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Thatcher’s Artists

Peter Wollen, 30 October 1997

Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection 
by Norman Rosenthal.
Thames and Hudson, 222 pp., £29.95, September 1997, 0 500 23752 2
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... role played by patrons in the formation of public taste, an encomium it would be difficult to read without remembering that all the work in this particular show was purchased or commissioned by Charles Saatchi. No doubt he will be pleased to be compared with Isabella d’Este. If there is a serious theme running through these essays, it concerns the ...

Think outside the bun

Colin Burrow: Quote Me!, 8 September 2022

The New Yale Book of Quotations 
edited by Fred R. Shapiro.
Yale, 1136 pp., £35, October 2021, 978 0 300 20597 8
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... of her family, so was ‘familiar’ in that sense, but ‘when the Compiler found how many well-read persons were unable to name the author of even the most familiar passage’, she felt the need to provide a volume of these ‘familiar quotations’. Quotations are ‘familiar’ in that strange and slightly coercive sense of being ‘stuff that ...

Imagine Tintin

Michael Hofmann: Basil Bunting, 9 January 2014

A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting 
by Richard Burton.
Infinite Ideas, 618 pp., £30, September 2013, 978 1 908984 18 0
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... doorstep. With Pickard’s encouragement, Bunting was tied into the writing scene in Newcastle (he read several times at the newly opened Morden Tower), he found publishers for some of his old poems, and even began writing again. His long poem Briggflatts was written on a commuter train; the last of his ‘sonatas’ (it’s only twenty pages), it was cut down ...

She gives me partridges

Bee Wilson: Alma Mahler, 5 November 2015

Malevolent Muse: The Life of Alma Mahler 
by Oliver Hilmes, translated by Donald Arthur.
Northeastern, 360 pp., £29, May 2015, 978 1 55553 789 0
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... Faustus, Adrian Leverkühn’s music is clearly based on Schönberg’s 12-tone compositions. Alma read the book and immediately told Schönberg she was very upset at the way Mann had appropriated his music. She then rang Mann and told him that Schönberg was angry about the misuse of his ‘intellectual property’ – thanks to Alma, he now was. She went ...

Are we there yet?

David Simpson: Abasing language, abusing prisoners, 17 February 2005

Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror 
by Mark Danner.
Granta, 573 pp., £16.99, February 2005, 9781862077720
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The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib 
edited by Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel.
Cambridge, 1284 pp., £27.50, February 2005, 0 521 85324 9
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... street have given us Camp Bread Basket, another probable icon of infamy. The photos are hard to read. Are the clenched fists and heavy boots caught in midair about to break the bones and bruise the flesh of defenceless prisoners, or are they posed for the camera in a gesture of simulated, lookalike bravado? Are they staged re-enactments of beatings that ...

The Comeuppance Button

Colin Burrow: Dreadful Mr Dahl, 15 December 2022

Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl, an Unofficial Biography 
by Matthew Dennison.
Head of Zeus, 264 pp., £20, August 2022, 978 1 78854 941 7
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... a title borrowed by Dennison for this new biography, though actually after you’ve read a dozen or so of them their twists cease to be at all unexpected. Dennison’s biography has the virtues of clarity and brevity, but despite declaring itself ‘unofficial’, which might suggest it offers shocking new revelations, it adds little to the very ...

Consulting the Furniture

Rosemary Hill: Jim Ede’s Mind Museum, 18 May 2023

Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists 
by Laura Freeman.
Cape, 377 pp., £30, May, 978 1 78733 190 7
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... furniture in their drawing room, turning the ‘cosy nooks and corners’ inside out and getting Donald to help him shift the piano. This was, in essence, what he did for the rest of his life, putting objects and people – often making little distinction between those categories – into relationships such that a certain mood or effect would be ...

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
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... of conduct Schwartz drew up for himself and distributed among his fellow students. They were to read a chapter from Aristotle’s Logic every day, as well as half an hour of Spinoza; to ‘use words as translations of reality, not as cheap band music’; to listen to Bach and avoid ‘catgut music’; and ‘to be pure of … laziness … pomposity ...

A Regular Bull

Christopher Hitchens, 31 July 1997

Whittaker Chambers: A Biography 
by Sam Tanenhaus.
Random House, 640 pp., $35, February 1997, 0 394 58559 3
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... not seem to have profited much by the penetration. It’s not absolutely clear whether, when he read a transcript of the Moscow trials in 1937, Chambers was more affected by fear than revulsion. At any rate, he underwent an excruciating self-examination. He had not failed to notice that other members of his subterranean fraternity, when recalled to ...

