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Nit, Sick and Bore

India Knight: The Mitfords, 3 January 2002

The Mitford Girls: The Biography of an Extraordinary Family 
by Mary Lovell.
Little, Brown, 611 pp., £20, September 2001, 0 316 85868 4
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Nancy Mitford: A Memoir 
by Harold Acton.
Gibson Square, 256 pp., £16.99, September 2001, 1 903933 01 3
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... She also conducted services in the ruined chapel of her mother’s remote Hebridean island, Inch Kenneth, and enjoyed planning her own funeral (her gravestone, chosen by her mother, reads: ‘Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth’). Having stalked Hitler for ages – she would sit at a table in his favourite restaurant, waiting, and shake uncontrollably as ...

How did the slime mould cross the maze?

Adrian Woolfson: The Future of Emergence, 21 March 2002

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software 
by Steven Johnson.
Allen Lane, 288 pp., £14.99, October 2001, 0 7139 9400 2
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The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture 
by Mark Taylor.
Chicago, 340 pp., £20.50, January 2002, 0 226 79117 3
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... behaviour might one day, in principle, be generated within the Internet. In The Soul of the White Ant (1937), the South African naturalist Eugène Marais painstakingly documented the natural history of the termites that build terminaries or ‘ant-hills’ on the open veldt. He astutely concluded that the terminary is a ‘distributed organism’: its ...

Wake up. Foul mood. Detest myself

Ysenda Maxtone Graham: ‘Lost Girls’, 19 December 2019

Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature, 1939-51 
by D.J. Taylor.
Constable, 388 pp., £25, September 2019, 978 1 4721 2686 3
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... to fisticuffs over Barbara? What made Janetta, still married to Hugh Slater, fall in love with Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, and would that relationship last?Taylor wades deep into the cigaretty fug of that small literary circle awash with till-boredom-do-us-part love affairs conducted in rented accommodation. (The love affairs were usually shorter than the ...

The Doctrine of Unripe Time

Ferdinand Mount: The Fifties, 16 November 2006

Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties 
by Peter Hennessy.
Allen Lane, 740 pp., £30, October 2006, 0 7139 9571 8
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... But he relives very well the innocence and modesty of those years, of which the hard-nosed Sir Kenneth Berrill, later head of Margaret Thatcher’s Central Policy Review Staff, remarked: ‘We had won the war and we voted ourselves a nice peace.’ As Hennessy himself says, ‘the Britain of the early 1950s, for all the shortages and everyday rubbing ...

Chumship

James Lasdun: Upper West Side Cult, 27 July 2023

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy and the Wild Life of an American Commune 
by Alexander Stille.
Farrar, Straus, 418 pp., $30, June, 978 0 374 60039 6
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... prison reformer). After qualifying as a doctor, she went to New York to train as an analyst at the White Institute – ‘a revolutionary alternative to mainstream, orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis’, according to the institute’s official history – under the then renowned Harry Stack Sullivan. Where orthodox Freudian practice focused on the internal ...

While Statues Sleep

Thomas Laqueur, 18 June 2020

Learning from the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil 
by Susan Neiman.
Allen Lane, 415 pp., £20, August 2019, 978 0 241 26286 3
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... texts of the modern history of slavery, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom in 1947 and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution in 1956, has any serious history book claimed that slavery was a benign paternalistic institution. No one has argued that it was anything other than the great moral stain on the American conscience. The view that the ...

Christopher Hitchens states a prosecution case

Christopher Hitchens, 25 October 1990

Crossman: The Pursuit of Power 
by Anthony Howard.
Cape, 361 pp., £15.95, October 1990, 0 224 02592 9
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... eager glint of the spectacles, the unstoppable self-regard in the guise of self-deprecation ... Kenneth Widmerpool! Adjustments made for the Wykehamist rather than the Eton style (Gaitskell, too, had been at Winchester), it has the tone of the power-votary and acquaintance-scraper to a T. The act was kept up until Gaitskell died, and its unfolding is not ...

Her way of helping me

Hugo Young, 6 December 1990

Listening for a Midnight Tram: Memoirs 
by John Junor.
Chapmans, 341 pp., £15.95, October 1990, 9781855925014
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... he thought was a scorching job on William Whitelaw, but chanced to run across him shortly after in White’s Club. The columnist confesses to being horrified. Presumably he would never attack a man he knew he was lunching with next week. But Whitelaw soon has him grovelling, by booming down the club staircase: ‘Hello John. You know, when my wife read what ...

Princess Diane

Penny Boumelha, 21 February 1985

Diane Arbus: A Biography 
by Patricia Bosworth.
Heinemann, 367 pp., £14.95, January 1985, 0 434 08150 7
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Inside the Onion 
by Howard Nemerov.
Chicago, 63 pp., £8.45, April 1984, 0 226 57244 7
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... of depressive significance, perhaps the least convincing of which comes when Arbus chooses a white refrigerator in preference to the presumably more life-affirming salmon-pink or pale green. Such a self-confirming closed circle of biographical method does not do justice either to Arbus’s work or, indeed, to her recurrent depressions. But Sartre’s ...

