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American Masturbation

Alan Coren, 17 July 1980

Thy Neighbour’s Wife 
by Gay Talese.
Collins, 568 pp., £7.95, June 1980, 0 00 216307 1
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... reading in the bog. You simply select that evening’s fantasy – Barbi Benton, Raquel Welch, Ryan O’Neal, Teddy Kennedy – hold it firmly in your head, and leap aboard your spouse. Not easy with the light on. All the subjects of what Talese calls his ‘Odyssey’, doubtless leading the more academic reader to expect him to come home after nine years ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2009, 7 January 2010

... this time at the Trafalgar Studios. I saw the first production at Wyndham’s in 1964 with Madge Ryan, Peter Vaughan and Dudley Sutton. Good in the part Sutton was already too old, as have been most of the actors who’ve played in it since. It’s a play I would dearly like to have written, though these days for it to retain its shock value the young man ...

Is it Art?

John Lanchester: Video games, 1 January 2009

... is the fact that she was also the main intellectual influence on her close friend and protégé Alan Greenspan, author of the recent monetary boom we were all enjoying so much until it destroyed the world economy. The only thing which isn’t ridiculous about Rand and her ‘objectivism’ is the number of people who take her seriously. It would be a good ...

Strike at the Knee

Malcolm Gaskill: Italy, 1943, 8 February 2024

The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943 
by James Holland.
Bantam, 565 pp., £25, September 2023, 978 1 78763 668 2
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... in Italy had it easy: they were, according to a popular song, ‘The D-Day Dodgers’. Cornelius Ryan’s book The Longest Day (1959) and the movie it inspired, and since then Saving Private Ryan and the miniseries Band of Brothers, fixed Normandy as the prologue to a dominant narrative that unfolds like a quest, destined ...

Do I like it?

Terry Castle: Outsider Art, 28 July 2011

... short and wonderful poem, called ‘Outsider Art’ in The Best of It, a recent collection by Kay Ryan, in which she speaks of claptrap homemade objects ‘too dreary or too cherry red’. If it’s a chair, it’s covered with things the Saviour said or should have said – dense admonishments in nail polish too small to be read. No surface, she ...

Do Anything, Say Anything

James Meek: On the New TV, 4 January 2024

Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television 
by Peter Biskind.
Allen Lane, 383 pp., £25, November, 978 0 241 44390 3
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... where a mobster beats his pregnant girlfriend to death. Chase took it as a compliment. When Alan Ball was co-writing Grace under Fire for ABC, ‘people’s assistants were coming up and giving me notes, like “I don’t like the colour of the wall on that set.”’ When he moved to HBO to make Six Feet Under, the feedback on his pilot script ...

I thought you were incredible

Bee Wilson: Elizabeth Taylor’s Magic, 16 November 2023

Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon 
by Kate Andersen Brower.
HarperCollins, 495 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 0 00 843582 0
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... an appearance on Aspel and Company, the ITV chat show hosted by Michael Aspel, one of a handful of Alan Partridgesque men who for decades had a monopoly on interviewing film stars on British TV. Taylor had recently completed her second stint at the Betty Ford Centre, where she was treated for alcoholism and other addictions and where she met her seventh and ...

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