‘The most wonderful person I’d ever met’

Wendy Steiner, 28 September 1989

Waverley Place 
by Susan Brownmiller.
Hamish Hamilton, 294 pp., £12.95, August 1989, 0 241 12804 8
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... shot several months before her death. The movie shows her happily dancing at a family party, a small bruise visible on her cheek. BBC 1’s Inside Story ends its coverage of the case with this image of the little dancing girl, the jury foreman insisting on remembering Lisa this way, a beautiful child not here to dance again. In the ...

Deadheaded Sentences

Andrew O’Hagan: A Disservice to Dolly, 4 August 2022

Run Rose Run 
by Dolly Parton and James Patterson.
Century, 439 pp., £20, March, 978 1 5291 3567 1
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The Stories of My Life 
by James Patterson.
Century, 358 pp., £20, June, 978 1 5291 3687 6
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... gun.’[End of chapter.]Who is James Patterson, and why does he write like this?First, a small clue. Hillary Clinton says he’s ‘the master storyteller of our times’. We know that Patterson helped Bill (from Hope, Arkansas) to write his first novel, The President Is Missing, which went to number one on the New York Times bestseller chart after ...

What’s the difference?

Arianne Shahvisi: Sex in the Brain, 8 September 2022

The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain 
by Gina Rippon.
Vintage, 424 pp., £9.99, September 2020, 978 1 78470 681 4
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The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women 
by Sharon Moalem.
Penguin, 274 pp., £9.99, March 2021, 978 0 241 39689 6
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... As a teenager,​  I couldn’t find anyone to play chess with me, so I pored over a small yellow copy of Chess Made Easy and set up games against myself. Mine is the 26th edition of Cecil Purdy and Gary Koshnitsky’s primer, first published in 1942. Returning to it recently, I noticed a brief section towards the end on ‘Women in Chess ...

Man-Eating Philosophers

Will Self: David Cronenberg, 18 June 2015

Consumed 
by David Cronenberg.
Fourth Estate, 288 pp., £18.99, October 2014, 978 0 00 729915 7
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... the screen. Or, more exactly, she was in the apartment in the QuickTime window in the screen, the small, shabby, scholarly apartment of Célestine and Aristide Arosteguy.’ In the final paragraph, the image of one of the characters on a computer screen ‘opened its mouth to speak but then unaccountably froze, then stuttered in a disturbing ...

Round the (Next) Bend

Simon Adams: Sir Walter Ralegh, 6 July 2000

The Letters of Sir Walter Raleigh 
edited by Agnes Latham and Joyce Youings.
Exeter, 403 pp., £45, July 1999, 0 85989 527 0
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... he has become a central subject in New Historicist approaches to Elizabethan studies, notably in Stephen Greenblatt’s Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles, the most stimulating modern study of Ralegh. This collection of letters was assembled by the late Agnes Latham, who edited Ralegh’s poems in 1951. It was originally intended as a ...

Kill your own business

Deborah Friedell: Amazon’s Irresistible Rise, 5 December 2013

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon 
by Brad Stone.
Bantam, 384 pp., £18.99, October 2013, 978 0 593 07047 5
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... What he liked about books was that they were ‘pure commodities’: copies of the latest Stephen King sold online would be no better or worse than those sold in shops. But no actual shop was big enough to offer all the three million-plus books in print. Two distributors, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, handled distribution for most American ...

O Wyoming Whipporwill

Claire Harman: George Barker, 3 October 2002

The Chameleon Poet: A Life of George Barker 
by Robert Fraser.
Cape, 573 pp., £25, February 2002, 0 224 06242 5
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... in print, Eliot signed him up with Faber and organised a group of backers to provide him with a small regular income. Barker had just married his sister’s friend Jessica Woodward and gone to live in a cottage in Dorset, but it isn’t clear if Eliot knew why. The reason given was that his new bride was consumptive; the truth was she was pregnant and they ...

Benefits of Diaspora

Eric Hobsbawm: The Jewish Emancipation, 20 October 2005

... the almost invariably vast impact of the outside world on the Jews, who are almost invariably a small minority of the population. My concern is with the impact of the Jews on the rest of humanity. And, in particular, with the explosive transformation of this impact in the 19th and 20th centuries: that is to say, since the emancipation and self-emancipation ...

