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Hit and Muss

John Campbell, 23 January 1986

David Low 
by Colin Seymour-Ure and Jim Schoff.
Secker, 180 pp., £9.95, October 1985, 9780436447556
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... but is not very often funny; Garland can be quite sharp, but his drawing is both fussy and crude. Gerald Scarfe is essentially a caricaturist; Marc and Osbert Lancaster are purveyors of one-line gags. The only comparison is with Vicky; he very nearly reaches Low’s level of political acuity and wit but his drawings are much slighter and his characterisation ...

Homage to Spain

Douglas Johnson, 22 May 1986

Homage to Catalonia 
by George Orwell.
Secker, 260 pp., £12.95, April 1986, 0 436 35028 9
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The Spanish Civil War 
by Hugh Thomas.
Hamish Hamilton, 1115 pp., £20, March 1986, 0 241 89450 6
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The Triumph of Democracy in Spain 
by Paul Preston.
Methuen, 274 pp., £14.95, April 1986, 0 416 36350 4
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... studies of the subject have appeared since (by historians such as Paul Preston, Raymond Carr and Martin Blinkhorn, to mention three British examples). My memories of Homage to Catalonia were not only of the fine, evocative writing, perhaps Orwell’s best, but of his enthusiasm for the people with whom he had lived and fought. If, for some people of my ...

McNed

Gillian Darley: Lutyens, 17 April 2003

The Architect and His Wife: A Life of Edwin Lutyens 
by Jane Ridley.
Chatto, 524 pp., £25, June 2002, 0 7011 7201 0
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Edwin Lutyens, Country Houses: From the Archives of ‘Country Life’ 
by Gavin Stamp.
Aurum, 192 pp., £35, May 2001, 1 85410 763 1
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Lutyens Abroad 
edited by Andrew Hopkins and Gavin Stamp.
British School at Rome, 260 pp., £34.95, March 2002, 0 904152 37 5
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... with him was replaced by friendship with his odd daughter Judith. Hardly recovered, she met Gerald Duckworth, Virginia Woolf’s nemesis, but it was for marriage to Lutyens that she gave up her plans to work at the Oxford Mission among the factory girls of Bethnal Green. Her mother’s disapproval of her choice of an architect of uncertain social ...

Pour a stiff drink

Tessa Hadley: Elizabeth Jane Howard, 6 February 2014

All Change 
by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
Mantle, 573 pp., £18.99, November 2013, 978 0 230 74307 6
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... All Change, was published in 2013, and she died in January this year, aged ninety. Her stepson Martin Amis advised her to embark on the Cazalet books, when she was hesitating between possibilities. It was good advice – and not only because they brought her solid sales and secured her popularity. The material of the chronicles seems like Howard’s ...

How the sanity of poets can be edited away

Arnold Rattenbury: The Sanity of Ivor Gurney, 14 October 1999

‘Severn and Somme’ and ‘War’s Embers’ 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by R.K.R. Thornton.
Carcanet, 152 pp., £7.95, September 1997, 1 85754 348 3
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80 Poems or So 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by George Walter and R.K.R. Thornton.
Carcanet, 148 pp., £9.95, January 1997, 1 85754 344 0
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... innocent homoeroticism discussed by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) or in Martin Taylor’s less fashionable, less thesis-driven anthology, Lads, republished in 1998. In Taylor’s collection, so often are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among them – Gurney’s, Edward Thomas’s, Owen’s – rise from ...

Flings

Rosemary Hill: The Writers’ Blitz, 21 February 2013

The Love-Charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War 
by Lara Feigel.
Bloomsbury, 519 pp., £25, January 2013, 978 1 4088 3044 4
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... an enthusiastic but erratic driver who had recently caused an accident in which her married lover Gerald O’Donovan was badly injured, careered around in her ambulance with the potential for doing more harm than good. The comedy of it was caught with cruel economy by Waugh in the opening of Officers and Gentlemen. It is a scene Feigel might have quoted at ...

