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Four Moptop Yobbos

Ian Penman, 17 June 2021

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 642 pp., £9.99, March, 978 0 00 834003 2
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The Beatles and Sixties Britain 
by Marcus Collins.
Cambridge, 382 pp., £90, March 2020, 978 1 108 47724 6
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The Beatles in Context 
edited by Kenneth Womack.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £74.99, January 2020, 978 1 108 41911 6
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... a framed still from a favourite film, A Hard Day’s Night; an essay by Eula Biss referring to Paul McCartney and ‘Norwegian Wood’; McCartney sporting a man bun during his lockdown vacation; rave reviews for McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various ...

Like What Our Peasants Still Are

Landeg White: Afrocentrism, 13 May 1999

Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes 
by Stephen Howe.
Verso, 337 pp., £22, June 1998, 1 85984 873 7
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... Sixties, after influencing virtually every major figure in anthropology from Malinowski to Audrey Richards. Roland Oliver, who in the Fifties pioneered the serious study of African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, has recently identified diffusionism as the biggest intellectual obstacle to be overcome in winning recognition for the new ...

A Toast at the Trocadero

Terry Eagleton: D.J. Taylor, 18 February 2016

The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England since 1918 
by D.J. Taylor.
Chatto, 501 pp., £25, January 2016, 978 0 7011 8613 5
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... a compliment. It was that other place, inhabited by bolshie ideologues like Leavis, Empson, I.A. Richards and Raymond Williams, which set the pace as far as concepts and critical procedures were concerned, and which engaged in such superfluous pursuits as reflecting on why one was studying literature in the first place. Oxford people just read the books and ...

Emvowelled

Thomas Keymer: Muddy Texts, 25 January 2024

Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early 18th-Century Literature 
by Abigail Williams.
Princeton, 328 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 0 691 17068 8
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... though an opening chapter on ‘The Good Reader’ gives more space than one might expect to I.A. Richards and Bonamy Dobrée, with their assumptions about informed reading and fixed meaning. Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, Harold Bloom’s map of misreading and Stanley Fish’s interpretive communities all get ...

I did not pan out

Christian Lorentzen: Sam Lipsyte, 6 June 2019

Hark 
by Sam Lipsyte.
Granta, 304 pp., £12.99, March 2019, 978 1 78378 321 2
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... the intellectual. But he is also one of the few working American novelists – along with Paul Beatty, Lydia Millet, Mark Leyner, Mark Doten – truly committed to satire. The opening passage of The Ask compares America to a ‘run-down and demented pimp’ slumped in the corner of a pool hall, a novel image of imperial decline. Sometimes it’s the ...

Coruscating on Thin Ice

Terry Eagleton: The Divine Spark, 24 January 2008

Creation: Artists, Gods and Origins 
by Peter Conrad.
Thames and Hudson, 529 pp., £24.95, September 2007, 978 0 500 51356 9
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... form of it – in this case, poetry, which had taken up where religion had left off. As I.A. Richards remarked with stunning off-handedness, it was perfectly capable of saving us. It was no accident that this exalted vision of art grew stronger with the advent of industrial capitalism. The artwork was the enemy of industrial production because it was an ...

‘Someone you had to be a bit careful with’

David Sylvester: Gallery Rogues, 30 March 2000

Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser 
by Harriet Vyner.
Faber, 317 pp., £20, October 1999, 0 571 19627 6
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... title and also by letting the first and last words in the book come from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and those on the jacket from Paul McCartney, so that Fraser is effectively handed over to showbiz. In reality, showbiz was in the margin of his life. He was a creative figure in the art world whose motivation for ...

Gangs

D.A.N. Jones, 8 January 1987

The Old School: A Study 
by Simon Raven.
Hamish Hamilton, 139 pp., £12, September 1986, 0 241 11929 4
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The Best Years of their Lives: The National Service Experience 1945-63 
by Trevor Royle.
Joseph, 288 pp., £12.95, September 1986, 0 7181 2459 6
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Murder without Conviction: Inside the World of the Krays 
by John Dickson.
Sidgwick, 164 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 9780283994074
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Inside ‘Private Eye’ 
by Peter McKay.
Fourth Estate, 192 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 947795 80 4
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Malice in Wonderland: Robert Maxwell v. ‘Private Eye’ 
by Robert Maxwell, John Jackson, Peter Donnelly and Joe Haines.
Macdonald, 191 pp., £10.95, December 1986, 0 356 14616 2
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... bat’ and ‘First Love’. He liked best the addictive serials of the Thirties written by Frank Richards for the Magnet and the Gem, with the characters neatly divided into two gangs easily distinguished by their appearance. There were curly-haired, pretty-mouthed cricketers, Bob Cherry and Tom Merry (Simon Raven’s favourite), and the manly, righteous ...

