California Noir

Michael Rogin: Destroying Los Angeles, 19 August 1999

Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster 
by Mike Davis.
Picador, 484 pp., £18.99, June 1999, 9780330372190
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... the map of concentric urban zones drawn in the Twenties by the Chicago School sociologist, Ernest W. Burgess, and a future Los Angeles segregated along the stratifying dimensions of land value, class, race and fear. A ‘Core City’ homeless containment zone sits at the centre of an inner city surrounded by a circle of decaying blue-collar ...

War in our Time

A.J.P. Taylor, 5 August 1982

... time. Later it was deplored by such differing authorities as Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Ernest Bevin. The transformation of Russia into a Soviet Empire ranks, I suppose, as the most significant change caused by the First World War. The enthusiasms which the war generated at first faded before the war ended. There was much talk of its being a war to ...
Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered 
by William Pritchard.
Oxford, 186 pp., £14.95, March 1985, 0 19 503462 7
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... Pritchard elucidates in this characteristically direct, helpful, teacherly summary: ‘The phrase may accommodate either an underlining of “sound” or of “sense”, thereby setting up a playful shuttling between the poem as communicating something, some grain of wisdom or truth about the world (the sound of sense), and the poem as wholly embodying that ...

Revolution and Enlightenment in France

Simon Schama, 20 December 1979

The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the ‘Encyclopédie’ 1775-1800 
by Robert Darnton.
Harvard, 624 pp., £13, September 1979, 0 674 08786 0
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... shifting social forces, the Enlightenment could be no more than an expression of that movement: in Ernest Labrousse’s awesome phrase, ‘la prise de conscience bourgeoise’. The Philosophes were correspondingly relegated to the role of window-dressers for the ascendant power of the bourgeoisie. One of the many satisfying results of Robert Darnton’s ...

Bardic

Richard Wollheim, 22 June 1995

Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society 
by Meyer Schapiro.
Braziller, 253 pp., £19.95, October 1994, 0 8076 1356 8
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... by debate. Each man chose a team, with an eye on victory. Schapiro’s team, which consisted of Ernest Nagel, the philosopher of science at Columbia, and A.J. Ayer, represented positivism de pur sang. In addition to these painstaking analyses, the essay contains the suggestion that the most fruitful way of looking at any theory of unity is to regard it, not ...

You can have it for a penny

Malcolm Gaskill: ‘Agent Sonya’, 6 January 2022

Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy 
by Ben Macintyre.
Viking, 377 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 0 241 40850 6
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... after Michael Gold, an American communist acquaintance who was once told to go fuck himself by Ernest Hemingway, whom Gold had called out for class treachery). They moved to a spacious villa, which they furnished nicely. Kuczynski was now both the pleasant provincial wife of a municipal architect and a secret agent. Sorge was fond of fast ...

Swank and Swagger

Ferdinand Mount: Deals with the Pasha, 26 May 2022

Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East 
by Jonathan Parry.
Princeton, 453 pp., £35, April, 978 0 691 18189 9
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... and free trade – Thatcherism avant la lettre. Urquhart’s view was mirrored 150 years later by Ernest Gellner in Plough, Sword and Book: ‘all these features seem highly congruent with an urban bourgeois lifestyle and with commercialism’; Islam was in fact ‘closer in many ways to the ideals and requirements of modernity than those of any other world ...

Selfie with ‘Sunflowers’

Julian Barnes, 30 July 2015

Ever Yours: The Essential Letters 
by Vincent van Gogh, edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker.
Yale, 777 pp., £30, December 2014, 978 0 300 20947 1
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Van Gogh: A Power Seething 
by Julian Bell.
Amazon, 171 pp., £6.99, January 2015, 978 1 4778 0129 1
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... for example, once dreamed the whole of Impressionism. As Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in May 1888, When good père Corot said a few days before he died: last night I saw in my dreams landscapes with entirely pink skies, well, didn’t they come, those pink skies, and yellow and green into the bargain, in Impressionist landscapes? All this is to say ...

The doughboy moved in

Laura Beers: Multicultural Britain, 7 March 2019

Mixing It: Diversity in World War Two Britain 
by Wendy Webster.
Oxford, 336 pp., £26, March 2018, 978 0 19 873576 2
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Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain 
by Jordanna Bailkin.
Oxford, 304 pp., £30, July 2018, 978 0 19 881421 4
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... bars’ in many British clubs and dance halls during the war, ‘however convenient it may have been to blame white Americans for the[ir] introduction’. The Casino dance hall in Warrington was forced to shutter its doors after its manager refused to bar coloured servicemen from the club, as requested to by a US army officer. Shortly before the ...

