Like a Manta Ray

Jenny Turner: The Entire History of Sex, 22 October 2015

The Argonauts 
by Maggie Nelson.
Graywolf, 143 pp., £23, May 2015, 978 1 55597 707 8
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... of reading Nelson is getting introduced to them: Catherine Opie and A.L. Steiner, Chris Burden and Paul McCarthy, Ryan Trecartin and Mike Kelley, Nao Bustamante and William Pope.L. Nelson spends less time on work that, in her view, is stupid, arrogant or exploitative. Names that come up in this context tend to be better known to mainstream audiences: Neil ...

A Gutter Subject

Neal Ascherson: Joachim Fest, 25 October 2012

Not Me: Memoirs of a German Childhood 
by Joachim Fest, translated by Martin Chalmers.
Atlantic, 316 pp., £20, August 2012, 978 1 84354 931 4
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... bag containing 13 books (the usual suspects plus Ernst Jünger, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Jean Paul) across the battlefields. When he was finally captured and sent to a temporary camp in France, his first punishment was having to hear the loudspeakers around the fence blasting out Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ fortissimo for nine days and nights without ...

Lord Have Mercy

James Shapiro: Plague Writing, 31 March 2011

Plague Writing in Early Modern England 
by Ernest Gilman.
Chicago, 295 pp., £24, June 2009, 978 0 226 29409 4
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... of these plague-ridden times? Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists delved into almost every dark corner of their audiences’ imaginations: murder, witchcraft, incest, civil war, apostasy. Playgoers saw rape victims stagger onstage and flinched as throats were slit and eyes gouged out. But one thing they never saw depicted was plague or its victims. Despite ...

Diary

Eliot Weinberger: Next stop, Forbidden City, 23 June 2005

... Gertrude Stein, whom Gu Cheng had never read.) He ultimately landed in a completely idiosyncratic corner of Surrealism. It is probably safe to say that Gu Cheng was the most radical poet in all of China’s 2500 years of written poetry. In 1988, Gu Cheng and Xie Ye moved to New Zealand. At first, he had a job at the University of Auckland, teaching ...

What is going on in there?

Hilary Mantel: Hypochondria, 5 November 2009

Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives 
by Brian Dillon.
277 pp., £18.99, September 2009, 978 1 84488 134 5
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... the eve of her wedding is a crawling (and well-founded) apprehension that disaster is around the corner. Our bodies make us know things our mind doesn’t quite know, or won’t accept: ambiguities in our situation, undeclared and forbidden loves and hatreds. How painful it would have been for Florence Nightingale’s family to face their mutual feints and ...

Whomph!

Joanna Biggs: Zadie Smith, 1 December 2016

Swing Time 
by Zadie Smith.
Hamish Hamilton, 453 pp., £18.99, November 2016, 978 0 241 14415 2
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... moment in the Inferno when Paolo and Francesca share ‘a kiss both looked-for and unbidden’ (in Paul Batchelor’s translation) as they read. That’s another thing: Smith’s literariness comes through here as something more amusing; fragments with titles such as ‘Speak, radio’ and ‘Brideshead unvisited’ open up the story to give a parallel ...

Between Victoria and Vauxhall

John Lanchester: The Election, 1 June 2017

... Perry Anderson writes about in his new book The H-Word.2 We have persuaded ourselves into a corner where governments believe they have no tools to address the shortfall in housing construction, especially social and low-cost housing. The best that successive governments have been able to do is to ‘leave it to the market’, even though the market has ...

Put a fist through it

Harriet Baker: The Hampstead Modernists, 8 October 2020

Circles and Squares: The Lives and Art of the Hampstead Modernists 
by Caroline Maclean.
Bloomsbury, 296 pp., £30, April, 978 1 4088 8969 5
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The See-Through House: My Father in Full Colour 
by Shelley Klein.
Chatto, 271 pp., £16.99, April, 978 1 78474 310 9
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... were invited to join Unit One, a group of painters, sculptors and architects brought together by Paul Nash to stand for ‘a truly contemporary spirit’ that would, he wrote in the Times, definitively bring together abstraction and Surrealism. But Maclean suggests that the decade’s innovation had already begun with the pink alabaster of Hepworth’s ...

Diary

Gaby Wood: Lucian Freud’s Printmaking, 1 June 2023

... I don’t want to miss anything that could be of use to me. I often put in what is round the corner from where I see it.’ This accounts for the strange torsion in some of the etched portraits. They look at first like mangled bits of realism but are in fact stealthy works of cubism: many selves, many facets, many moments in one. They display two kinds ...

Why all the hoopla?

Hal Foster: Frank Gehry, 23 August 2001

Frank Gehry: The Art of Architecture 
edited by Jean-Louis Cohen et al.
Abrams, 500 pp., £55, May 2001, 0 8109 6929 7
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... ever since (he redesigned it again in 1991-92). He took a modest bungalow on a corner lot, wrapped it in layers of corrugated metal and chain-link, and poked glass structures through its exterior. The result was a simple house extruded into surprising shapes and surfaces, spaces and views. It is justly admired, but it also serves ...

Restoring St. George’s

Peter Campbell: In Bloomsbury, 20 November 2003

... handsome, as became clear in the arguments fifty years ago about how much grime to wash off St Paul’s. The contrast on a bright day between the dirty-grey south portico of St George’s, which was cleaned decades ago, and the stark black and white of the untouched south face of the tower suggests that the clear picture one now has of the portico’s ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2000, 25 January 2001

... I always felt kindly towards him after learning that he would not stay in the same room as Paul Johnson. 15 March. There is generally a beggar sitting outside the back door of M&S (and likely to be one at the front as well). I will sometimes give them my change as I’m coming out, though I’m irritated at being asked for money as I’m padlocking my ...

Strange Apprentice

T.J. Clark, 8 October 2020

... Pissarro​ , Camille Pissarro’s eldest son, was barely into his teens in the mid 1870s when Paul Cézanne came to live nearby. Nonetheless he retained strong memories of the time, and many years later his brother Paul-Émile wrote down these sentences at Lucien’s dictation:Cézanne lived in Auvers, and he used to ...

‘Rip their skin off’

Alexander Clapp: Montenegro’s Pivot, 25 April 2024

... with the state-run planning authority it housed. On my visit, Đukanović was working out of a corner office on the second floor. Red leather couches faced a desk; a wooden model galleon sat on a table. Photos of him meeting foreign dignitaries were framed on the wall: John McCain, Vladimir Putin, Jens Stoltenberg.Đukanović stared at me intently during ...

His Peach Stone

Christopher Tayler: J.G. Farrell, 2 December 2010

J.G. Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries 
edited by Lavinia Greacen.
Cork, 464 pp., €19.95, September 2010, 978 1 85918 476 9
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... the sort one can appeal to, the younger sisters are at boarding school and Angela is impossible to corner. So the Major finds himself haunting the building, embarrassed and bewildered. The Majestic is not a well run hotel. On arrival, the Major is led, after a long wait in the dusty foyer, to a cavernous Palm Court. Here the gloom caused by insurgent ...