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The Man in the Clearing

Iain Sinclair: Meeting Gary Snyder, 24 May 2012

... home.’ He is Gary Snyder, poet, bioregionalist, teacher. Having bought out his early partners, Allen Ginsberg and Dick Baker, he is the sole proprietor of this estate, a hundred acres of manzanita thickets, with open stretches of ponderosa pine, black oak, cedar, madrone, Douglas fir, bunchgrass – and one of the most seductive houses in ...

The Heart’s Cause

Michael Wood, 9 February 1995

The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling 
by Diana Trilling.
Harcourt Brace, 442 pp., $24.95, May 1994, 0 15 111685 7
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... who weren’t New York intellectuals at all. We could think of Kenneth Burke, R.P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, many more. But Mrs Trilling’s point is important. What hides in the phrase ‘general culture’ is the belief that literature and culture and politics are connected, that controversy is good and bad for the mind and heart, that we can share moral ...
Cary Grant: A Class Apart 
by Graham McCann.
Fourth Estate, 346 pp., £16.99, September 1996, 1 85702 366 8
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... making it hard even for her to feel settled within any single identity.’ In his book on Woody Allen (1990) he expands: ‘Many observers have been content to settle on the fairly contemptuous belief that movie stars “play themselves” – as if playing oneself were easy, given the complex, contradictory material at hand and the problem of fixing upon a ...

Most Curious of Seas

Richard Fortey: Noah’s Flood, 1 July 1999

Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event that Changed History 
by William Ryan and Walter Pitman.
Simon and Schuster, 319 pp., £17.99, February 1999, 0 684 81052 2
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... to challenge what he sees as Creationist nonsense. A group of local fundamentalists, led by one Allen Roberts, claimed to have found ‘scientific’ evidence of the remains of Noah’s Ark. Plimer counter-claimed that this alleged evidence is a natural geological structure, a syncline, located about 20 miles from Mount Ararat in Turkey – not far as the ...

Lost in the Forest

Ian Hacking: Who needs the DSM?, 8 August 2013

DSM-5: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition 
by the American Psychiatric Association.
American Psychiatric Publishing, 947 pp., £97, May 2013, 978 0 89042 555 8
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... attended to the trees (the kinds of disorder recognised in the manual), but few thought about the wood. I want to talk about the object as a whole – about the wood – and will seldom mention particular diagnoses, except when I need an example. Many worries have already been aired. In mid-May an onslaught was delivered by ...

Eye-Catchers

Peter Campbell, 4 December 1986

Survey of London: Vol. XLII. Southern Kensington: Kensington to Earls Court 
Athlone, 502 pp., £55, May 1986, 0 485 48242 8Show More
Follies: A National Trust Guide 
by Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp.
Cape, 564 pp., £15, June 1986, 0 224 02105 2
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The Botanists 
by David Elliston Allen.
St Paul’s Bibliographies, 232 pp., £15, May 1986, 0 906795 36 2
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British Art since 1900 
by Frances Spalding.
Thames and Hudson, 252 pp., £10.50, April 1986, 0 500 23457 4
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Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760-1900 
by Richard Altick.
Ohio State, 527 pp., £55, March 1986, 0 8142 0380 9
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History of the British Pig 
by John Wiseman.
Duckworth, 118 pp., £12.95, May 1986, 9780715619872
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... Doric temple of 1758 at Hagley Park) and Temple Bar (in its present situation in a Hertfordshire wood) are all follies by Headley’s and Meulencamp’s definition. The first, like many of their eye-catchers and shams, is not quite what it seems; the second was a plaything, although also a try-out for the big architecture of the next generation; the third is ...

Diary

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s Grotto, 5 October 2023

... laid out, in a serpentine river, pieces of water, lawns, &c, and very gracefully adorn’d with wood. One first comes to an island in which there is a castle, then near the water is a gateway, with a tower on each side, and passing between two waters there is a fine cascade from one to the other, a thatch’d house, a round pavilion on a mount, [and] Shake ...

La Bonita Cigarera

Katy Emck, 3 October 1996

The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in 19th-Century New York 
by Amy Gilman Srebnick.
Oxford, 238 pp., £18.99, February 1996, 9780195062373
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... fiancé Daniel Payne was the prime suspect. By mid-August suspicion had fallen on Joseph Morse, a wood-engraver and neighbour of the Rogers’s. At the time of Mary’s disappearance Morse had had a very public fight with his wife over the fact that he’d slept with another woman. Rumours were circulating that Mary had been seen with an unidentified man that ...

