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His Galactic Centrifuge

Edmund Gordon: Ballard’s Enthusiasms, 23 May 2024

Selected Non-Fiction: 1962-2007 
by J.G. Ballard, edited by Mark Blacklock.
MIT, 386 pp., £30, October 2023, 978 0 262 04832 3
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... by Carnell), established a bimonthly schedule the following year. At last there was a platform in Britain for quality science fiction; what it now needed was a distinctively British approach.James Graham Ballard hadn’t read much science fiction during his boyhood in Shanghai’s International Settlement (he had just turned eleven when the Japanese invaded ...

Heaven’s Waiting Room

Alex Harvey: When Powell met Pressburger, 20 March 2025

The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger 
edited by Nathalie Morris and Claire Smith.
BFI, 206 pp., £30, October 2023, 978 1 83871 917 3
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... original had been cut by an hour and the extensive flashback structure lost. It was, as the critic Ian Christie wrote, ‘as if the film had been punished for its own revolt against the “mere tyranny” of time by having a strict and false linearity imposed’. Critics greeted the restored version as a lost masterpiece. The film never settles in form, tone ...

Heroes of Our Time

Karl Miller, 19 May 1988

The Monument 
by T. Behrens.
Cape, 258 pp., £11.95, May 1988, 0 224 02510 4
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The Passion of John Aspinall 
by Brian Masters.
Cape, 360 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 0 224 02353 5
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... have done something to temper Aspinall’s scorn at the degeneration of the species in the modern Britain of social welfare, and who should surely have found something to honour in the exploits of her old friend the millionaire hero of Howletts and Port Lympne, where his zoos have been located. After Oxford, Aspinall got on his bike and pedalled into ...

His Bonnet Akimbo

Patrick Wright: Hamish Henderson, 3 November 2011

Hamish Henderson: A Biography. Vol. I: The Making of the Poet (1919-53) 
by Timothy Neat.
Polygon, 416 pp., £14.99, May 2009, 978 1 84697 132 7
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Hamish Henderson: A Biography. Vol. II: Poetry Becomes People (1954-2002) 
by Timothy Neat.
Polygon, 395 pp., £25, November 2009, 978 1 84697 063 4
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... Janet, had served as a nurse in the First World War, then returned to lose her own battle in Britain. Thirty-nine and unmarried, she became pregnant within weeks of the armistice, much to the horror of her well-off Dundee family. Neat penetrates the various legends put about by Henderson, who didn’t at all mind if people took him for the bastard son of ...

Bastard Foreigners

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare v. the English, 2 July 2020

Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness 
by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton.
Cambridge, 245 pp., £75, October 2019, 978 1 108 49373 4
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... are Imogen’s amateur vivisectionist stepmother and her son, the would-be rapist Cloten: ‘Britain’s a world/By itself,’ he vaunts, ‘and we will nothing pay/For wearing our own noses.’ Both are defeated over the course of the play, and its happy ending celebrates Cymbeline’s wise decision that ...

Strange, Angry Objects

Owen Hatherley: The Brutalist Decades, 17 November 2016

A3: Threads and Connections 
by Peter Ahrends.
Right Angle, 128 pp., £18, December 2015, 978 0 9532848 9 4
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Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism 
by Barnabas Calder.
Heinemann, 416 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 0 434 02244 1
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Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture 1945-75 
by Elain Harwood.
Yale, 512 pp., £60, September 2015, 978 0 300 20446 9
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Concrete Concept: Brutalist Buildings around the World 
by Christopher Beanland.
Frances Lincoln, 192 pp., £18, February 2016, 978 0 7112 3764 3
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This Brutal World 
by Peter Chadwick.
Phaidon, 224 pp., £29.95, April 2016, 978 0 7148 7108 0
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Modern Forms: A Subjective Atlas of 20th-Century Architecture 
by Nicolas Grospierre.
Prestel, 224 pp., £29.99, February 2016, 978 3 7913 8229 6
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Modernist Estates: The Buildings and the People Who Live in Them 
by Stefi Orazi.
Frances Lincoln, 192 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 0 7112 3675 2
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Architecture an Inspiration 
by Ivor Smith.
Troubador, 224 pp., £24.95, November 2014, 978 1 78462 069 1
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... era to be given a Unesco World Heritage listing. It is a commonplace that modern architecture in Britain, as an ideology, was an import from interwar Central Europe – dropped off en route to the US by Mendelsohn or Gropius, and picked up by permanent émigrés like Goldfinger, Lubetkin et al – and Ahrends’s book is a document of the way the architects ...

