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Liquid Fiction

Thomas Jones: ‘The Child that Books Built’, 25 April 2002

The Child that Books Built: A Memoir of Childhood and Reading 
by Francis Spufford.
Faber, 214 pp., £12.99, April 2002, 0 571 19132 0
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A Child’s Book of True Crime: A Novel 
by Chloe Hooper.
Cape, 238 pp., £12.99, February 2002, 0 224 06237 9
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... about lying in the long grass at the edge of the playground with his friends Richard and Roger, ‘trying to fart at will’; about avoiding Julie, ‘who liked to pounce on innocent-looking kids and ask them the Question – “D’you know what having it off means?”’; about the time Francis ‘crept onto the landing and kissed Aslan’s ...

Caretaker/Pallbearer

James Wolcott: Updike should stay at home, 1 January 2009

The Widows of Eastwick 
by John Updike.
Hamish Hamilton, 308 pp., £18.99, October 2008, 978 0 241 14427 5
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... he cited, Updike and Philip Roth, are still displaying their self-absorbency and depriving tender young empaths of valuable column inches. With an almost audible sigh, Updike concedes that the pups have a point. ‘He or she may feel, as the grey-haired scribes of the day continue to take up space and consume the oxygen in the increasingly small room of the ...

Why did we start farming?

Steven Mithen: Hunter-Gatherers Were Right, 30 November 2017

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States 
by James C. Scott.
Yale, 336 pp., £20, September 2017, 978 0 300 18291 0
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... suspect they were also practising some form of environmental management, setting fires to promote young shoots, building small dams to retain and divert water, and undertaking selective culls among wild herds to sustain animal populations. The key to food security was diversity: if, by chance, a particular foodstuff gave out, there were always more to choose ...

Air-Conditioned Unease

Andrew O’Hagan: Joan Didion on the Couch, 26 June 2025

Notes to John 
by Joan Didion.
Fourth Estate, 208 pp., £18.99, April, 978 0 00 876724 2
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Didion & Babitz 
by Lili Anolik.
Atlantic, 344 pp., £10.99, July, 978 1 80546 394 8
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The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir 
by Griffin Dunne.
Grove, 385 pp., £10.99, June 2024, 978 1 80471 057 9
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The Uptown Local: Joy, Death and Joan Didion 
by Cory Leadbeater.
Fleet, 213 pp., £12.99, June 2024, 978 0 349 12717 0
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... and their cubs and regretted having to stop reading when her therapist called her into his room. Roger MacKinnon, who was then 73, was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst once described by the New York Times as ‘John Wayne in a blue suit’. He taught at Columbia and had co-authored a book about the usefulness of the interview in clinical situations. Didion ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Finding My Métier, 4 January 2018

... always liked because it’s so unlike, uneasy, fierce and with me still at fifty looking quite young.He could be quite difficult, though I never found him so, and I always remember that in 1987, on the day Russell Harty was pilloried by the Sun for his patronage of rent boys, Snowdon rang and asked him to supper, a circumstance with which, had they ...

I am only interested in women who struggle

Jeremy Harding: On Sarah Maldoror, 23 May 2024

... mother worked as a maid. Her father was a black Frenchman from Guadeloupe, who died when she was young. She was one of four children in a single-parent family and spent periods in an orphanage. By the 1950s she was in Paris, where she found work as a PE instructor and enrolled at the school of dramatic arts in the rue Blanche. She was one of a group of ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1995, 4 January 1996

... been playing, with, responsible for their suppression, the commissioner of police for Bruges, one Roger de Bris. This gives quiet pleasure as it’s also the name of the transvestite stage director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, who makes his appearance bare-shouldered and in a heavy ball gown. 7 March. Our pillar box is now emptied at 9 a.m. not by the ...