Shuffling off

John Sutherland, 18 April 1985

Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction 
by Garrett Stewart.
Harvard, 403 pp., £19.80, December 1984, 0 674 19428 4
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Forms of Feeling in Victorian Fiction 
by Barbara Hardy.
Owen, 215 pp., £12.50, January 1985, 9780720606119
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Language and Class in Victorian England 
by K.C. Phillipps.
Basil Blackwell in association with Deutsch, 190 pp., £19.50, November 1984, 0 631 13689 4
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... crude rhetoric and subtle drama.’ Hardy’s extended discussions of the deaths of Nell and Paul Dombey are every bit as intelligent as Stewart’s, and designed to make a quite opposite point about troughs and peaks in Dickensian artistry. The terms ‘form’ and ‘feeling’ have been refrains in Hardy’s criticism for the last ten years. Her ...

A Lot of Travail

Michael Wood: T.S. Eliot’s Letters, 3 December 2009

The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Vol. II: 1923-25 
edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton.
Faber, 878 pp., £35, November 2009, 978 0 571 14081 7
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... is worth nothing if it doesn’t cost too much. When he discovered that his theologian friend Paul Elmer More didn’t believe in hell, he was indignant and wrote: ‘Is your God some kind of Santa Claus?’ This morality literally erupts in two letters in the volume, producing moments of shock amid an otherwise totally absorbing (perhaps I mean ...

Positively Spaced Out

Rosemary Hill: ‘The Building of England’, 6 September 2001

The Buildings of England: A Celebration Compiled to Mark 50 Years of the Pevsner Architectural Guides 
edited by Simon Bradley and Bridget Cherry.
Penguin Collectors’ Society, 128 pp., £9.99, July 2001, 0 9527401 3 3
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... but does little to characterise him as a writer.At the Architectural Review in the 1930s, James Richards had found editing Pevsner’s articles hard work. By the end of the war he was fluent, but his use of English retains a sense of discovery and the flexibility of a mature intellect expressing itself with the vitality of youth. Pevsner was still young in ...

Boom and Bust

Margaret Anne Doody, 19 June 1997

A History of the Breast 
by Marilyn Yalom.
HarperCollins, 331 pp., £15.99, March 1997, 0 04 440913 3
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... Dombey employs Polly Toodle as a wet-nurse for his motherless baby. Polly Toodle must be called ‘Richards’ to get rid of the ridiculous low-class appellation, and to separate her from her family. Mr Dombey is very anxious to treat their agreement as ‘a mere matter of bargain and sale, hiring and letting’, and is determined to keep the nurse and his ...

Got to go make that dollar

Alex Abramovich: Otis Redding, 3 January 2019

Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life 
by Jonathan Gould.
Crown, 544 pp., £12.99, May 2018, 978 0 307 45395 2
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... the Rolling Stones had conceived as a homage to Redding and the Stax studio sound; Keith Richards later called the Stones’ version ‘a demo for Otis’). Slow, pleading ballads like ‘These Arms of Mine’, ‘Chained and Bound’, ‘My Lover’s Prayer’, ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’ and ‘Pain in My Heart’ may have been his bread ...

Ways to Be Pretentious

Ian Penman, 5 May 2016

M Train 
by Patti Smith.
Bloomsbury, 253 pp., £18.99, October 2015, 978 1 4088 6768 6
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Collected Lyrics 1970-2015 
by Patti Smith.
Bloomsbury, 303 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 1 4088 6300 8
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... is that she was wearing a greyish white T-shirt adorned with a Nosferatu-like image of Keith Richards. Before the assembled hacks, she launched into a risible stream-of-consciousness rap – a dithyramb to all the Keefs and Bobs and other venerable rock’n’roll patriarchs. I wanted a polysex pop music Kali, and here she was dragging it all back down ...

Who Are They?

Jenny Turner: The Institute of Ideas, 8 July 2010

... of ‘real journalists, not just celebrity columnists’. The Battle had its big names too: Paul Mason from Newsnight, Suzanne Moore from the Mail on Sunday, the novelist Philip Hensher. Some people refuse to stand on an IoI platform, considering them clandestine and creepy. Others are a bit doubtful, but take part in the events in the interests of free ...

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