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Secrets are best kept by those who have no sense of humour

Alan Bennett: Why I turned down ‘Big Brother’, 2 January 2003

... one imagines, by John Bayley, whose efforts on behalf of his late wife and her reputation make Max Clifford seem timid and retiring. One lesson of this deplorable business is never to sanction the shooting of any video, however lofty its purpose, because once shot it will be shown. Professor Hodges seems to have arrived at his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s ...

A Djinn speaks

Colm Tóibín: What about George Yeats?, 20 February 2003

Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats 
by Ann Saddlemyer.
Oxford, 808 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 19 811232 7
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... and you must not.’ The figure of Maud in the automatic writing was the ‘Bird with white & black head & wings’. She was ‘dangerous . . . Nothing must be said unless she speaks of it – then simply say you are destroying the souls of hundreds of young men. That method is most wicked in this country – wholesale slaughter because a few are cruel ...

Selflessness

Jonathan Rée, 8 May 1997

Proper Names 
by Emmanuel Levinas, translated by Michael Smith.
Athlone, 191 pp., £45, January 1997, 0 485 11466 6
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Levinas: An Introduction 
by Colin Davis.
Polity, 168 pp., £39.50, November 1996, 0 7456 1262 8
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Basic Philosophical Writings 
by Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi.
Indiana, 201 pp., £29.50, November 1996, 0 253 21079 8
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... recognise them as exceeding the limits of our own experience, and hence to confront a nauseating black hole within our everyday self-satisfactions. The subjectivity of others is essentially ‘impenetrable’, and ‘radically refractory’ to our understanding. ‘No consciousness can even conceive of a consciousness other than itself,’ Sartre said. We ...

Liquidator

Neal Ascherson: Hugh Trevor-Roper, 19 August 2010

Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Weidenfeld, 598 pp., £25, July 2010, 978 0 297 85214 8
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... he attacked the whole Religion and the Rise of Capitalism orthodoxy established by R.H. Tawney and Max Weber. The question for him was not why capitalism emerged in Protestant countries but why it did not emerge in Catholic Europe after the Counter-Reformation. Widening his focus, he denounced another received version: that the intellectual pedigree of the ...

I have washed my feet out of it

Hilary Mantel: Growing up in Ghana, 21 October 2004

Hustling Is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl 
by John Chernoff.
Chicago, 480 pp., £16, January 2004, 0 226 10352 8
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Exchange Is Not Robbery: More Stories of an African Bar Girl 
by John Chernoff.
Chicago, 425 pp., £16, November 2004, 0 226 10355 2
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Purple Hibiscus 
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Fourth Estate, 307 pp., £12.99, March 2004, 0 00 717611 2
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... this. Because Hawa is telling him clearly: ‘I know – every man, every kind of man, it’s not black or white, it’s any kind of man; they are just like a dog. He can go out and do whatever he likes.’ From time to time, expatriate men offer bed and board. Sometimes it turns into a lengthy relationship. For a year she is with ‘Nigel Manners’, a ...

The Monster Plot

Thomas Powers: James Angleton, Spymaster, 10 May 2018

The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton 
by Jefferson Morley.
Scribe, 336 pp., £20, December 2017, 978 1 911344 73 5
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... sent her four-page letter to the Post. Instead, a year later she sent a copy of the letter to Max Holland, a long-time student of the Warren Commission, who recently sent me a copy. Roman also wrote to Jeremy Gunn, the executive director of the JFK Assassination Records Review Board, telling him she had agreed to the interview with Morley ‘against my ...

The Magic Bloomschtick

Colin Burrow: Harold Bloom, 21 November 2019

The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon 
by Harold Bloom, edited by David Mikics.
Library of America, 426 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 1 59853 640 9
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... by the reaction to his earlier book into seeing a wider world of writing. There are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, Jay Wright) as well as on 12 women writers. Toni Morrison (‘a child of Faulkner’) is given shorter shrift than she deserves and told off for being ideological, but ...

