How terribly kind

Edmund White: Gilbert and George, 1 July 1999

Gilbert & George: A Portrait 
by Daniel Farson.
HarperCollins, 240 pp., £19.99, March 1999, 0 00 255857 2
Show More
Show More
... could turn into a performance piece, as it seemed to be for Duchamp when he decided to stay in the Green Hotel in Pasadena in 1963, which was seen as an allusion to his much earlier Green Box, a miniature portfolio of his principal work; or for Vito Acconci, following strangers and recording their movements – or ...

Against Policy

Thomas Jones: ‘The Manual of Detection’, 28 May 2009

The Manual of Detection 
by Jedediah Berry.
Heinemann, 278 pp., £14.99, March 2009, 978 0 434 01945 8
Show More
Show More
... The Man of a Thousand and One Voices is more impressive in the carnival posters, with his face lit green by hocus-pocus. In the flesh he looks more like an accountant who’s had a bad day and stumbled into the wrong part of town. He was shaking his head, looking sad about the whole thing. I was sad about it, too, and I let him know, in so many ...

At the Royal Academy

James Davidson: ‘Bronze’, 11 October 2012

... is typical of what I think of when I think of ancient bronzes: a thin-skinned balloon of brown-green metal, light and yet strong, self-consciously opposed both to the ‘pitiless bronze’ of ancient weapons and armour, and to the blockish stone sculptures with which they had to share ancient exhibition space, unmalleable marbles that could never imagine ...

Prosecco Notwithstanding

Tobias Gregory: 21st-Century Noir, 3 July 2008

The Lemur 
by Benjamin Black.
Picador US, 144 pp., $13, June 2008, 978 0 312 42808 2
Show More
Show More
... to a gleaming keenness’ – and the right clothes for all occasions. ‘Today she wore a dark green suit and a Philip Treacy hat that was a minuscule square of black velvet topped with a few wisps of what might be spun sugar.’ ‘She was wearing the grey silk kimono that some Japanese bigwig presented to her when she visited Kyoto as a UN Special ...

Short Cuts

Chris Armstrong: High Seas Fishing, 18 May 2023

... by nets, longlines and harpoons. The scale of the loss is mind-boggling. For every three hundred green turtles that swam the Caribbean before industrialised fishing, just one is left. Ninety per cent of the world’s large fish and oyster beds have gone. Seagrass meadows are disappearing at a rate of 7 per cent per year. Only one in twenty blue whales ...

Israel’s Putinisation

Adam Shatz: Israel’s Putinisation, 18 February 2016

... long as it did, liberals in Tel Aviv could tell themselves that things weren’t so bad behind the Green Line, the border between Israel and the territory it captured in the 1967 war. Indeed, the resilience of Israel’s democratic institutions helped sustain the illusion that the Green Line was still a frontier, even as it ...

In the Gasworks

David Wheatley, 18 May 2000

To Ireland, I 
by Paul Muldoon.
Oxford, 150 pp., £19.99, March 2000, 0 19 818475 1
Show More
Bandanna 
by Paul Muldoon.
Faber, 64 pp., £7.99, February 1999, 0 571 19762 0
Show More
The Birds 
translated by Paul Muldoon, by Richard Martin.
Gallery Press, 80 pp., £13.95, July 1999, 1 85235 245 0
Show More
Reading Paul Muldoon 
by Clair Wills.
Bloodaxe, 222 pp., £10.95, October 1998, 1 85224 348 1
Show More
Show More
... of his earlier joke about the horse that goes round and round the statue of King Billy on College Green. Apart from its obvious use as an image of political paralysis, the obsessive circular motion refers us back to Ferguson again, who wrote an essay ‘On the Ceremonial Turn, Called Desiul’. This is the Irish word deiseal, ‘clockwise’, which Joyce uses ...

