I do not have to be you

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Audre Lorde’s Legacy, 9 October 2025

Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde 
by Alexis Pauline Gumbs.
Penguin, 511 pp., £14.99, August, 978 0 14 199620 2
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... was a more traditional biography, though her account ended in 1986, six years before Lorde’s death from cancer at the age of 58. Gumbs argues that because Lorde’s legacy is now secure, she has been able to write a different kind of book, what she calls a ‘quantum biography where life in full emerges in the field of relations in each particle’. She ...
Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot 
by Michael Rogin.
California, 320 pp., $24.95, May 1996, 0 520 20407 7
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... who starred in Hollywood’s first feature-length partial-talkie – the movie which sounded the death knell for silent cinema – is himself a historical monument ‘condensing into a single figure the structures of white supremacist racial integration that built the United States: black labour in the realm of production, inter-racial nurture and sex (the ...

Stalking Out

David Edgar: After John Osborne, 20 July 2006

John Osborne: A Patriot for Us 
by John Heilpern.
Chatto, 528 pp., £25, May 2006, 0 7011 6780 7
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... the centrality of Osborne’s influence on the generations that followed. Following Osborne’s death in 1994, however, David Hare, among others, leaped to the playwright’s defence, in his memorial eulogy and a longer lecture first delivered in 2002 and repeated on the stage of the Royal Court on the 50th anniversary of Look Back in Anger’s opening. Now ...

Faint Sounds of Shovelling

John Kerrigan: The History of Tragedy, 20 December 2018

Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy 
by Yopie Prins.
Princeton, 297 pp., £24, April 2017, 978 0 691 14189 3
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Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages 
by Tanya Pollard.
Oxford, 331 pp., £60, September 2017, 978 0 19 879311 3
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Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy 
by Richard Halpern.
Chicago, 313 pp., £34, April 2017, 978 0 226 43365 3
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Samson Agonistes: A Redramatisation after Milton 
by John Kinsella.
Arc, 109 pp., £10.99, October 2018, 978 1 911469 55 1
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... The hat, however, suggests to the adult Aurora, by now a poet with an interest in tragedy, the death of Aeschylus, who according to legend was killed when a circling eagle or vulture, mistaking his bald pate for a rock, dropped a tortoise on it from a great height in order to crack open its shell. Perhaps the beginnings of this thought had struck the young ...

Victory by Simile

Andrea Brady: Phillis Wheatley’s Evolution, 4 January 2024

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence 
by David Waldstreicher.
Farrar, Straus, 480 pp., £24, March 2023, 978 0 8090 9824 8
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... ill on arrival that ‘the Captain had fears of her dropping off his hands, without Emolument by death.’ Susanna Wheatley had recently lost a daughter of around Phillis’s age; there’s some speculation that she imagined the child as a replacement.In an essay of 1983, Alice Walker writes of her grief for ‘this sickly, frail Black girl’ whose ...

What if he’d made it earlier?

David Runciman: LBJ, 5 July 2012

The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV: The Passage of Power 
by Robert Caro.
Bodley Head, 712 pp., £30, June 2012, 978 1 84792 217 5
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... whether Kennedy would drop Johnson from the ticket the following year, which would have been the death of his political ambitions. Kennedy always denied it and there is no evidence that he ever discussed the possibility with his advisers. But as Caro points out, this hardly settles the matter. Kennedy had shown himself Johnson’s equal in ruthlessness and ...

‘I’m coming, my Tetsie!’

Freya Johnston: Samuel Johnson’s Shoes, 9 May 2019

Samuel Johnson 
edited by David Womersley.
Oxford, 1344 pp., £95, May 2018, 978 0 19 960951 2
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... bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and immediately deposited their ambitions in him. Michael, the son of a labourer, had had the rare good luck to receive a charity school education and ...

Touching and Being Touched

John Kerrigan: Valentine Cunningham, 19 September 2002

Reading after Theory 
by Valentine Cunningham.
Blackwell, 194 pp., £45, December 2001, 0 631 22167 0
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... A few months before his early death from tuberculosis, John Keats scribbled these lines in his papers: This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d – see, here it is I hold it towards you ...