Sympathy for the Devil

Michael Wood, 16 October 1997

The Master and Margarita 
by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor.
Picador, 367 pp., £20, August 1997, 0 330 35133 8
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The Master and Margarita 
by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Penguin, 412 pp., £7.99, May 1997, 0 14 118014 5
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... have written this novel, or any novel we could read, because he’s only fictional, as Woody Allen would say, and fictional authors have even more trouble finding real publishers than flesh-and-bones authors do. But then imagining the Master has written the novel fictionalises us, pulls us into his world rather than puts him in ours. In this world we can ...

Just one of those ends

Michael Wood: Apocalypse Regained, 13 December 2001

Apocalypse Now Redux 
directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
August 2001
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Marlon Brando 
by Patricia Bosworth.
Weidenfeld, 216 pp., £12.99, October 2001, 0 297 84284 6
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... Cowie tells us, Brando reads the whole poem. This is a great, time-twisting gag, worthy of Woody Allen. A resurrected fictional character, cued by a reference to himself in his earlier incarnation, picks up and reads a work by a real-life poet. Coppola now seems to have invented Conrad, Kurtz and Eliot, but the only real agent here is literature. By ...

Diary

Eliot Weinberger: Next stop, Forbidden City, 23 June 2005

... its form, not a question of how you used it – it wasn’t a matter of taking this piece of wood and making a plank out of it … The important thing was to rap it – it turns into glass; rap it again and it turns to brass; again and to water. Changes in the texture of language. ‘Many of the characteristics of Gu Cheng’s previous work (predictable ...

Making sentences

Philip Horne, 21 November 1991

The Jameses: A Family Narrative 
by R.W.B. Lewis.
Deutsch, 696 pp., £20, October 1991, 0 233 98748 7
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Meaning in Henry James 
by Millicent Bell.
Harvard, 384 pp., £35.95, October 1991, 9780674557628
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... With his going, there was only Leon Edel (who in due course encouraged his colleague Gay Wilson Allen to write William James: A Biography, which appeared in 1967). Edel was at first going to produce an edition of Henry James’s letters, but decided to delay for over twenty-five years while he put out his four biographical volumes, edited The Diary of Alice ...

Paddling in the Gravy

E.S. Turner: Bath’s panderer-in-chief, 21 July 2005

The Imaginary Autocrat: Beau Nash and the Invention of Bath 
by John Eglin.
Profile, 292 pp., £20, May 2005, 1 86197 302 0
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... and the odd architect’, possessors of ‘monumental egos and superhuman wills’: men like John Wood and Ralph Allen. (The Duke of Chandos turned out something of an also-ran.) Eglin’s widely sourced and well-written book amounts to as lively an offbeat history of Bath as one could wish; it is helped along by quotations ...

Resistance to Torpor

Stephen Sedley: The Rule of Law, 28 July 2016

Entick v. Carrington: 250 Years of the Rule of Law 
edited by Adam Tomkins and Paul Scott.
Hart, 276 pp., £55, September 2015, 978 1 84946 558 8
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... In December 1763, Wilkes himself was awarded £1000 against the undersecretary of state, Robert Wood, for trespass to his house and papers; and much later, in 1769, he secured judgment for four times that sum against Lord Halifax personally for trespass and false imprisonment. In neither case did the defendant’s counsel try to argue that office as a ...

Nothing like a Teacup

Anahid Nersessian: In Meret Oppenheim’s Shoes, 4 May 2023

My Album: From Childhood to 1943 
by Meret Oppenheim, translated by Lisa Wenger and Martina Corgnati.
Scheidegger & Spiess, 324 pp., £42, September 2022, 978 3 03942 093 3
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The Loveliest Vowel Empties 
by Meret Oppenheim, translated by Kathleen Heil.
World Poetry Books, 128 pp., £18, February, 978 1 954218 08 6
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... and the New York Times used it to illustrate its review of the show. The article, by Edward Allen Jewell, was dismissive: if Dada ‘believed in nothing’, Jewell wrote, Surrealism, its giddy offspring, was more interesting and more contemptible for believing so much in itself. The ‘world craves new light and desperately needs new heroes’, but ...

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