Wigging In

Matthew Bevis: On James Schuyler, 23 April 2026

A Day like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler 
by Nathan Kernan.
FSG, 503 pp., £30, September 2025, 978 0 374 28117 5
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... coming. Auden based a character in The Age of Anxiety, published in 1947, on Schuyler: Emble is a young man given to watching others with ‘a covert but passionate curiosity. What makes them tick? What would it feel like to be a success?’ Just over forty years later, Schuyler had an inkling. Having been introduced to the audience at the Dia Art Foundation ...

The Past’s Past

Thomas Laqueur, 19 September 1996

Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History 
by Jay Winter.
Cambridge, 310 pp., £12.95, September 1996, 0 521 49682 9
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... definition predicated on rupture. Against this orthodoxy several scholars – the art historians Kenneth Silver and Romi Golan, for example – have recently argued that, on the contrary, French art in the Twenties and Thirties was far more conservative than Modernist. Winter writes in this revisionist tradition but attacks on a broader front. He has devoted ...

Excellence

Patrick Wright, 21 May 1987

Creating excellence: Managing corporate culture, strategy and change in the New Age 
by Craig Hickman and Michael Silva.
Allen and Unwin, 305 pp., £12.50, April 1985, 0 04 658252 5
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Intrapreneuring: Why you don’t have to leave the corporation to become an entrepreneur 
by Gifford Pinchot.
Harper and Row, 368 pp., £15.95, August 1985, 0 06 015305 9
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The IBM Way: Insights into the World’s Most Successful Marketing Organisation 
by Buck Rodgers.
Harper and Row, 224 pp., £12.95, April 1986, 0 06 015522 1
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Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage 
by Richard Foster.
Macmillan, 316 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 333 43511 7
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Ford 
by Robert Lacey.
Heinemann, 778 pp., £15, July 1986, 0 434 40192 7
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Company of Adventurers: The Story of the Hudson’s Bay Company 
by Peter Newman.
Viking, 413 pp., £14.95, March 1986, 0 670 80379 0
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Augustine’s Laws 
by Norman Augustine.
Viking, 380 pp., £12.95, July 1986, 9780670809424
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Peak Performers: The New Heroes in Business 
by Charles Garfield.
Hutchinson, 333 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 09 167391 7
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Going for it: How to Succeed as an Entrepreneur 
by Victor Kiam.
Collins, 223 pp., £9.95, May 1986, 0 00 217603 3
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Take a chance to be first: The Secrets of Entrepreneurial Success 
by Warren Avis.
Macmillan, 222 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 02 504410 9
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The Winning Streak 
by Walter Goldsmith and David Clutterbuck.
Weidenfeld/Penguin, 224 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 297 78469 2
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The Roots of Excellence 
by Ronnie Lessem.
Fontana, 318 pp., £3.95, December 1985, 0 00 636874 3
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The New Management of Local Government 
by John Stewart.
Allen and Unwin, 208 pp., £20, October 1986, 0 00 435232 7
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... Reward. Stories of personal and corporate triumph abound, but narrative is put to other uses too. Kenneth Blanchard’s best-selling ‘One Minute Manager’ series combines the barely worded zen fable with the idiom of the children’s story. Other books use narrative to bring large-scale history back into the depleted scene. Robert Lacey’s Ford traces the ...

Cute, My Arse

Seamus Perry: Geoffrey Hill, 12 September 2019

The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 148 pp., £20, April 2019, 978 0 19 882952 2
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... resulting in numerous comical episodes. ‘Likely lad’: n. (b) British a working-class young man; a young man with characteristics stereotypically associated with the working class. (OED) Hill has been very well served by the excellent Kenneth Haynes, who saw both his prose and ...

Open in a Scream

Colm Tóibín, 4 March 2021

Francis Bacon: Revelations 
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.
William Collins, 869 pp., £30, January, 978 0 00 729841 9
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... and he opened a showroom in South Kensington to display his rugs and furniture. Rab Butler, then a young MP, and his wife, Sydney Courtauld, Samuel Courtauld’s daughter, commissioned him to design their dining room. Interior design led to a growing circle of acquaintance, including with the Australian painter Roy de Maistre. In his memoir, Patrick White ...

O brambles, chain me too

Tom Paulin: Life and Vowels of Andrew Marvell, 25 November 1999

World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell 
by Nicholas Murray.
Little, Brown, 294 pp., £20, September 1999, 0 316 64863 9
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Marvell and Liberty 
edited by Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis.
Macmillan, 365 pp., £47.50, July 1999, 0 333 72585 9
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Andrew Marvell 
edited by Thomas Healy.
Longman, 212 pp., £12.99, September 1998, 0 582 21910 8
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... his MA, and soon left for the Continent, where he appears to have acted as tutor to a wealthy young man. (On the other hand he may have entered his brother-in-law Edmund Popple’s trading-house.) When he returned to England in 1647 his political sympathies were apparently royalist. Though he was soon to change his views, the best readings of his poetry ...

