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Frognal Days

Zachary Leader: Files on the Fifties, 4 June 1998

Previous Convictions: A Journey Through the Fifties 
by Nora Sayre.
Rutgers, 464 pp., £27.95, April 1997, 0 8135 2231 5
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... she later identified as ‘a component of his talent: pursuing a topic until it was driven into a corner’. The photographer Walker Evans, who befriended her later in the decade, had a comparable intensity: he could ‘gaze at a single picture in silence for half an hour’. Evans took Sayre on long, unhurried walks through the city, wheeling her around to ...

The ashtrays worry me

Emilie Bickerton: Eric Rohmer, 19 March 2015

Eric Rohmer: Biographie 
by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe.
Stock, 605 pp., €29, January 2014, 978 2 234 07561 0
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Friponnes de porcelaine 
by Eric Rohmer.
Stock, 304 pp., €20, January 2014, 978 2 234 07631 0
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... in her apartment, with its unframed Mondrian prints hanging on the wall, tennis rackets in one corner, fabrics, paints and plants in another. Nothing is rushed in this opening: we are simply encouraged, as always, to follow the rhythm of the characters, explore their world. At times Rohmer gives us a closer shot of Louise but more often the frame includes ...

Twenty Kicks in the Backside

Tom Stammers: Rosa Bonheur’s Flock, 5 November 2020

Art Is a Tyrant: The Unconventional Life of Rosa Bonheur 
by Catherine Hewitt.
Icon, 483 pp., £20, February, 978 1 78578 621 1
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... as the Bonheur studio evolved into a family enterprise with a clear chain of command. One visitor, Paul Delaroche, recalled: ‘There was nothing simpler and more touching than this household with its patriarchal ways.’ And yet, when her father urged her to sign her first works as Raimond, Bonheur refused: the name Rosa, she insisted, was more befitting of ...

Diary

Tom Paulin: Summer in Donegal, 16 September 1999

... with small stones to bind them. Then the remains of a lower wall running up against it, making the corner of a rectangle. I pull away moss and earth, and find a stone-paved floor, the hazel bushes growing up through it. I want it to be a fort or an ancient lookout, in line with the crannog, the tiny island fort, in the estuary below, but the fact it’s not ...

A Family of Acrobats

Adam Mars-Jones: Teju Cole, 3 July 2014

Every Day Is for the Thief 
by Teju Cole.
Faber, 162 pp., £12.99, April 2014, 978 0 571 30792 0
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... the culture of the street: ‘Only the most tenuous of connections between us, looks on a street corner by strangers, a gesture of mutual respect based on our being young, black, male, based, in other words, on our being “brothers”.’ Not so brotherly now. Julius finds only distorted reflections of himself in his passport, since the first name on it ...

Greasers and Rah-Rahs

John Lahr: Bruce Springsteen’s Memoir, 2 February 2017

Born to Run 
by Bruce Springsteen.
Simon and Schuster, 510 pp., £20, September 2016, 978 1 4711 5779 0
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... daughter, Virginia, killed at the age of five by a truck while riding her tricycle past the corner gas station. He adds: ‘I felt an ultimate security, full licence and a horrible unforgettable boundary-less love. It ruined me and it made me.’ For this contaminated and contaminating love, Springsteen writes, ‘I abandoned my parents, my sister, and ...

Au revoir et merci

Christopher Tayler: Romain Gary, 6 December 2018

The Roots of Heaven 
by Romain Gary, translated by Jonathan Griffin.
Godine, 434 pp., $18.95, November 2018, 978 1 56792 626 2
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Promise at Dawn 
by Romain Gary, translated by John Markham Beach.
Penguin, 314 pp., £9.99, September 2018, 978 0 241 34763 8
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... a Jesuit palaeontologist, is questioning Saint-Denis, the French colonial administrator of this corner of Chad. Tassin is looking for information about a mysterious figure called Morel, whose recent activities have scandalised all of French Equatorial Africa. Saint-Denis begins to recount lengthy conversations he had with people who recounted to him other ...

