Other Selves

John Bayley, 29 October 1987

How I Grew 
by Mary McCarthy.
Weidenfeld, 278 pp., £14.95, September 1987, 0 297 79170 2
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Myself and Michael Innes 
by J.I.M. Stewart.
Gollancz, 206 pp., £12.95, September 1987, 0 575 04104 8
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... the fact that Mary was being made love to at the time in peculiar ways by a young painter called Kenneth Callahan (her own technical defloration had occurred a couple of years earlier) and was also involved, though not seriously, with a green-eyed lesbian of 35 called Czerna Wilson, who wore her bronze hair in a pigtail that reached her hips. Callahan’s ...

Diary

Frank Kermode: Being a critic, 27 May 1999

... apparently rather remote from the stated aims of the collection, for instance the chapters on Kenneth Tynan’s theatre criticism and on the usefulness of Blackwood’s Magazine as a vehicle of First World War propaganda. But this is a lively and sensible book, largely, it must be said, by academics of one kind or another, few of whom ever passed the ...

Kindergarten Governor

Gary Indiana: It’s Schwarzenegger!, 6 November 2003

... politicians don’t. Besides, as Susan Faludi pointed out, the core of Schwarzenegger’s white, male, locker-room constituency likes the idea of assaulting and humiliating women, so long as there’s no emotion involved – a further reason Clinton got pilloried for his indiscretions (he seemed to care about the women he romanced). Second, a tripling ...

On Not Being Sylvia Plath

Colm Tóibín: Thom Gunn on the Move, 13 September 2018

Selected Poems 
by Thom Gunn.
Faber, 336 pp., £16.99, July 2017, 978 0 571 32769 0
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... or on albums or in ordinary books. One was The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, edited by Kenneth Allott. It had been published first in 1950, with a second edition in 1962. The other was The New Poetry, also published in 1962. Edited by A. Alvarez, it had a crazy Jackson Pollock painting on the cover. In the Allott anthology I was intrigued by some ...

Chicory and Daisies

Stephanie Burt: William Carlos Williams, 7 March 2002

Collected Poems: Volume I 
by William Carlos Williams, edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan.
Carcanet, 579 pp., £12.95, December 2000, 1 85754 522 2
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Collected Poems: Volume II 
by William Carlos Williams, edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan.
Carcanet, 553 pp., £12.95, December 2000, 1 85754 523 0
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... what order. Stanzas follow the movement of eye and mind from road to roadside, through ‘leafless white birches’ to a munitions plant, or to the ‘beauty,/at the swamp’s centre: the/dead-end highway, abandoned/ when the new bridge went in’. Williams’s most powerful lines show, in ‘Spring Strains’ for example, how an observer might scan a young ...

It’s she, it’s she, it’s she

Joanna Biggs: Americans in Paris, 2 August 2012

Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis 
by Alice Kaplan.
Chicago, 289 pp., £17, May 2012, 978 0 226 42438 5
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As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries 1964-80 
by Susan Sontag.
Hamish Hamilton, 544 pp., £18.99, April 2012, 978 0 241 14517 3
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... might be, he would accuse her of being ‘too Frenchy’.) In her three years at the White House, she led a major renovation, and in a televised tour of the improvements combined a geeky knowledge of Lincoln and Jefferson with an antique dealer’s fastidiousness about the dating of chairs. She also did a shorter version of the tour in ...

Red makes wrong

Mark Ford: Harry Mathews, 20 March 2003

The Human Country: New and Collected Stories 
by Harry Mathews.
Dalkey Archive, 186 pp., £10.99, October 2002, 1 56478 321 9
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The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays 
by Harry Mathews.
Dalkey Archive, 290 pp., £10.99, April 2003, 1 56478 288 3
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... they lived in Deyá, Mallorca, where Mathews came under the influence of Robert Graves, whose The White Goddess lurks behind some of the arcane mystic lore that turns up in the plot of his first novel, The Conversions (1962). A much greater influence on his early fiction, however, was Raymond Roussel, to whose work he was introduced by John Ashbery in ...

