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My Old, Sweet, Darling Mob

Iain Sinclair: Michael Moorcock, 30 November 2000

King of the City 
by Michael Moorcock.
Scribner, 421 pp., £9.99, May 2000, 0 684 86140 2
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Mother London 
by Michael Moorcock.
Scribner, 496 pp., £6.99, May 2000, 0 684 86141 0
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... non-event in the calendar of civic discourse, posters appeared out of nowhere with the head of a man who wasn’t quite Frank Dobson. There was nothing peevish or pop-eyed about this citizen. The shirt was open-necked. The tilted look was watchful, eyes narrowed against bright light: a non-combatant shocked to find himself exposed on the hustings. No ...

On Top of Everything

Thomas Jones: Byron, 16 September 1999

Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame 
by Benita Eisler.
Hamish Hamilton, 835 pp., £25, June 1999, 0 241 13260 6
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... outlaws acting out the poet’s fantasies and those of his readers. Conrad the Corsair, ‘that man of loneliness and mystery’, is typical. Having got wind that the Turkish Pacha intends to attack him on his ‘Pirate’s isle’, he launches a pre-emptive assault, which involves the dubious tactic of infiltrating the Turkish palace during a ...

The ashtrays worry me

Emilie Bickerton: Eric Rohmer, 19 March 2015

Eric Rohmer: Biographie 
by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe.
Stock, 605 pp., €29, January 2014, 978 2 234 07561 0
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Friponnes de porcelaine 
by Eric Rohmer.
Stock, 304 pp., €20, January 2014, 978 2 234 07631 0
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... he recorded countless sunsets disappearing into the sea in the hope of capturing one elusive green ray; he planted flowers so that a month later an actor could pick a rose; he posted mail to a false address to check a plot point that rested on a letter not reaching its destination. But when it came to shooting he abandoned himself to the moment. In 24 feature ...

Don’t go quietly

David Trotter: Ken Loach’s Fables, 6 February 2025

Kes 
by David Forrest.
BFI, 112 pp., £12.99, May 2024, 978 1 83902 564 8
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... real locations among real people going about their ordinary business. Later, after Eileen and a man she’s picked up have had sex in a derelict building, there’s a further montage of a dozen or so shots – many more than mere reality-effect would require – of workmen demolishing a row of houses. Social realism could be said to revive alongside the ...

Rising Moon

R.W. Johnson, 18 December 1986

L’Empire Moon 
by Jean-Francois Boyer.
La Découverte, 419 pp., August 1986, 2 7071 1604 1
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The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection 
by Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead.
Sheridan Square, 255 pp., $19.95, May 1986, 0 940380 07 2
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... Sure enough, Jesus appeared to the 16-year-old Moon and informed him that he was the chosen man, thus making him one of the hundred-plus messiahs Korea had spawned in only a century. According to Moon’s official biography, he then gained a degree as an electrical engineer at Waseda University in Japan (though the university has no record that he was ...

All This Love Business

Jean McNicol: Vanessa and Julian Bell, 24 January 2013

Julian Bell: From Bloomsbury to the Spanish Civil War 
by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams.
Stanford, 314 pp., £38.95, 0 8047 7413 7
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... according to his friend John Lehmann he was ‘a great, untidy, sprawling figure of a young man’. Virginia Woolf blamed his lack of looks on his father’s family: ‘He had a strong element of the Bell in him. What do I mean? I think I mean that he was practical & caustic & shrewd … He had much higher spirits. He was much more adapted to life. He ...
... almost convivial, has no pride; when we first meet him, he is described as ‘an ordinary young man, very lively and free in his manners but nothing special in him’. He is constantly paying visits in the town’s highest circles, but he has other calls to make too. At the direction of a mysterious ‘Committee’ somewhere abroad, he has set up a ...