Loadsa Serious Money

Ian Taylor, 5 May 1988

Regulating the City: Competition, Scandal and Reform 
by Michael Clarke.
Open University, 288 pp., £25, May 1986, 9780335153817
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Regulating fraud: White-Collar Crime and the Criminal Process 
by Michael Levi.
Tavistock, 416 pp., £35, August 1987, 0 422 61160 3
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... markets by making a few phone calls and by holding informal meetings, at short notice, with small groups of heads of financial institutions. The unresolved question is whether the new, more formal regulatory systems are likely to have influence over established City institutions and over the ‘new money’ now so significant in the City. Clarke’s ...

I am an irregular verb

Margaret Anne Doody: Laetitia Pilkington, 22 January 1998

Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington 
edited by A.C. Elias.
Georgia, 348497 pp., £84.95, May 1997, 0 8203 1719 5
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... friendly with Swift, whom it was in their interest to cultivate. She and her husband were rather small people, physically, socially and economically, but they were brave enough to have Swift as a visitor: The Dean came to dine with us in our Lilliputian Palace, as he called it, and who could have thought it? he just looked into the Parlour, and ran up into ...

Diary

Will Self: Walking out of London, 20 October 2011

... who grow hundreds of acres of wheat, ride to hounds and potter in their walled garden. History, Stephen Dedalus groaned, is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake – but these friends of ours are for the most part happily slumberous. For a couple of years I managed to put the child off on the grounds that he was too little, but this August I had to ...

A Spanish girl is a volcano

John Pemble: Apostles in Gibraltar, 10 September 2015

John Kemble’s Gibraltar Journal: The Spanish Expedition of the Cambridge Apostles, 1830-31 
by Eric Nye.
Macmillan, 416 pp., £100, January 2015, 978 1 137 38446 1
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... the excitement: ‘A wild, bustling time we had of it. I played my part as a conspirator in a small way, and made friends with two or three gallant men.’ Mission accomplished, they returned to Bordeaux, embarked for Dublin on the packet Leeds, and enjoyed fine nights on deck with ‘certain agreeable samples of womankind’, singing songs and reading ...

Touch of Evil

Christopher Hitchens, 22 October 1992

Kissinger: A Biography 
by Walter Isaacson.
Faber, 893 pp., £25, September 1992, 0 571 16858 2
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... congruent, whether you draw them from Clark Clifford’s memoirs, Seymour Hersh’s critique, Stephen Ambrose’s judicious biography of Nixon or the recollections of Averell Harriman, Richard Holbrooke or Daniel Davidson. Mr Isaacson has added some extra but exiguous detail to the story. By shopping on both sides of the street, and betraying the side he ...

Daisy packs her bags

Zachary Leader: The Road to West Egg, 21 September 2000

Trimalchio: An Early Version of ‘The Great Gatsby’ 
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by James L.W. West III.
Cambridge, 192 pp., £30, April 2000, 0 521 40237 9
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... Interpretation of Literature’. This belittling tag, coined in a 1988 essay of the same name by Stephen Parrish, general editor of the monumental Cornell Wordsworth, reflected two more widespread beliefs in literary theory: that ‘language is prior to thought’ and that authorial intention is ‘not only elusive and illusory, but irrelevant’. In the ...

Bumming and Booing

John Mullan: William Wordsworth, 5 April 2001

Wordsworth: A Life 
by Juliet Barker.
Viking, 971 pp., £25, October 2000, 9780670872138
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The Hidden Wordsworth 
by Kenneth Johnston.
Pimlico, 690 pp., £15, September 2000, 0 7126 6752 0
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Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s 
by David Bromwich.
Chicago, 186 pp., £9.50, April 2000, 0 226 07556 7
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... Juliet Barker finds the idea ‘ludicrous’, but says no more. Wordsworth éminence grise Stephen Gill thought that a verdict on Johnston’s claims would only be possible after ‘years’ of ‘rigorous scholarly assessment’. It was about a year and a half before the speculation was scotched. Michael Durey, writing in the TLS, proved that ‘Mr ...