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Impossible Conception

T.J. Reed: ‘Death in Venice’, 25 September 2014

Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach 
by Philip Kitcher.
Columbia, 254 pp., £20.50, November 2013, 978 0 02 311626 1
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... palatable to the middle classes’. The novella’s effect was all the stronger for not being – Philip Kitcher misreads it – about ‘a closet homosexual’ who has ‘refused to acknowledge his sexual inclinations’. Unlike his fully self-aware creator, who, though never a practising homosexual (‘how can one sleep with men?’ he asked in a 1950 diary ...

Against Hellenocentrism

Peter Green: Persia v. the West, 8 August 2013

Trouble in the West: Egypt and the Persian Empire, 525-332 BC 
by Stephen Ruzicka.
Oxford, 311 pp., £45, April 2012, 978 0 19 976662 8
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King and Court in Ancient Persia 559 to 331 BCE 
by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones.
Edinburgh, 258 pp., £24.99, January 2013, 978 0 7486 4125 3
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... intellectual centre; and the final disruption and takeover of the Persian empire (335-23) by the short-lived and ambiguously Hellenic world conqueror Alexander III of Macedon. These extraordinary events – and the Greek writers who, propagandists all, preserved them for posterity – dictated, in definitive and compelling fashion, the triumph, over two ...

What does China want?

Jonathan Steele: China in the Stans, 24 October 2013

Restless Valley: Revolution, Murder and Intrigue in the Heart of Central Asia 
by Philip Shishkin.
Yale, 316 pp., £20, June 2013, 978 0 300 18436 5
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The Chinese Question in Central Asia: Domestic Order, Social Change and the Chinese Factor 
by Marlène Laruelle and Sébastien Peyrouse.
Hurst, 271 pp., £40, October 2012, 978 1 84904 179 9
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... group which operated out of the mountains in Tajikistan and northern districts of Afghanistan, was short-lived. There were a number of incursions into Kyrgyzstan in 1999 and 2000, but several hundred of its members were killed fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. While the Taliban were able to relaunch their movement a few years later, the ...

Up the Garden Path

R.W. Johnson: Michael Foot, 26 April 2007

Michael Foot: A Life 
by Kenneth O. Morgan.
Harper, 568 pp., £25, March 2007, 978 0 00 717826 1
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... Bevan as a monumental study of ‘the man and his socialism’. It is repeatedly contrasted with Philip Williams’s biography of Gaitskell, always in order to say how much better Foot’s book is – it being understood that Foot was a Bevanite, Williams a Gaitskellite. Once in full flow Morgan writes in the same windy, cadenced way as Foot: ‘Foot’s ...

Martinique in Burbank

David Thomson: Bogart and Bacall, 19 October 2023

Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair 
by William J. Mann.
HarperCollins, 634 pp., £35, August, 978 0 06 302639 1
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... biographer Todd McCarthy observed, this was the ‘decisive film’ in Hawks’s career. In two short weeks, it seems, Bacall acquired the husky voice we all know. And you can’t beat the lines Jules Furthman gave her – sometimes picking up on things Slim Hawks had said. Bacall was young, but she looked and sounded ancient in her wisdom – and she ...

No Light on in the House

August Kleinzahler: Richard Brautigan Revisited, 14 December 2000

An Unfortunate Woman 
by Richard Brautigan.
Rebel Inc, 110 pp., £12, July 2000, 1 84195 023 8
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Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-70 
by Richard Brautigan.
Rebel Inc, 146 pp., £6.99, June 2000, 1 84195 027 0
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You Can't Catch Death 
by Ianthe Brautigan.
Rebel Inc, 209 pp., £14.99, July 2000, 1 84195 025 4
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... identify the author, but these, too, have grown faint. Revenge of the Lawn is a collection of short fiction written between 1962 and 1970, 62 pieces over 160 pages. The longest of them run to five pages. Several are only half a page or less. A few are mildly charming. Brautigan is puppyish and sometimes endearing when he effuses over a new girlfriend: he ...

Refugees from the Past

James Meek: Jameson on Chandler, 5 January 2017

Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 87 pp., £12.99, July 2016, 978 1 78478 216 0
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... novels Raymond Chandler wrote between 1939 and 1953 featuring the Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe, and the best-known film adaptation of any of them, the 1946 movie of the first book, The Big Sleep, have helped to shape the perception of what America was like in the 1940s and early 1950s. The film is dark and menacing – Fredric Jameson writes ...

