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Rigging the Death Rate

Paul Taylor, 11 April 2013

... dot; the position of the dot is the best estimate of the mortality rate; the bars through the dot mark the 95 per cent confidence interval: if the data are accurate and the method unbiased, 95 per cent of the time the true rate will be somewhere in this range. Hospital units are arranged in order of the number of operations performed, with smaller units to ...

Sisyphus at the Selectric

James Wolcott: Undoing Philip Roth, 20 May 2021

Philip Roth: The Biography 
by Blake Bailey.
Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021, 978 0 224 09817 5
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Philip Roth: A Counterlife 
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021, 978 0 19 984610 8
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Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth 
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020, 978 0 525 50524 2
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... for a beautiful young woman to see to him as Jane Eyre looked after old Mr Rochester,’ Benjamin Taylor writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I can’t be the first gay man to have been an older straight man’s ...
... to her and she wrote back. Then I left Deutsch to join Queen Magazine. They wanted me because of Mark Boxer, the Art Director, who had become a great friend. There was a sort of troika: Jocelyn Stevens, who’d bought it, Mark Boxer and Beatrix Miller, who was brought in as the editor, and who later edited Vogue. She was ...

On Caleb Femi

Amber Medland, 24 February 2022

... the poem ends in ‘the widening gyre’, a geometric stairwell where ten-year-old Damilola Taylor bled to death in 2000 after being stabbed in the leg with a broken bottle on his way home from the library: ‘It is true on paper there were no designs for a tomb/yet the East Wing stairs were where Damilola was found:/blue dawn, blue body, blue ...

In the dark

Philip Horne, 1 December 1983

The Life of Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius 
by Donald Spoto.
Collins, 594 pp., £12.95, May 1983, 0 00 216352 7
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Howard Hawks, Storyteller 
by Gerald Mast.
Oxford, 406 pp., £16.50, June 1983, 0 19 503091 5
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... comparatively safe community we form with its makers. The script is full of ironic glances that mark and alleviate the cruel logic of the action – like the policeman early on who admonishes Janet Leigh for sleeping in her car: ‘There are plenty of motels in this area. You should’ve – I mean just to be safe – Anthony Perkins, who plays Norman Bates ...

Exceptionally Wonderful Book

John Sutherland, 6 October 1994

Knowledge of Angels 
by Jill Paton Walsh.
Green Bay in association with Colt, 268 pp., £14.99, July 1994, 0 948845 05 8
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... new medium to ‘crawl back into its tube’. It all went wrong. The 1957 film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, was epic only in the scale of its box-office failure. The chronically self-destructive Clift lost his good looks in an automobile crash during production, and has two disconcertingly different faces at various points in the ...

Anxiety of Influx

Tony Tanner, 18 February 1982

Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail 
by Stephen Fender.
Cambridge, 241 pp., £15, January 1982, 0 521 23924 9
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Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The 19th-Century Response 
by Lee Clark Mitchell.
Princeton, 320 pp., £10.70, July 1981, 9780691064611
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... points to one of the key sources for that kind of anguished energy which is so often a distinctive mark of American writing. Chapter One draws on Washington Irving and on less well-known figures such as Timothy Flint and James Hall, and, taking up the fairly familiar point that when confronted by any new scene or phenomenon we need ‘reassuring frames’ or ...

Theme-Park Prussia

David Blackbourn, 24 November 1994

Prussia: The Perversion of an Idea 
by Giles MacDonogh.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 456 pp., £20, July 1994, 1 85619 267 9
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... than several Ruritanian dynasties with an equally grubby record. Lord Vansittart and A.J.P. Taylor can rest easily in their graves. It has proved more difficult to kill off Prussia in the mind. Post-war historians in the Federal Republic were soon busy rehabilitating the Borussian state. Influential figures like Gerhard Ritter insisted that the main ...

Generations

John Sutherland, 4 March 1982

The Survivors 
by Elaine Feinstein.
Hutchinson, 316 pp., £7.95, February 1982, 0 09 145850 1
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Helliconia Spring 
by Brian Aldiss.
Cape, 361 pp., £6.95, February 1982, 0 224 01843 4
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The Great Fire of London 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Hamish Hamilton, 169 pp., £7.95, January 1982, 0 241 10704 0
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A Loss of Heart 
by Robert McCrum.
Hamish Hamilton, 282 pp., £7.95, February 1982, 0 241 10705 9
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... slabs. The town hall. The Liver building. Lime Street Station. This terseness could be seen as a mark of embarrassment and I wonder if Feinstein may have felt inhibited by certain pieties. There seems a kind of nihil nisi bonum at work in the novel. Neither family contains a character who is at all sternly dealt with. Cruelty is recorded – old Solomon’s ...

Wicked Converse

Keith Thomas: Bewitched by the Brickmaker, 12 May 2022

The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World 
by Malcolm Gaskill.
Allen Lane, 308 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 0 241 41338 8
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... last time that someone would come to grief after offending Parsons. Eighteen months on, Jonathan Taylor claimed to have been attacked in bed by three demonic snakes. He, too, suspected that this was the work of Parsons. Then Taylor started to have ‘fits’. Other accusers came forward. William Branch, a ...
Dark Continent: Europe’s 20th Century 
by Mark Mazower.
Penguin, 496 pp., £20, March 1998, 0 7139 9159 3
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... combined with creative acts of will to make possible the first step towards a united Europe.’ Mark Mazower’s splendid new book is a kind of anti-Duroselle. It tells ‘a story of narrow squeaks and unexpected twists, not inevitable victories and forward marches’. It argues that each of the three great ideologies competing for the loyalties of ...

St Jude’s Playwright

Michael Church, 5 September 1985

The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams 
by Donald Spoto.
Bodley Head, 409 pp., £12.95, May 1985, 0 370 30847 6
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Tennessee Williams on File 
by Catherine Arnott.
Methuen, 80 pp., £7.95, May 1985, 0 413 58550 6
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... the art he deployed in at least twelve plays with such magnificent success. The arch-rationalist Mark Twain held Sir Walter Scott to blame for the disabling romanticism of the American South: Tennessee Williams, brought up on the Waverley novels, was a joyful victim of the disease. ‘I write out of love for the South … I think the war between romanticism ...

America Explodes

Adam Shatz, 18 June 2020

... little more than memorable speeches. Floyd’s death not only follows the killings of Breonna Taylor, an emergency medic shot dead while asleep in bed in her home in Kentucky by police officers looking for drug dealers operating out of a different house, and Ahmaud Arbery, a jogger murdered by a group of men who claimed to be making a ‘citizen’s ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2014, 8 January 2015

... and another was Keith McNally, the proprietor of Balthazar.15 January. The police officer who shot Mark Duggan is to be returned to firearms duty just as was the officer who shot Jean Charles de Menezes. The Met doesn’t seem to understand what is wrong with this. It’s just one word. Tact.20 February. The walls of the sitting room and the study in ...

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