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Babylon with Bananas

Michael Newton: Tarzan's best friend, 29 January 2009

Me Cheeta: The Autobiography 
by Cheeta.
Fourth Estate, 320 pp., £16.99, October 2008, 978 0 00 727863 3
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... of the book, and it makes constant capital-lettered appearances, from the episode in which a Black Mamba is loose on the boat that brings Cheeta to America to dancer Tosca Roulien getting knocked down by John Huston’s car. According to Cheeta, and he should know, the contradictions in human feelings about Death appear most vividly in our paradoxical ...

Un-Roman Ways

Michael Kulikowski: The Last Days of Rome, 24 September 2009

428 AD: An Ordinary Year at the End of the Roman Empire 
by Giusto Traina, translated by Allan Cameron.
Princeton, 203 pp., £16.95, May 2009, 978 0 691 13669 1
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... local powers and odd, un-Roman ways of doing things. In Anatolia, the Pyrenees, the Vosges and the Black Forest, the Welsh marches and Yorkshire moors, archaeology and the occasional literary source show us patterns of settlement and society that no longer look towards, or even acknowledge the existence of an imperial centre, as they had done 50 years ...

So Caucasian

Emily Wilson: ZZ Packer, 1 April 2004

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere 
by ZZ Packer.
Canongate, 238 pp., £9.99, February 2004, 1 84195 478 0
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... each of the stories shows the importance of race, they all challenge the assumptions that to be black must mean feeling like a loser, and that feeling like a loser is always caused by being black. Blackness does not always imply defeat, and alienation can’t always be explained by race. In several stories, a ...

Elsinore’s Star Bullshitter

Michael Dobson, 13 September 2018

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness 
by Rhodri Lewis.
Princeton, 365 pp., £30, November 2017, 978 0 691 16684 1
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... side of the space, it turned out that these figures were not as dead as the young male corpse in black, set apart from the others, might have feared or hoped. Selectively revived in turns by a sort of black mass (performed by a coven of witches evidently visiting from Dunsinane), the cast of Hamlet were compelled once more ...

Marvellous Money

Michael Wood: Eça de Queirós, 3 January 2008

The Maias: Episodes from Romantic Life 
by José Maria Eça de Queirós, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Dedalus, 714 pp., £15, March 2007, 978 1 903517 53 6
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... of galoshes; they had wandered into the hip-bath. All of them were in the same format, wrapped in black binding like battle-armour, sullen and aggressive. The walls were resplendent, decked with cards printed in coloured lettering that irradiated harsh verses from Scripture, stern moral counsels, cries from the psalms, insolent threats of hell-fire. And in ...

Hope in the Desert

Eric Foner: Democratic Party Blues, 12 May 2022

What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party 
by Michael Kazin.
Farrar, Straus, 396 pp., $35, March, 978 0 374 20023 7
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... to be fed up with the Democrats’ inability to get bills through Congress.In What It Took to Win, Michael Kazin traces the history over the past two centuries of what he calls ‘the oldest mass party in the world’. Kazin has been engaged with Democratic politics since 1960, when, at the age of twelve, he sported a large campaign button for John ...

Diary

Elisa Segrave: Is this what it’s like to be famous?, 11 May 1995

... offices without appointments, leaving my book like a cuckoo laying eggs. In one office a friendly black receptionist gave me a copy of Caroline Blackwood’s account of the Duchess of Windsor and her French lawyer, Maître Blum. The girl dismissed my interest in a history of the Harlem Renaissance, repeating how much she loved the book on the Duchess. I read ...

Reasons for thinking that war is a good thing

Eric Foner: The death of Liberalism, 27 June 2002

The Strange Death of American Liberalism 
by H.W. Brands.
Yale, 200 pp., £16, January 2002, 0 300 09021 8
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... the Elder struck political gold during the 1988 Presidential campaign by castigating his opponent, Michael Dukakis, as a liberal, virtually no American politician will voluntarily accept the label. One unlikely exception is Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s new billionaire Republican Mayor, who during the campaign ...

