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He was the man

Robert Crawford: Ezra Pound, 30 June 2016

Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and his Work: Vol. III: The Tragic Years, 1939-72 
by A. David Moody.
Oxford, 654 pp., £30, September 2015, 978 0 19 870436 2
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... the form of San Zeno the   columns signed by their maker    the frescoes in S. Pietro and the madonna in Ortolo e ‘fa di clarità l’aer tremare’ as in the manuscript of the Capitolare Trattoria degli Apostoli (dodici) ‘Ecco il tè’ said the head waiter in 1912 explaining its mysteries to the piccolo with a teapot from another hotel but coffee ...

On the Sixth Day

Charles Nicholl: Petrarch on the Move, 7 February 2019

Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer 
by Christopher Celenza.
Reaktion, 224 pp., £15.95, October 2017, 978 1 78023 838 8
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... on an off-day) and a medal stamped with the initials ‘M.L.’, which Scève interpreted as ‘Madonna Laura’. The general view is that this was more of a publicity stunt than a genuine discovery, but it fanned interest in the question of her identity, and though various families in and around Avignon hurried to claim her, the de Sades remained the chief ...

My Hands in My Face

Tom Crewe: Ocean Vuong’s Failure, 26 June 2025

The Emperor of Gladness 
by Ocean Vuong.
Cape, 397 pp., £20, May, 978 1 78733 540 0
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... to the world’? Only one place: Vuong’s second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, has a blurb by Madonna (‘beautiful writing’). It resumes Little Dog’s story, beginning in 2009: Vuong has switched to a slightly unstable third-person past tense, and Little Dog is now called Hai, but we have the same geographic and social setting, the same family ...

My Kind of Psychopath

Michael Wood, 20 July 1995

Pulp Fiction 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 198 pp., £7.99, October 1994, 0 571 17546 5
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Reservoir Dogs 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 113 pp., £7.99, November 1994, 0 571 17362 4
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True Romance 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 134 pp., £7.99, January 1995, 0 571 17593 7
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Natural Born Killers 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 175 pp., £7.99, July 1995, 0 571 17617 8
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... in this context that we can think about all the talk in Tarantino’s films. The gangsters discuss Madonna in Reservoir Dogs, and have an endless discussion about whether tipping a waitress is the right thing to do.   ‘I don’t tip because society says I gotta. I tip when somebody deserves a tip.’   ‘You don’t have any idea what you’re ...

What is the burglar after?

T.J. Clark: Painting the Poem, 6 October 2022

... del Sarto’ remains by far the best (closest) performance we have of that shading – in the Madonna of the Harpies, say, or the Borghese Holy Family, or the Louvre’s inconsolable Caritas. Sometimes, whatever Baudelaire may say, a fantasy life of the artist is the only way to bring a set of paintings back from the dead.A fantasy life, or a fantasy ...

After the Earthquake

Tim Parks: Silone and Silone, 9 July 2009

Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone 
by Stanislao Pugliese.
Farrar, Straus, 426 pp., $35, June 2009, 978 0 374 11348 3
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... views were more traditional, ‘biblical’ she would later call them: he made her ‘feel like a Madonna’ but he would rage against her as a whore when she betrayed him. By the time Fontamara was published in 1933 (with money Valangin had helped to raise) the affair was over. From this point on Silone presented himself as a writer of the people, closer to ...

Disaffiliate, Reaffiliate, Kill Again

Jeremy Harding: Régis Debray, 7 February 2008

Praised Be Our Lords: The Autobiography 
by Régis Debray, translated by John Howe.
Verso, 328 pp., £19.99, April 2007, 978 1 84467 140 3
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... in Chile. It was an important trip for the apprentice revolutionary, with Myriam, his ‘brown Madonna’, acting as guide and mentor. The pleasure of the relationship and the imminence of a life in the struggle were satisfyingly fused. (Myriam/Burgos remained in the picture, in Paris, long after the revolution had receded.) Debray was, at this time, one ...

