Refugees from the Past

James Meek: Jameson on Chandler, 5 January 2017

Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 87 pp., £12.99, July 2016, 978 1 78478 216 0
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... silence of another race … Hooey Phooey Sing – Long Sing Tung, that kind of place, where a nice-mannered Jap hisses at you … I saw a Jap gardener at work weeding a huge lawn. He was pulling a piece of weed out of the vast velvet expanse and sneering at it the way Jap gardeners do … He had a sort of dry musty smell, like a fairly clean ...

Barely under Control

Jenny Turner: Who’s in charge?, 7 May 2015

... Most of them were developed under Andrew Adonis’s academies programme for New Labour: the Richard Rogers-designed Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, which opened in 2004, is one of these, as is Zaha Hadid’s Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton. The programme was launched in 2000 by the then education secretary, David Blunkett, who explained that if ...

Ghosts

Hugh Haughton, 5 December 1985

The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 
by Thomas Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate.
Macmillan, 604 pp., £30, April 1985, 0 333 29441 6
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The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy: Vols I and II 
edited by Lennart Björk.
Macmillan, 428 pp., £35, May 1985, 0 333 36777 4
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Emma Hardy’s Diaries 
edited by Richard Taylor.
Mid-Northumberland Arts Group/Carcanet, 216 pp., £14.95, January 1985, 0 904790 21 5
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The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Vol. V: 1914-1919 
edited by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate.
Oxford, 357 pp., £22.50, May 1985, 0 19 812622 0
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The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, Vol. III 
edited by Samuel Hynes.
Oxford, 390 pp., £32.50, June 1985, 0 19 812784 7
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Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 1660-1900 
by K.D.M. Snell.
Cambridge, 464 pp., £30, May 1985, 0 521 24548 6
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Thomas Hardy 
edited by Samuel Hynes.
Oxford, 547 pp., £12.95, June 1984, 0 19 254177 3
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... account of his childhood, given the suggestiveness of these incidents. Florence added a few nice episodes, illustrating, for example, his fear of being touched as a boy and in adult life, and it’s sad that these are now buried in the notes at the back, along with her descriptions of Hardy’s appearance and Max Gate. Hardy’s amazement as a child ...

No Mythology, No Ghosts

Owen Hatherley: Second City?, 3 November 2022

Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain 
by Richard Vinen.
Allen Lane, 545 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 0 241 45453 4
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... set within a shopping mall, Grand Central, which blurs into another shopping mall, the Bull Ring. Richard Vinen, writing the first serious history of Birmingham in a long while, is aware of how hard it is to pin the city down, to explain what it is or what it is for. Planners in the 1960s, he says, ‘were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had been ...

Light Entertainment

Andrew O’Hagan: Our Paedophile Culture, 8 November 2012

... holiday she could remember. ‘Dear Mr Gamlin,’ Blyton wrote the next day. ‘Thank you for your nice letter. It all sounds very interesting but I ought to warn you of something you obviously don’t know, but which has been well known in the literary and publishing world for some time – I and my stories are completely banned by the BBC as far as children ...

The Cult of Celebrity

Jacqueline Rose, 20 August 1998

... all too close who also stages something in the nature of a magical disappearing act. Here is Richard Gere interviewed – although that is not quite the right word – by Cameron Docherty in the Independent last June:He is as elusive as smoke. Restless and edgy, he paces around the marble floor of his Malibu home wondering why people are always curious ...

Howzat?

Stephen Sedley: Adversarial or Inquisitorial?, 25 September 2003

The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial 
by John Langbein.
Oxford, 376 pp., £30, February 2003, 0 19 925888 0
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Archbold: International Criminal Courts 
edited by Rodney Dixon, Richard May and Karim Khan.
Sweet and Maxwell, 1000 pp., £125, December 2002, 0 421 77270 0
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... on populations, such a stance is time-consuming but indispensable. The South African jurist Richard Goldstone, the tribunal’s second appointed prosecutor, who saved it from an early demise and made it a court to be reckoned with, remarks in his foreword to Archbold: ‘There were no precedents on which we could rely. We came from many legal ...

The Groom Stripped Bare by His Suitor

Jeremy Harding: John Lennon, 4 January 2001

Lennon Remembers 
by Jann Wenner.
Verso, 151 pp., £20, October 2000, 1 85984 600 9
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... ones that I really wrote from experience and not projecting myself into a situation and writing a nice story about it, which I always found phony’ – ‘third-person songs about people who lived in concrete flats and things’. The emphasis now is on a music that comes from the inside, no virtuosity, none of the courtesies of ‘projection’, no more ...