Cartwheels down the aisle

Barbara Newman: Byzantine Intersectionality, 26 September 2024

Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender and Race in the Middle Ages 
by Roland Betancourt.
Princeton, 274 pp., £28, March 2023, 978 0 691 24354 2
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... an artificial vagina. But this was one procedure no one dared attempt.The 11th-century philosopher Michael Psellus anticipated contemporary thought in treating gender as a spectrum rather than a binary. Here Betancourt’s close attention to the nuances of Greek literary language pays off. Psellus claimed to have a compassionate, deeply emotional – and ...

Maggie’s Hobby

Nicholas Hiley, 11 December 1997

New cloak, Old dagger: How Britain’s Spies Came in from the Cold 
by Michael Smith.
Gollancz, 338 pp., £20, November 1996, 0 575 06150 2
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Intelligence Power in Peace and War 
by Michael Herman.
Cambridge, 436 pp., £50, October 1996, 0 521 56231 7
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UK Eyes Alpha 
by Mark Urban.
Faber, 320 pp., £16.99, September 1996, 0 571 17689 5
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... invested in the War Loan, to protect their finances against any postwar Labour government. As Michael Smith describes, these problems were exacerbated by the budget cuts which followed the end of hostilities. In 1919, MI5’s annual grant dropped from £100,000 to £30,000, forcing it into unsavoury alliances with the political Right. It recruited Maxwell ...

Mini-Whoppers

Patrick Parrinder, 7 July 1988

Forty Stories 
by Donald Barthelme.
Secker, 256 pp., £10.95, April 1988, 0 436 03424 7
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Tiny Lies 
by Kate Pullinger.
Cape, 174 pp., £9.95, April 1988, 0 224 02560 0
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Ellen Foster 
by Kaye Gibbons.
Cape, 146 pp., £9.95, May 1988, 0 224 02529 5
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After the War 
by Frederick Raphael.
Collins, 528 pp., £11.95, April 1988, 0 00 223352 5
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... is cut out in proof. Connors, like his editor, is probably more interested in Edwina, the gorgeous black model who answers his contact advertisement for people who have been struck by lightning. Edwina not only agrees to Connors’s request to have her photograph taken, but graciously offers to take him home for a back rub. Edwina apart, the other people who ...

Ripping Yarns

John Sutherland, 8 April 1993

Tennyson 
by Michael Thorn.
Little, Brown, 566 pp., £18.99, October 1992, 0 316 90299 3
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Tennyson 
by Peter Levi.
Macmillan, 370 pp., £20, March 1993, 0 333 52205 2
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... young Alfred grew up: the alcoholism, madness and opium addiction. Under this family regime of ‘black-bloodedness’ (a term which Charles Tennyson popularised) ‘the boyish self-confidence disappeared and Alfred became subject to those moods of self-torment and remorse which are not uncommon in boys of sensitive nature.’ Happily in later life, the poet ...

Looking after men

Nicholas Spice, 9 July 1987

The Present Moment 
by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye.
Heinemann, 155 pp., £9.95, July 1987, 0 434 44027 2
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Memory of Departure 
by Abdulrazak Gurnah.
Cape, 159 pp., £9.95, April 1987, 0 224 02432 9
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You can’t get lost in Cape Town 
by Zöe Wicomb.
Virago, 184 pp., £3.95, May 1987, 0 86068 820 8
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... to which it belongs. However, access to these possibilities is severely restricted. For a young black girl in Nyeri, in the years just following the First World War, the choice is stark and simple: ‘picking coffee or looking after men’. Since picking coffee is the way of ‘choosing for yourself’, Wairimu picks coffee, an independence that ensures her ...

Forster in Cambridge

Richard Shone, 30 July 2020

... King’s chapel was a ‘folie de grandeur’ – the college had, he thought, been hoodwinked by Michael Jaffé, the Rubens expert – and did not suit the chapel’s interior (‘too coloured’). He said that Roger Fry had taught him all he knew about pictures – save ‘my own feelings about them’. Another meeting came about through the young painter ...

Whoopers and Shouters

James Morone: William Jennings Bryan, 21 February 2008

A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan 
by Michael Kazin.
Anchor, 374 pp., $16.95, March 2007, 978 0 385 72056 4
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... the role of Bryan and the director kept saying: ‘More pompous, Morone. Make him more pompous.’ Michael Kazin is a fine historian who specialises in the lost causes of the left. He has written sympathetic books on the Populist movement and the 1960s. In A Godly Hero, his life of Bryan, he now draws an unexpected conclusion: defying capitalists and defending ...

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