Alma’s Alter

Gabriele Annan, 11 June 1992

Oscar Kokoschka: Letters 
translated by Mary Whittall.
Thames and Hudson, 320 pp., £24.95, March 1992, 0 500 01528 7Show More
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“... War. He insisted that every detail of Alma’s anatomy should be correct, and when he finally took delivery of her replica, it accompanied him everywhere: to restaurants and even to the theatre, where he would book a seat for it. This weird episode is relevant to a letter of 17 April 1928 to Anna Kallin: My friends in Morocco tried various arguments to ...”

George’s Hand

Dinah Birch, 7 March 1996

A Son at the Front 
by Edith Wharton.
Northern Illinois, 223 pp., $26, November 1995, 0 87580 203 6Show More
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“... charity worker. She created jobs for unemployed women, ran restaurants to feed refugees, took responsibility for six hundred orphans fleeing occupied Belgium. France awarded her the cross of the Legion of Honour. The literary establishment was not so grateful. Her writings about the war were less successful than the earlier novels of manners. A Son ...”

Diary

Christopher Hadley: The Lake Taupo Stamp, 18 September 1997

“... at an alarming rate. Much later, he wrote in Philately magazine about the find: One evening ... I took down from its shelf my old schoolboy collection of stamps, wondering and hoping that the whole lot might make a couple of pounds. Turning over the pages I came across one which had a solitary stamp mounted in the middle of it. Why it was stuck on a page to ...”

On Thatcher

“... what she liked, and her own part in the Heathite reign of error only magnified her disgust. As John Ranelagh, who once worked for her at the Conservative Research Department, says, she was no intellectual. His book purports to be about the people who did her intellectual work for her, and what they undoubtedly had in common was the conviction that the ...”

Tasty Butterflies

Richard Fortey: Entomologists, 24 September 2009

Bugs and the Victorians 
by J.F.M. Clark.
Yale, 322 pp., £25, June 2009, 978 0 300 15091 9Show More
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“... John Lubbock, Liberal MP and social reformer (he introduced the bank holiday into law in 1871), was also the founding father of scientific anthropology and an obsessive entomologist. Of his many books, the most successful, Ants, Bees and Wasps, ran to 18 editions. In 1872, he presented a wasp that he had tamed (allegedly) to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science ...”

Pound & Co.

August Kleinzahler: Davenport and Kenner, 26 September 2019

Questioning Minds: Vols I-II: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner 
edited by Edward Burns.
Counterpoint, 1817 pp., $95, October 2018, 978 1 61902 181 5Show More
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“... Davenport ended up teaching at Haverford College in Pennsylvania for two years and then took a job at the University of Kentucky, ‘the remotest offer with the most pay’. He taught there for 27 years; in 1973 Kenner moved on to Johns Hopkins for 17 years, and finally, in 1990, to the University of Georgia for a decade. By 1977, the exchange of ...”

Devils Everywhere

David Wootton: The Terrors of the Night, 9 March 2006

At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime 
by Roger Ekirch.
Weidenfeld, 447 pp., £20, June 2005, 0 297 82992 0Show More
Saving the Daylight: Why We Put the Clocks Forward 
by David Prerau.
Granta, 256 pp., £14.99, October 2005, 1 86207 796 7Show More
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“... history of nighttime, which draws on accounts of the dark in early modern Europe. In a recent LRB John Demos pondered the perils of popular history, in which events constantly drive the story onwards, in which interpretations receive short shrift, in which character and personality trump situation and circumstance. Ekirch has written a book that anybody with ...”

The Journalistic Exemption

Jo Glanville: GDPR and Journalism, 5 July 2018

“... that used his services. In March this year, the self-confessed blagger turned whistleblower John Ford revealed the tactics he had used over a period of 15 years up to 2010 to obtain information illegally for newspapers; on one occasion he impersonated William Hague on the phone to get access to his bank account. Many believe that such malpractice ...”

Taking sides

Karl Miller, 17 April 1980

W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet 
by Charles Osborne.
Eyre Methuen, 336 pp., £7.95, March 1980, 0 413 39670 3Show More
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“... merely to be pure in heart. Before long, Isherwood too was waving this phrase about as a panacea. John Layard was revered as the one man who was pure in heart, who was therefore without guilt or fear, and consequently unable to contract disease, and who was profoundly, fundamentally happy. When Auden told Isherwood that in Berlin were to be found not only ...”

Room for the Lambs

Elizabeth Spelman: Sexual equality, 26 January 2006

Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws 
by Catharine MacKinnon.
Harvard, 558 pp., £25.95, March 2005, 0 674 01540 1Show More
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“... she knew it to have arisen. Though she would not want to be caught in a political dalliance with John Stuart Mill, MacKinnon would surely second his claim that ‘the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal.’ But MacKinnon is not without concern that many women suffer from such equiphobia as well – or rather, that ...”

Diary

Jeremy Harding: Hitchens, 31 March 2011

“... seldom meets with moderation and when he does, it’s apt to give way to exasperation. And so John Barrell, reviewing his book on Tom Paine (LRB, 30 November 2006): Rights of Man (not The Rights of Man, as Hitchens persistently calls it) was written as an answer to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Hitchens tells us that among others ...”

Destroy the Miracle!

Lorna Scott Fox: Manuel Rivas, 19 May 2011

Books Burn Badly 
by Manuel Rivas, translated by Jonathan Dunne.
Vintage, 592 pp., £8.99, February 2011, 978 0 09 952033 7Show More
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“... the docks by leaping over the flames (as one jumps over the bonfire to fend off evil spirits on St John’s night), and he and his best friend, Luís Terranova, an extrovert tango singer and his temperamental opposite, go into hiding for the rest of the war. Some time later Luís is taken as a sexual pet by the local censor, Commander Dez, who, like many of ...”

Diary

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Karl Miller Remembered, 9 October 2014

“... that I would have to end it, if I couldn’t get my sentences sorted. Eventually I sorted them and took the piece to the Statesman’s office in Great Turnstile. When Karl had read it he said: ‘You’re a writer now.’ He was liable to make patriarchal remarks of that kind, and for better or worse – either way it’s a confession – I was very ...”

Not Just the Money

Mattathias Schwartz: Cybermafia, 5 July 2012

DarkMarket: How Hackers Became the New Mafia 
by Misha Glenny.
Vintage, 432 pp., £8.95, July 2012, 978 0 09 954655 9Show More
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“... three ambitious histories of the region. His fourth book, McMafia, examined how the underworld took advantage of globalisation in the 1990s, establishing partnerships and franchises in the manner of their corporate counterparts. In DarkMarket, Glenny traces a virtual landscape that maps onto familiar political geography, explaining, for instance, how the ...”

At Tate Britain

Julian Bell: John Everett Millais, 15 November 2007

“... concerns of the one-time infant prodigy who, after his youthful dalliance with ideology, took his manager wife and their eight children on an upward social trajectory, seem to have been hard work and sound professional practice. A self-portrait of 1880, requested of the maestro by the Uffizi, records a bland incurious glance at the mirror; but that ...”
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