Getting back

Adrian Poole, 1 July 1982

A crowd is not company 
by Robert Kee.
Cape, 240 pp., £7.50, May 1982, 9780224020039
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Bedbugs 
by Clive Sinclair.
Allison and Busby, 109 pp., £6.95, May 1982, 0 85031 454 2
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New Writing and Writers 19 
John Calder, 262 pp., £6.95, April 1982, 0 7145 3811 6Show More
Zhenia’s Childhood 
by Boris Pasternak, translated by Alec Brown.
Allison and Busby, 115 pp., £6.95, May 1982, 0 85031 466 6
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... when he was ten and she was seven: ‘What does she look like?’ he asks. ‘An old lady, white hair, in her eighties,’ I say. He smiles. ‘Everything changes,’ he says, ‘except the dead.’ Elsewhere a Russian dissident reminds us of Bashevis Singer’s Gimpel the Fool, who cannot find it in himself to disbelieve his wife, though all the ...

Fuentes the Memorious

John Sutherland, 19 June 1986

The Old Gringo 
translated by Margaret Sayers Peden and Carlos Fuentes, by Carlos Fuentes.
Deutsch, 199 pp., £8.95, May 1986, 0 233 97862 3
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Where the air is clear 
by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Sam Hileman.
Deutsch, 376 pp., £4.95, June 1986, 0 233 97937 9
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Farewell to the Sea 
by Reinaldo Arenas, translated by Andrew Hurley.
Viking, 412 pp., £12.95, May 1986, 0 670 52960 5
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Digging up the mountains 
by Neil Bissoondath.
Deutsch, 247 pp., £8.95, May 1986, 0 233 97851 8
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... novelist to choose from. He could, for instance, have picked on the investigative journalist John Kenneth Turner, who travelled to Mexico in 1908 and discovered that Diaz’s wonderfully healthy economy was based on massive slavery and the slaughter of the Yaqui Indians. Turner wrote up his findings in a series of slashing articles later collected as the book ...

‘The Sun Says’

Paul Laity, 20 June 1996

... LOLLY. The doctrine remains: give money back to ‘the people’. The Sun constantly accuses Kenneth Clarke of timidity in his fiscal policy – the Chancellor’s November Budget was ‘as inspiring as a cod kipper’; and by attempting to push Major to the right using the rhetoric of the people’s hatred of being ‘shackled’ by the state it has ...

Who framed Madame Moitessier?

Nicholas Penny, 9 April 1992

Metropolitan Jewellery 
by Sophie McConnell.
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Bulfinch, 111 pp., £17.99, November 1991, 0 8212 1877 8
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Italian Renaissance Frames 
by Timothy Newbery, George Bisacca and Laurence Kanter.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 111 pp., £25, May 1991, 0 8109 3455 8
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The Italian Renaissance Interior 1400-1600 
by Peter Thornton.
Weidenfeld, 407 pp., £65, October 1991, 0 297 83006 6
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Palaces of Art 
edited by Giles Waterfield.
Dulwich Picture Gallery, 188 pp., £20, December 1991, 0 9501564 5 0
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... in later centuries. Tragically, a painting often has to shed its frame to retain its lovers. Kenneth Clark, seeking to persuade the Trustees of the National Gallery to purchase Ingres’s portrait of Madame Moitessier, had it removed from the florid gilt composition frame which the artist had probably selected (and possibly even designed) for it, fearing ...

I want to be the baby

Kasia Boddy: Barthelme’s High Jinks, 18 August 2022

Collected Stories 
by Donald Barthelme, edited by Charles McGrath.
Library of America, 1004 pp., £40, July 2021, 978 1 59853 684 3
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... painting from Elaine de Kooning, Lightnin’ Hopkins in concert and a festival of poetry featuring Kenneth Koch, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Bly. Most fun of all, Barthelme organised an exhibition, New American Artefacts: The Ugly Show, which included all sorts of bits and pieces he’d found in junk shops: plastic flowers and fruit, a giant jar of ...

Make use of me

Jeremy Treglown: Olivia Manning, 9 February 2006

Olivia Manning: A Life 
by Neville Braybrooke and June Braybrooke.
Chatto, 301 pp., £20, November 2004, 0 7011 7749 7
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... lets slip the fact of the boy’s presence to their unreliable, chronically broke and sponging White Russian friend, Prince Yakimov, who betrays him. The Levant Trilogy continues the Pringles’ story but alternates between their experiences and those of a young British officer just arrived in North Africa, Simon Boulderstone, who is trying to track down ...

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