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Nicholas Spice, 4 September 1986

A Simple Story 
by S.Y. Agnon, translated by Hillel Halkin.
246 pp., £13.10, March 1986, 0 8052 3999 5
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At the Handles of the Lock: Themes in the Fiction of S.Y. Agnon 
by David Aberbach.
Oxford, 221 pp., £18, November 1984, 0 19 710040 6
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Snakewrist 
by Christopher Burns.
Cape, 240 pp., £9.95, July 1986, 0 224 02351 9
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... and for ‘holy’ or ‘wise’. The echoes are fortuitous, but they are not unapt. For, as David Aberbach shows, Agnon was preoccupied throughout his writing career with the private sufferings of passive personalities, which he portrayed with a judicious and detached agnosticism. Commenting on the Hebrew meaning of Agnon, Aberbach concludes: ‘The ...

We demand cloisters!

Tom Stammers: Artists’ Studios, 29 June 2023

The Artist’s Studio: A Cultural History 
by James Hall.
Thames and Hudson, 345 pp., £30, November 2022, 978 0 500 52171 7
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... nexus, in favour of Spartan purity. The unlikely father of the ‘white cube effect’ was Casper David Friedrich, whose studio’s one ornament was a T-square dangling from the wall, a reminder of honest German craftsmanship in keeping with his penchant for woodwork and frame-design. Of course, Friedrich’s brand of mystical pietism was partly responsible ...

Screaming in the Streets

Lucie Elven: On Nan Goldin, 20 February 2025

This Will Not End Well 
Neue Nationalgalerie, until 6 April 2025Show More
Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well 
edited by Fredrik Liew.
Steidl, 216 pp., £44, January 2023, 978 3 96999 058 2
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... was reticent and barely spoke, but became friends with a fellow student (and fellow photographer), David Armstrong. The camera became a solution to the problems of childhood, of growing up, of what was happening to her now – a way of proving her experiences were real.After leaving Satya, she moved into a flatshare with Armstrong in Boston. Her luminous ...

It isn’t the lines

Bee Wilson: Paul Newman’s Looks, 16 February 2023

Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man 
by Paul Newman, edited by David Rosenthal.
Century, 320 pp., £25, October 2022, 978 1 5291 9706 8
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The Last Movie Stars 
directed by Ethan Hawke.
HBO/CNN
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... Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Newman hardly moves his eyes when he speaks – only his mouth. We see him wearing dark grey pyjamas, standing with the help of crutches, sinking glass after glass of whiskey. Taylor and Newman are playing a married couple who have become estranged and are living in a dysfunctional household preoccupied with the impending death of its ...

Mr Toad’s Wild Ride

Jessica Olin: Leaving Graceland, 5 December 2024

From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir 
by Lisa Marie Presley with Riley Keough.
Macmillan, 281 pp., £25, October 2024, 978 1 0350 5104 5
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... car and he had on a respectable outfit – black pants and some kind of blouse – but he was also wearing a big, majestic belt with buckles and jewels and chains, as well as sunglasses. He was smoking a cigar. I met him at the car, and I walked up the walkway with him, and I just remember that feeling of walking next to him, holding his hand.After Elvis ...

Diary

Rebecca Solnit: Get Off the Bus, 20 February 2014

... down the peninsula to Silicon Valley. A tall young black man held one corner of the banner; he was wearing a Ulysses T-shirt, as if analogue itself had come to protest against digital. The Brass Liberation Orchestra played Eurythmics’ ‘Sweet Dreams’ as the television cameras rolled. The white buses took up most of the four lanes of Eighth Street at ...

Miracle on Fleet Street

Martin Hickman: Operation Elveden, 7 January 2016

... it be any more or any less improper to pay someone for handing over a photograph of Prince William wearing a bikini? The court cases were scarcely covered by the Fleet Street newspapers, save to complain that they were taking place at all (the Daily Mail described Elveden as ‘a disgraceful attempt by police and prosecutors to intimidate whistleblowers and ...

