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Abolish everything!

Andrew Hussey: Situationist International, 2 September 1999

The Situationist City 
by Simon Sadler.
MIT, 248 pp., £24.95, March 1998, 0 262 19392 2
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... come from?’ For a fleeting moment, two years later, as they manned the barricades of the rue Gay-Lussac, daubed their slogans on walls across the Left Bank and engaged the enemy in the Paris streets, the Situationists understandably thought of themselves as the avatars of high postwar revolutionary theory. Since 1968 the literature on the Situationist ...

Other Things

J.I.M. Stewart, 2 February 1984

Soor Hearts 
by Robert Alan Jamieson.
Paul Harris, 166 pp., £6.95, January 1984, 0 86228 072 9
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The Life and Loves of a She-Devil 
by Fay Weldon.
Hodder, 240 pp., £8.95, January 1984, 9780340332283
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Cathedral 
by Raymond Carver.
Collins, 230 pp., £8.95, January 1984, 0 00 222790 8
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The Cannibal Galaxy 
by Cynthia Ozick.
Secker, 162 pp., £7.95, January 1984, 0 436 35483 7
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The Collected Works of Jane Bowles 
introduced by Truman Capote.
Peter Owen, 476 pp., £10.95, January 1984, 0 7206 0613 6
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Let it come down 
by Paul Bowles.
Peter Owen, 318 pp., £8.95, January 1984, 0 7206 0614 4
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... She stopped what she was doing and looked at him. ‘We need another fridge,’ she said. They search through newspaper advertisements for something they can afford. Sandy sees that they must go to a type of auction sale that her husband feels to be demeaning. She turns away to prepare a meal, and when she looks at him again it is to find that not only the ...

Seventy Years in a Colourful Trade

Andrew O’Hagan: The Soho Alphabet, 16 July 2020

Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia 
by Darren Coffield.
Unbound, 364 pp., £25, April 2020, 978 1 78352 816 5
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... he drew me pictures of devils (I have them somewhere). Sarah Lucas and I walked the streets in search of more drink after Damien Hirst told Will Self to ‘crack a fucking smile’. I think I sang with Milli Vanilli. Life coaches will tell you that nothing interesting happens after three o’clock in the morning. They’re wrong. I nearly died in an ...

Diary

Adam Shatz: Ornette Coleman, 16 July 2015

... in a dramatic week for freedom in America. The Supreme Court had ruled five to four in favour of gay marriage; at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Obama had drawn on the cadences of the Southern black church, in perhaps the most powerful speech of his presidency, and invited his audience to join him in singing ‘Amazing ...

Baleful Smile of the Crocodile

Neal Ascherson: D.S. Mirsky, 8 March 2001

D.S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life 1890-1939 
by G.S. Smith.
Oxford, 398 pp., £65, June 2000, 0 19 816006 2
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... the best young Russian writers – including M.A. Kuzmin, a predatory but thrillingly rebellious gay who roped the young Mirsky and his friends into a homoerotic salon. Politically, Dmitry had no time for the doomed efforts to turn Russia into a constitutional state. As Smith puts it, he ‘never seems to have written or done anything to suggest that he ...

If you’re not a lesbian, get the hell out

Lidija Haas: Jane Bowles, 25 April 2013

Everything Is Nice: Collected Stories, Sketches and Plays 
by Jane Bowles.
Sort Of, 416 pp., £10.99, December 2012, 978 1 908745 15 6
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... ever more awkward and dangerous situations – preferably involving ‘sinister’ men – in her search for ‘my own little idea of salvation’; Mrs Copperfield, on a trip to Panama that’s in the loosest sense a parody of the Bowles honeymoon, leaves her husband for a local prostitute called Pacifica. Though there’s an apparent parallel between the ...

Modernity’s Undoing

Pankaj Mishra: ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’, 31 March 2011

A Visit from the Goon Squad 
by Jennifer Egan.
Corsair, 336 pp., £14.99, March 2011, 978 1 78033 028 0
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... moments of narrative tension, which then lodge the book’s apparently minor characters – a gay junkie, a celebrity profiler, a flailing PR executive – more securely in the reader’s memory. People who would only be allowed bit roles in a longer, intricately plotted novel kaleidoscopically emerge as figures in their own right. Egan exposes her ...