On Needing to Be Looked After

Tim Parks: Beckett’s Letters, 1 December 2011

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941-56 
edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck.
Cambridge, 791 pp., £30, September 2011, 978 0 521 86794 8
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... 1929, when Beckett was 23, and 1940. Those years were troubled by a dilemma that threatened the young man’s mental health. Beckett’s parents had wanted him to get involved in the family quantity surveying business; instead he studied languages and in 1928 went to Paris as a young academic. It seemed a sensible ...

Up from the Cellar

Nicholas Spice: The Interment of Elisabeth Fritzl, 5 June 2008

Greed 
by Elfriede Jelinek, translated by Martin Chalmers.
Serpent’s Tail, 340 pp., £7.99, July 2008, 978 1 84668 666 5
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... sense, but a kind of greed. Janisch, the country policeman, is a good-looking man, not young but intensely attractive to women, and he exploits this to seduce them, usually by pulling them over on mountain roads for minor traffic offences, then propositioning them. His preferred prey are single women of a certain age, and his ostensible goal in ...

Look at Don Juan

Adam Shatz: Camus in the New World, 19 October 2023

Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World 
by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Kaplan, translated by Ryan Bloom.
Chicago, 152 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 226 69495 5
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... and Guelma, at the cost of thousands of Algerian lives.Camus had been a communist in Algiers as a young man, but turned against it in 1939, when he wrote that the Soviet Union ‘can be classed among the countries that prey on others’. Nonetheless, he fell under the suspicion of the State Department months before his arrival in New York for ‘filing ...

Oh God, what have we done?

Jackson Lears: The Strange Career of Robert Oppenheimer, 20 December 2012

Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer 
by Ray Monk.
Cape, 818 pp., £30, November 2012, 978 0 224 06262 6
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... in ideas. This was the world of Knaben3physik (‘boy physics’) in the 1920s and 1930s, when young men who had not been shaving for more than a few years were excitedly reading one another’s papers and poring over the results of experiments in Cambridge, Göttingen, Copenhagen and (eventually) Berkeley. This was how Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and ...

Do I like it?

Terry Castle: Outsider Art, 28 July 2011

... concise and to the point here: The term ‘outsider art’ was coined by the art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for ‘art brut’ (‘raw art’ or ‘rough art’), a label created by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by ...

Basking

Paul Seabright, 21 March 1985

The Forger’s Art 
edited by Denis Dutton.
California, 276 pp., £18, June 1984, 0 520 04341 3
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Of Mind and Other Matters 
by Nelson Goodman.
Harvard, 210 pp., £14.90, April 1984, 0 674 63125 0
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Fact, Fiction and Forecast 
by Nelson Goodman.
Harvard, 131 pp., £4.20, April 1984, 0 674 29071 2
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But is it art? 
by B.R. Tilghman.
Blackwell, 193 pp., £15, August 1984, 0 631 13663 0
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... One evening last September, millions of viewers watched three young men forge a Modigliani sculpture live on Italian television. Three things distinguished the programme from other forgers’ At Homes, such as the BBC’s regular visits to the studio of Tom Keating (a sale of whose work had raised £274,000 at Christie’s that very day ...

Wobbly, I am

John Kerrigan: Famous Seamus, 25 April 2024

The Letters of Seamus Heaney 
edited by Christopher Reid.
Faber, 820 pp., £40, October 2023, 978 0 571 34108 5
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... him a visibility at odds with the solitude and simplicity he craved. One reason he moved with his young family from Belfast to Glanmore in County Wicklow in 1972 was to protect himself from what the final poem in North (1975) calls ‘Exposure’. In this fraught lyric, Heaney is in the woods of Wicklow, ‘feeling/Every wind that blows’; but physical ...

Bordragings

John Kerrigan: Scotland’s Erasure, 10 October 2024

England’s Insular Imagining: The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland 
by Lorna Hutson.
Cambridge, 323 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 1 009 25357 4
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... in France, his French marriages and susceptibility to Gallic culture. The Scottish historian Roger Mason has said that the 1550s saw the ‘establishment of what amounted to French colonial rule in Scotland’. Hutson obscures this story with her insular narrative, yet the English and the Scots were both impelled by wider conflicts.Confessional ...

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