Left with a Can Opener

Thomas Jones: Homer in Bijelo Polje, 7 October 2021

Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry 
by Robert Kanigel.
Knopf, 320 pp., £28.95, April 2021, 978 0 525 52094 8
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... a gunshot wound in a Los Angeles hotel room.Milman Parry was born in Oakland, California, on 23 June 1902. His father was variously a prosthetics fitter, a nurse and a pharmacist who devised his own hair tonic and dandruff remedy. When a masked gunman tried to hold up the drugstore where he worked he threw the cash register at the robber, chased him into ...

Even Hotter, Even Louder

Tony Wood: Shining Path, 4 July 2019

The Shining Path: Love, Madness and Revolution in the Andes 
by Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna.
Norton, 404 pp., £19.99, May 2019, 978 0 393 29280 0
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... involved in student protests against the military dictatorship of Juan Velasco Alvarado in June 1969. Dozens were killed in clashes with security forces, sparking further protests that led the government to call a state of emergency; Guzmán and other leaders were briefly imprisoned. The following year, he led a splinter group away from the main Maoist ...

Diary

Anne Enright: Mrs Robinson Repents, 28 January 2010

... her 19-year-old lover, Kirk McCambley. She has some experience of the mental health profession. In June 2008, days before she embarked on the affair, she said on the radio: ‘I have a very lovely psychiatrist who works with me in my offices and his Christian background is that he tries to help homosexuals – trying to turn them away from what they are ...

Where will this voyage end?

Neal Ascherson, 14 June 1990

Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two centuries look back on the French Revolution 
by E.J. Hobsbawm.
Verso, 144 pp., £24.95, May 1990, 0 86091 282 5
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... of a ‘standing up’ after long prostration.) The Polish elections had taken place in June, but the Communist retreat did not become an uncontrollable rout there until a few months later. Much the same was true of Hungary, while the interventions of ‘the people’ on the streets of Prague, Leipzig, Berlin, Timisoara, Bucharest – the events ...

Stanley and the Activists

Philip Williamson, 13 October 1988

Baldwin and the Conservative Party: The Crisis of 1929-1931 
by Stuart Ball.
Yale, 266 pp., £25, April 1988, 0 300 03961 1
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... onset of world depression: exports collapsed and competition from imports increased, unemployment rose towards three million, there were deficits in the balance of payments, in the unemployment insurance fund and in the Budget, and sterling came under severe international pressure. Yet in conditions which required firm, decisive government, the 1929 General ...

Tall Storeys

Patrick Parrinder, 10 December 1987

Life: A User’s Manual 
by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos.
Collins Harvill, 581 pp., £15, October 1987, 0 00 271463 9
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The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room 
by Paul Auster.
Faber, 314 pp., £10.95, November 1987, 0 571 14925 1
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... while many of the most familiar words in the language are equally debarred from both texts. Perec rose to the Oulipian challenge on many other occasions, and in a variety of literary forms. For example, there is a brief play, Les Horreurs de la Guerre, in which the dialogue consists entirely in the enunciation of the letters of the alphabet from A to Z. (It ...

At Home in the Huntington

John Sutherland: The Isherwood Archive, 10 June 1999

... diaries to be published and promised that they would be ‘frank’. The world’s press rose to the bait, expecting another instalment of Hollywood-Babylon: ‘Private Lives of Stars Laid Bare in Diaries,’ the Telegraph forecast. Prudently, Isherwood had destroyed the journals that would have interested posterity most: the record of his life ...

Leave, and Leave Again

William Davies: The Brexit Mentality, 7 February 2019

... rise; celebrities, such as Phil Collins and Tracey Emin, threatened to leave Britain if income tax rose. We are all too conscious of anxieties concerning immigration in British society, yet the latent fear of emigration – by capital and capitalists – has shaped our politics far more decisively over the past thirty or forty years. Contemporary forms of ...

