Dining at the White House

Susan Pedersen: Ralph Bunche, 29 June 2023

The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations and the Fight to End Empire 
by Kal Raustiala.
Oxford, 661 pp., £26.99, March, 978 0 19 760223 2
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... intellectuals and scholars (Alain Locke, Rayford Logan, Merze Tate, E. Franklin Frazier, Eric Williams) who together would subject the global racial order to excoriating analysis.Bunche spent a dozen years at Howard, finding his wife, Ruth, among his students; the school also proved a springboard for an astonishingly forward-looking research agenda. At a ...

Places Never Explained

Colm Tóibín: Anthony Hecht, 8 August 2013

The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht 
edited by Jonathan Post.
Johns Hopkins, 365 pp., £18, November 2012, 978 1 4214 0730 2
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... beginning that he would not be able to write poetry, Jarrell by August 1944 was writing to Oscar Williams: ‘If anybody can write a good poem about anything, he ought to do it about a war he’s in.’ Two months later, in Tucson, Arizona, he wrote to a friend: I’ve been wonderfully lucky for the past six months – my job and Tucson are swell, Mackie ...

Everybody’s Joan

Marina Warner, 6 December 2012

... this position, uncompromising commitment to a principle becomes a good in itself, or, as Bernard Williams explored in his last book, a higher authority is accorded to truthfulness (sincerity, assertion) than to truth (precision, accuracy). Ardent conviction proves more persuasive than accurate witnessing; intensity trumps scepticism and hesitation. Joan ...

Elective Outsiders

Jeremy Harding, 3 July 1997

Conductors of Chaos: A Poetry Anthology 
edited by Iain Sinclair.
Picador, 488 pp., £9.99, June 1996, 0 330 33135 3
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Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne 
by N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge.
Liverpool, 196 pp., £25, April 1996, 0 85323 840 5
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Carl Rakosi: Poems 1923-41 
edited by Andrew Crozier.
Sun & Moon, 209 pp., $12.99, August 1995, 1 55713 185 6
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The Objectivists 
edited by Andrew McAllister.
Bloodaxe, 156 pp., £8.95, May 1996, 1 85224 341 4
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... genealogical misfit in the multiple-graft family tree, covered in creeper; which leads from Pound, Williams and Marianne Moore through a flurry of cousins and affines to the poets of Iain Sinclair’s anthology. ‘If Rakosi were more predictable, clubbable and given to the right patter,’ August Kleinzahler wrote in 1984, ‘a collected poems would have been ...

Seedy Equations

Adam Mars-Jones: Dealing with James Purdy, 18 May 2023

James Purdy: Life of a Contrarian Writer 
by Michael Snyder.
Oxford, 444 pp., £27, January, 978 0 19 760972 9
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... sums of money, Purdy’s parents divorced, and his mother, Vera, began running a boarding house. Richard, his older brother, had a successful stint as an actor before alcoholism ended his career and forced him to return home. Snyder refers to him as ‘an aspiring actor and gay youth’ who felt stuck in a conservative Midwestern town, but there is no ...

Salem’s Lot

Leslie Wilson, 23 March 1995

... would’ve, or did you?’ they asked. ‘I did,’ said Ingram, quite calmly. A psychologist, Richard Peterson, was brought in to help interrogate Ingram: his role was vital because he gave Ingram an explanation of what was happening to him. When Ingram asked why he had no memory of what he’d done, Peterson told him that it was ‘not uncommon for ...

Distraction v. Attraction

Barbara Everett: Ashbery, Larkin and Eliot, 27 June 2002

... such a thing as a pure Americanness in poetry. Earlier ‘Redskin’ poets such as William Carlos Williams sought to achieve it, probably, in contradistinction from the European corruptions of men like Eliot. But I find it much more strongly represented in such a post-Eliot poet as John Ashbery, who seems to me a true poet of distraction. The back cover of ...

The future was social

Stefan Collini: Karl Polanyi’s Predictions, 23 January 2025

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time 
by Karl Polanyi.
Penguin, 358 pp., £10.99, June 2024, 978 0 241 68555 6
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... the celebrated generation of radical WEA tutors in the immediate postwar years emerged, including Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.)Polanyi took these teaching duties very seriously, and when, after four years, he departed for temporary posts at colleges in the United States, he took with him the ...

Irangate

Edward Said, 7 May 1987

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey 
by Salman Rushdie.
Picador, 171 pp., £2.95, January 1987, 0 330 29990 5
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Turning the Tide: US Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace 
by Noam Chomsky.
Pluto, 298 pp., £5.95, September 1986, 0 7453 0184 3
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... Israeli domination. One sure thing to fall back on is what the American historian William Appleman Williams has called ‘empire as a way of life’: the notion that since nearly everything in the world has a bearing on America, it had better be under American control. A precise insight into what sort of strategy might follow from such a premise is to be found ...

Tankishness

Peter Wollen: Tank by Patrick Wright, 16 November 2000

Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine 
by Patrick Wright.
Faber, 499 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 571 19259 9
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... with the tank. Among them we find not only Fuller, the Crowleyite and Mosleyite, but also Clough Williams-Ellis, one of the group at Bermicourt, now best known for the village of Portmeirion, which he designed and assembled – a bizarre bricolage of architectural styles and elements. Another was Wilfred Bion, whose War Memoirs are filled with sketch-maps ...

Let’s consider Kate

John Lanchester: Can we tame the banks?, 18 July 2013

... are doing. Instead these banks seem, in the words of Manchester University anthropologist Karel Williams, ‘loose federations of money-making franchises’. One risk analyst talked about her bank as ‘a nation engaged in perpetual civil war’, while a trader said: ‘You have to understand, it’s us against the bank.’ The rules, the laws, are ...

With A, then B, then C

Susan Eilenberg: The Sexual Life of Iris M., 5 September 2002

Iris Murdoch: A Life 
by Peter Conradi.
HarperCollins, 706 pp., £9.99, August 2002, 9780006531753
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... prizes in the League of Nations essay competition two years in a row, beating the young Raymond Williams the second time around. From BMB Murdoch learned, too, an admiration for the Soviet Union which the evidence of Stalin’s purges and show trials could not shake; her Soviet sympathies outlasted her pacifism by some years.It was only in retrospect that ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: A Shameful Year, 8 January 2004

... Eating Primer’. Perhaps it is the same boy who has inscribed across one of the pages: ‘G.H. Williams, Lancs and England’.22 January. Watching Footballers’ Wives I see among the production credits the name Sue de Beauvoir.I do so hope she’s a relation.1 February, Yorkshire. Last time we visited Kirkby Stephen we were in Mrs H.’s shop when a clock ...

You Muddy Fools

Dan Jacobson: In the months before his death Ian Hamilton talked about himself to Dan Jacobson, 14 January 2002

... poems in the magazine.Subsequently other people became stalwarts of a kind, didn’t they? Hugo Williams?Oh, they came in. David Harsent was another.Peter Dale?I think we published some of his poems. He never became quite one of the gang. There was a certain amount of indecision about him then. David Harsent appeared from nowhere. I think via the TLS. I was ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1998, 21 January 1999

... funny: Cary Grant, as the reformed cat burglar, invites the Lloyd’s insurance agent (John Williams) to have lunch at his villa overlooking the Mediterranean. Grant’s housekeeper serves a delicious meal, the first course of which is a tart with ham, herbs and eggs. ‘It’s a local speciality,’ says Grant, looking immensely sophisticated. ‘They ...