The Question of U

Ian Penman: Prince, 20 June 2019

Prince: Life and Times 
by Jason Draper.
Chartwell, 216 pp., £15.99, February 2017, 978 0 7858 3497 7
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The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince 
by Mayte Garcia.
Trapeze, 304 pp., £9.99, April 2018, 978 1 4091 7121 8
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... Yet, to my knowledge, the only critic who ever tackled the subject head on is the writer Carol Cooper, an African American woman who had also worked in the music industry. In an astute piece for the Face in June 1983 (it includes a wholly imaginary Q&A with Prince which was still being quoted as fact thirty years later, so acute was her ...

Hush-Hush Boom-Boom

Charles Glass: Spymasters, 12 August 2021

The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War – A Tragedy in Three Acts 
by Scott Anderson.
Picador, 576 pp., £20, February, 978 1 5290 4247 4
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... Fritz Lang’s Cloak and Dagger and lingered in Hollywood as a screenwriter, socialising with Gary Cooper and Ava Gardner. This sybaritic idyll ended with the expiration of his studio contract, and he returned to New York divorced, unemployed and broke. Then came the call from Wisner.Wisner had left the law to become deputy assistant secretary of state for ...

A Whack of Pies

Matthew Bevis: Dear to Mew, 16 December 2021

This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew 
by Julia Copus.
Faber, 464 pp., £25, April 2021, 978 0 571 31353 2
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Selected Poetry and Prose 
by Charlotte Mew, edited by Julia Copus.
Faber, 176 pp., £14.99, October 2019, 978 0 571 31618 2
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... on her work as worthy of parody – not just recognisable, but recognised. When Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare secured her a civil list pension in 1923, Mew couldn’t decide whether it was more ‘like a dream or a nightmare’. Such diffidence also contained defiance. Her public readings were bracing affairs – ‘like having ...

Double-Barrelled Dolts

Ferdinand Mount: Mosley’s Lost Deposit, 6 July 2006

Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism 
by Stephen Dorril.
Viking, 717 pp., £30, April 2006, 0 670 86999 6
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Hurrah for the Blackshirts! Fascists and Fascism between the Wars 
by Martin Pugh.
Pimlico, 387 pp., £8.99, March 2006, 1 84413 087 8
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... took voice lessons, ‘its calculated changes in pitch sounded like a car changing gear.’ Duff Cooper called him an ‘adulterous, canting, slobbering Bolshie’. When Mosley switched over to Labour in 1924, his new colleagues were equally suspicious of him. Ernest Bevin thought him ‘the kind of unreliable intellectual who might at any moment stab me in ...

Aubade before Breakfast

Tom Crewe: Balfour and the Souls, 31 March 2016

Balfour’s World: Aristocracy and Political Culture at the Fin de Siècle 
by Nancy Ellenberger.
Boydell, 414 pp., £30, September 2015, 978 1 78327 037 8
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... the Pall Mall Gazette, had liaisons with Violet Manners, later duchess of Rutland – Lady Diana Cooper was the result – as well as with George’s sister Pamela, who protested to alarmed family members that ‘he says “How do you do” as if it was “you are the Soul of my life,” but he is unaware of this, I really believe like people who clear their ...

Bobbery

James Wood: Pushkin’s Leave-Taking, 20 February 2003

Pushkin: A Biography 
by T.J. Binyon.
HarperCollins, 731 pp., £30, September 2002, 0 00 215084 0
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... a grounded reality but merely to itself; it is not a story so much as a game played with a story. John Bayley, in his perceptive book Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary, has faulted Shklovsky’s formalism, arguing that as with Tolstoy’s or Shakespeare’s characters, we are encouraged by artifice to think of Onegin and Tatiana as real people with real ...

The Basic Couple

Benjamin Kunkel: Norman Rush, 24 October 2013

Subtle Bodies 
by Norman Rush.
Granta, 234 pp., £14.99, October 2013, 978 1 84708 780 5
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... American novel’s evasion, as Fiedler saw it, of the reality of mature sexual love, from Fenimore Cooper down to Faulkner and Hemingway. In a sense, there would have been no need. Asked by an interviewer from the Paris Review about his early influences, Rush first mentioned ‘D.H. Lawrence. Actually, a lot of Lawrence.’ He has probably been familiar for ...

Who’s the alpha male now, bitches?

