Puzzled Puss

John Lahr: Buster Keaton’s Star Turn, 19 January 2023

Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life 
by James Curtis.
Knopf, 810 pp., £30, February 2022, 978 0 385 35421 9
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... into the stalls by the screen villain. (Woody Allen appropriated the conceit in both The Purple Rose of Cairo and his short story ‘The Kugelmass Episode’, where the narrator, a professor of literature, finds himself trapped with Madame Bovary and visible to the novel’s readers.) Keaton’s films are filled with wonder at the camera’s ability to mix ...

Why Partition?

Perry Anderson, 19 July 2012

... to that of a military force compelled to withdraw in the face of greatly superior numbers.’ In June, Nehru and his colleagues were released from imprisonment for the Quit India campaign during the war, and in the winter provincial and central elections were held, still on the suffrage of 1935. The result was, or should have been, a cold douche for ...

Questions Concerning the Murder of Benazir Bhutto

Owen Bennett-Jones: Who killed Benazir Bhutto?, 6 December 2012

... out what was going on and to influence events. Helped by the high attrition rate among jihadis, he rose through the ranks and by the mid-1990s, after an intense power struggle with a rival commander, emerged as the leader of Harkat ul Jihad al Islami or HUJI, once described by a liberal Pakistan weekly as ‘the biggest jihadi outfit we know nothing ...

His Spittin’ Image

Colm Tóibín: John Stanislaus Joyce, 22 February 2018

... Joyce noted that his father was drunk, and again on 31 May and 1 and 2 and 13 and 14 and 15 June. And on Sunday 24 June: ‘Pappie home to dinner very drunk: shouting, swearing etc. Pappie has thrown his dinner about the floor: Baby [the youngest of the family] white as a sheet: Pappie gone out again: home ...

Love in a Dark Time

Colm Tóibín: Oscar Wilde, 19 April 2001

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde 
edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Fourth Estate, 1270 pp., £35, November 2000, 1 85702 781 7
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... was 21 – Wilde was 36 – but their friendship did not begin until the following year. In May or June 1892 Wilde wrote to Ross: ‘Bosie has insisted on stopping here for sandwiches. He is quite like a narcissus – so white and gold. I will come either Wednesday or Thursday night to your rooms. Send me a line. Bosie is so tired: he lies like a hyacinth on ...

Bitter Chill of Winter

Tariq Ali: Kashmir, 19 April 2001

... or Bill Clinton.’The beards were unimpressed. One of the few beardless men in the audience rose to his feet and addressed the Congressman: ‘Please answer honestly to our worries,’ he said. ‘In Afghanistan we helped you defeat the Red Army. You needed us then and we were very much loyal to you. Now you have abandoned us for India. Mr Clinton ...

The Deaths Map

Jeremy Harding: At the Mexican Border, 20 October 2011

... there so many apprehensions of ‘illegals’ (170,000 in the Tucson Sector from October 2009 to June 2010, for instance) and so few federal prosecutions in the state on drugs charges (1107 in the same period)? How is it that out of the half-million undocumented Hispanics in Arizona, fewer than 3000 are in state penitentiaries on drug offences? Why, in Pima ...

Issues of Truth and Invention

Colm Tóibín: Francis Stuart’s wartime broadcasts, 4 January 2001

The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart 
edited by Brendan Barrington.
Lilliput, 192 pp., £25, September 2000, 1 901866 54 8
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... Stuart was interviewed. He told the interviewer: ‘The Jew was always the worm that got into the rose and sickened it. Yes, but of course I take that as praise. I mean all those so-called healthy roses, they need exposing – many of them are sick.’ Interviewer: Are you ashamed that you helped Nazi Germany now? Stuart: Sorry? Interviewer: Are you ...

Dynasty

Sherry Turkle: Lacan and Co, 6 December 1990

Jacques Lacan and Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985 
by Elisabeth Roudinesco, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman.
Free Association, 816 pp., £25, December 1990, 9781853431630
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... commended in Lacan’s reading of Freud: they specifically excluded the psychological subject. In June 1964 Lacan founded the Freudian School. Unlike traditional psychoanalytic societies, it welcomed non-analysts as members. From its earliest days it was a meeting-place for mathematicians, philosophers, linguists, anthropologists and literary critics. It was ...

The Dark Side of Brazilian Conviviality

Perry Anderson, 24 November 1994

... economy continued to diversify. Unobtrusively, capital stock was modernised, productivity rose, and exports increased, from about $3-4 billion a year in 1981 to some $25 billion this year, yielding a positive trade balance and substantial reserves. By the mid-Nineties, the objective weight of the country in the new global order had altered. Richer and ...

Corncob Caesar

Murray Sayle, 6 February 1997

Old Soldiers Never Die: The Life of Douglas MacArthur 
by Geoffrey Perret.
Deutsch, 663 pp., £20, October 1996, 9780233990026
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... glacial career testified), whereas the unfashionable engineers had serious peacetime duties, rose faster and could transfer back at a higher rank in the event of war. The ploy worked. MacArthur was never much of an engineer, but he learned the basics of harbours, pontoons and bridges, knowledge which would one day come in handy on remote Pacific ...

Who does that for anyone?

Adam Shatz: Jean-Pierre Melville, 20 June 2019

Jean-Pierre Melville: Le Solitaire 
by Bertrand Teissier.
Fayard, 272 pp., €22, October 2017, 978 2 213 70573 6
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Jean-Pierre Melville, une vie 
by Antoine de Baecque.
Seuil, 244 pp., €32, October 2017, 978 2 02 137107 9
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... acquire meaning later on, like the languorous shot in Le Cercle rouge of a barmaid handing a red rose to Corey, the robber played by Delon, just before he falls into a trap laid by the police. The minimalism of Melville’s films – and their indifference to psychological motivation and melodramatic convention – provoked comment that he was imitating ...

Diary

Bernadette Wren: Epistemic Injustice, 2 December 2021

... attack in recent years. We weren’t hammered just in the right-wing press. On Newsnight in June last year, a critique of our work was illustrated with gloomy shots of the unlovable 1960s Tavistock building, and of discarded toys in a derelict attic – childhood lost, innocence destroyed. The producer invited a gender-critical commentator to repeat the ...

All Together Now

John Lloyd: The British Trade Union, 19 October 2000

British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics. Vol. I: The Postwar Compromise, 1945-64 
edited by John McIlroy and Nina Fishman et al.
Ashgate, 335 pp., £35, January 2000, 0 7546 0018 1
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British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics. Vol. II: The High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964-79 
edited by John McIlroy and Nina Fishman et al.
Ashgate, 389 pp., £35, January 2000, 0 7546 0018 1
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The TUC: From the General Strike to New Unionism 
by Robert Taylor.
Palgrave, 299 pp., £45, September 2000, 0 333 93066 5
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... wonderfully revealing passages on these (and other) periods: none so rich as the gathering of 1 June 1969 at Chequers which brought together Wilson, his First (and Employment) Secretary Barbara Castle, Jack Jones of the Transport Workers, Hugh Scanlon of the Engineers and Vic Feather, the recently elected TUC General Secretary. The hours of argument circled ...

After the Earthquake

Tim Parks: Silone and Silone, 9 July 2009

Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone 
by Stanislao Pugliese.
Farrar, Straus, 426 pp., $35, June 2009, 978 0 374 11348 3
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... off the correspondence. Tranquilli was dismayed. On the extreme left in every debate, Tranquilli rose rapidly through the ranks of first the Socialist, then the Communist Party. Pugliese sums up the early years: In August 1919 . . . he was elected secretary of the Unione Giovanile Socialista . . . two months later, he was elected to the Central ...