Just a smack at Grigson

Denis Donoghue, 7 March 1985

Montaigne’s Tower, and Other Poems 
by Geoffrey Grigson.
Secker, 72 pp., £5.95, October 1984, 0 436 18806 6
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Collected Poems: 1963-1980 
by Geoffrey Grigson.
Allison and Busby, 256 pp., £4.95, October 1984, 0 85031 557 3
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The Faber Book of Reflective Verse 
edited by Geoffrey Grigson.
Faber, 238 pp., £7.95, October 1984, 0 571 13299 5
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Blessings, Kicks and Curses 
by Geoffrey Grigson.
Allison and Busby, 279 pp., £4.95, October 1984, 0 85031 558 1
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The Private Art: A Poetry Notebook 
by Geoffrey Grigson.
Allison and Busby, 231 pp., £4.95, October 1984, 9780850315592
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Before the Romantics: An Anthology of the Enlightenment 
by Geoffrey Grigson.
Salamander, 349 pp., £5.95, September 1984, 0 907540 59 7
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... perhaps only six middling poets worth attending to – six poets in England (and as far as long or short sight tells me, fewer still in the United States).’ That every year new maggots make new flies is what Grigson’s report comes to. In one of the new poems, ‘April Values’, he urges us to be more exclusive: Let us not prefer Ashbery to Yeats, Let us ...

Who’s under the desk?

Siddhartha Deb: James Lasdun’s Novel, 7 March 2002

The Horned Man 
by James Lasdun.
Cape, 195 pp., £10.99, February 2002, 0 224 06217 4
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... has been explored with varying degrees of insight by writers as different as Francine Prose, Philip Roth, James Hynes and even Jonathan Franzen in the opening pages of The Corrections. The Horned Man, however, is concerned with the campus only up to a point: its world is not self-enclosed, and can hardly be so, set as the college is in a decaying ...

Spying on Writers

Christian Lorentzen, 11 October 2018

... and meant to bring attention to the cause anyway. As with Allen Ginsberg, the bureau stopped short of interviewing Sontag because they knew that an interview would only result in bad publicity when she inevitably wrote about it. Some of the files were opened as a result of the efforts of the writers themselves or their publishers. Bennett Cerf sought the ...

A Long Day at the Chocolate Bar Factory

James Wood: David Bezmozgis, 16 December 2004

‘Natasha’ and Other Stories 
by David Bezmozgis.
Cape, 147 pp., £10.99, August 2004, 0 224 07125 4
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... Chekhov may be divine, but he is responsible for much sinning on earth. The contemporary short story is essentially sub-Chekhovian. It is most obviously indebted to what Shklovsky called Chekhov’s ‘negative endings’: the way his stories expire into ellipses, or seem to end in the middle of a thought – ‘It was starting to rain ...

Made by the Revolution

Perry Anderson: Mao’s Right Hand, 12 September 2024

Zhou Enlai: A Life 
by Chen Jian.
Harvard, 817 pp., £29.95, May, 978 0 674 65958 2
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... Forward, but in neither case were most deaths deliberate. They were closer, as Mao’s biographer Philip Short put it, to what is legally defined as manslaughter.4 Conversion and mobilisation were the aims, not extermination. Of course, over time Mao’s gifts degenerated. His last significant essay, ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the ...

Nelly gets her due

John Sutherland, 8 November 1990

The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 317 pp., £16.99, October 1990, 0 670 82787 8
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The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant 
edited by Elisabeth Jay.
Oxford, 184 pp., £16.95, October 1990, 0 19 818615 0
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... I don’t handle divorce business.’ In general, scholarly investigators should follow Philip Marlowe’s rule. One feels degraded when Dickens’s private letters are subjected to infra-red photographic analysis (as they were in the 1950s). Beneath the crossings-out are references to Ellen Ternan, his mistress – or perhaps not his mistress ...

For a Lark

Patricia Beer, 21 March 1996

Hearts Undefeated: Women’s Writing of the Second World War 
edited by Jenny Hartley.
Virago, 302 pp., £12.99, May 1995, 9781853816710
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... us, it is natural that she should leave it out. It is relevant, however, to quote the opinion of Philip Larkin about poetry in wartime as it throws light on the weakness of much wartime prose. He certainly did not mean to comfort or console us either. He speaks harshly of poets whom we may have admired in our time: ‘A period which can laud the poetry of ...

Water, Water

Asa Briggs, 9 November 1989

The Conquest of Water: The Advent of Health in the Industrial Age 
by Jean-Pierre Goubert.
Polity, 300 pp., £25, April 1989, 0 7456 0508 7
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... came ubiquitous Perrier), and at least for the historically-initiated, water power: France was short of coal. There was a time, too, not all that long ago, when another aspect of French concern was expressed in the requirement to pay for water in the locked bathroom for which the key was always carefully kept locked away at the hotel or pension desk. A few ...

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