What We Have

David Bromwich: Tarantinisation, 4 February 1999

The Origins of Postmodernity 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 143 pp., £11, September 1998, 1 85984 222 4
Show More
The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-98 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 206 pp., £11, September 1998, 1 85984 182 1
Show More
Show More
... is compelled to treat as a second nature. This claim, too, had been made first in architecture, by Robert Venturi: ‘The main justification of the honky-tonk elements in the architectural order is their very existence. They are what we have.’ Eventually, Post-Modernism itself would be given a honky-tonk logo and shorthand promo: around 1992, its friends and ...

Too Many Alibis

James Wood: Geoffrey Hill, 1 July 1999

Canaan 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Penguin, 76 pp., £7.99, September 1996, 0 14 058786 1
Show More
The Truth of Love: A Poem 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Penguin, 82 pp., £8.99, January 1997, 0 14 058910 4
Show More
Show More
... in selected exemplars of the past, literary and moral. Some are familiar from his earlier work: Robert Southwell, Ruskin, the Church Fathers, Boethius, the Book of Daniel, ‘the solitary great ones – Isaiah, Amos,/Ezekiel’. To these can now be added ‘the De Causa Dei of Thomas Bradwardine’, the Polish poet Aleksander Wat, Milton ...

Diary

Paul Muldoon: Hiberno-English Shenanigans, 1 July 1999

... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...

What’s left of Henrietta Lacks?

Anne Enright: HeLa, 13 April 2000

... Lacks. Click. The American Congressional Record. In Memory of Henrietta Lacks – Hon. Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr (Extension of Remarks – 4 June 1997) Henrietta Lacks was born in 1920 in Clover, Virginia. At the age of 23 she moved to Turner’s Station, near Baltimore, Maryland, joining her husband David. She had five children, four of whom ...

Thank you, Disney

Jenny Diski: The Town that Disney Built, 24 August 2000

The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town 
by Andrew Ross.
Verso, 340 pp., £17, June 2000, 1 85984 772 2
Show More
Celebration, USA: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town 
by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins.
Holt, 342 pp., £18.99, September 1999, 0 8050 5560 6
Show More
Show More
... cinema he said he wanted to create a modern movie theatre. That was fine, he was told by Robert Stern, who was overseeing the town’s look, as long as Pelli understood that as far as Celebration was concerned, modern ended in the 1930s. The future as defined by the brochure from Michael Eisner’s Disney Corporation was to be found not in Walt’s ...

Being that can be understood is language

Richard Rorty: H.-G. Gadamer, 16 March 2000

... new attributions cohere with the older ones in ways that save the phenomena. To put the point in Robert Brandom’s Hegelian way: to understand the nature of an object is to be able to recapitulate the history of the concept of that object. That history, in turn, is simply the history of the uses of the various words used to describe the object. As Jonathan ...

Scentless Murder

Michael Wood: Billy Wilder, 2 March 2000

Conversations with Wilder 
by Cameron Crowe.
Faber, 373 pp., £20, December 1999, 0 571 20162 8
Show More
Show More
... glass of tea?’ Holmes, enjoying himself, is off the hook, and soon leaves the scene. Holmes is Robert Stephens, wonderfully effete and engaging; Wilder says he ‘never quite knew if he was a homosexual or not’ – offscreen, that is. Watson is Colin Blakely, a kind of terrier of a companion to the great man. When Watson finds out what Holmes has been ...

Fade to Greige

Elaine Showalter: Mad for the Handcuff Bracelets, 4 January 2001

A Dedicated Follower of Fashion 
by Holly Brubach.
Phaidon, 232 pp., £19.95, October 1999, 9780714838878
Show More
Fashion Today 
by Colin McDowell.
Phaidon, 511 pp., £39.95, September 2000, 0 7148 3897 7
Show More
Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender and Society in Clothing 
by Diana Crane.
Chicago, 294 pp., £19, August 2000, 0 226 11798 7
Show More
Historical Fashion in Detail: The 17th and 18th Centuries 
by Avril Hart and Susan North.
Victoria & Albert Museum, 223 pp., £19.95, October 2000, 1 85177 258 8
Show More
Don We Now Our Gay Appalrel: Gay Men’s Dress in the 20th Century 
by Shuan Cole.
Berg, 224 pp., £42.99, September 2000, 1 85973 415 4
Show More
The Gallery of Fashion 
by Aileen Ribeiro.
Princeton, 256 pp., £60, November 2000, 0 691 05092 9
Show More
Giorgio Armani 
by Germano Celant and Harold Koda.
Abrams, 392 pp., £40, October 2000, 0 8109 6927 0
Show More
Show More
... York this season is the Armani retrospective at the Guggenheim. Designed by the Post-Modern artist Robert Wilson, who has draped the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramps with white gauze, bathed the museum in patchouli and musk, and created a Japanese soundtrack to accompany the show, the exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and ...

