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Dark Strangers, Gorgeous Slums

Philip Horne, 16 March 1989

Off the Rails: Memoirs of a Train Addict 
by Lisa St Aubin de Teran.
Bloomsbury, 193 pp., £12.95, January 1989, 0 7475 0011 8
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The Marble Mountain, and Other Stories 
by Lisa St Aubin de Teran.
Cape, 126 pp., £10.95, January 1989, 9780224025973
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The Bathroom 
by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated by Barbara Bray.
Boyars, 125 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 7145 2880 3
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Motherland 
by Timothy O’Grady.
Chatto, 230 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 7011 3341 4
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A Lesser Dependency 
by Peter Benson.
Macmillan, 146 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 333 49093 2
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... a flash, I’d launch the dart at the board. This is only apparent ‘relaxation’, though, the mark of an obsessional state, and, irrationally, when Edmondsson tries to distract him from his darts and get him to return to Paris, ‘I hurled a dart at her with all my might and it stuck in her forehead.’ He is much distressed at his (not fatal) act, which ...

Diary

Ardis Butterfield: Who was Chaucer?, 27 August 2015

... or heretofore unpublished. So we fall upon a startlingly sexy note written by Virginia to Leonard a year and a half after their marriage, in which the Mandril [Leonard Woolf’s pet name for Virginia] ‘wishes me to inform you delicately that her flanks and rump are now in finest plumage, and invites you to an ...

Here/Not Here

Wendy Steiner, 4 July 1996

... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...

Buggering on

Paul Addison, 21 July 1983

Winston Churchill: Companion Vol. V, Part III, The Coming of War 1936-1939 
by Martin Gilbert.
Heinemann, 1684 pp., £75, October 1982, 0 434 29188 9
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Finest Hour: Winston Churchill, 1939-1941 
by Martin Gilbert.
Heinemann, 1308 pp., £15.95, June 1983, 0 434 29187 0
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Churchill 1874-1915 
by Ted Morgan.
Cape, 571 pp., £12.50, April 1983, 0 224 02044 7
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The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 
by William Manchester.
Michael Joseph, 973 pp., £14.95, June 1983, 0 7181 2275 5
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... someone who had read it all before a dozen times? This train of speculation leads us closer to the mark. The official biography, and Churchill’s own works, are far too extensive for most people to read even if they could afford to buy them, which they cannot. So there is a huge and lucrative gap in the market for the middle-range biography. The point happens ...

Under the Soles of His Feet

Stephen Alford: Henry’s Wars, 4 April 2019

The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII 
by Steven Gunn.
Oxford, 297 pp., £35, January 2018, 978 0 19 880286 0
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... William Body, who complained about his lodgings was put very firmly in his place by Lord Leonard Grey: ‘I saide,’ Grey reported, ‘I was sure he sholde never be so good, as the Dukes of Norfoke, and Suffolke, and my lorde my brother [the Marquess of Dorset], whom I had seen lodged wors.’ Those in command exhibited many qualities. Grey was ...

The Paranoid Sublime

Andrew O’Hagan, 26 May 1994

How late it was, how late 
by James Kelman.
Secker, 374 pp., £14.99, March 1994, 0 436 23292 8
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... it was that the better writers – whom we may as well call James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard among others – wouldn’t join in on the song. ‘It’s their loss,’ she said. ‘I mean, what do they want?’ A fairly good idea of what they wanted could be gleaned at that time from a visit to the Scotia Bar in Stockwell Street, where the ...

Corporate Imposter

Alex Harvey, 4 February 2021

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden 
by Denis Johnson.
Vintage, 224 pp., £9.99, February 2019, 978 1 78470 817 7
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... some form of enlightenment. In Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (1991), Johnson’s fourth novel, Leonard English, a failed suicide, gives up his job as a medical equipment salesman in Kansas and moves to Provincetown, Massachusetts to become a private detective. He’s another drifter, a voyeuristic onlooker, who visits drag shows, develops a crush on a ...

What’s wrong with Desmond?

Ian Hamilton, 30 August 1990

Clever Hearts: Desmond and Molly MacCarthy 
by Hugh Cecil and Mirabel Cecil.
Gollancz, 320 pp., £18.95, July 1990, 0 575 03622 2
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... him by his Bloomsbury acquaintances and chums, both old and young. ‘When I first saw Desmond,’ Leonard Woolf later recalled, ‘he looked like a superb young eagle who with one sweep of his great wing could soar to any height he chose ... Why did he never fulfil his promise? Why did the splendid eagle degenerate into an affable hawk?’ This was a question ...

Evil Days

Ian Hamilton, 23 July 1992

The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 
by John Carey.
Faber, 246 pp., £14.99, July 1992, 0 571 16273 8
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... to shut a window or moderate the volume. One summer afternoon, when I was doggedly trying to mark a batch of A-level papers, my patience gave out, and I crossed the street in protest. Rereading this now, in the light of Carey’s book, I find myself wondering what he would make of such a tale if the complainer had been a drippy poet and the noisemakers ...