Multiplying Marys

Marina Warner: On Mary Magdalene, 22 February 2024

Mary Magdalene: A Cultural History 
by Philip C. Almond.
Cambridge, 347 pp., £30, December 2022, 978 1 009 22169 6
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Mary Magdalene: A Visual History 
by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona.
T&T Clark, 154 pp., £17.99, February 2023, 978 0 567 70574 7
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... France, a different and far more festive popular cult sprang up around the figure of her companion Sarah, who is portrayed as a magical Black Virgin; she is the patron saint of the Gitans, or Gypsies, of this area and beyond.Mary Magdalene’s posthumous fame centred on her relics, which were as multiple as her jostling identities. Relics lend specificity and ...

Ah, how miserable!

Emily Wilson: Three New Oresteias, 8 October 2020

The Oresteia 
by Aeschylus, translated by Oliver Taplin.
Liveright, 172 pp., £17.99, November 2018, 978 1 63149 466 6
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The Oresteia 
by Aeschylus, translated by Jeffrey Scott Bernstein.
Carcanet, 288 pp., £16.99, April 2020, 978 1 78410 873 1
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The Oresteia 
by Aeschylus, translated by David Mulroy.
Wisconsin, 234 pp., £17.50, April 2018, 978 0 299 31564 1
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... at the way one word, phrase, action or body can turn into another, often at a terrible price. The death of Iphigenia becomes the death of Agamemnon. More broadly, in one of the Chorus’s most powerful images, Ares, the war god, is presented as a money changer who ‘trades men into jars’ filled with ash. The living ...

Our Flexible Friends

Conor Gearty, 18 April 1996

Scott Inquiry Report 
by Richard Scott.
HMSO, 2386 pp., £45, February 1996, 0 10 262796 7
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... made it so attractive to government that it became virtually unrepealable despite this explicit death wish. The problem posed by the cessation of hostilities with Germany and Japan in 1945 was met by a timely emphasis on the newly arrived Cold War ‘emergency’, and there matters stood in the decades that followed, with one bout of paranoia after another ...

Notes on a Notebook

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 September 1999

... you do well to forget your own advice. 2. Last April I began to write an account of the life and death of Rosemary Nelson, a 40-year-old solicitor in the town of Lurgan in County Armagh. At 12.40 p.m. on 15 March she got into her car outside her house at 5 Ashgrove Grange. As she drove away a bomb went off in the car. She lost both legs and suffered fatal ...

Gotcha, Pat!

Terry Castle: Highsmith in My Head, 4 March 2021

Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith 
by Richard Bradford.
Bloomsbury, 258 pp., £20, January 2021, 978 1 4482 1790 8
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... Screeched and pranced around the Rotunda like an inebriated baby goat? Beaten a policeman to death? I could be wrong, but I don’t think so. Imagining something and doing it are two different things – or so I, like Caliban, would like to believe. Thought is free.Of course, Highsmith was unsurpassed at depicting such destructive self-abandon, above ...

Seventy Years in a Colourful Trade

Andrew O’Hagan: The Soho Alphabet, 16 July 2020

Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia 
by Darren Coffield.
Unbound, 364 pp., £25, April 2020, 978 1 78352 816 5
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... I sat at the bar with Douglas Gordon while he drew me pictures of devils (I have them somewhere). Sarah Lucas and I walked the streets in search of more drink after Damien Hirst told Will Self to ‘crack a fucking smile’. I think I sang with Milli Vanilli. Life coaches will tell you that nothing interesting happens after three o’clock in the ...

Where am I in all this?

Michael Newton: Pola Negri, 19 February 2015

Pola Negri: Hollywood’s First Femme Fatale 
by Mariusz Kotowski.
Kentucky, 322 pp., £29.95, April 2014, 978 0 8131 4488 7
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... own words that her models were the divas of opera and theatre, or the great dancers of ballet: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse et al (silent movies are much closer to ballet and grand theatre than they are to Breaking Bad). Both Bernhardt and Duse offered the young Negri the same melancholy advice: one could choose perfection of the life or perfection of ...