The Chase

Inigo Thomas: ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’, 20 October 2016

... appears as static as a Monet locomotive idling at the Gare St Lazare. He also left out the hare. Kenneth Clark described Rain, Steam and Speed as the ‘most extraordinary’ of Turner’s paintings. ‘I suppose that everybody today would accept it as one of the cardinal pictures of the 19th century on account of its subject as well as its ...

Don’t go quietly

David Trotter: Ken Loach’s Fables, 6 February 2025

Kes 
by David Forrest.
BFI, 112 pp., £12.99, May 2024, 978 1 83902 564 8
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... certainly got the memo. ‘The BBC,’ she complained in a letter to the then minister of health, Kenneth Robinson, ‘are determined to do everything in their power to present promiscuity as normal.’Up the Junction, based on a book by Nell Dunn, was the first collaboration between Ken Loach, who joined the BBC as a trainee director in 1963, and Tony ...

A British Bundesrat?

Colin Kidd: Scotland and the Constitution, 17 April 2014

... Union: The UK as a Federation, published last year; while Conservatives at Westminster, including Kenneth Baker, Malcolm Rifkind and members of the so-called Democracy Taskforce set up by the Tories in opposition and headed by Ken Clarke, have over the past decade proposed various means of ironing out post-devolutionary wrinkles in the British political ...

Escape of a Half-Naked Sailor

P.N. Furbank: ‘Three Queer Lives’, 29 November 2001

Three Queer Lives: An Alternative Biography of Fred Barnes, Naomi Jacob and Arthur Marshall 
by Paul Bailey.
Hamish Hamilton, 242 pp., £14.99, October 2001, 0 241 13455 2
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... how horrific it would be! In his palmy days he could be seen walking down Charing Cross Road, in a white cashmere jacket with matching plus-fours and knee-length pink stockings, a marmoset perching on his shoulder. By the 1930s he was entertaining in Southend pubs in exchange for a drink or small change, his ravaged features plastered over with make-up, and on ...
Rembrandt by Himself 
edited by Christopher White and Quentin Buvelot.
Yale, 272 pp., £25, June 1999, 9781857092523
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Rembrandt: The Painter at Work 
by Ernst van de Wetering.
Amsterdam University Press, 340 pp., £52.50, November 1997, 90 5356 239 7
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... our culture’s chief pictorial repository for the so-called human condition. John Rupert Martin, Kenneth Clark, H.P. Chapman and E.H. Gombrich (respectively) were, each of them, writing out of a scholarly knowledge of the 17th century. Nonetheless, their terminologies raise a major problem: does the strength of our emotional response to Rembrandt lead us ...

Thunder in the Mountains

J. Hoberman: Orson Welles, 6 September 2007

Orson Welles: Hello Americans 
by Simon Callow.
Vintage, 507 pp., £8.99, May 2007, 978 0 09 946261 3
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What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career 
by Joseph McBride.
Kentucky, 344 pp., $29.95, October 2006, 0 8131 2410 7
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... murderous teenagers of Heavenly Creatures as ‘the most hideous man alive’, matches wits with Kenneth Tynan and Laurence Olivier in Austin Pendleton’s play Orson’s Shadow, and has even been fingered posthumously as a suspect in the 1947 Black Dahlia murder. Welles appears, larger than life, in documentaries and dramatisations, of both his own story ...

V is for Vagina

T.J. Clark: De Kooning in Cuba, 7 May 2026

... previous eighteen months: colour had come back, after years of exclusion, into Kline’s black and white world. There are distinct echoes of the Klines – of his tribute to King Oliver’s syncopation, for example – in Suburb in Havana. De Kooning, to sum up, was a creature of the New York School. But he was also a naïf, a Great American Artist, a ...

What happened to the Labour Party?

W.G. Runciman: The difference between then and now, 22 June 2006

... the difference which is neatly captured in two remarks by two different observers. The first is Kenneth Galbraith, in The Affluent Society published in the late 1950s, where he remarked that ‘few things are more evident in modern social history than the decline of interest in inequality as an economic issue. This has been particularly true in the United ...