I eat it up

Joanne O’Leary: Delmore Schwartz’s Decline, 21 November 2024

The Collected Poems 
by Delmore Schwartz, edited by Ben Mazer.
Farrar, Straus, 699 pp., £40, April 2024, 978 0 374 60430 1
Show More
Show More
... deepest longing was for some unattainable separation of body and mind, and perhaps this is why, as Anthony Hecht pointed out, ‘there are probably more abstract nouns and adjectives’ in Schwartz’s work than in ‘any other modern writer’.‘The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me’ is a comic meditation on the burden of physicality and ‘the scrimmage of ...

Things go kerflooey

Ruby Hamilton: David Lynch’s Gee-Wizardry, 11 September 2025

David Lynch’s American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema 
by Mike Miley.
Bloomsbury, 272 pp., £21.99, January, 979 8 7651 0289 3
Show More
Show More
... with Mark Frost, an experienced screenwriter with whom Lynch had originally planned to adapt Anthony Summers’s Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. The usual line is that Frost contributed the more prosaic beats of the police procedural and soap opera – which is hard to dispute when what we know of their writing process is that Lynch lay on a ...

Spaces between the Stars

David Bromwich: Kubrick Does It Himself, 26 September 2024

Kubrick: An Odyssey 
by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams.
Faber, 649 pp., £25, January, 978 0 571 37036 8
Show More
Show More
... But the mistake lay in the expectation.Douglas hired Kubrick again three years later to replace Anthony Mann as the director of Spartacus. This was a risky opportunity; but in 1960 success with a Roman epic could be trusted to make a director’s commercial reputation. An iron law of the genre was that Jesus must be in the movie somewhere. Spartacus dodged ...

A New Kind of Being

Jenny Turner: Angela Carter, 3 November 2016

The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography 
by Edmund Gordon.
Chatto, 544 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 0 7011 8755 2
Show More
Show More
... and moved with him to Bristol in 1961. She applied for jobs with the Bristol Evening Post and BBC West but didn’t get them. Then she signed on with the Labour Exchange and started writing what her father, she claimed, always referred to as her ‘dirty books’. There’s​ an amazing bit in Carter’s first fashion essay, ‘Notes towards a Theory of ...

Worse than a Defeat

James Meek: Shamed in Afghanistan, 18 December 2014

The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan 
by Jack Fairweather.
Cape, 488 pp., £20, December 2014, 978 0 224 09736 9
Show More
Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War 
by Frank Ledwidge.
Yale, 287 pp., £10.99, July 2014, 978 0 300 20526 8
Show More
British Generals in Blair’s Wars 
edited by Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron and Hew Strachan.
Ashgate, 404 pp., £19.95, August 2013, 978 1 4094 3736 9
Show More
An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict 1978-2012 
by Mike Martin.
Hurst, 389 pp., £25, April 2014, 978 1 84904 336 6
Show More
Show More
... to six British soldiers: Nigel Coupe of the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, and Jake Hartley, Anthony Frampton, Christopher Kershaw, Daniel Wade and Daniel Wilford of the Yorkshire Regiment. All except Coupe, a sergeant and father of two children, were aged between 19 and 21. They died in Afghanistan in March 2012, out on patrol in Helmand province, when ...

A Short History of the Trump Family

Sidney Blumenthal: The First Family, 16 February 2017

... Trump’s business has been dependent almost from the start on real-life racketeers. There was Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, and Paul ‘Big Paulie’ Castellano, boss of the Gambino crime family, who owned the company that provided the ready-mix cement for Trump Tower, used in place of the usual steel girders. There ...

The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennett, 8 March 2007

... the page. So in due course Her Majesty went to Wales and to Scotland and to Lancashire and the West Country in that unremitting round of nationwide perambulation that is the lot of the monarch. The Queen must meet her people, however awkward and tongue-tied such meetings might turn out to be. Though it was here that her staff could help. To get round the ...