulu in Hollywood show a face as beautiful, and almost as unchanging, as a Japanese mask. Both praise and criticism notice this inexpressiveness: ‘Louise Brooks exists with an overwhelming insistence … always enigmatically impassive,’ ‘Louise Brooks cannot act … she does not suffer … she does nothing.’ Her writing, on the other hand, is painfully self-revealing. Sometimes funny, sometimes angry, she is unfailingly perceptive about the arts of acting and film-making. The description of Pabst’s direction of Pandora’s Box is one of the best things in the book:

You know a Pre-Raphaelite picture when you see one, but definitions come hard. The paintings are likely to be detailed, but Rossetti’s are soft and generalised; they often take subjects from English poetry or the Bible, but can be pure landscapes, or illustrations of Greek myths, or even about modern politics. The Pre-Raphaelite programme – to replace an exhausted tradition, of painterly conventionalities and trivial subject-matter, with a style which paid close attention to the detail of natural appearances and took themes of an aesthetically and morally elevated sort – is clear enough. The results evoke responses which are nothing like as simple.

How many books have I read? Two hundred, three hundred, five hundred …? I could compile a list. But what would it tell me? What I know? What I have forgotten? What I was? What I wanted to be? What my mother and father wanted and expected and expect me to be? Millions of Cats, Goodnight Moon, Caps for Sale, Where the wild things are, The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book, Stuart Little, The Secret Garden, The Borrowers, The Little Prince, Member of the Wedding, Gigi, Lord of the Flies, Return of the Native …

The ‘homes fit for heroes’ of Mark Swenarton’s title – or some relation of them – can be found on the outskirts of almost any British town. Yet they are more seen than noticed, and it may take a description to bring them to mind: ‘two-storey cottages, built in groups of four or six, with medium or low-pitched roofs and little exterior decoration, set amongst gardens, trees, privet hedges and grass verges, and often laid out in cul-de-sacs or around greens’. They enter architectural history as a footnote, to the English vernacular and Georgian revivals, or the Garden City movement, but appear in social history as an impressive statistic: one family in 20 still lives in this kind of inter-war council housing.

Edward Hopper’s 1920 etching ‘Les Deux Pigeons’