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A Dreadful Drumming

Theo Tait: Ghosts, 6 June 2013

The Undiscovered Country: Journeys among the Dead 
by Carl Watkins.
Bodley Head, 318 pp., £20, January 2012, 978 1 84792 140 6
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A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof 
by Roger Clarke.
Particular, 360 pp., £20, November 2012, 978 1 84614 333 5
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... and the house was no longer troubled by spirits. As Clarke points out, this could be an M.R. James or Sheridan le Fanu story. One detail – the house was suspiciously cheap for its size – features in countless modern ghost stories of the Amityville type. There are, according to Clarke, eight main categories of ghostly phenomenon: traditional ghosts ...

The Death of Actaeon

Robin Robertson, 5 June 2003

... after Ovid for James Lasdun The midday sun finds a way down into a deep cleft in the mountain meshed with cypresses and pine, to flare on a distant speck of glass: the sacred pool where twenty Amnisian nymphs attend their queen, huntress and protectress of this place, these woods and hills. As she steps forward, they take her clothes and stand aside, while the deftest folds the locks of hair into a knot ...

In the Hands of Any Fool

Walter Gratzer, 3 July 1997

A Short History of Cardiology 
by Peter Fleming.
Rodopi, 234 pp., £53.50, April 1997, 90 420 0048 1
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... sphygmomanometers that had become available for the accurate measurement of blood pressure. Sir James Mackenzie, the patron, and Thomas Lewis, the leader of the scientific school and as much a physiologist as a physician, still held that ‘the trained finger’ was the best instrument for measuring arterial pressure. Science made perhaps its first ...

Memories We Get to Keep

James Meek: James Salter’s Apotheosis, 20 June 2013

All That Is 
by James Salter.
Picador, 290 pp., £18.99, May 2013, 978 1 4472 3824 9
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Collected Stories 
by James Salter.
Picador, 303 pp., £18.99, May 2013, 978 1 4472 3938 3
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... point of view we experience the world, at the smallest remove from the first person ‘I’ – as James Kelman put it, not so much written from a character’s viewpoint as over his shoulder. In a writer like Kelman, Bellow or Coetzee, it’s a means to great work. Used as a default by less accomplished writers, the single-perspective free indirect speech ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘3.10 to Yuma’, 1957 & 2007 , 18 October 2007

3.10 to Yuma 
directed by James Mangold.
September 2007
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3.10 to Yuma 
directed by Delmer Daves.
August 1957
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... too. The simultaneous release of a DVD version of Delmer Daves’s classic 3.10 to Yuma (1957) and James Mangold’s remake of the same film – there is even a trailer for the new movie among the special features of the DVD of the old one – makes you wonder whether Hollywood is dedicating itself to pure nostalgia or pure denial. Is the past all we have, or ...

The Card-Players

Paul Foot, 18 September 1986

Error of Judgment: The Truth about the Birmingham Bombings 
by Chris Mullin.
Chatto, 270 pp., £10.95, July 1986, 0 7011 2978 6
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... Five of them had been arrested as they tried to get on a ferry to Belfast to attend the funeral of James McDade, a prominent IRA member who had blown himself to pieces planting a bomb in Coventry. They had left Birmingham by train less than half an hour before the bombs went off, and the bombs were planted within a few hundred yards of Birmingham’s New ...

The Leopard

James Meek: A Leopard in the Family, 19 June 2014

... come back that night to feast on what remained. He paid labourers to build a box-like machan, or hunter’s hide, in the closest tree to the kill, and after work climbed the ladder to the hide with Belli, a member of the Badaga people who worked as estate carpenter and was a renowned shikari, or huntsman. Robin poked his shotgun out of the same small opening ...

Unaccommodated Man

Christopher Tayler: Adventures with Robert Stone, 18 March 2004

Bay of Souls 
by Robert Stone.
Picador, 250 pp., £16.99, February 2004, 0 330 41894 7
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... interest is something he calls ‘literary vitalism’: ‘Frank Norris, Dreiser, Kate Chopin, James Branch Cabell’. As he sees it, these writers traffic in ‘the purifying effect of struggle’, all ‘Eros and Thanatos’ and ‘solitary acts of personal liberation’. Teaching Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, he finds his students ...

Planes, Trains and SUVs

Jonathan Raban: James Meek, 7 February 2008

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent 
by James Meek.
Canongate, 295 pp., £16.99, February 2008, 978 1 84195 988 7
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... James Meek’s last, bestselling novel, The People’s Act of Love, published in 2005 to great critical acclaim, was set in 1919, in ‘that part of Siberia lying between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk’. Anglophone readers who can locate ‘that’ part of Siberia without a good atlas deserve spot prizes. The historical date and exotic location gave Meek a fictional and cultural space in which extraordinary events and people could seem believable, when placed inside a landscape rendered in exact and first-hand detail ...

Argy-Bargy

Malcolm Deas, 6 May 1982

... is the Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the phantom Foreign Office in St James’s Square. For reasons of economy or snobbery or inertia, that Institute has paid precious little attention to Latin America in recent years, though it used to run a regular seminar on the region. It is a bit more tin-pot than it used to be. It is a credit ...

Time of the Red-Man

Mark Ford: James Fenimore Cooper, 25 September 2008

James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years 
by Wayne Franklin.
Yale, 708 pp., £25, July 2008, 978 0 300 10805 7
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... It was a curious set of circumstances that in 1820 drove James Cooper (the ‘middle surname’ Fenimore would not be added for another six years), the son of one of post-independence America’s wealthiest land speculators, to embark on a career in the dubious and unpredictable world of novel-writing. Almost nothing in Cooper’s life up until that year, in which he turned 31, indicates an interest in fiction, or in the arts ...

Hoogah-Boogah

James Wolcott: Rick Moody, 19 September 2002

The Black Veil 
by Rick Moody.
Faber, 323 pp., £16.99, August 2002, 0 571 20056 7
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... the memory of one’s spouse that gives adultery its dirty kick? (In a poem called ‘Adultery’, James Dickey, who knew whereof he spoke, concluded: ‘Guilt is magical.’) Why are ‘peccadillos’ deemed part of the devil’s handiwork? (Most peccadillos are as harmless as hobbies.) Is a belt easier to swipe than, say, a pair of cashmere socks or a bottle ...

Are you having fun today?

Lorraine Daston: Serendipidity, 23 September 2004

The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science 
by Robert Merton and Elinor Barber.
Princeton, 313 pp., £18.95, February 2004, 0 691 11754 3
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... its learning lightly, or so one might think. For reasons never completely explained, either in James Shulman’s graceful introduction or in Merton’s gallant afterword, written at 91 after four operations for cancer and with a fifth impending, the manuscript was shelved at Merton’s behest (he mentions Barber’s gracious indulgence on this score) and ...

Spying on Writers

Christian Lorentzen, 11 October 2018

... call to the author’s publicist, and the rest would probably come up if an agent googled, say, ‘James Baldwin communist?’ Like lazy students of literature everywhere, the agents filing reports didn’t usually bother to do their reading. In the documents collected here only the report on Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago delivers the ...

Silly Buggers

James Fox, 7 March 1991

The Theatre of Embarrassment 
by Francis Wyndham.
Chatto, 205 pp., £15, February 1991, 0 7011 3726 6
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... was eagerly lobbied for by our detractors. Perhaps the epitaph for the Magazine – long after Hunter Davies, that other Sixties figure, had been hired to tame it – was the final meeting between McCullin and Andrew Neil, Murdoch’s Editor on the Sunday Times, when McCullin was sacked. His images were no longer needed at the beginning of the That-cherite ...

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