Neutered Valentines

David Bromwich: James Agee, 7 September 2006

‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, ‘A Death in the Family’, Shorter Fiction 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 818 pp., $35, October 2005, 1 931082 81 2
Show More
Film Writing and Selected Journalism 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 748 pp., $40, October 2005, 1 931082 82 0
Show More
Brooklyn Is 
by James Agee.
Fordham, 64 pp., $16.95, October 2005, 0 8232 2492 9
Show More
Show More
“... the Sierra Madre, and a friendly profile of its director in Life, led to an invitation to work for John Huston. He wrote an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s story ‘The Blue Hotel’, which Huston did not use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s ...”

When Ireland Became Divided

Garret FitzGerald: The Free State’s Fight for Recognition, 21 January 1999

Documents on Irish Foreign Policy. Vol. I: 1919-22 
edited by Ronan Fanning.
Royal Irish Academy and Department of Foreign Affairs, 548 pp., £30, October 1998, 1 874045 63 1
Show More
Show More
“... up the British Empire and thus further [sic] the world revolution.’ If only people like Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell had been so clear-sighted. The failure to secure even a hearing, let alone recognition, from Wilson in Paris did not discourage the Dáil Government from pursuing this issue in the United States itself, where the strongest popular and ...”

The Road to Reading Gaol

Colm Tóibín, 30 November 2017

“... had another connection to Jane Elgee before her marriage. In a letter to his son William in 1921, John Butler Yeats wrote of Jane Wilde: ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when the circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it.’ Butt enjoyed various romances, and was, on occasion, heckled at public meetings by the ...”

The Question of U

Ian Penman: Prince, 20 June 2019

Prince: Life and Times 
by Jason Draper.
Chartwell, 216 pp., £15.99, February 2017, 978 0 7858 3497 7
Show More
The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince 
by Mayte Garcia.
Trapeze, 304 pp., £9.99, April 2018, 978 1 4091 7121 8
Show More
Show More
“... their profit-eyed, zoned-out heroes.Prince​ was born on 7 June 1958 in Minneapolis. His father, John L. Nelson, was 42 at the time; his mother, Mattie Shaw, was 25. His first name was the one his father performed under in a local jazz combo: Prince Rogers. During Prince’s teenage years it was a volatile ...”

Mother One, Mother Two

Jeremy Harding: A memoir, 31 March 2005

“... above all, the charmed, successful Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady (Maureen had certainly not read Shaw, for whom Colin evinced another of his hatreds). Nancy’s songs were very much a feature of Maureen’s repertoire, but with Eliza she had a daily complicity. Eliza’s songs, both before and after Higgins’s breakthrough, were forever on her lips. When ...”