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The Art of Self-Defeat

Noël Annan, 19 July 1984

Faces of Philip: A Memoir of Philip Toynbee 
by Jessica Mitford.
Heinemann, 175 pp., £9.95, July 1984, 0 434 46802 9
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... in which he lived was insufferable and that he must do what he could to save it. One or two of his close friends may have wondered whether a memoir should be written; and then put the idea from their minds, remembering those touching and boring notices in the Times which read: ‘NM writes: Colonel Jocelyn Lethbridge – always known to his friends as ...

Carrying on with a foreign woman

John Sutherland, 7 November 1985

Galapagos 
by Kurt Vonnegut.
Cape, 269 pp., £9.50, October 1985, 0 224 02847 2
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A Family Madness 
by Thomas Keneally.
Hodder, 315 pp., £9.95, September 1985, 0 340 38449 2
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A Storm from Paradise 
by Stuart Hood.
Carcanet, 188 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 85635 582 8
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Samarkand 
by John Murray.
Aidan Ellis, 255 pp., £8.95, May 1985, 0 85628 151 4
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The Sicilian 
by Mario Puzo.
Bantam, 410 pp., £9.95, May 1985, 0 593 01001 9
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Putting the boot in 
by Dan Kavanagh.
Cape, 192 pp., £8.95, August 1985, 0 224 02332 2
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... on, sustained by his mother’s favourite quotation (which stands as the novel’s epigraph): Anne Frank’s ‘In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.’ But, of course, Anne wrote that before the Germans got her. Thomas Keneally likes to run his fiction close to historical fact. An appended ...

St Jude’s Playwright

Michael Church, 5 September 1985

The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams 
by Donald Spoto.
Bodley Head, 409 pp., £12.95, May 1985, 0 370 30847 6
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Tennessee Williams on File 
by Catherine Arnott.
Methuen, 80 pp., £7.95, May 1985, 0 413 58550 6
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... Rose which was to haunt him wherever he went, and in almost everything he wrote. ‘We were so close to each other, we had no need of others,’ he said many years later. When Rose was ill, he would be convinced that he, too, was ill. He loved her charm and her imagination, and watched her phobic retreat from life as though a part of himself was dying. By ...

Very Nasty

John Sutherland, 21 May 1987

VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov 
by Andrew Field.
Macdonald, 417 pp., £14.95, April 1987, 0 356 14234 5
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... incestuous Dmitri), ‘who was very beautiful, unhappily married, passionate, high-living, and in close proximity to the grand duke for more than a decade was probably his lover, and he may have been the father of some of her children’. Close proximity is all the evidence Field can apparently muster for this theory ...

Simone de Sartre

Douglas Johnson, 7 June 1984

La Cérémonie des Adieux 
by Simone de Beauvoir.
Gallimard, 559 pp., frs 90
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Simone de Beauvoir Today 
by Alice Schwarzer, translated by Marianne Howarth.
Chatto, 120 pp., £6.95, February 1984, 0 7011 2784 8
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Lettres au Castor et à Quelques Autres 
by Jean-Paul Sartre, edited by Simone de Beauvoir.
Gallimard, 520 pp., frs 120, May 1983, 9782070260782
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... would always be a part of her life. In 1973, Sartre told an interviewer that he had never been so close to any woman as he had been to le Castor. After his death, seven years later, Beauvoir wrote in La Cérémonie des Adieux: His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It was splendid enough in itself ...

Peachy

David Thomson: LA Rhapsody, 27 January 2022

Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis and Los Angeles, California 
by Matthew Specktor.
Tin House, 378 pp., $17.95, July 2021, 978 1 951142 62 9
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... his destiny was the swimming pool that awaits Gatsby, or the vanishing of Dick Diver at the close of Tender Is the Night.Specktor starts his book with a comic-scary photomat picture of Fitzgerald spooking the camera, staring into his abyss. In the introduction, we get the outline of Specktor’s own broken life, with a wife, N, lost to another ...

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Michael Hofmann: Zagajewski’s Charm, 15 December 2005

Selected Poems 
by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh, Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry and C.K. Williams.
Faber, 173 pp., £12.99, October 2004, 0 571 22425 3
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A Defence of Ardour: Essays 
by Adam Zagajewski.
Farrar, Straus, 198 pp., $14, October 2005, 0 374 52988 4
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... Doktor, Herr Privatdozent’): a bookworm, globetrotter, noticer who seems very close to the poet himself. The experience of reading him is very different, but the unself-conscious way with which Zagajewski handles this ‘I’ brings to mind Frank O’Hara. Certainly, it wouldn’t be easy to say who is ...