Carnival Time

Peter Craven, 18 February 1988

The Remake 
by Clive James.
Cape, 223 pp., £10.95, October 1987, 0 224 02515 5
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In the Land of Oz 
by Howard Jacobson.
Hamish Hamilton, 380 pp., £12.95, September 1987, 0 241 12110 8
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... a pity that James, who can talk with such trenchancy and sense about everything from Mandelstam to Martin Amis, makes such a fool of himself (and of us) when he touches on the literature of his birthplace. His recent overview of Australian poetry in the Times Literary Supplement shows him at his worst – uninformed and wallowing. Even when he affects to ...

His Whiskers Trimmed

Matthew Karp: Robert E. Lee in Defeat, 7 April 2022

Robert E. Lee: A Life 
by Allen Guelzo.
Knopf, 585 pp., $27.99, September 2021, 978 1 101 94622 0
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... their best to isolate him from the wider Confederate war effort. There were notable successes. Gerald Ford restored Lee’s American citizenship in 1975; as governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton joined other Southern politicians in merging the state holidays for Lee and Martin Luther King Jr. In the last five ...

Gorgon in Furs

D.D. Guttenplan: Paula Fox, 12 December 2002

Borrowed Finery: A Memoir 
by Paula Fox.
Flamingo, 256 pp., £12, August 2002, 0 00 713724 9
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... mores is compounded when he takes the son of a gangster for a lover. Helen had met Claude through Gerald, her landlord, partially crippled after a garden hose was forced into his rectum as punishment for his violations of Cajun propriety – and his only offence had been to write poetry about life on the bayou. Helen’s exposure to such violence makes her ...

Holocaust History

Geoff Eley, 3 March 1983

... little credibility amongst scholars, and which was authoritatively disposed of in a major essay by Martin Broszat, one of many current historians whom Dawidowicz implicitly belittles.In all these ways the discussion of the literature is selective, impressionistic and extremely unreliable. It encourages little confidence in the author’s judgment. She descends ...

Doctor Feelgood

R.W. Johnson, 3 March 1988

Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home 
by Garry Wills.
Heinemann, 488 pp., £14.95, February 1988, 0 434 86623 7
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... to pouring hundreds of billions of dollars towards Lockheed, Boeing, Rockwell, General Dynamics, Martin Marietta and so on. Even though there’s no money to pay for it. Even though this means a huge budget deficit, means cutting back on education and social spending, means borrowing abroad, means becoming a debtor nation, means the collapse of the ...

Creamy Polished Globes

Blake Morrison: A.E. Coppard’s Stories, 7 July 2022

The Hurly Burly and Other Stories 
by A.E. Coppard, edited by Russell Banks.
Ecco, 320 pp., £16.99, March 2021, 978 0 06 305416 5
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... undoes all hope with a brutal sentence of his own: ‘April came, May came, and then his son Martin was drowned in a boating accident, on a lake, in a park.’ The story ends with Martin’s funeral and Dan’s return to prison.Coppard liked to say that his stories had little to do with him (‘There is no stupider ...

Red Flag, Green Light

Rosa Lyster: Keep the Con Going, 16 November 2023

Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Swindled the World 
by Yepoka Yeebo.
Bloomsbury, 378 pp., £20, August 2023, 978 1 5266 6857 8
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... as one big revolutionary cocktail party, with people like Oliver Tambo, W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King in attendance. Accra quickly became a magnet for liberation movements across the continent, but it also attracted spies, war criminals and corrupt businessmen. Malcolm X remembered sitting in a hotel dining room there, listening to Americans ...

Bloody Sunday Report

Murray Sayle: Back to Bloody Sunday, 11 July 2002

... Cathedral, Londonderry, of Gráinne, daughter of Northern Ireland’s Education Minister Martin McGuinness (not yet knighted for his varied public services, but it’s early days), and Sean ‘Harpie’ Hargan, the Derry football hero. The TV wasn’t there, we thought wistfully, to cover us, or the long-running story that had brought us back to ...

Resistance from Elsewhere

Kevin Okoth: Black Marxism, 7 April 2022

Black Marxism 
by Cedric Robinson.
Penguin, 436 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 0 241 51417 7
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Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition 
by Joshua Myers.
Polity, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2021, 978 1 5095 3792 1
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... and the Reproduction of Racial Capitalism in South Africa’, by the South African historians Martin Legassick and David Hemson. In the late 1970s, the official position of the UN’s International Labour Organisation was that the policy of apartheid was in direct conflict with economic growth, and that growth would eventually undermine and force an end ...

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