Devouring the pangolin

John Sutherland, 25 October 1990

The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History 
by Robert Darnton.
Faber, 393 pp., £25, September 1990, 0 571 14423 3
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... a crisis in historiography. ‘Monographism has taken over academic history and confined it to a corner of our culture where professors write books for other professors and review them in journals restricted to members of the profession.’ With some alarm he noted that ‘the disease must have infected me, for there I was, a former police reporter on the ...

Serial Evangelists

Peter Clarke, 23 June 1994

Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931-83 
by Richard Cockett.
HarperCollins, 390 pp., £25, May 1994, 0 00 223672 9
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... clearly signals hubris, since we know that there was to be more than one nasty surprise around the corner. The General Theory abruptly ceased to be compared with Newton’s Principia or Darwin’s Origin, those revolutionary texts generated by illustrious Cambridge predecessors. Instead, its scientific status came to seem comparable with that of an equally ...

World’s End

John Ryle, 13 October 1988

The Missionaries 
by Norman Lewis.
Secker, 245 pp., £10.95, May 1988, 0 436 24595 7
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... reduced a thriving forest-dwelling Indian population to beggary and degradation, the men street-corner drunks, their female children prostituted on the streets of Asuncion. In the case of the few tribes not already in touch with civilizados the first contact may be seen as an augury: missionaries bring medicine, but they also bring disease, disease to which ...

Mon Charabia

Olivier Todd: Bad Duras, 4 March 1999

Marguerite Duras 
by Laure Adler.
Gallimard, 627 pp., frs 155, August 1998, 2 07 074523 6
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No More 
by Marguerite Duras.
Seven Stories, 203 pp., £10.99, November 1998, 1 888363 65 7
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... with the Chinaman lasted almost two years. After the popular romances of Delly and the novels of Paul Bourget, Marguerite delved into Shakespeare and Molière. Her biographer suggests that the ‘purity’ of her style derives from her study of Madame de Lafayette and Racine, but this is hard to reconcile with the alleged influence of Bataille and ...

Mayhem at Millbank

David Sylvester: The new hang at the Tate Britain (2000), 18 May 2000

... exciting and illuminating juxtaposition between Jagger’s relief, No Man’s Land (1919-20), and Paul Nash’s Totes Meer (1940-41). It may be relevant that the theme is concrete for once. A lot more light will be thrown on the problem now that the Tate at Bankside has opened its doors and we start to see what the curators there have been able to do with the ...

Anyone can do collage

Hal Foster: Kurt Schwitters, 10 March 2022

Poisoned Abstraction: Kurt Schwitters between Revolution and Exile 
by Graham Bader.
Yale, 240 pp., £45, November 2021, 978 0 300 25708 3
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Myself and My Aims: Writings on Art and Criticism 
by Kurt Schwitters, edited by Megan R. Luke, translated by Timothy Grundy.
Chicago, 656 pp., £30, October 2020, 978 0 226 12939 6
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... Take an old tram ticket, he suggests by way of example, ‘cut a square from its right-hand corner and you have an i-drawing.’ ‘This describes the discovery of an artistic structure in the non-artistic world and the creation of an artwork from this structure through delimitation alone.’ An ‘i’ composition is collage at its purest, a simple cut ...

Summer Simmer

Tom Vanderbilt: Chicago heatwaves, 22 August 2002

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago 
by Eric Klinenberg.
Chicago, 305 pp., £19.50, August 2002, 0 226 44321 3
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... index was measured in units that corresponded to the rate of heat loss; one of the geographers, Paul Siple, later regretted this, as the use of units was often taken to imply that the index was an alternative temperature scale. This past winter a US-Canadian team unveiled a new wind chill index without the Celsius figure attached. In time, those numbers ...

Determinacy Kills

Terry Eagleton: Theodor Adorno, 19 June 2008

Theodor Adorno: One Last Genius 
by Detlev Claussen.
Harvard, 440 pp., £22.95, May 2008, 978 0 674 02618 6
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... in which the truth can no longer be portrayed directly but can only be squinted at out of the corner of one’s eye, grasped only by bouncing one proposition against its opposite. Perhaps this is what Adorno had in mind when he called art a negative image of reality. Beckett’s language, which manages like some wounded animal to drag itself along when it ...

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