Alzheimer’s America

Mark Greif: Don DeLillo, 5 July 2007

Falling Man 
by Don DeLillo.
Picador, 246 pp., £16.99, May 2007, 978 0 330 45223 6
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... named for a person whose name we don’t recognise: ‘Bill Lawton’, ‘Ernst Hechinger’, ‘David Janiak’. ‘Bill Lawton’, a secret name uttered by children playing in their rooms, turns out to be Bin Laden translated into Americanese. ‘Ernst Hechinger’ turns out to have been the name Martin went under when he was involved in the German ...

You Know Who You Are

Colin Kidd: About Last Year, 25 January 2018

Fall Out: A Year Of Political Mayhem 
by Tim Shipman.
William Collins, 559 pp., £25, November 2017, 978 0 00 826438 3
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... expectations. For all that the Labour Party has tried to exploit Remainer discontent with the May government’s push for a clean Brexit, a powerful undertow of Lexiteering persists. The post-2008 crisis of capitalism has delivered a propitious conjuncture: the left’s supplanting of New Labour and its engagement with an electorate that seems willing to ...

Red Rover

Clare Hollingworth, 4 February 1982

At the Barricades: The Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist 
by Wilfred Burchett.
Quartet, 341 pp., £10.95, May 1981, 0 7043 2214 5
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... Vietcong hide-out in the Southern capital. Many readers, while enjoying Burchett’s racy style, may be critical of his opinions; there are also errors of fact. During the negotiations between the North Vietnamese and the Americans in Paris, Burchett writes of a misunderstanding between the chief American negotiator, ...

Short Cuts

Paul Myerscough: Zidane at work, 5 October 2006

... letters of Zidane’s name: the effect of his total presence is to obscure him completely. This may be the idea the film starts out with; it is not what makes it compelling. Watching Zidane at work in this way is an extraordinary experience. He is in possession of the ball for only a tiny fraction of the game, a total of perhaps two minutes or less. Much of ...

One Foot on the Moon

Uri Avnery: Israel’s Racist Laws, 25 June 2009

... democratic state’, and undertake to serve in the army or a civilian alternative. Its sponsor is David Rotem of Israel Is Our Home, who also happens to be chairman of the Knesset law committee. A declaration of loyalty to the state and its laws is reasonable. But loyalty to the Zionist state? Zionism is an ideology, and in a democratic state the ruling ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: Henry Moore, 25 March 2010

... the grain follows the form as contours follow the slope of a hill – and led to analyses such as David Sylvester’s of the 1945-46 Reclining Figure: ‘the sacrificed and resurrected god of a fertility rite … at once skeletal and alive, prone in burial and flowering into new life’. The carvings in this room provide a formidable example of sustained ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Ghost Writer’, ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, 22 April 2010

The Ghost Writer 
directed by Roman Polanski.
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 
directed by Niels Arden Oplev.
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... an entirely different movie. The resemblances, as they say, are entirely coincidental, although we may believe that in the collective imagination as in Freud’s unconscious there are no accidents, only genres. This second film is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, based on the first novel in the late Stieg Larsson’s bestselling trilogy (the others are The ...

At the Ashmolean

Rosemary Hill: The Capture of the Westmorland, 19 July 2012

... a put-upon bear-leader struggling to get his charge to learn more and drink less, the whole truth. David Stevenson and William Sandys, tutors to Lewisham and Basset, emerge as significant characters with important contacts and interests of their own. Piranesi dedicated a print to Sandys while Stevenson is depicted with Lewisham among the crowd of cognoscenti ...

Between Two Deaths

Slavoj Žižek: The Culture of Torture, 3 June 2004

... but call to mind the ‘theatre of cruelty’, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, scenes from David Lynch movies. This brings us to the crux of the matter. Anyone acquainted with the US way of life will have recognised in the photographs the obscene underside of US popular culture. You can find similar photographs in the US press whenever an initiation ...

Snob Cuts

Rosemary Hill: Modern Snobbery, 3 November 2016

... at askance as part of ‘a wider bias against applicants from less privileged backgrounds who may be lacking the “polish” of their upper-middle-class, Russell Group-educated contemporaries’. The justification for this, as old as snobbery itself, is that the brown-shoe wearer would simply not ‘fit in’. Snobbery works like Chinese boxes. The ...

At the Courtauld

John-Paul Stonard: Chaïm Soutine, 30 November 2017

... areas of colour, enlivened by tiny touches of chromatic variation – an excuse for pure painting. David Sylvester said of Soutine’s landscapes that the motif is ‘secondary to the forces it has unleashed’, and the same holds true for the portraits. Flickers of colour only half follow the folds of the white uniform in The Little Pastry Cook ...

‘Succession’

John Lanchester, 21 November 2019

... is the parody Fox News banner running across the bottom of the credits: ‘Gender-fluid illegals may be entering the country twice.’ Many of the best lines are given to Tom, Shiv’s weak, sneaky, bullied-and-bullying husband. In one episode, the top executives of Waystar are on a corporate retreat in Hungary – or as Tom puts ...

At the Shrink

Janique Vigier, 22 October 2020

... In​ the spring of 1972, the poet Bernadette Mayer began to keep a journal for her analyst, David Rubinfine, whose patients included Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, and who was notorious for having married another patient, Elaine May, a decade earlier. Mayer was 27. In the journal – there were two, in fact; Rubinfine read one while she wrote in the other – she attempted to record her states of consciousness ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Napoleon’, 14 December 2023

... that Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) can be distressed at the right time in his career. Or the effect may be amazing: all kinds of things happen in our minds if we learn that Napoleon is among the crowd at the guillotining of Marie Antoinette in 1793. As a matter of fact he was in Toulon at the time, putting an end to a royalist revolt backed by England and Spain ...

The Virgin

David Plante, 3 April 1986

... gave me an address. She lives in California.’ ‘You see,’ Mrs Trimble said, ‘she may be a carrier and not know.’ ‘She’s married.’ Mrs Trimble raised her hands. ‘Then she should inform her husband.’ ‘Maybe she got it from him.’ ‘Maybe.’ ‘I’ll bet there’s someone he, too, should inform.’ ‘It would be interesting to ...