Diary

Elaine Showalter: At the Modern Language Association , 9 February 1995

... in hotel rooms, where nervous job candidates measure sociability against talking too much; open cash bars, listed in the conference programme, where large departments and various divisions, caucuses, societies and organisations entertain anyone with the price of a small expensive drink; and exclusive gatherings hosted by publishers, admission by printed ...

Surviving the Sixties

Hilary Mantel, 18 May 1989

Shoe: The Odyssey of a Sixties Survivor 
by Jonathan Guinness.
Century Hutchinson, 233 pp., £14.95, March 1989, 0 09 173857 1
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Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman 
by Peter Feibleman.
Chatto, 364 pp., £14.95, February 1989, 0 7011 3441 0
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... he describes a seascape, one thinks immediately of those framed prints they used to sell in Boots Cash Chemist. Hellman, that ‘bombastic, opinionated, dazzling, enraging, funny, peevish, bawdy’ woman, left him with a mass of material. ‘I have notes that were pushed under my door, notes left on tables and countertops, piles of letters ... her voice on 16 ...

Countess Bitch

Robert Tombs, 16 November 1995

The Notorious Life of Gyp: Right-Wing Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle France 
by Willa Silverman.
Oxford, 325 pp., £24, June 1995, 0 19 508754 2
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... dialogues for newspapers, the slangy irreverence of ‘Bob’, a French forerunner of Just William, and racy novels featuring the tragic adventures of slim, persecuted, upper-class, ‘devilishly boyish’ heroines. Much of this was, of course, an endless rehashing of her own grudges and fantasies, but the prime motive was ...
After Hannibal 
by Barry Unsworth.
Hamish Hamilton, 242 pp., £16, September 1996, 0 241 13342 4
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... of converting a sprawling 19th-century folly into a medieval restaurant, once he has conned enough cash out of the other dreamers. Like Jack Sprat and his wife, the Blemishes are splendidly grotesque caricatures, he skinny with envy and greed, she mountainous, and much is made of their domestic harmony:   ‘You are so clever, Stan.’ Mildred spoke through ...

V.G. Kiernan writes about the Marx sisters

V.G. Kiernan, 16 September 1982

The Daughters of Karl Marx: Family Correspondence 1866-98 
edited by Olga Meier, translated by Faith Evans.
Deutsch, 342 pp., £14.95, June 1982, 0 233 97337 0
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... as she might well write today. She was always exasperated with the devious Hyndman, and with William Morris – ‘a fine old chap’ – and Bax when they wavered towards Anarchism. ‘Bax, reasonable on many points, is quite mad on others.’ In the earlier pages family affairs are the staple. Of the two parents, one figures, as Sheila Rowbotham ...

George Eliot, Joyce and Cambridge

Michael Mason, 2 April 1981

... this comic exhibition, and gave Fred a cheque for a comfortable sum of money; and Fred, getting cash for the cheque at the ‘Cave of Harmony’, imitated his uncle the Bishop and his Chaplain, winding up with his Lordship and the Chaplain being unwell at sea – the Chaplain and the Bishop quite natural and distinct.   ‘How much does a glass of this ...

Diary

A. Craig Copetas: Yaaaggghhhh, 25 June 1992

... girls Ian knew and, by evening, the four of us had consumed a clean lid of California’s largest cash crop. What happened over the next few days remains fuzzy, but I do remember waking up in the West Parade apartment in shock and confusion with a woman from Glasgow whom I didn’t understand, and the most horrible stench I’d ever smelled coming from the ...

Diary

Marina Warner: Gone Bananas, 25 May 1995

... them. The harvest was then delivered to harbour and shipped by companies who paid the farmers cash on the dock: Fyffes and the formerly Dutch company of Geest, who used to sail from St Lucia to Dominica by schooner before loading the fruit onto steamships bound for Britain. The banana is a kind crop: a perennial with no need of cross-fertilisation, it ...