Vampire to Victim

Nina Auerbach: The Cult of Zelda, 19 June 2003

Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise 
by Sally Cline.
Murray, 492 pp., £25, September 2003, 0 7195 5466 7
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... family from which Scott had been her escape. Zelda lived to please, but nobody much liked her. Ernest Hemingway, who detested women writers, saw her as an insane harpy who destroyed Scott’s work. Though Cline insists, often on flimsy evidence, that Zelda was an authentic artist, she is fair-minded enough to surround her with women who really did make ...

Mad Monk

Jenny Diski: Not going to the movies, 6 February 2003

The New Biographical Dictionary of Film 
by David Thomson.
Little, Brown, 963 pp., £25, November 2002, 0 316 85905 2
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Nobody’s Perfect: Writings from the ‘New Yorker’ 
by Anthony Lane.
Picador, 752 pp., £15.99, November 2002, 0 330 49182 2
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Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film 
by Peter Wollen.
Verso, 314 pp., £13, December 2002, 1 85984 391 3
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... mostly long gone and others not notable for their movie credits – Karl Lagerfeld, Walker Evans, Ernest Shackleton and Lego. In Thomson’s view film ought to be enough to detain a film-loving writer, but it isn’t. Perhaps Lane is merely keeping his options open and, who knows, doesn’t want to be a writer exclusively on film. The diversity is ...

The Housekeeper of a World-Shattering Theory

Jenny Diski: Mrs Freud, 23 March 2006

Martha Freud: A Biography 
by Katja Behling, translated by R.D.V. Glasgow.
Polity, 206 pp., £25, January 2006, 0 7456 3338 2
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... his works seriously could ever really believe in: the ordinary, undamaged specimen. According to Ernest Jones, ‘her personality was fully developed and well integrated: it would well deserve the psychoanalysts’ highest compliment of being “normal”.’ No problem for Martha coming to terms with her missing penis at the right stage of her ...

Formication

Daniel Soar: Harry Mathews, 21 July 2005

My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 
by Harry Mathews.
Dalkey Archive, 203 pp., £8.99, July 2005, 1 56478 392 8
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... and the Oulipo’, Mathews gives an account of a befuddled ethnolinguist called Ernest Botherby who, encountering two undiscovered New Guinean tribes, tried to explain to one the existence of the other. He was hindered by the fact that the language of each tribe contained only three words, which could be used to express only a single ...

Be flippant

David Edgar: Noël Coward’s Return, 9 December 1999

1956 and All That 
by Dan Reballato.
Routledge, 265 pp., £40, February 1999, 0 415 18938 1
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Collected Plays: Six 
by Noël Coward.
Methuen, 415 pp., £9.99, April 1999, 0 413 73410 2
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Collected Plays: Seven 
by Noël Coward.
Methuen, 381 pp., £9.99, April 1999, 0 413 73410 2
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Collected Revue Sketches and Parodies 
by Noël Coward.
Methuen, 282 pp., £9.99, April 1999, 0 413 73390 4
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Noël Coward: A Life in Quotes 
edited by Barry Day.
Metro, 116 pp., £9.99, November 1999, 9781900512848
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Noël Coward: The Complete Lyrics 
Methuen, 352 pp., £30, December 1998, 0 413 73230 4Show More
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... a financial issue in Design for Living (1932), and a parent-figure in Gilda’s outsider husband Ernest, but essentially the contest is between a ménage and its trois. In the later comedies the hero juggles the delights of sex as against solitude: in Present Laughter (1934) he prefers his women absent, and in Blithe Spirit (1941) wishes they were ...

A Plan and a Man

Neal Ascherson: Remembering Malaya, 20 February 2014

Massacre in Malaya: Exposing Britain’s My Lai 
by Christopher Hale.
History Press, 432 pp., £25, October 2013, 978 0 7524 8701 4
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... extorted concessions from the British by brandishing Cold War threats of communist expansion. As Ernest Bevin said when he was foreign secretary, ‘Our support of nationalism in South and South-East Asia provides the best possible counter to communist subversion and penetration.’ Merdeka – independence – was finally granted in 1957, well before the ...