That’s democracy

Theo Tait: Dalton Trumbo, 2 March 2000

Johnny Got His Gun 
by Dalton Trumbo.
Prion, 222 pp., £5.99, May 1999, 1 85375 324 6
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... fade-ins and fade-outs. Filled with visceral and revolting images, it’s a novel that is easy to read but difficult to forget. The words ‘loneliness and silence and blackness’ recur frequently, along with ‘pain’ and ‘pus’. But, true to form, Trumbo manages to bring it all to an upbeat conclusion. In the visionary final section, an uneasy ...

Abolish everything!

Andrew Hussey: Situationist International, 2 September 1999

The Situationist City 
by Simon Sadler.
MIT, 248 pp., £24.95, March 1998, 0 262 19392 2
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... the English-speaking world imagine. In his introduction to a new translation of Jappe’s book by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Clark speaks of Debord as a thinker who engaged with the future as well as the present and whose time is yet to come.* The Situationist City also seeks to make connections between Situationist ideas and developments in mainstream ...

Tropical Storms

Blake Morrison, 6 September 1984

Poems of Science 
edited by John Heath-Stubbs and Phillips Salman.
Penguin, 328 pp., £4.95, June 1984, 0 14 042317 6
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The Kingfisher 
by Amy Clampitt.
Faber, 92 pp., £4, April 1984, 0 571 13269 3
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The Ice Factory 
by Philip Gross.
Faber, 62 pp., £3.95, June 1984, 0 571 13217 0
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Venus and the Rain 
by Medbh McGuckian.
Oxford, 57 pp., £4.50, June 1984, 0 19 211962 1
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Saying hello at the station 
by Selima Hill.
Chatto, 48 pp., £2.95, June 1984, 0 7011 2788 0
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Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems 
by Liz Lochhead.
Polygon, 159 pp., £2.95, May 1984, 0 904919 80 3
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News for Babylon: The Chatto Book of West Indian-British Poetry 
edited by James Berry.
Chatto, 212 pp., £4.95, June 1984, 9780701127978
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Human Rites: Selected Poems 1970-1982 
by E.A. Markham.
Anvil, 127 pp., £7.95, May 1984, 0 85646 112 1
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Midsummer 
by Derek Walcott.
Faber, 79 pp., £3.95, July 1984, 0 571 13180 8
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... love stories, but Lochhead does seem most inventive when she is (and is on the) offensive. Donald Davie (LRB, Vol. 6, No 11), seeking a contrast to the knotted texture of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry, has used the notion of a poetry that is ‘ventilated’, a poetry that lets us hear the natural speaking voice. This aptly characterises Lochhead’s ...

Ruin it your own way

Susan Pedersen, 4 June 2020

Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution 
by Selina Todd.
Chatto, 304 pp., £18.99, August 2019, 978 1 78474 082 5
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A Taste of Honey 
by Shelagh Delaney.
Methuen, 112 pp., £14.44, November 2019, 978 1 350 13495 9
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... what mothers give and resent giving, of what daughters learn and hate learning. Helen isn’t what Donald Winnicott in 1953 called a ‘good enough mother’ – not by a long shot. But she gave what she could: she didn’t abort Jo, she kept her alive and taught her what she knew of the world. Jo knows, and hates, that she’s repeating the script: ‘I ...

Desperado as Commodity

Alex Harvey: Jean-Patrick Manchette, 26 May 2022

The N’Gustro Affair 
by Jean-Patrick Manchette, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
NYRB, 180 pp., £12, September 2021, 978 1 68137 512 0
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No Room at the Morgue 
by Jean-Patrick Manchette, translated by Alyson Waters.
NYRB, 188 pp., £12, August 2020, 978 1 68137 418 5
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... to descriptions of what she does, how she holds herself and the way she talks.Fatale should be read in relation to La Position du tireur couché (1981), translated as The Gunman, Manchette’s final néo-polar, whose protagonist is also an assassin. Martin Terrier is a contract killer who works for ‘the company’. The book’s title indicates ...

Mr Trendy Sicko

James Wolcott, 23 May 2019

White 
by Brett Easton Ellis.
Picador, 261 pp., £16.99, May 2019, 978 1 5290 1239 2
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... seems a flimsy pretence. Yet for all its flaws, American Psycho was prophetic in its invocation of Donald Trump as aspirational monster-mogul and endures as an exhibit of slasher-film iconography owing to Mary Harron’s screen adaptation from 2000. The film’s spotless scene design (everything showroom shiny, the downtown loft as laboratory, anticipating the ...

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