Bonkers about Boys

James Davidson: Alexander the Great, 1 November 2001

Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction 
edited by A.B. Bosworth and E.J. Baynham.
Oxford, 370 pp., £35, September 2000, 0 19 815287 6
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... Arrian, curiously cut short. And what has happened to the famous description of Tyre? It would be nice to know, at any rate, what was so distasteful about the inscription that Alexander wrote on the ship he dedicated to Heracles after the conquest, ‘either his own composition or someone else’s, but not worth recording. That is the reason I myself didn’t ...

Diary

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

... was bestowed still the greatest honour that could have come my way.15 February. Good reviews for Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or ...

The Leg

Oliver Sacks, 17 June 1982

... the subject up. ‘How’s the leg, Sacks?’ he asked, tapping the cast. ‘You’ve done a nice job,’ I replied, ‘but it doesn’t seem quite right.’ ‘Why, what’s the matter? Is it painful?’ ‘Well, not exactly. I am afraid it sounds silly, but ... but it seems to have no tone, and I can’t really feel it or move it.’ I saw an ...

Dark Strangers, Gorgeous Slums

Philip Horne, 16 March 1989

Off the Rails: Memoirs of a Train Addict 
by Lisa St Aubin de Teran.
Bloomsbury, 193 pp., £12.95, January 1989, 0 7475 0011 8
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The Marble Mountain, and Other Stories 
by Lisa St Aubin de Teran.
Cape, 126 pp., £10.95, January 1989, 9780224025973
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The Bathroom 
by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated by Barbara Bray.
Boyars, 125 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 7145 2880 3
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Motherland 
by Timothy O’Grady.
Chatto, 230 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 7011 3341 4
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A Lesser Dependency 
by Peter Benson.
Macmillan, 146 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 333 49093 2
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... male previous tenant, a distinguished-looking chap, inspected the bottle and said it was a very nice wine but – with a propitiatory laugh – he preferred Burgundy. I said that for my part I didn’t much care for the way he was dressed. He smiled awkwardly and blushed. A certain coolness then ensued, to tell the truth, and conversation flagged. The not ...

Return to the Totem

Frank Kermode, 21 April 1988

William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion 
by Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery.
Oxford, 671 pp., £60, February 1988, 0 19 812914 9
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Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare 
by Stanley Cavell.
Cambridge, 226 pp., £25, January 1988, 0 521 33032 7
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A History of English Literature 
by Alastair Fowler.
Blackwell, 395 pp., £17.50, November 1987, 0 631 12731 3
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... parts of Henry VI, which we are now invited to refer to as The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York – 1 Henry VI comes later, after Titus Andronicus. The two parts of Henry IV are similarly split by The Merry Wives, which shows how fiercely attentive to chronology we are required to be. For simplicity’s sake, the following remarks on ...

Cooking it up

Rupert Christiansen, 19 January 1989

Maria: Callas Remembered 
by Nadia Stancioff.
Sidgwick, 264 pp., £13.95, April 1988, 0 283 99645 5
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Callas at Juilliard: The Master Classes 
by John Ardoin.
Robson, 300 pp., £16.95, April 1988, 0 86051 504 4
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Callas as they saw her 
edited by David Lowe.
Robson, 264 pp., £6.95, April 1988, 9780860514961
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The Great Caruso 
by Michael Scott.
Hamish Hamilton, 322 pp., £16.95, June 1988, 0 241 11954 5
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Chaliapin 
by Victor Borovsky.
Hamish Hamilton, 630 pp., £25, April 1988, 0 241 12254 6
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... Opera became a sensitive field of ideological possibilities: the traditions associated with Richard Wagner, in particular, had to be reassessed in the withering light of Nazism, while in Italy the revival – begun under Mussolini as part of a nationalist cultural policy – of an apparently dead repertory of early 19th-century works led to a vogue for ...

Bow. Wow

James Wolcott: Gore Vidal, 3 February 2000

Gore Vidal 
by Fred Kaplan.
Bloomsbury, 850 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 7475 4671 1
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... campy romps such as Myra Breckinridge and Duluth, political dramas (The Best Man, An Evening with Richard Nixon), and TV travelogues (Vidal in Venice). With the exception of John Updike, no American novelist of the postwar period has shown as much disinterested devotion to criticism as a regular practice (as opposed to an easy way to keep your name in print ...