Hare’s Blood

Peter Wollen: John Berger, 4 April 2002

The Selected Essays of John Berger 
edited by Geoff Dyer.
Bloomsbury, 599 pp., £25, November 2001, 0 7475 5419 6
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... a series made for BBC2 in collaboration with Mike Dibb and others, and intended as a riposte to Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation.In many ways the BBC series was directly inspired by Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, particularly in its emphasis on photography as the upstart ...

My Darlings

Colm Tóibín: Drinking with Samuel Beckett, 5 April 2007

... It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever needed an eye surgeon (which she did not), and his mad ...

Reasons for Liking Tolkien

Jenny Turner: The Hobbit Habit, 15 November 2001

... That book is fused with my being in a way that happens only with things encountered when one is young and growing like one of our hero’s magic trees. Even now, even as I find the book silly and boring and rather noisome (to use a word from J.R.R.’s special vocabulary), it still locks with my psyche in a most alarming way. There is suction, something ...

Conspire Slowly, Act Quickly

David Runciman: Thatcher Undone, 2 January 2020

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. III: Herself Alone 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 1072 pp., £35, October 2019, 978 0 241 32474 5
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... later, Thatcher gave her support to Iain Duncan-Smith, helping him to see off Michael Portillo and Kenneth Clarke. When Duncan-Smith proved even less successful than his predecessor, he was replaced by another Thatcherite, Michael Howard, who went down to defeat against Blair in 2005. In truth, it was Blair himself who most appreciated her blessing. When she ...

The Chase

Inigo Thomas: ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’, 20 October 2016

... appears as static as a Monet locomotive idling at the Gare St Lazare. He also left out the hare. Kenneth Clark described Rain, Steam and Speed as the ‘most extraordinary’ of Turner’s paintings. ‘I suppose that everybody today would accept it as one of the cardinal pictures of the 19th century on account of its subject as well as its ...

Berenson’s Elixir

Simon Schama, 1 May 1980

Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur 
by Ernest Samuels.
Harvard, 477 pp., £9.50, June 1979, 0 674 06775 4
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Being Bernard Berenson 
by Meryle Secrest.
Weidenfeld, 473 pp., £8.50, January 1980, 0 297 77564 2
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... of Ernest Samuels’s painstakingly researched and beautifully written biography of the young Berenson, subtitled The Making of a Connoisseur. By no means a hagiography, Samuels’s book offered a view of Berenson in the full flower of his blooming egotism, as well as a penetrating insight into his Paterian idealism, and his adaptation of the ...

When the Costume Comes Off

Adam Mars-Jones: Philip Hensher, 14 April 2011

King of the Badgers 
by Philip Hensher.
Fourth Estate, 436 pp., £18.99, March 2011, 978 0 00 730133 1
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... an equation accepted by many homosexuals of the generation of Burgess’s octogenarian narrator, Kenneth Toomey. Terrence Rattigan was surprised to find during war service that he was brave in an ordinary way. Out of this realisation came his interest in such non-cowardly homosexuals as T.E. Lawrence (Ross) and Alexander the Great (Adventure Story). But ...

The Unstoppable Upward

James Wolcott: ‘The Life of Saul Bellow’, 24 January 2019

The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005 
by Zachary Leader.
Cape, 864 pp., £35, November 2018, 978 0 224 10188 2
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... psychology; I’m not sure there’s anything comparable in American literary history.† I was a young-gun devotee of Mailer, who made possible my start in writing, but I never wanted him to file adoption papers. A patriarchal nimbus settled on Bellow in his later years that remains unique, inspiring, a little weird, a bit Holy Ghost. Attending Bellow’s ...

Higher Ordinariness

Jonathan Meades: Poor Surrey, 23 May 2024

Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39 
by Gavin Stamp.
Profile, 568 pp., £40, March, 978 1 80081 739 5
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The Buildings of England: Surrey 
by Charles O’Brien, Ian Nairn and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 854 pp., £60, November 2022, 978 0 300 23478 7
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... The few who didn’t – the usual crew of Betjeman, Waugh, Lancaster, a Mitford or two and even Kenneth Clark – were regarded as frivolous self-advertisers playing at perversity. What had been a far from straightforward face-off between propagandists for diverse forms of classicism and, on the other side, god’s own warrior-goths, was exhumed as a ...