Our Island Story

Stefan Collini: The New DNB, 20 January 2005

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 
edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison.
Oxford, sixty volumes, £7,500, September 2004, 9780198614111
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... have made more enemies in these two years than in ten years of editing the Cornhill. One man signed himself the other day “your justly incensed enemy” – because I had not asked him to write articles already assigned to others and he is not an extreme example of the antiquarian.’ As copy started to arrive, Stephen wailed over ‘the insane ...

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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... 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 reflections on the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death; a ...

A Journey in the South

Andrew O’Hagan: In New Orleans, 6 October 2005

... mild-mannered, imperturbable, sucking juice out of a Waffle House cup. He is a 50-year-old black man with a short moustache and a gap between his teeth. He was born in Pitt County but spent his happiest days in Atlanta. Terry sat at the counter of the Waffle House waiting for a decision. It turned out he needed more than Yolande to cover his shifts, so we ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2000, 25 January 2001

... a letter stops to talk – and what enables him to break the ice is that she is a woman doing a man’s job. 8 January. By train to Cambridge on a day of blinding sunshine and bitter cold. We eat our sandwiches on the train, a busy, bucketing electric job that scampers through Shepreth and Foxton and very different from the plodding little steam train I ...

Tankishness

Peter Wollen: Tank by Patrick Wright, 16 November 2000

Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine 
by Patrick Wright.
Faber, 499 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 571 19259 9
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... in my mind until ten weeks after the War had broken out. When it did recur to me it was as if a ray of light had struck a sensitised plate.’ In September 1914, very soon after the outbreak of war, Swinton was instructed by Kitchener, whom he had known in South Africa, to travel immediately to France as an official Eyewitness and write a series of reports ...

Paralysed by the Absence of Danger

Jeremy Harding: Spain, 1937, 24 September 2009

Letters from Barcelona: An American Woman in Revolution and Civil War 
edited by Gerd-Rainer Horn.
Palgrave, 209 pp., £50, February 2009, 978 0 230 52739 3
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War Is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War 
by James Neugass.
New Press, 314 pp., £16.99, November 2008, 978 1 59558 427 4
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We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War 
by Paul Preston.
Constable, 525 pp., £9.99, June 2009, 978 1 84529 946 0
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... by ‘the students and faculty’ of Harvard – and a juggernaut containing $15,000 worth of X-ray equipment, autoclaves, an operating table and a generator. By the end of the month, when the Republican government set its heart on the capture of Teruel, Neugass was part of a mobile AMB infirmary consisting of 17 vehicles. Neugass himself drove ‘a long ...

Open in a Scream

Colm Tóibín, 4 March 2021

Francis Bacon: Revelations 
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.
William Collins, 869 pp., £30, January, 978 0 00 729841 9
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... was living. We know what he painted: in 1933, when he was 23, his Crucifixion that looks like an X-ray; eleven years later, the contortions of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. But what was going on in his mind is a matter for speculation. In October 1940, his asthma exacerbated by the dust from the bombing, he left London and moved to a ...

Loafing with the Sissies

Colm Tóibín: The Trials of Andy Warhol, 10 September 2020

Warhol: A Life as Art 
by Blake Gopnik.
Allen Lane, 931 pp., £35, March, 978 0 241 00338 1
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... Warhol wasn’t interested in the play, but he did want to cast Solanas in an erotic film, I, a Man. On the day she shot Warhol, Solanas rode the six floors with her victim in the elevator up to his office. ‘Solanas’s bullets,’ the Times reported, ‘punctured his stomach, liver, spleen, oesophagus and lungs. At one point, the doctors pronounced him ...

In Hyperspace

Fredric Jameson, 10 September 2015

Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative 
by David Wittenberg.
Fordham, 288 pp., £18.99, March 2013, 978 0 8232 4997 8
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... of what would have happened had the time traveller not stepped on the butterfly: this is from Ray Bradbury’s immortal ‘Sound of Thunder’, but the idea is adaptable to any number of wistful daydreams – had Lincoln not been assassinated, or Bobby Kennedy – or more sombre fantasies, like Philip K. Dick’s Man in ...

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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... 1960s pop-rock before its larky brashness got lost in earnest philosophising. I see the young Ray Davies – an ambiguous girly-boy who hymned his cheap-suit backstreet bohemia over blackout power chords – as Smith’s John the Baptist. Horses betrays a love of early Kinks, Them, Who, but reframes their riffy aesthetic with studied artfulness. How much ...

Most Himself

Matthew Reynolds: Dryden, 19 July 2007

The Poems of John Dryden: Vol. V 1697-1700 
edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins.
Longman, 707 pp., £113.99, July 2005, 0 582 49214 9
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Dryden: Selected Poems 
edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins.
Longman, 856 pp., £19.99, February 2007, 978 1 4058 3545 9
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... souls may fall, Strike through and make a lucid interval, But Shadwell’s genuine night admits no ray, His rising fogs prevail upon the day. Besides, his goodly fabric fills the eye, And seems designed for thoughtless majesty: Thoughtless as monarch oaks that shade the plain, And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign. On the one hand, the crescendo of ...

Philistines

Barbara Everett, 2 April 1987

... many ways sharply characterised, with a formidable resource of observed contemporaneity – Media Man in motion. Yet, for all his TV hair-do’s, he, too, has an ancestry like that of Rhiannon and Malcolm; he is surely descended from the incorrigible Patrick of the earlier book who lamentably rapes the gentle Jenny instead of marrying her the first time ...

Sex on the Roof

Patricia Lockwood, 6 December 2018

Evening in Paradise: More Stories 
by Lucia Berlin.
Picador, 256 pp., £14.99, November 2018, 978 1 5098 8229 8
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Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs 
by Lucia Berlin.
Picador, 160 pp., £12.99, November 2018, 978 1 5098 8234 2
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... first and last time anyone took over herself.’ Lilacs and dizziness, the sweeping element of a man. ‘Andado’ climaxes not with a defloration, but with what directly precedes it: They heard the river before they saw it, and then the clatter of Lautaro’s hooves on the wooden bridge. His ghastly shriek as the bridge gave way. They were both thrown from ...

The Contingency of Language

Richard Rorty, 17 April 1986

... sort of political thought which sets aside questions about both the will of God and the nature of man and dreams of creating a new kind of human being. Simultaneously, the Romantic poets were showing what can happen when art is no longer thought of as imitation, but rather as self-creation. These poets made it plausible for art to claim the place in culture ...

Pipe down back there!

Terry Castle: The Willa Cather Wars, 14 December 2000

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism 
by Joan Acocella.
Nebraska, 127 pp., £13.50, August 2000, 0 8032 1046 9
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... peasants’ – Mencken wrote approvingly in 1919 – and drew from it ‘the eternal tragedy of man’. Reviewing her early novels in the Nation, Carl Van Doren praised both her democratic outlook and ‘elemental’ vision of human suffering. ‘Passion blows through her chosen characters,’ he enthused, ‘like a free, wholesome, if devastating ...