Oh, the curse!

David Runciman: A home run, 19 February 2004

Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball 
by Stephen Jay Gould.
Cape, 342 pp., £16.99, January 2004, 0 224 05042 7
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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game 
by Michael Lewis.
Norton, 288 pp., $24.95, June 2003, 0 393 05765 8
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... the press that Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ shortstop, a nice, inoffensive boy with cheekbones, the David Beckham of baseball, had promised him that ‘the ghosts would turn up eventually’. The Red Sox were at least spared the indignity of having their misfortunes blamed on some hapless idiot whose glove happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong ...

Conspire Slowly, Act Quickly

David Runciman: Thatcher Undone, 2 January 2020

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. III: Herself Alone 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 1072 pp., £35, October 2019, 978 0 241 32474 5
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... having lived long enough to see another Conservative enter Downing Street. That prime minister, David Cameron, wanted to give her a full state funeral, putting her on the same level as Churchill. She vetoed the idea. So she was given a full ceremonial funeral instead, which placed her on a par with the Queen Mother and Princess Diana, though she received ...

Wallacette the Rain Queen

Mark Lambert, 19 February 1987

The Beet Queen 
by Louise Erdrich.
Hamish Hamilton, 338 pp., £10.95, February 1987, 0 241 12044 6
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Marya: A Life 
by Joyce Carol Oates.
Cape, 310 pp., £10.95, January 1987, 0 224 02420 5
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The Lost Language of Cranes 
by David Leavitt.
Viking, 319 pp., £10.95, February 1987, 0 670 81290 0
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... of the Unfamiliar, and she could picture Dot touching the waves with an iron sceptre.’ Dot is wearing an ugly but ‘plantlike’ dress on which the other candidates for queenship are described as ‘feasting their eyes’. There has been a drought in the Argus region, and as Wallace puts it, ‘we needed a kind rain, a blessing rain.’ Dot contrives to ...

Leave them weeping

Colin Grant: Frederick Douglass, 1 August 2019

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom 
by David Blight.
Simon and Schuster, 892 pp., £30, November 2018, 978 1 4165 9031 6
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... five times the size of the others, is a stern-looking man with bushy, neatly parted grey hair, wearing a frock-coat and necktie. Two hundred years after his birth into slavery, Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and writer once described as ‘an ornament to society and a blessing to his race’, looms munificently over the city he visited during a ...

The Strangest Piece of News

Nick Wilding: Galileo, 2 June 2011

Galileo: Watcher of the Skies 
by David Wootton.
Yale, 328 pp., £25, October 2010, 978 0 300 12536 8
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Galileo 
by J.L. Heilbron.
Oxford, 508 pp., £20, October 2010, 978 0 19 958352 2
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... for calculating planetary positions, the latter for describing the physical universe.) Thanks to David Wootton’s careful reconstruction of the writing and printing of the Sidereus (in an article in Issue 6 of Galilaeana: Journal of Galilean Studies), we now know that Galileo’s swaggering pro-Copernicanism, the least plausible of the rival models to most ...

Can’t you take a joke?

Jonathan Coe, 2 November 2023

Different Times: A History of British Comedy 
by David Stubbs.
Faber, 399 pp., £20, July, 978 0 571 35346 0
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... sense of humour’: a phenomenon everyone considers to be distinctive but no one can define. As David Stubbs writes in Different Times, his impressive survey of British comedy on stage, radio, film and television, ‘it’s not so much a case of Britain producing comedy as comedy producing Britain.’ The book provides a good opportunity to look at our ...

Here/Not Here

Wendy Steiner, 4 July 1996

... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...

Short Cuts

Tom Crewe: Colourisation, 22 March 2018

... in Retrographic, colourised by Mads Madsen, is of the scaffold: Powell, who looks to be wearing the same outfit as on the Saugus, is stood in his socks, his legs bound, a hood over his head; a man in a brown hat, shaded by one of several umbrellas, is adjusting the noose. Powell’s co-conspirators, George Atzerodt and ...

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