How much?

Ian Hamilton: Literary pay and literary prizes, 18 June 1998

Guide to Literary Prizes, 1998 
edited by Huw Molseed.
Book Trust, 38 pp., £3.99, May 1998, 0 85353 475 6
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The Cost of Letters: A Survey of Literary Living Standards 
edited by Andrew Holgate and Honor Wilson-Fletcher.
W Magazine, 208 pp., £2, May 1998, 0 9527405 9 1
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... stop with Eliot,’ he trumpeted. ‘He is merely the first. It is the restart of civilisation.’ William Carlos Williams, working fairly happily as a doctor in New Jersey, was to be Pound’s second escapee. Marianne Moore might be his third. At one stage, he envisaged annual liberations – assuming, of course, that a sufficient supply of stifled talent was ...

What makes Rupert run?

Ross McKibbin: Murdoch’s Politics, 20 June 2013

Murdoch’s Politics: How One Man’s Thirst for Wealth & Power Shapes Our World 
by David McKnight.
Pluto, 260 pp., £12.99, February 2013, 978 0 7453 3346 5
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... by his obsessive anti-Communism. Not that Britain was neglected: the Sun, after all, was the cash cow of News International. Murdoch was closely involved with the Institute of Economic Affairs; he supported David Hart, Thatcher’s hatchet man, who did much to defeat the miners, and the Committee for a Free Britain of which Hart was a prominent ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: BP in Azerbaijan, 7 November 2024

... British brand being swallowed up in a hostile takeover, urged BP to move aggressively into the cash-strapped Soviet Union. ‘Start some investment rolling,’ she told Browne, who was then the managing director of BP’s Exploration and Production division. He ordered an underling to ‘get to Moscow and make something happen.’ (Browne was later ...

You’ve got it or you haven’t

Iain Sinclair, 25 February 1993

Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror 
by Tony Lambrianou and Carol Clerk.
Pan, 256 pp., £4.99, October 1992, 0 330 32284 2
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Gangland: London’s Underworld 
by James Morton.
Little, Brown, 349 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 356 20889 3
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Nipper: The Story of Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read 
by Leonard Read and James Morton.
Warner, 318 pp., £5.99, September 1992, 0 7515 0001 1
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Smash and Grab: Gangsters in the London Underworld 
by Robert Murphy.
Faber, 182 pp., £15.99, February 1993, 0 571 15442 5
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... base, international connections, Africa. Their disadvantage was that they were embarrassingly cash-rich. Then credit was too good. They could never be quite respectable without decent debts. The PR was fine. Quality photo-opportunities: Lord Boothby and Sonny Liston. Bags of conspicuous chanty, widows and orphans, cigars and monkey suits. Corporate ...

Mandelson’s Pleasure Dome

Iain Sinclair, 2 October 1997

... as a minicabber, ferrying striped faces south of the river for regular bits of business, cash drops. These heavy suits would sit, white-knuckled, fingers digging into the scarlet leather, until they made it safely home to Poplar. They piled into the nearest boozer and pitched back the doubles until they could lift a shot glass without spilling half ...

The Animalcule

Nicholas Spice: Little Mr De Quincey, 18 May 2017

Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey 
by Frances Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 397 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 1 4088 3977 5
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... accepted this, arguing that he had been subdued to a life of literary hackwork by the need for cash – to support his burgeoning family (he clocked up eight children) and to keep his creditors at bay and himself out of prison. The periodical press made De Quincey a writer in the way the piano made Chopin a composer. Had it not been for the thriving ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: The Plutocrat Tour, 7 July 2022

... hand between barista and punter. The Palm Tree only accepts readies: good, dirty, plague-carrying cash; folding paper portraits of folk you’d prefer to keep out of your pockets.When a couple of art sympathisers drifted in, they were sent off to a filling station on Grove Road to find coins. Back in the Sunday spread of Victoria Park, the original people’s ...