Alan Bennett writes about his new play

Alan Bennett: ‘The Habit of Art’, 5 November 2009

... are.The Brewhouse is not a garret, quite; say sheltered accommodation rather. A granny flat. But mark this. If the college is minded to provide this accommodation it’s for nothing so vulgar as a poet in residence. This isn’t Keele, still less is it East Anglia. No. We see it as providing a niche – young persons nowadays might even call it a pad – for ...

What’s Left?

Sheila Fitzpatrick: The Russian Revolution, 30 March 2017

October: The Story of the Russian Revolution 
by China Miéville.
Verso, 358 pp., £18.99, May 2017, 978 1 78478 280 1
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The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 
by Mark D. Steinberg.
Oxford, 388 pp., £19.99, February 2017, 978 0 19 922762 4
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Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 
by S.A. Smith.
Oxford, 455 pp., £25, January 2017, 978 0 19 873482 6
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The Russian Revolution: A New History 
by Sean McMeekin.
Basic, 496 pp., $30, May 2017, 978 0 465 03990 6
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Historically Inevitable? Turning Points of the Russian Revolution 
by Tony Brenton.
Profile, 364 pp., £25, June 2016, 978 1 78125 021 1
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... Revolution, and ‘if its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them.’ Mark Steinberg is the only one of the professional historians writing on the revolution to confess to any lingering emotional attachment to it. Of course, revolutionary idealism and daring leaps into the unknown tend to result in hard landings, but, Steinberg ...

Uncle Wiz

Stefan Collini: Auden, 16 July 2015

Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Vol. V: 1963-68 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 561 pp., £44.95, June 2015, 978 0 691 15171 7
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Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Vol. VI: 1969-73 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 790 pp., £44.95, June 2015, 978 0 691 15171 7
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... he wrote in 1965 for the New Yorker, ostensibly a review of autobiographies by Evelyn Waugh and Leonard Woolf. On the pretext that ‘no one can read an autobiography which describes a time, a country, a class familiar to him without starting to compose his own,’ Auden turned this into an 11,000-word comparison of his and their lives, under a series of ...

As Astonishing as Elvis

Jenny Turner: Ayn Rand, 1 December 2005

Ayn Rand 
by Jeff Britting.
Duckworth, 155 pp., £12.99, February 2005, 0 7156 3269 8
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... Rand Institute in California. The ARI was founded in 1985, three years after Rand’s death, by Leonard Peikoff, her friend and heir. It runs a newsletter called Impact and, via the Objectivist Academic Center, undergraduate courses in the Randian world vision. Objectivism was the name Rand gave to the system of philosophy she developed in a 30,000-word ...

Callaloo

Robert Crawford, 20 April 1989

Northlight 
by Douglas Dunn.
Faber, 81 pp., £8.95, September 1988, 0 571 15229 5
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A Field of Vision 
by Charles Causley.
Macmillan, 68 pp., £10.95, September 1988, 0 333 48229 8
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Seeker, Reaper 
by George Campbell Hay and Archie MacAlister.
Saltire Society, 30 pp., £15, September 1988, 0 85411 041 0
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In Through the Head 
by William McIlvanney.
Mainstream, 192 pp., £9.95, September 1988, 1 85158 169 3
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The New British Poetry 
edited by Gillian Allnutt, Fred D’Aguiar, Ken Edwards and Eric Mottram.
Paladin, 361 pp., £6.95, September 1988, 0 586 08765 6
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Complete Poems 
by Martin Bell, edited by Peter Porter.
Bloodaxe, 240 pp., £12.95, August 1988, 1 85224 043 1
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First and Always: Poems for Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital 
edited by Lawrence Sail.
Faber, 69 pp., £5.95, October 1988, 0 571 55374 5
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Birthmarks 
by Mick Imlah.
Chatto, 61 pp., £4.95, September 1988, 0 7011 3358 9
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... whiff here of the loftily musing Poet; there’s something a little stagey about that exclamation-mark, but such worries vanish with I do not like the big brave boasts of war.          GIVE ME GOOD PIGEONS! – A very large number of Great Commoners Built like Nye Bevan or Gambetta. Strong, rather than prettily melodious, clear and confident, this ...
Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot 
by Michael Rogin.
California, 320 pp., $24.95, May 1996, 0 520 20407 7
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... to demonstrate their Americanness – is lost when the book is cited by the Afrocentric theorist Leonard Jeffries or the Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Abdul Muhammed as proof of a Jewish conspiracy to malign African-Americans. Here, Rogin is not as forceful as he might be in explaining the ethnic dynamic in the grand Gesamtkunstwerk of American show ...

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