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So Ordinary, So Glamorous

Thomas Jones: Eternal Bowie, 5 April 2012

Starman: David Bowie, the Definitive Biography 
by Paul Trynka.
Sphere, 440 pp., £9.99, March 2012, 978 0 7515 4293 6
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The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s 
by Peter Doggett.
Bodley Head, 424 pp., £20, September 2011, 978 1 84792 144 4
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... Lady Gaga, Hot Chip and C Spencer Yeh owe as much to him now as the Sex Pistols, Kate Bush and Joy Division did in the late 1970s. Because of the way Bowie ceaselessly reinvented himself, from his first gig, playing saxophone with the Kon-Rads at the Bromley Tech PTA school fête in June 1962, to his apparent retirement five or six years ...

The Hard Zone

Andrew O’Hagan: At the Republican National Convention, 1 August 2024

... for those feelings that move them to tears. ‘I went to prison so as you don’t have to!’ said Peter Navarro, another Trump ally who broke the law. It isn’t true, but it’s nice to have someone who thinks about you like that.Trump’s​ second chief of staff, John Kelly, used to refer to his boss’s White House as Crazytown. According to The ...

This Singing Thing

Malin Hay: On Barbra Streisand, 12 September 2024

My Name Is Barbra 
by Barbra Streisand.
Century, 992 pp., £35, November 2023, 978 1 5291 3689 0
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... like a cartoon wolf while motorbikes crash in her wake.What’s Up, Doc? was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, fresh from the success of The Last Picture Show. For the first time Streisand was in the hands of a director her own age and a denizen of New Hollywood. Bogdanovich, ever the auteur, had worked out every beat to his own exact specifications. In ...

Arrayed in Shining Scales

Patricia Lockwood: Solving Sylvia Plath, 10 July 2025

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath 
by Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg.
Faber, 812 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 571 37764 0
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... doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is revealing, that textual arm around ...

Bunnymooning

Philip French, 6 June 1996

The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives 
by Sebastian Faulks.
Hutchinson, 309 pp., £16.99, April 1996, 0 09 179211 8
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... was my key writer when I came to edit Isis. I doubt if any Oxford undergraduate – and I include Peter Fleming and Kenneth Tynan – has written so wide-ranging, witty and intelligent a group of pieces over such a short period as Jeremy wrote for Isis that summer. They always turned up on time, perfectly typed and at the right length. Their subjects included ...

Keller’s Causes

Robin Holloway, 3 August 1995

Essays on Music 
by Hans Keller, edited by Christopher Wintle, Bayan Northcott and Irene Samuel.
Cambridge, 269 pp., £30, October 1994, 0 521 46216 9
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... personified, with an authority that seemed to emanate, via Freud and Schoenberg, from the Burning Bush, which made him vastly appealing to anyone possessing the juvenile desire to be told what to think. The unforgettable voice, ubiquitous in print and on the air, posed paradoxes, puns and provocations. ‘Hans Killer,’ oft-quoted in Pseuds’ Corner, became ...

The Finchley Factor

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Thatcher in Israel, 13 September 2018

Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East 
by Azriel Bermant.
Cambridge, 274 pp., £22.99, September 2017, 978 1 316 60630 8
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... turned to the new president, at which Thatcher tapped the side of her skull and said: ‘Peter, there’s nothing there.’ And after she had left office, Nicholas Henderson, her ambassador in Washington between 1979 and 1982, told Tony Benn: ‘If I reported to you what Mrs Thatcher really thought about President Reagan, it would damage ...

Diary

Julian Barnes: People Will Hate Us Again, 20 April 2017

... was probably no causal connection, but it meant that my publisher could buy me the original of a Peter Brookes cartoon which appeared in the Times. It shows a House of Commons green bench, deserted apart from two figures. Fox, eyes staring and face aghast, is reading out his resignation speech, while next to him a colleague hides his face behind a book: it ...

Madnesses

John Kerr, 23 March 1995

The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement 
by Richard Noll.
Princeton, 387 pp., £19.95, January 1995, 0 691 03724 8
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... of perversity, hostility and just plain bad intentions. A kinder, gentler unconscious, George Bush might say. Jung could never quite match Freud as a literary persona, but then who can? Jung’s forte was rather his therapeutic attitude. Much of what he had to say about treatment was both humane and wise, very much to be preferred to the blank-screen ...

Flight to the Forest

Richard Lloyd Parry: Bruno Manser Vanishes, 24 October 2019

The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of Death and Treasure 
by Carl Hoffman.
William Morrow, 347 pp., £14.74, March 2019, 978 0 06 243905 5
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... to being afraid. An indelible passage describes the surgery that he performed on himself using a bush knife and fish hooks. As I am trying to squeeze out pus through slight pressure and massage, a piece of flesh suddenly balloons out of the wound – as large as a squirrel’s head … The muscle, three fingers thick, protrudes further every day and suddenly ...

A Great Deaf Bear

James Wood: Beethoven gets going, 7 January 2021

Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces 
by Laura Tunbridge.
Penguin, 276 pp., £16.99, June 2020, 978 0 241 41427 9
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The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography 
by Mark Evan Bonds.
Oxford, 325 pp., £22.99, January 2020, 978 0 19 006847 9
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Beethoven: Variations on a Life 
by Mark Evan Bonds.
Oxford, 147 pp., £14.99, September 2020, 978 0 19 005408 3
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Beethoven: The New Complete Edition 
Deutsche Grammophon, 123 discs, November 2019Show More
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... as the obvious turning point in the development of ‘music as thought’. The German composer Peter Cornelius (known to choristers everywhere as the composer of ‘The Three Kings’) asserted that everyone can feel the difference between Haydn and Mozart on the one hand, and Beethoven on the other. ‘Some call it depth, humour, subjectivity … We for ...

Transitology

Stephen Holmes: Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia by Stephen Cohen, 19 April 2001

Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia 
by Stephen Cohen.
Norton, 305 pp., £15.95, November 2000, 0 393 04964 7
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... American values’ in Russia over the past decade. Condoleezza Rice and other members of President Bush’s foreign policy team have even begun echoing those leftist critics, such as Stephen Cohen, who miss no opportunity to denounce ‘the disastrous failure of US policy towards post-Communist Russia’. Best known for his 1973 study of Bukharin, Cohen is ...

Avoid the Orient

Colm Tóibín: The Ghastly Paul Bowles, 4 January 2007

Paul Bowles: A Life 
by Virginia Spencer Carr.
Peter Owen, 431 pp., £19.95, July 2005, 0 7206 1254 3
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... the desert very exciting, because there’s nothing there. You won’t find a tree or a rock or a bush. You won’t find anything at all, except sand dunes. You can pretend you’re lost in there. You can get lost in there. It’s very beautiful. Even Jane [his wife] thought it very beautiful, the most beautiful place you ever saw. I don’t try to analyse ...

Karl Miller Remembered

Neal Ascherson, John Lanchester and Andrew O’Hagan, 23 October 2014

... first important critical essay (‘Notes on Agreement and Elegance’) came out as a prose bramble-bush which intimidated many readers. But he grew steadily out of that mode, perfecting his own unmistakeable and unpredictable manner with the language. Though few realised it, he continued to write remarkable verse for the rest of his life, which he apparently ...

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