Expendabilia

Hal Foster: Reyner Banham, 9 May 2002

Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future 
by Nigel Whiteley.
MIT, 494 pp., £27.50, January 2002, 0 262 23216 2
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... his third passion, which both continued and contradicted his Modernist and Pop beliefs, was his search for an architecture autre – ‘other’ in the anti-classical, almost ‘raw’ sense of the art autre or art brut advocated by Jean Dubuffet and others in the 1950s. The Brutalism of the Smithsons and Stirling presented such an architecture for ...

A Light-Blue Stocking

Helen Deutsch: Hester Lynch Salusbury Thrale Piozzi, 14 May 2009

Hester: The Remarkable Life of Dr Johnson’s ‘Dear Mistress’ 
by Ian McIntyre.
Constable, 450 pp., £25, November 2008, 978 1 84529 449 6
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... as a single woman, published in the St James Chronicle in 1763, was entitled ‘Imagination’s Search after Happiness’. It therefore seemed natural to her to use her talents to charm her distant new husband, ‘so Instead of Dressing showily, or behaving usefully – I sate at home and wrote Verses.’ But Thrale wasn’t impressed and Johnson stepped ...

Too Big to Shut Down

Chal Ravens: Rave On, 7 March 2024

Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain 
by Ed Gillett.
Picador, 464 pp., £20, August 2023, 978 1 5290 7064 4
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... leaves little doubt that dancing has long been the target of state repression, especially when gay or Black people are doing it. The founding legend of rave concerns the ‘Ibiza Four’: the DJs Danny Rampling, Paul Oakenfold, Johnny Walker and Nicky Holloway, who in 1987 went on holiday to Ibiza, took Ecstasy under the stars at the open-air club ...

The South

Colm Tóibín, 4 August 1994

One Art: The Selected Letters of Elizabeth Bishop 
Chatto, 668 pp., £25, April 1994, 0 7011 6195 7Show More
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... which the emotion appears to be hidden, to lurk mysteriously in the space between the words. The search for pure accuracy in her poems forced her to watch the world helplessly, as though there were nothing she could do. The statements she made in her poems seem always distilled, put down on the page – despite the simplicity and the tone of casual ...

Why do white people like what I write?

Pankaj Mishra: Ta-Nehisi Coates, 22 February 2018

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy 
by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Hamish Hamilton, 367 pp., £16.99, October 2017, 978 0 241 32523 0
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... among the privileged – the CIA under Obama set up a recruiting office at the Miami Beach Gay Pride parade. Overt racism and homophobia had become taboo, even as imprisonment or premature death removed 1.5 million black men from public life. Diversification and multiculturalism among upwardly mobile, college-educated elites went together with mass ...

History as a Bunch of Flowers

James Davidson: Jacob Burckhardt, 20 August 1998

The Greeks and Greek Civilisation 
by Jacob Burckhardt, edited by Oswyn Murray, translated by Sheila Stern.
HarperCollins, 449 pp., £24.99, May 1998, 0 00 255855 6
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... so coolly or callously, and so at odds with what we know of his own quiet lifestyle that led Peter Gay to describe Burckhardt as an intellectual voluptuary. The founders of the new history may have seen a foreshadowing in Burckhardt, but it was Durkheim they modelled themselves on. The latter’s objective approach, which demanded a hard society of hard social ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Finding My Métier, 4 January 2018

... has a compass at all it’s fixed permanently on self-seeking.23 February. I go to the chemist in search of Collis Browne, which Boots choose no longer to sell, though why no one can explain. Depending on what one wants, the chemist has always been a theatre of embarrassment, though never so much as when our local pharmacy was on the corner of Sharpleshall ...

Sod off, readers

John Sutherland, 26 September 1991

Rude Words: A Discursive History of the London Library 
by John Wells.
Macmillan, 240 pp., £17.50, September 1991, 0 333 47519 4
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Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English 
by Geoffrey Hughes.
Blackwell, 283 pp., £16.95, August 1991, 0 631 16593 2
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... Similarly, no one who once uses the recently-advertised OED in machine-readable form with all its search and cross-reference facilities will want to be confined to the printed volumes. Chadwyck Healey have advertised for imminent sale a database comprising texts of all the poetry listed in the NCBEL. It cannot be long before all literature in English is ...

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