Impersonality

Barbara Everett, 10 November 1988

A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers 
by Hugh Kenner.
Barrie and Jenkins, 290 pp., £16.95, September 1988, 0 7126 2197 0
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... biography, and all other forms of snobbish gossip. This is why things are as bad as they are in Britain now. There is a great deal of philistinism in the British Isles, true, and it does a great deal of harm. But in trying to construct a thesis, Kenner finds himself working back and back to find when we started sinking, and absent mindedly includes both ...

The Finchley Factor

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Thatcher in Israel, 13 September 2018

Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East 
by Azriel Bermant.
Cambridge, 274 pp., £22.99, September 2017, 978 1 316 60630 8
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... of Israel, the book which appeared under Wilson’s name in 1981: ostensibly a history of ‘Britain, America and the State of Israel’, it was a weirdly one-sided polemic, whose hero was Balfour and villain Ernest Bevin, Attlee’s foreign secretary and an ogre to Zionists to this day. It was so slipshod and inaccurate that Thurston Clarke in the New ...

Betting big, winning small

David Runciman: Blair’s Gambles, 20 May 2004

... he was advised by his doctors to take a holiday. He reluctantly agreed, spending three weeks at Ian Fleming’s somewhat spartan Jamaican hideaway, even though British troops remained on the ground in Egypt. When he returned, it soon became clear that he could not continue in office (at the 18 December meeting of the 1922 Committee Eden was forced to admit ...

On the imagining of conspiracy

Christopher Hitchens, 7 November 1991

Harlot’s Ghost 
by Norman Mailer.
Joseph, 1122 pp., £15.99, October 1991, 0 7181 2934 2
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A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs 
by Theodore Draper.
Hill and Wang, 690 pp., $27.95, June 1991, 0 8090 9613 7
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... nobody refers to Keith Kyle as a ‘collusion theorist’ because he explodes the claim that Britain, France and Israel were not acting in concert in 1956. The term ‘organised crime’, which suggests permanent conspiracy, is necessary both to understand and to prosecute a certain culture of wrongdoing. And you may have noticed that those who are too ...

Underwater Living

James Meek, 5 January 2023

... comes along every century or so, but the 2013 calamity – part of a series of floods that wracked Britain that winter – was portrayed by the government and media as an outrider of man-made climate change. And yet the government response was broadly the same as in 1953: money was rushed into building new flood defences. The best – a cynic would say the ...

No more pretty face

Philip Horne, 8 March 1990

Emotion Pictures: Reflections on the Cinema 
by Wim Wenders, translated by Sean Whiteside and Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 148 pp., £12.99, November 1989, 0 571 15271 6
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Scorsese on Scorsese 
by Martin Scorsese, edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie.
Faber, 178 pp., £12.99, November 1989, 9780571141036
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... film books (they have been publishing screenplays for some time). Since the mid-Seventies, Britain has been lamentably served in this respect, with the decline or disappearance of the main series that flourished in the Sixties, the era of Bergman, Fellini and Godard. Secker had Cinema One and Cinema Two; Lorrimer did Classic and Modern Film ...

High-Meriting, Low-Descended

John Mullan: The Unpolished Pamela, 12 December 2002

Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded 
by Samuel Richardson, edited by Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely.
Oxford, 592 pp., £6.99, June 2001, 0 19 282960 2
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... long time it has been the business of academics to build genealogies for the Novel that challenge Ian Watt’s narrative of its ‘rise’ via Defoe and Richardson and Fielding. Yet the many prehistories of the Novel that try to make Richardson’s achievement appear less surprising miss a simple truth: his contemporaries did think that Richardson’s ...

Laertes has a daughter

Bee Wilson: The Redgraves, 6 June 2013

The Redgraves: A Family Epic 
by Donald Spoto.
Robson, 361 pp., £25, November 2012, 978 1 84954 394 1
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The House of Redgrave: The Lives of a Theatrical Dynasty 
by Tim Adler.
Aurum, 336 pp., £20, July 2012, 978 1 84513 623 9
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... of Saint Joan. In the fearful climate preceding the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in Britain in 1967, Redgrave’s sexuality was anxiously hidden from his children. After the birth of Corin’s first child Redgrave finally confessed ‘that I am, to say the least of it, bisexual’; his son sympathised with the burden of guilt and shame that he ...

Rubbing Shoulders with Unreason

Peter Barham: Foucault's History of Madness, 8 March 2007

History of Madness 
by Michel Foucault, edited by Jean Khalfa, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa.
Routledge, 725 pp., £35, April 2006, 0 415 27701 9
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... but over the years, the subtitle clambered into first place and usurped the incumbent. As Ian Hacking remarks in a witty and astute foreword, this is rather like the Cheshire Cat leaving behind only its grin. Hacking suggests that the disappearance or suppression of the déraison is a sign that Foucault had changed his mind about ...

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