Among the Bobcats

Mark Ford, 23 May 1991

The Dylan Companion 
edited by Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman.
Macmillan, 338 pp., £10.99, April 1991, 0 333 49826 7
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Bob Dylan: Performing Artist. Vol. I: 1960-73 
by Paul Williams.
Xanadu, 310 pp., £14.99, February 1991, 1 85480 044 2
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Dylan: Behind the Shades 
by Clinton Heylin.
Viking, 528 pp., £16.99, May 1991, 0 670 83602 8
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The Bootleg Series: Vols I-III (rare and unreleased) 1961-1991 
by Bob Dylan.
Columbia, £24.95, April 1991
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... performance of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ immortalised on what became known as the Royal Albert Hall bootleg, though it seems that most of this tape was recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. Dylan and the Band had been barracked between most of the numbers of the second half of the show, in which he changed from ...

After-Lives

John Sutherland, 5 November 1992

Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography 
by Ian Hamilton.
Hutchinson, 344 pp., £18.99, October 1992, 0 09 174263 3
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Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy 
by Michael Millgate.
Oxford, 273 pp., £27.50, June 1992, 0 19 811276 9
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The Last Laugh 
by Michael Holroyd.
Chatto, 131 pp., £10.99, December 1991, 0 7011 4583 8
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Trollope 
by Victoria Glendinning.
Hutchinson, 551 pp., £20, September 1992, 0 09 173896 2
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... public property and scholars should be allowed to prepare competing editions, as they are free to do with Shakespeare and Dickens. Keepers of the Flame is an unusually timely book, and will be buoyed by current celebrated causes. The right to authorial privacy is even now being fiercely defended by Stephen Spender against the intrusive Hugh ...

Can there be such a thing as music criticism?

John Deathridge, 20 February 1986

Music and Civilisation: Essays in Honour of Paul Henry Lang 
edited by Edmond Strainchamps, Maria Rika Maniates and Christopher Hatch.
Norton, 499 pp., £35, March 1985, 0 393 01677 3
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The Farthest North of Humanness: Letters of Percy Grainger 1901-1914 
edited by Kay Dreyfus.
Macmillan, 542 pp., £25, December 1985, 0 333 38085 1
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Musicology 
by Joseph Kerman.
Collins/Fontana, 255 pp., £10.95, March 1985, 0 00 197170 0
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... of the editor, even ‘boredom and emptiness were to be experienced to the full.’ By comparison, David Josephson’s more modest essay on Percy Grainger in Music and Civilisation comes as a refreshing surprise. Josephson is a victim of Lang’s musicological high-mindedness only to the extent that he distrusts any kind of ad hominem argument that could ...

Sweet Sin

J.P. Stern, 5 August 1982

Marbot 
by Wolfgang Hildesheimer.
Suhrkamp, 326 pp., May 1981, 3 518 03205 4
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... at Stonyhurst, better than it does Andrew himself, who was brought up by a private tutor at Marbot Hall. But what it describes is one half of the English experience Hildesheimer presents, the foil against which the other half – Andrew’s life – must be seen. More recent German Anglophiles have found that there is a price to pay for these attractive ...

A Man of Parts and Learning

Fara Dabhoiwala: Francis Williams Gets His Due, 21 November 2024

... archive. Our surviving written and visual materials from the past are not neutral. They don’t do equal justice to different people and groups. On the contrary, they perpetuate the disparities of the past. And this is a particular problem for the era of the transatlantic slave trade. Millions on millions of men, women and children were ...

It was worse in 1931

Colin Kidd: Clement Attlee, 17 November 2016

Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee 
by John Bew.
Riverrun, 668 pp., £30, September 2016, 978 1 78087 989 5
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... Fabians attended by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, Attlee whispered to his brother: ‘Do we have to grow a beard to join this show?’ The confident pre-1914 left, he later reflected, had been too rigid in its scientific approach to social problems and altogether ‘too Webby’. Socialist eggheads remained a source of exasperation into the late ...

Better on TV

Jon Day: The Tennis Craze, 8 October 2020

A People’s History of Tennis 
by David Berry.
Pluto, 247 pp., £14.99, May, 978 0 7453 3965 8
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... a low wall which abuts the court on the ‘hazard end’ – mimics the layout of a dining hall or long forgotten medieval street. In part because of the size and complexity of the court, real tennis was from the beginning an exclusive game, often associated with royalty. Two French kings died of tennis injuries. Anne Boleyn was watching a game of ...

Sunshine

David Goldie: Morecambe and Wise, 15 April 1999

Morecambe and Wise 
by Graham McCann.
Fourth Estate, 416 pp., £16.99, October 1998, 1 85702 735 3
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... earlier in the day. Graham McCann proposes that this popular endorsement of Morecambe and Wise as de facto national comics is also a vindication of what were then the public service ideals of the BBC. As national broadcasting fragments under the narrowing commercial stresses of satellite and digital, and as political devolution threatens national news ...

Diary

Matt Foot: Children of the Spied-On, 29 June 2023

... time, nothing much seemed to be happening, but then in January the lead counsel to the inquiry, David Barr KC, who has been plodding through the evidence since 2015, made a submission about the role of SDS’s senior management. He focused on a simple question: what was the justification, as understood at the outset, for the infiltration by undercover ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Did in 2015, 7 January 2016

... start which I somehow feel should be the climax of the show, but better for me as by the time we do get round this quite substantial exhibition I’m exhausted. As always with Rembrandt feel almost arraigned by the self-portraits and put on the spot. ‘And?’ he seems to be saying. ‘So?’ The self-disgust is there and the sadness, but in a very ...

The Raging Peloton

Iain Sinclair: Boris Bikes, 20 January 2011

... guerrilla footage of the real Boris Johnson jabbering on his cell phone and wobbling towards City Hall, as well as faked sequences of a clown with an unshorn flop of albino hair stunting around underpasses and concrete ramps. The Tebbit sound-bark has come back, to remind us how neatly bogus bicycle rhetoric chimes with agitation in the streets, with the ...

Diary

Ian Aitken: Closing Time at the Last Chance Saloon, 6 August 1992

... London Evening Standard had turned down the editorship of the Times in favour of succeeding Sir David English at the Daily Mail. As a boy, wrote Sir Perry, he had wanted to be editor of the Times more than anything in the world. So when Mr Paul Dacre picked Rothermere’s Daily Mail in preference to Rupert Murdoch’s Times, Worsthorne’s first reaction ...

What is Labour for?

John Lanchester: Five More Years of This?, 31 March 2005

David Blunkett 
by Stephen Pollard.
Hodder, 359 pp., £20, December 2004, 0 340 82534 0
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... so far rightwards that it isn’t really the same party any more. In that process of migration, David Blunkett was one of the key players. Blunkett is important not only because of how he behaved when in office – we’ll get to that in a moment – but also because of the journey he took to get there. A man who from 1980 to 1987 was the leader of the ...

Diary

David Bromwich: The Establishment President, 13 May 2010

... movement is concentrated now on handing him a defeat in this year’s midterm elections. Don’t do anything rash to jeopardise our victory – that is what the radio hosts say. (The Tea Party crowd with their anti-tax, anti-debt, anti-government views are regarded sympathetically by something between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of the voters: they know they ...

Follow the Money

David Conn, 30 August 2012

... compete with the badge on the players’ shirts; and to my mind at least, the game had nothing to do with money. This year, the championship was won in injury time at the end of the final game of the season with a goal by the Argentinian striker Sergio Aguero, whom City had bought for £38 million less than a year before, and even the children hugging their ...