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Our Way of Proceeding

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Jesuit Methods, 22 February 2024

The Jesuits: A History 
by Markus Friedrich, translated by John Noël Dillon.
Princeton, 854 pp., £22, October 2023, 978 0 691 22620 0
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... was an earlier staple in his reading, the deeds of bold knights of chivalry. Our Lady the Mother of God became the object of his chivalric devotion, and once he was able to limp along the roads of Spain, he sought her in prayer during a whole night spent before her image in her shrine at Montserrat, outside Barcelona. So far not much else was clear ...

All the girls said so

August Kleinzahler: John Berryman, 2 July 2015

The Dream Songs 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 427 pp., £11.99, October 2014, 978 0 374 53455 4
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77 Dream Songs 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 84 pp., £10, October 2014, 978 0 374 53452 3
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Berryman’s Sonnets 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 127 pp., £10, October 2014, 978 0 374 53454 7
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The Heart Is Strange 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 179 pp., £17.50, October 2014, 978 0 374 22108 9
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Poets in their Youth 
by Eileen Simpson.
Farrar, Straus, 274 pp., £11.50, October 2014, 978 0 374 23559 8
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... by others, and by himself, as ‘having no skin’. He had been a bit of a hysteric and a drama queen from early in life, given to fainting dead away when in emotional distress or faced with conflict, even having psychosomatic epileptic seizures, as often as not to subdue his ‘difficult’, possessive ...

A Day’s Work

Joanna Biggs: Reports from the Workplace, 9 April 2015

... When T. was four or five, he wanted to be a binman: ‘You get to make a hell of a mess.’ His mother was a lab technician at a secondary school and his father a civil engineer but he had ‘never been able to apply myself in an academic situation. So it took me three years to do half-decent at my A levels, whereas my sisters both cracked on, knuckled down ...

Günter Grass’s Uniqueness

J.P. Stern, 5 February 1981

... and its surrounding countryside becomes, for a boy born of a German father and a Cashubian (Slav) mother, a part of his intimate personal history. As a member of the German lower middle class that was particularly receptive to the new racist and nationalist ideas, at the age of ten he entered the ‘Jungvolk’, from which he was promoted to the Hitler ...

Illuminating, horrible etc

Jenny Turner: David Foster Wallace, 14 April 2011

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace 
by David Lipsky.
Broadway, 320 pp., $16.99, 9780307592439
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The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel 
by David Foster Wallace.
Hamish Hamilton, 547 pp., £20, April 2011, 978 0 241 14480 0
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... ten years older and, in some ways, Hal’s opposite – the neglected child of an alcoholic single mother, a high-school dropout and painkiller addict, who is known to his so-called friends as BIM (for Big Indestructible Moron) – who yet has transformed himself, by the time we meet him, into a man heroically determined, with the support of Alcoholics ...

Heathcliff Redounding

David Trotter: Emily Brontë’s Scenes, 9 May 2024

Emily Brontë: Selected Writings 
edited by Francis O’Gorman.
Oxford, 496 pp., £95, December 2023, 978 0 19 886816 3
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... a mistress in a Liverpool slum. Episodes describing the boy’s retrieval by his father after his mother dies in abject poverty frame a story otherwise set largely in postwar Britain, about the children of an inter-racial marriage, one of whom goes missing. (The story’s primary historical context is the Moors murders of the 1960s.) Phillips is well aware ...

Slow Waltz

Daniel Trilling: Trouble with the Troubles Act, 6 June 2024

... in Belfast, was shot dead by the IRA while off duty. For more than thirty years, Andy and his mother, Martha, have been waiting for the British state to properly investigate Tony’s murder. For most of that time they have felt completely alone in their endeavour. In May 2022, legislation was making its way through Parliament that made it more likely than ...

I adore your moustache

James Wolcott: Styron’s Letters, 24 January 2013

Selected Letters of William Styron 
edited by Rose Styron and R. Blakeslee Gilpin.
Random House, 643 pp., £24.99, December 2012, 978 1 4000 6806 7
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... of the playwright Lillian Hellman, whom Edmund Wilson would describe in his journals as the queen bee of the Martha’s Vineyard ‘cocktail belt’, Styron and Rose would become champion party-throwers themselves up in Roxbury, Connecticut, between work-slogs. But by the year of Kazin’s Christmas report, the ...

Whirligig

Barbara Everett: Thinking about Hamlet, 2 September 2004

... Caligula and Nero, he had a weakness for horrible women: his last wife, Agrippina, Nero’s mother, set about getting her son the throne by poisoning Claudius once he had adopted Nero. After Nero came to power he murdered Claudius’ son Britannicus; and then, before he was 16, Nero married Claudius’ daughter Octavia. Thus the pathetic Octavia was ...

Not Even a Might-Have Been

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Chips’s Adventures, 19 January 2023

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1024 pp., £35, March 2021, 978 1 78633 181 6
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1938-43 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1120 pp., £35, September 2021, 978 1 78633 182 3
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1943-57 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1168 pp., £35, September 2022, 978 1 5291 5172 5
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... of background Channon yearned for: a Nicolson baronetcy had been created by Charles I, and on his mother’s side he was related to the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. Where some people reinvent themselves to disguise a lowly upbringing, Channon tried desperately to shed his origins as the son of a rich shipowner – ‘I have put my whole life’s force into ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... she got to know the other young mothers. As well as befriending Naseem she was close to another mother from the tower, Munira, who lived on the fifth floor. It was a strong Muslim community: many were from the Middle East, but a sizeable number were from Morocco, and some of the local boys referred to Grenfell Tower as ‘the Moroccan flats’. ‘It was ...

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