Someone to Disturb

Hilary Mantel: A Memoir, 1 January 2009

... him. I made him some instant coffee and he sat down and told me about himself. It was then June 1983. I had been in Saudi Arabia for six months. My husband worked for a Toronto-based company of consulting geologists, and had been seconded by them to the Ministry of Mineral Resources. Most of his colleagues were housed in family ‘compounds’ of ...

Velvet Gentleman

Nick Richardson: Erik Satie, 4 June 2015

A Mammal’s Notebook: The Writings of Erik Satie 
edited by Ornella Volta, translated by Antony Melville.
Atlas, 224 pp., £17.50, June 2014, 978 1 900565 66 0
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... he claimed was bestowed on his family by a Babylonian king) of a Rosicrucian order called the Rose + Croix esthétique, which Satie joined as its in-house composer. For the inauguration of the Salon de la Rose + Croix, the order’s cultural wing, Satie composed three ‘Sonneries’ for trumpets and harps. No scores of ...

Great Portland Street Blues

Karl Miller, 25 January 1990

Boswell: The Great Biographer. Journals: 1789-1795 
by James Boswell, edited by Marlies Danziger and Frank Brady.
Heinemann, 432 pp., £25, November 1989, 0 434 89729 9
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... in public – as once at a royal levee, resplendent ‘in a suit of imperial blue, lined with rose-coloured silk, and ornamented with rich gold-wrought buttons’. What energy he had, what persistence, what lapses and arrests. By the end of his tumultuous life he had at least become the grey eminence saluted in the title conferred on the last of the ...

Island Politics

Sylvia Lawson: The return of Australia’s Coalition Government, 12 November 1998

... was set up as a result of the all-important High Court judgment in Mabo v. Queensland, which in June 1992 overturned the old fiction of terra nullius, acknowledged the prior ownership of the continent by its first peoples and confirmed their right to make claims on it now. Two days before Christmas 1993, after months of intensely difficult negotiation by ...

Making strange

John Sutherland, 19 March 1981

Other people 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 223 pp., £5.95, March 1981, 0 224 01766 7
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The Magic Glass 
by Anne Smith.
Joseph, 174 pp., £6.50, March 1981, 9780718119867
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The Book of Ebenezer Le Page 
by Gerald Edwards.
Hamish Hamilton, 400 pp., £7.50, March 1981, 0 241 10477 7
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Sharpe’s Eagle 
by Bernard Cornwell.
Collins, 266 pp., £6.50, February 1981, 0 00 221997 2
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XPD 
by Len Deighton.
Hutchinson, 397 pp., £6.95, March 1981, 0 09 144570 1
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... randomly taken, and mocked by grandiloquent chapter titles (‘A Star is Born’, ‘Mighty Like a Rose’). The sequence records her birth inter faeces (her mother has taken an ill-timed overdose of salts); her ungrateful father, desperate for a ‘laddie’, names her after the passing milkman’s horse; the narrative jumps seven years to the heroine’s ...

Against Responsibility

William Davies, 8 November 2018

Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism 
by Melinda Cooper.
Zone, 447 pp., £24, March 2017, 978 1 935408 84 0
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... Managing families – but lost all ideological confidence along with her parliamentary majority in June last year.) The phrase was used as a way of signalling economic and moral commitment at the same time. Gordon Brown – who liked to cloak redistributive policies in communitarian, traditionalist rhetoric – is said to have been the first to use it, in ...

Gargantuanisation

John Lanchester, 22 April 2021

Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula 
by Laleh Khalili.
Verso, 368 pp., £20, April 2020, 978 1 78663 481 8
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... ignored subject at the centre of the global economy. The truth is that shipping is responsible, as Rose George put it in the subtitle of her classic 2013 book on the subject, for ‘90 Per Cent of Everything’. It is the physical equivalent of the internet, the other industry which makes globalisation possible. The internet abolishes national boundaries for ...