What else actually is there?

Jenny Turner: On Gillian Rose, 7 November 2024

Love’s Work 
by Gillian Rose.
Penguin, 112 pp., £9.99, March 2024, 978 0 241 94549 0
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Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory 
by Gillian Rose, edited by Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson.
Verso, 176 pp., £16.99, September 2024, 978 1 80429 011 8
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... then you will understand the trrragedy’ – to a student who claimed not to see the point of Max.‘Andrew, with your Kant worrrrk’, ‘Sara, your labours with Krrristeva’, ‘Tony, with your worrrk on Fichte’: four or five of us took every class Rose would give us, and obviously, I called us the Rosettes. Ridiculous, I used to think, addressing ...

Alan Bennett chooses four paintings for schools

Alan Bennett: Studying the Form, 2 April 1998

... and Gossaert has painted his own name below it (and again on the neck ornament of Balthazar’s black servant). On the right, Melchior is waiting with his presentation, rather precariously balanced in his limp hand. The detail is such that one can distinguish the hairs on the mole on Caspar’s cheek. Above the scene, and in another order of things, the ...

Is Michael Neve paranoid?

Michael Neve, 2 June 1983

... for insanity and the ‘insane act’. As for the extremely influential degenerationist writing of Max Nordau, it surely must be seen in its own terms – as an example of paranoia as a wish, even a dream, come true. In Degeneration, dedicated to the criminologist and psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, Nordau sees the 20th century as a death rattle, not for ...

We came, we saw, he died

Jackson Lears: Clinton’s Creed, 5 February 2015

Hard Choices 
by Hillary Clinton.
Simon and Schuster, 635 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 1 4711 3150 9
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HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton 
by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
Hutchinson, 440 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 0 09 195448 2
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... However empty his promises proved to be, Americans can congratulate themselves on having elected a black man; now, in the feel-good world of identity politics, it’s time to elect a woman. Who else but Hillary Clinton? Clinton’s Hard Choices is the quintessential candidate’s memoir, a 600-page doorstopper detailing her four years as secretary of state ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Did in 2015, 7 January 2016

... soon flags and nobody seems to mind if I say the same thing three times over with three minutes max per interview. It’s all very jolly, some of them shake hands and there are occasional selfies, but even when we’ve been at it an hour we haven’t reached the end of the line. Then we are called inside to be shepherded with Maggie Smith through the foyer ...

Where could I emote?

Bee Wilson: Looking for Al Pacino, 26 June 2025

Sonny Boy: A Memoir 
by Al Pacino.
Century, 369 pp., £25, October 2024, 978 1 5299 1262 3
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... If you can swallow your embarrassment, there is much to enjoy in the way he turns up every dial to max and then turns it up a little bit more, assisted by Chris O’Donnell as a surprisingly effective straight guy. To me, Heat is a stranger case. Pacino puts in a bizarrely strident and overblown performance as the cop to Robert de Niro’s robber. De Niro is ...

Serious Mayhem

Simon Reynolds: The McLaren Strand, 10 March 2022

The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren: The Biography 
by Paul Gorman.
Constable, 855 pp., £14.99, November 2021, 978 1 4721 2111 0
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... way. We didn’t know the song had originally been written and performed by the light entertainer Max Bygraves, but intuited that McLaren’s version was an assault on the middle-aged and middle of the road. Elsewhere on the record, Sid Vicious too defiled showbiz with his punk take on ‘My Way’, twisting Sinatra’s swagger into psychopathic ...

The Ostrich Defence

Azadeh Moaveni: Trafficking Antiquities, 5 October 2023

... context, but also fuelled more serious crime. ‘That means violence, bribery, depravity, black market, dirty money.’The Louvre’s director at the time, Jean-Luc Martinez, seems to have done nothing with these findings. According to a report by the Office Central de Lutte contre le Trafic des Biens Culturels, quoted in Libération, Martinez was ...

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