Wonder

Michael Wood, 10 November 1994

The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western 
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew Bruccoli.
Cambridge, 352 pp., £30, June 1994, 9780521402316Show More
The Great Gatsby 
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew Bruccoli.
Cambridge, 225 pp., £27.95, October 1991, 0 521 40230 1Show More
Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Macmillan, 400 pp., £17.50, June 1994, 0 333 59935 7Show More
Show More
“... is a movie producer in love with his dead wife, whom he finds reincarnate in the person of an English girl who strays into the studio on the night of an earthquake. Hollywood is Western, in Fitzgerald’s terms, because it repeats the past, because its simulacra point to real loss. The narrator describes the studio back lot in the moonlight as ‘thirty ...”

Subduing the jury

E.P. Thompson, 18 December 1986

“... the first may prepare for the second. Whether packing does or could take place in contemporary English practice is a matter remarkably obscure. The Police may properly inspect the panel against their records, in order to remove disqualified persons, and in the course of this scrutiny much other information will come to light, which may or may not be passed ...”

Where are we now?

LRB Contributors: Responses to the Referendum, 14 July 2016

“... in 293. Soon afterwards, Britain was back in Roman Europe.The second break with Europe was English rather than British. Henry VIII’s decision to ‘take back control’ from faceless foreign cardinals and unelected popes was an immense event, tearing apart the seamless robe of European Catholic Christendom and shaping ...”

Meltings

Nicholas Penny, 18 February 1988

Painting as an Art 
by Richard Wollheim.
Thames and Hudson, 384 pp., £28, November 1987, 0 500 23495 7Show More
Show More
“... admires for their ‘learning and originality’ the ‘two great proponents of this method in the English-speaking world: T.J. Clark on the theoretical, Francis Haskell on the anecdotal, wing’, but dismisses both as not promising much ‘as far as my interests, or the central problems of the study of art, are concerned’. Both these writers have done much ...”

You could catch it

Greil Marcus, 25 March 1993

Panegyric. Vol. I 
by Guy Debord, translated by James Brook.
Verso, 79 pp., £29.95, January 1993, 0 86091 347 3Show More
The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Post-Modern Age 
by Sadie Plant.
Routledge, 226 pp., £40, May 1992, 0 415 06222 5Show More
Show More
“... 80 frs, and I read it immediately, right on the street.’ One can certainly do the same with the English edition – big type and big margins don’t leave room for too many words on its 79 pages – and even if one knows nearly nothing of Debord, or perhaps especially if one doesn’t, one might be drawn to do so. The tone is seductive, the feeling elegiac ...”

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 2Show More
Show More
“... postwar revolutionary theory. Since 1968 the literature on the Situationist International in the English-speaking world has tended to present the movement as a dead avant-garde, a museum piece. Similarly in France, although Situationist writings have been a significant influence on such Post-Modernist figures as Baudrillard, Virilio and Marc ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... agreed that things will never be the same again. And if Scotland wins, perhaps the tired lull of English politics will also be disrupted. Tariq Ali As I debate​ what to write on my ballot paper, I am becoming increasingly irritated by the Electoral Commission’s decision to amend the original wording, ‘Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent ...”

Words as Amulets

Ange Mlinko: Barbara Guest’s Poems, 3 December 2009

The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest 
edited by Hadley Haden Guest.
Wesleyan, 525 pp., £33.95, July 2008, 978 0 8195 6860 1Show More
Women, the New York School and Other True Abstractions 
by Maggie Nelson.
Iowa, 288 pp., £38.50, December 2007, 978 1 58729 615 4Show More
Show More
“... of men who made her something else: one introduced her to bohemia and Henry Miller, another was an English peer who introduced her to H.D., another a military historian. She seems to have lived very comfortably, in Washington DC and New York City. She had two children. She travelled widely. All this is vaguely sketched because she was herself immune to ...”

Back to Life

Christopher Benfey: Rothko’s Moment, 21 May 2015

Mark Rothko: Towards the Light in the Chapel 
by Annie Cohen-Solal.
Yale, 296 pp., £18.99, February 2015, 978 0 300 18204 0Show More
Show More
“... that is a Dvinsk not an American idea of a suit, travelling across America and not able to speak English,’ he told Motherwell. In Portland, as in many other American cities, prosperous German Jews, who had mainly emigrated during the 19th century, had their own established neighbourhood while the ‘Eastern Jews’ fleeing the pogroms were confined to more ...”

White Hat/Black Hat

Frances Richard: 20th-Century Art, 6 April 2006

Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism 
by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.
Thames and Hudson, 704 pp., £45, March 2005, 0 500 23818 9Show More
Show More
“... helped to install Peter Bürger’s 1974 essay ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’ (translated into English in 1984) as a founding text of alternative cultural criticism. October’s influence on arts professionals has been powerful and lasting, though the editors in feistily refusing their own teachers’ canonical Modernism have retained a surprising amount ...”

Diary

Matthew Hughes: The Man Who Killed Hammarskjöld?, 9 August 2001

“... as ‘les affreux’ – an assortment of carpetbaggers, misfits and ideologues. Some of them were English-speaking, but the majority were French-speaking and had served in the Belgian or French Army. Some had fought in ‘dirty wars’ in Indochina and Algeria; others were French extremists from Algeria – ‘Ultras’ from the OAS – exiled to the Congo by ...”

Impossible Wishes

Michael Wood: Thomas Mann, 6 February 2003

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann 
edited by Ritchie Robertson.
Cambridge, 257 pp., £45.50, November 2001, 9780521653107Show More
Thomas Mann: A Biography 
by Hermann Kurzke, translated by Leslie Willson.
Allen Lane, 582 pp., £30, January 2002, 0 7139 9500 9Show More
Show More
“... his irony, and Mann scholars worry especially about his reputation in America and the UK. ‘For English readers,’ Donald Prater writes in his biography of Mann, ‘the humour of which he was so proud is faint.’ Prater is discussing the four Joseph novels (1933, 1934, 1936, 1943), but as far as I know English-speaking ...”