Anti-Dad

Adam Mars-Jones: Amis Resigns, 21 June 2012

Lionel Asbo: State of England 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 288 pp., £18.99, June 2012, 978 0 224 09620 1
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... manner that appeals to everyone. Just as Amis once confessed (or boasted) that he stopped finding Madonna attractive when she went ‘hard-body’, so there are readers in good numbers who prefer something suppler in their sentences than articulated armour-plate and an almost arthropod vision of imaginative prose. Many of these disaffected readers are likely ...

Something Is Surviving

Jenny Turner: Olga Tokarczuk’s Mycophilia, 26 June 2025

The Empusium 
by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
Fitzcarraldo, 326 pp., £14.99, September 2024, 978 1 80427 108 7
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... Jacob was imprisoned for thirteen years in the monastery of Częstochowa, famous for its Black Madonna: the icon hid, he said, the Shekhinah, the Kabbalistic divine in its feminine aspect, which, like him, had to be ‘raised from the ashes and allowed to save the world’. A nearby cave system links up to another, five hundred miles away, ‘in the shape ...

Adieu, madame

Terry Castle: Sarah Bernhardt, 4 November 2010

Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt 
by Robert Gottlieb.
Yale, 233 pp., £18.99, October 2010, 978 0 300 14127 6
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... celebrity to market her own image on a truly international scale. She was a self-brander – like Madonna or Lady Gaga – avant la lettre. Painters and sculptors and designers flocked to her. Canny advertisers – especially in America – clamoured to use her picture on trade cards and soap packaging. Virtually every other ‘vintage’ postcard or trade ...

The Shock of the Pretty

James Meek: Seventy Hours with Don Draper, 9 April 2015

... off her teal coat. The juxtaposition of Bobby’s tartan zip-up jacket and baseball cap with the Madonna-like incline of blonde Betty’s passionlessly beautiful face combine the ideals of wholesome American family life and the purity of the Virgin. Betty Draper and Don Draper, with their children, in season three of ‘Mad Men’. We don’t need to ...

A Difficult Space to Live

Jenny Turner: Stuart Hall’s Legacies, 3 November 2022

Selected Writings on Marxism 
by Stuart Hall, edited by Gregor McLennan.
Duke, 380 pp., £25.99, April 2021, 978 1 4780 0034 1
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Selected Writings on Race and Difference 
by Stuart Hall, edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Duke, 472 pp., £27.99, April 2021, 978 1 4780 1166 8
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... pumped-up critical-theory balloon’: ‘I really cannot read another cultural studies analysis of Madonna or The Sopranos.’He made one final attempt to intervene in British politics in 2013, with the Kilburn Manifesto, put together with his old comrades Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin. ‘The Labour Party,’ he wrote with Alan O’Shea, ‘may be busy ...

Among the Flutterers

Colm Tóibín: The Pope Wears Prada, 19 August 2010

The Pope Is Not Gay 
by Angelo Quattrocchi, translated by Romy Clark Giuliani.
Verso, 181 pp., £8.90, June 2010, 978 1 84467 474 9
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... like in Poland in August 1991, when John Paul II came to Jasna Gora, the monastery of the Black Madonna, in Czestochowa. He came to address a million young people, most of them from Eastern Europe, many of them in search of a new belief system to replace the one which had recently faded. We all watched entranced as Wojtyla walked up to the altar where he ...

Why Literary Criticism is like Virtue

Stanley Fish, 10 June 1993

... to the right you will hit a stalled car. The car has only one occupant, but it is Saul Bellow, or Madonna, or Michael Jordan, or Margaret Thatcher. What do you do? I submit that if you are seeking counsel at a crucial moment of decision the last person you want to turn to is someone who spends his time thinking up hypotheticals like this one so that he can ...

Literary Friction

Jenny Turner: Kathy Acker’s Ashes, 19 October 2017

After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography 
by Chris Kraus.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 1 63590 006 4
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... option: one politician, Margaret Thatcher; one princess, Princess Di; one blonde superstar, Madonna; one lean and androgynous rock’n’roll performer, Patti Smith. In Kraus’s view, Acker went along with this weird logic, too. ‘Acker is in London, at a peak of notoriety that only certain literary men enjoy,’ she wrote in her marvellous third ...

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