Andrew O’Hagan, 22 October 2015

... who look at life through the telescopic lens of a rifle, and that was the model for him, much as John Wayne was once a model for boys who thought cowboys put decency back into the world. On 20 July 2012, James Holmes, after dyeing his hair a kind of purple, went to a midnight screening of the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises at the Century movie theatre in ...

The Wickedest Woman in Paris

Colm Tóibín, 6 September 2007

Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins 
by Rupert Everett.
Abacus, 406 pp., £7.99, July 2007, 978 0 349 12058 4
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... what was McKellen like? Come on, guys.) Soon, he is describing another night out, with Lady Diana Cooper, Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger. (‘And so I became friends with Bianca Jagger. She was beautiful. She’d just cut her hair short and was wearing a green Halston trouser suit.’) Next on the list are Bob Geldof and Paula Yates: According to Alan ...

Hooted from the Stage

Susan Eilenberg: Living with Keats, 25 January 2024

Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph 
by Lucasta Miller.
Vintage, 357 pp., £12.99, April 2023, 978 1 5291 1090 6
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Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse 
by Anahid Nersessian.
Verso, 136 pp., £12.99, November 2022, 978 1 80429 034 7
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... Thomas’s death the family fractured. Frances ran away, abandoning the children to her parents, John and Alice Jennings. When she reappeared two months later it was to take over the lease on the Moorfields stables and transfer it to her new young husband, William Rawlings. Her parents watched as she drove their once prosperous business into the ...

I’m always in the club

Christian Lorentzen: Peter Matthiessen in Paris, 5 February 2026

True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen 
by Lance Richardson.
Chatto, 709 pp., £30, October 2025, 978 1 78474 301 7
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... charismatic, amoral outsider at the centre. The story got him the attention of the publisher John Farrar, who passed it to Edward Weeks at the Atlantic. Matthiessen was taken on as a client by ‘the toughest agent in town’. Bernice Baumgarten also represented John Dos Passos, Edna St Vincent Millay and Raymond ...

Lunch with Mussolini

Thomas Jones: Ferrari Speeds Ahead, 14 August 2025

Enzo Ferrari: The Definitive Biography of an Icon 
by Luca Dal Monte.
Cassell, 520 pp., £12.99, February 2025, 978 1 78840 475 4
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... later, Raymond Sommer won the Turin Grand Prix in a Ferrari 159. He was killed when his car (a Cooper, not a Ferrari) overturned during the Haute-Garonne Grand Prix in September 1950. Antonio Ascari’s son, Alberto, was killed test-driving a Ferrari at Monza in May 1955, four days after he’d survived skidding into the harbour during the Monaco Grand ...

Brideshead and the Tower Blocks

Patrick Wright, 2 June 1988

Home: A Short History of an Idea 
by Witold Rybczynski.
Heinemann, 256 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 434 14292 1
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... The nostalgic Charles Ryder is remembering the warm depths of a great mahogany-framed cooper bathtub at Brideshead. A huge towel hangs from a chintz armchair and a brass lever – ‘heavy as a piece of marine engineering’ – stands where moden taps might be. With its coal fire and steamdimmed watercolours, this bathroom is contrasted ...

Easy-Going Procrastinators

Ferdinand Mount: Margot Asquith’s War, 8 January 2015

Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary 1914-16: The View from Downing Street 
edited by Michael Brock and Eleanor Brock, selected by Eleanor Brock.
Oxford, 566 pp., £30, June 2014, 978 0 19 822977 3
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Margot at War: Love And Betrayal In Downing Street, 1912-16 
by Anne de Courcy.
Weidenfeld, 376 pp., £20, November 2014, 978 0 297 86983 2
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The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush To War, 1914 
by Douglas Newton.
Verso, 386 pp., £20, July 2014, 978 1 78168 350 7
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... that had left Denis Anson to drown. The party had included Lady Diana Manners (later to marry Duff Cooper) and Margot’s stepson and daughter-in-law, Raymond and Katharine Asquith. Two years later, when Violet and her husband ‘Bongie’ Bonham Carter were laughing about Lloyd George’s behaviour, Margot was reminded of ‘that same laughter that rung down ...

Diary

Rebecca Solnit: After the Oil Spill, 5 August 2010

... and looking just like paint thinner or gasoline.And then there’s the aerial footage taken by John Wathen, or Hurricane Creekkeeper, that’s gone viral on YouTube, Facebook, other facets of the internet, and the media, including CNN. It shows great plumes of smoke rising from the sea, as the oil is burned off the surface. The flames are invisible but the ...