Condy’s Fluid

P.N. Furbank, 25 October 1990

A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture 
by Samuel Hynes.
Bodley Head, 514 pp., £20, October 1990, 0 370 30451 9
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Killing in Verse and Prose, and Other Essays 
by Paul Fussell.
Bellew, 294 pp., £9.95, October 1990, 0 947792 55 4
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... by others for bringing home the full horror of the war (the Dean of Durham and the zoologist Ray Lankester thought it a disgrace), and it was the one scene in the film that was not authentic and had been faked up behind the lines. Hynes brings the same flair to advertisements. He reproduces a deliciously modish Bond Street tailor’s advertisement ...

The Wildest, Highest Places

David Craig, 17 July 1997

John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings 
edited by Terry Gifford.
Baton Wicks, 912 pp., £20, November 1996, 1 898573 07 7
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... wholeheartedness of their responses to life around him and to his correspondents. In them we see a man at one with himself and with the granite, the fast rivers, the mighty resinous trees of the western Sierra Nevada. In a letter of 1871 to the friend who elicited much of his most heartfelt incidental writing, Jeanne Carr, wife of the professor of agriculture ...

Stupid Questions

Laleh Khalili: Battlefield to Boardroom, 24 February 2022

Risk: A User’s Guide 
by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico.
Penguin, 343 pp., £20, October 2021, 978 0 241 48192 9
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... in the way of his subsequent career as a novelist, screenwriter and TV host, or his cameo in Iron Man 2.Recently, however, a wave of newly retired special operators from the War on Terror years have specialised in a different genre: the business self-help manual. These former military officers feel that a career spent planning deadly missions and leading men ...

Astral Projection

Alison Light: The Case of the Croydon Poltergeist, 17 December 2020

The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story 
by Kate Summerscale.
Bloomsbury, 345 pp., £18.99, October, 978 1 4088 9545 0
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... a poltergeist that plagued the lives of the Irving family in a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Man.* Gef hurled objects, killed rabbits, spat at the family and stole from them, but he also spoke several languages. ‘I am the Fifth Dimension!’ he apparently shouted. ‘I am the Eighth Wonder of the World!’Ghost hunting was a money-spinner between the ...

Mon Pays

Michael Rogin: Josephine Baker, 22 February 2001

The Josephine Baker Story 
by Ean Wood.
Sanctuary, 327 pp., £16.99, September 2000, 1 86074 286 6
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Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s 
by Petrine Archer-Straw.
Thames and Hudson, 200 pp., £14.95, September 2000, 0 500 28135 1
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... is packed with revelatory, disturbing illustrations; Archer-Straw has little time either for Man Ray’s 1926 photographic series Noire et blanche (Kiki of Montparnasse’s head alongside an African mask) or for the much attacked 1984 Museum of Modern Art Primitivism exhibition, which juxtaposed modern painting and sculpture with African prototypes ...
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 
by Brian Boyd.
Chatto, 783 pp., £25, January 1992, 0 7011 3701 0
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... have said, “Sister, be grateful that they were not forking.’ ” So, no problem with the man. Then when Lolita was scaling the bestseller list and before Nabokov became wary of the spontaneous interview, a reporter from Sports Illustrated accompanied the Nabokovs on a butterfly-hunting trip. Nabokov kept up a running commentary. When the car ...

Why do white people like what I write?

Pankaj Mishra: Ta-Nehisi Coates, 22 February 2018

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy 
by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Hamish Hamilton, 367 pp., £16.99, October 2017, 978 0 241 32523 0
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... were always defined against omnipresent threats: mutinous natives, rebellious slaves. The white man, Tocqueville wrote as he observed race relations in America, ‘is to the men of other races what man himself is to the animals’, in the sense that he ‘makes them serve his purposes, and when he cannot make them ...

Where on Earth are you?

Frances Stonor Saunders, 3 March 2016

... to Yachtspersons, Comedians and Gospel Groups, requires a ‘good health certificate’, chest X-ray, HIV test result and statement of good character ‘from your local police authorities’. China asks if you have a ‘serious mental disorder’ or infectious pulmonary tuberculosis. Saudi visas are in the gift of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. You must ...

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