Why Sakhalin?

Joseph Frank: Charting Chekhov’s career, 17 February 2005

Chekhov: Scenes from a Life 
by Rosamund Bartlett.
Free Press, 395 pp., £20, July 2004, 0 7432 3074 4
Show More
Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters 
translated by Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips.
Penguin, 552 pp., £12.99, June 2004, 0 14 044922 1
Show More
Show More
... life of someone they are liable to end up disliking intensely. Lawrence Thompson was selected by Robert Frost to be his official biographer: after literally living with his subject, the biographer found the poet to be very far from admirable; and the work he produced bore clear evidence of this shift in sentiment. I spent more years than I like to recall ...

Give or take a dead Scotsman

Liam McIlvanney: James Kelman’s witterings, 22 July 2004

You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free 
by James Kelman.
Hamish Hamilton, 437 pp., £12.99, June 2004, 0 241 14233 4
Show More
Show More
... The soundtrack might be Muddy Waters singing ‘You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had’ or Robert Johnson’s ‘Drunken Hearted Man’. Repetition, sexual boasting, showy licks and riffs: the novel has it all. There is even a touch of satanic folklore, in the shape of a ghostly hobo rumoured to be the devil himself. While not exactly ...

No Intention of Retreating

Lorna Scott Fox: Martha Gellhorn’s Wars, 2 September 2004

Martha Gellhorn: A Life 
by Caroline Moorehead.
Vintage, 550 pp., £8.99, June 2004, 0 09 928401 4
Show More
Show More
... to say that the pioneer of a kind of war reporting epitomised today by Pilger, Maggie O’Kane and Robert Fisk did not receive the recognition that was her due, when it was due. Instead there was more pain and guilt in store for Gellhorn, as her mother slowly died and she couldn’t give what she felt, and her love-starved son went increasingly off the ...

Inconvenient Truths

Hugh Miles: Who put the bomb on Pan Am 103?, 21 June 2007

... of Lockerbie victims now believe that the former Libyan intelligence officer is innocent. Robert Black QC, an emeritus professor of Scottish law at Edinburgh University, was one of the architects of the original trial in Holland. He has closely followed developments since the disaster happened and in 2000 devised the non-jury trial system for the ...

Godly Mafia

Blair Worden: Aristocrats v. the King, 24 May 2007

The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I 
by John Adamson.
Weidenfeld, 742 pp., £25, March 2007, 978 0 297 84262 0
Show More
Show More
... and country in the 1590s, had sought to resolve it. The first was James I’s leading adviser Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, Lord Burghley’s son, whose ‘Great Contract’ of 1610 attempted to place the Crown’s finances on a less vexatious footing. Bedford used parliamentary pressure to the same end in 1641. Adamson’s account bears out ...

Otherwise Dealt With

Chalmers Johnson: ‘extraordinary rendition’, 8 February 2007

Ghost Plane: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Rendition Programme 
by Stephen Grey.
Hurst, 306 pp., £16.95, November 2006, 1 85065 850 1
Show More
Show More
... him in handcuffs and chains, and fly him to a destination where they know he will be tortured. As Robert Baer, a former CIA operative in the Middle East, has commented, ‘we pick up a suspect or we arrange for one of our partner countries to do it. Then the suspect is placed on civilian transport to a third country where, let’s make no bones about it, they ...

Sarko, Ségo & Co.

Jeremy Harding: The Banlieues Go to the Polls, 26 April 2007

... by ACLEFEU. So, by and large, does Marie-George Buffet, the Communist contender, whose predecessor Robert Hue fared disastrously in 2002. Buffet is the self-styled candidate of the ‘popular anti-liberal left’: a left-of-socialist coalition that failed to come together at the end of last year, enabling the Communists to appropriate the title, which always ...