Of the Mule Breed

David Bromwich: Robert Southey, 21 May 1998

Robert Southey: A Life 
by Mark Storey.
Oxford, 405 pp., £25, April 1997, 0 19 811246 7
Show More
Show More
... to Moscow’: The Emperor Nap he would set off On a summer excursion to Moscow; The fields were green, and the sky was blue, Morbleu! Parbleu! What a pleasant excursion to Moscow! It is hard to feel grim about the man who wrote this. As Storey rightly says, it cannot have been what his government patrons had in mind. Southey’s popular poetry was simply ...

McTeague’s Tooth

David Trotter: Good Fetishism, 20 November 2003

A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature 
by Bill Brown.
Chicago, 245 pp., £22.50, April 2003, 0 226 07628 8
Show More
Show More
... its place alongside Duchamp’s urinal, Picasso’s bicycle seat and the ‘broken pieces’ of a green bottle which shine with a light of their own in Williams’s ‘Between Walls’. Brown turns from the inexorable downward spiral of McTeague to the ‘underplotted sketches’ which comprise The Country of the Pointed Firs, an account of a summer spent in ...

Diary

David Trotter: Bearness, 7 November 2019

... the shed’s concrete apron onto the grass. She doesn’t quite know what to make of the spongy green stuff. Is it safe to tread on?This is no ordinary zoo. In fact, it’s not a zoo at all. For one thing, there are no visitors, except on open days. For another, it houses members of a single species only. The sheds, enclosures, and an array of other ...

But how?

David Runciman: Capitalist Democracy, 30 March 2023

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism 
by Martin Wolf.
Allen Lane, 496 pp., £30, February, 978 0 241 30341 2
Show More
Show More
... would think Ukraine’s travails were worth this? The second is a relic from the past: even if a green industrial revolution does generate plenty of new jobs, most of them will be skilled, many of them will be short rather than long-term, and some will be automated. Labour can no longer do the heavy lifting required to anchor capitalist social ...

Diary

Helen Sullivan: A City of Islands, 1 December 2022

... in a shipping container, a post office, a satellite dish as big as the post office, the bright green tourism office with a sign showing the distance from Pohnpei to various cities around the world, and a billboard displaying two thermometers, which measured the island’s Covid vaccination progress (70 per cent of the population). At the Red Cross office I ...

Diary

Gale Walden: David’s Presence, 2 November 2023

... The​ day David died, I was in the Urbana Free Library, in the How to Organise section. I was always searching for ways to corral my home. Paper and books were my biggest downfall, but clothes didn’t stay on hangers and dishes multiplied. A lot of things multiplied. Especially books about how to organise your house ...

Adulterers’ Distress

Philip Horne, 21 July 1983

A Nail on the Head 
by Clare Boylan.
Hamish Hamilton, 135 pp., £7.95, July 1983, 0 241 11001 7
Show More
New Stories 8: An Arts Council Anthology 
edited by Karl Miller.
Hutchinson, 227 pp., £8.95, May 1983, 9780091523800
Show More
The Handyman 
by Penelope Mortimer.
Allen Lane, 199 pp., £6.95, May 1983, 0 7139 1364 9
Show More
Open the Door 
by Rosemary Manning.
Cape, 180 pp., £7.95, June 1983, 0 224 02112 5
Show More
A Boy’s Own Story 
by Edmund White.
Picador, 218 pp., £2.50, July 1983, 0 330 28151 8
Show More
Show More
... too cleverly vivacious. The most valuable juxtaposition pairs two longish stories set in Scotland, David Craig’s ‘Jason and the Green Woman’ and John Murray’s ‘The Señor and the Celtic Cross’, which operate quite different ironies about the limits of civilised society. The latter story, told in a tormented ...

How Dirty Harry beat the Ringo Kid

Michael Rogin, 9 May 1996

John Wayne: American 
by Randy Roberts and James Olson.
Free Press, 738 pp., £17.99, March 1996, 0 02 923837 4
Show More
Show More
... the cowboy statue has sought protection from the elements and taken shelter indoors. Florence has David, also transferred from open to inner space; Orange County has John Wayne. Orange County, where unfettered individualism rises from a government-subsidised foundation in mineral wealth, agribusiness, aerospace and real-estate speculation. When John Wayne ...