Had we lived …

Jenny Diski: The Afterlife of Captain Scott, 9 February 2006

Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South 
by David Crane.
HarperCollins, 637 pp., £25, November 2005, 0 00 715068 7
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... The huts and their contents have been preserved intact, and the photographs show intensely close details of things long left behind: ragged shirts and socks hanging up on lines, wooden cases forming a wall, a jar of fruit salts, bottled redcurrants and gooseberries, tins of dried onions and parsnips, reams of unused paper on a shelf, a small open book ...

Z/R

John Banville: Exit Zuckerman, 4 October 2007

Exit Ghost 
by Philip Roth.
Cape, 292 pp., £16.99, October 2007, 978 0 224 08173 3
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... reputation, but it was not until the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 – at the close of the Age of Aquarius, did we but know it – that he attained the worldwide renown, or infamy, as some might say, which he continues to enjoy and, if we are to believe The Anatomy Lesson and The Counterlife, to chafe under. Portnoy’s Complaint was the ...

An Even Deeper Bunker

Tom Vanderbilt: Secrets and spies, 7 March 2002

Body of Secrets: How America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World 
by James Bamford.
Century, 721 pp., £20, May 2001, 0 7126 7598 1
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Total Surveillance: Investigating the Big Brother World of E-Spies, Eavesdroppers and CCTV 
by John Parker.
Piatkus, 330 pp., £10.99, September 2001, 0 7499 2226 5
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... on the National Security Agency, The Puzzle Palace, published soon after Reagan became President, Frank Raven, an NSA official, is asked what happens when someone on whom the NSA is spying enters the US. ‘You have intelligence which is entirely foreign and you have intelligence which is entirely domestic,’ Raven says. ‘But then you have the third ...

From Plato to Nato

Christopher Norris, 7 July 1983

Literary Theory: An Introduction 
by Terry Eagleton.
Blackwell, 244 pp., £15, May 1983, 0 631 13258 9
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Essays on Fiction 1971-82 
by Frank Kermode.
Routledge, 227 pp., £9.95, May 1983, 0 7100 9442 6
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Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction 
by Vincent Leitch.
Hutchinson, 290 pp., £15, January 1983, 0 09 150690 5
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Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies 
by Peter Wollen.
Verso, 228 pp., £15, March 1983, 0 86091 055 5
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Knowing the Poor: A Case-Study in Textual Reality Construction 
by Bryan Green.
Routledge, 221 pp., £12.95, February 1983, 0 7100 9282 2
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... can be thus summarily wished away in the interests of an uncluttered critical praxis. Frank Kermode’s Essays on Fiction are likewise preoccupied with the relationship between criticism and its broader institutional context. That he construes the relationship in very different terms is a measure of its deep ambivalence as regards the politics of ...

The Devil upon Two Sticks

Charles Nicholl: Samuel Foote, 23 May 2013

Mr Foote’s Other Leg: Comedy, Tragedy and Murder in Georgian London 
by Ian Kelly.
Picador, 462 pp., £18.99, October 2012, 978 0 330 51783 6
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... Goodere, Bart. The reiterated claim of genuineness trumps various competitors with his close family connection to the case. Foote’s theatrical career began under the tutelage of the veteran Irish actor and director Charles Macklin. Somewhat improbably, his first outing, in early 1744, was in the role of Othello. This was received well enough but ...

Buy birthday present, go to morgue

Colm Tóibín: Diane Arbus, 2 March 2017

Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer 
by Arthur Lubow.
Cape, 734 pp., £35, October 2016, 978 0 224 09770 3
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Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov 
by Alexander Nemerov.
Fraenkel Gallery, 106 pp., $30, March 2015, 978 1 881337 41 6
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... run, Arbus became interested in the connections she could make, the seductions. She liked getting close to those she photographed. She wanted her own unsparing gaze to find a gaze returned. She wanted people to welcome her advances, to note her energy and give it back to her. She wasn’t interested in suffering or pain, or victims of accidents or ...

Pals

John Bayley, 23 May 1991

The Oxford Book of Friendship 
edited by D.J. Enright and David Rawlinson.
Oxford, 360 pp., £15, April 1991, 0 19 214190 2
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... and unsentimentally. There can seem to be no problem. In ‘Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s’ Frank O’Hara writes that The poem goes on too long because our friendship has been long. In the context of poetry and longevity friendship seems to take a quite natural place at the civilised table. Mention of ‘friendship’, that is. What about John ...

Glooms

E.S. Turner, 23 February 1995

Edward Lear: A Biography 
by Peter Levi.
Macmillan, 362 pp., £20, January 1995, 0 333 58804 5
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... affectionate, and all life-long.’ What of that first impetuous excursion to Delphi with young Frank Lushington, when the happy pair decked their hats and horses with wild flowers? ‘I do not think the key to this is precisely sexual attraction, but the spring in Greece at full blast,’ says Levi, in the spirit of Honi soit. The diaries of that period ...

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