At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘I’m Still Here’, 6 March 2025

... Herszage), out on the town with her friends, is stopped, frisked and almost arrested by the police. Still, the film hangs on to its jollity for quite a while. We leave the beach – the Paiva family lives just across the road – to continue partying in a house. And then other houses. It’s all samba and bossa nova and the memories of rock ...

Big Books

Penelope Fitzgerald, 15 September 1988

William Morris: An Approach to the Poetry 
byJ.M.S. Tompkins.
Cecil Woolf, 368 pp., £20, May 1988, 0 900821 84 1
Show More
Show More
... a maker’s pains, it dawned upon me that we must have heard the Saga of Burnt Njal ... Pressed by the need to pass the story between his teeth and clarity it, he had used us. Morris’s open-heartedness, his shyness, his reckless treatment of the furniture, his concentration on whatever he had in hand as though the universe contained no other possible ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: Hamish Fulton, 9 May 2002

... from, and in a sense complementary to, American Sublime, another celebration of wilderness, which David Craig wrote about in the last issue of the LRB.Fulton has made many walks of many kinds in many places over the last thirty years. But because a walk must exist in the present, and take place elsewhere, all he has to offer in the gallery are wall ...

At the White Cube

Peter Campbell: Anselm Kiefer, 22 February 2007

... profound but not fully explained. The religious feel of things at White Cube is intensified by the character of the gallery building: a simple prism of white and grey which stands in the middle of a cobbled yard, as many small churches and chapels do in close-built towns and cities. It has the severity and simplicity of rooms specially designed for ...

At Tate Modern

Peter Campbell: The fairground at Bankside, 22 June 2006

... of art is on the whole a private matter and chattering crocodiles of schoolchildren need not be a serious barrier to contemplation. In fact, much is gained from the fairground tilt the mix of the committed and the casual gives the atmosphere of the place. It has, in particular, contributed to the great success of installations in the Turbine Hall, which ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’, 16 November 2023

... as it does in Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). Though the obvious does occasionally have to be explained. As Michael Corleone says in The Godfather Part II, ‘if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.’ It’s an accident, of course, that another Corleone is played by Robert De Niro, the ...

At the Museum Ludwig

Brian Dillon: Roni Horn’s Conceptualism, 1 August 2024

... Death, Roni Horn’s retrospective at Museum Ludwig in Cologne (until 11 August), you’re flanked by 96 photographs of her niece Georgia. The two grids of 48 seem to match until you’ve swivelled back and forth a few times and started noting certain fine disparities. Georgia’s grin slips, her head tilts, she peers at us through different holes in the slice ...

Diary

Maya Jasanoff: In Sierra Leone, 11 September 2008

... onto the brown strip of beach. A couple of women slouched over baskets of mangos. A boy wandered by to ask for money, then posed for a photo, droop-lidded and smirking, his dog-tags glinting in the twilight. Shiny SUVs with corporate insignia piled up along the loading ramp behind me, glamorous, outsized and out of place. Against the trace of the hills on ...

Miss Lachrymose

Liz Brown: Doris Day’s Performances, 11 September 2008

Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door 
byDavid Kaufman.
Virgin, 628 pp., £29.95, June 2008, 978 1 905264 30 8
Show More
Show More
... this is still what her friends call her. Marty Melcher, her third husband and manager, appears to be the only person close to her who actually referred to her as Doris Day; he insisted on using both names. The transition from birth name to celebrity persona is common enough: Frances Gumm became Judy Garland; Lucille LeSueur became Joan Crawford; Norma Jeane ...

Make them go away

Neal Ascherson: Grossman’s Failure, 3 February 2011

To the End of the Land 
byDavid Grossman, translated byJessica Cohen.
Cape, 577 pp., £18.99, September 2010, 978 0 224 08999 9
Show More
Show More
... Some novels are met by such a hurricane of hostile criticism that they sink out of sight. Only word of mouth, the contrary opinion running from reader to reader, can occasionally bring them to the surface again. To the End of the Land has the opposite problem. It arrived on a foaming wave of praise which, when they actually get down to its pages, will leave many readers puzzled ...

Maiden Aunt

Colin Kidd: Adam Smith, 7 October 2010

Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life 
byNicholas Phillipson.
Allen Lane, 345 pp., £25, August 2010, 978 0 7139 9396 7
Show More
Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and moral theory 
byFonna Forman-Barzilai.
Cambridge, 286 pp., £55, March 2010, 978 0 521 76112 3
Show More
Show More
... and repeatedly reject the lessons of Thatcherite economics. Yet at the root of her puzzlement, by a further irony, was her own misunderstanding of Smith. It was not simply that the electorate north of the border had betrayed its free-marketeering heritage, but that Thatcher’s hero was far from the proto-Thatcherite she and her advisers assumed him to ...

Lost in Beauty

Michael Newton: Montgomery Clift, 7 October 2010

The Passion of Montgomery Clift 
byAmy Lawrence.
California, 333 pp., £16.95, May 2010, 978 0 520 26047 4
Show More
Show More
... sad joke of his career was that his fame outlived his success; after Red River, he couldn’t even be anonymous in failure. The shape of Clift’s career has a tragic symmetry: eight early films, from Red River to Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953), and then, after Edward Dmytryk’s Raintree County (1957), eight late films from Vincent ...

Mad for Love

Tobias Gregory: ‘Orlando Furioso’, 9 September 2010

‘Orlando Furioso’: A New Verse Translation 
byLudovico Ariosto, translated byDavid Slavitt.
Harvard, 672 pp., £29.95, November 2009, 978 0 674 03535 5
Show More
Show More
... mad for love. To recover his lost wits, his comrade-in-arms Astolfo travels to the Moon, guided by St John the Evangelist. On the Moon all that is lost on Earth can be found. The favours of princes show up as inflated bellows, ladies’ charms as limed snares; lost wits are stored in individually labelled ...

High Taxes, Bad Times

John Pemble: Late Georgian Westminster, 10 June 2010

The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1820-32 
byD.R. Fisher.
Cambridge, 6336 pp., £490, December 2009, 978 0 521 19314 6
Show More
Show More
... timber and plaster above a stone crypt. The debating chamber, converted from St Stephen’s Chapel by Wren in 1692, measured 15 metres by ten and had 348 seats for the 658 MPs. Dark narrow passages and staircases gave access to committee rooms (half of them unfit for use or used for other purposes), a library and a smoking ...

Toolkit for Tinkerers

Colin Burrow: The Sonnet, 24 June 2010

The Art of the Sonnet 
byStephanie Burt and David Mikics.
Harvard, 451 pp., £25.95, May 2010, 978 0 674 04814 0
Show More
Show More
... been the most versatile and enduring of poetic forms. It has been pumped with inscape and instress by Gerard Manley Hopkins, filled with sentiment by Anna Seward, cut and pasted by Ted Berrigan (his 1964 Sonnets were apparently assembled with the help of the 1960s equivalent of a Pritt ...