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I gotta use words

Mark Ford: Eliot speaks in tongues, 11 August 2016

The Poems of T.S. Eliot: Volume I: Collected & Uncollected Poems 
edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.
Faber, 1311 pp., £40, November 2015, 978 0 571 23870 5
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The Poems of T.S. Eliot: Volume II: Practical Cats & Further Verses 
edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.
Faber, 667 pp., £40, November 2015, 978 0 571 23371 7
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... published in 1940 – the phrase ‘She was … a one-night-stand type’ occurs), Edward Winslow Martin (author of The Secrets of the Great City, 1868, which mentions ‘cheap hotels’), the London Baedeker, Cooper’s The Prairie and Hamlet’s ‘overwhelming question’ – ‘“To be, or not to be, that is the question.” Perhaps also OED 6: “to pop ...

Where could I emote?

Bee Wilson: Looking for Al Pacino, 26 June 2025

Sonny Boy: A Memoir 
by Al Pacino.
Century, 369 pp., £25, October 2024, 978 1 5299 1262 3
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... from Laughton’s acting classes was a half-Spanish boy from Ohio called Ramón Estevez – or Martin Sheen (Laughton must have been doing something right). Pacino remembers that Marty did a monologue from The Iceman Cometh that ‘blew the roof off’. Before long, Sheen had moved into Pacino’s South Bronx apartment so that they could split the ...

Itemised

Fredric Jameson, 8 November 2018

My Struggle: Book 6. The End 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken and Don Bartlett.
Harvill Secker, 1153 pp., £25, August 2018, 978 1 84655 829 0
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... self either – that great peerless theme of David Foster Wallace’s in his last book, The Pale King (2011).Q. Does anything happen in these books?A. Yes, but not where you think. Let’s first follow a certain consequence of itemisation to its conclusion. There are feelings and emotions in these volumes and they are the usual ones ...

The Deaths Map

Jeremy Harding: At the Mexican Border, 20 October 2011

... the country decided on a boycott, also their riposte in the late 1980s when Arizona baulked at the Martin Luther King holiday. After SB1070, a group of California truckers refused to work in the state, the mayor of San Francisco advised his employees to avoid visiting and by 2011, dozens of valuable conference bookings had ...
... of Kafka’s; in addition, the father is party, we are told, to an intellectual debate about Martin Buber; we’re also told that he’s a friend of Stefan Zweig’s. But this specificity, even if it doesn’t develop much beyond these few references to an outside world, is not common in the books of yours I’ve read. Hardship generally fells your Jews ...

The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... has a nice tracking shot through the deserted quays of the future Docklands. The TV comic Dave King, playing a corrupt detective, reprimands Hoskins. A car has been detonated outside a Hawksmoor church. ‘We can’t have bombs going off, Harold. We can’t have corpses.’ But that, unfortunately, is the price in the catalogue. Spontaneous public ...

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat

David Runciman: Thatcher’s Rise, 6 June 2013

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography. Vol. I: Not for Turning 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 859 pp., £30, April 2013, 978 0 7139 9282 3
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... sent a letter to the Times condemning her economic policies (the signatories included Mervyn King, the future governor of the Bank of England). They wrote: ‘There is no basis in economic theory or supporting evidence for the government’s belief that by deflating demand they will bring inflation permanently under control and thereby introduce an ...

Festival of Punishment

Thomas Laqueur: On Death Row, 5 October 2000

Proximity to Death 
by William McFeely.
Norton, 206 pp., £17.95, January 2000, 0 393 04819 5
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Death Row: The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment 
edited by Bonnie Bobit.
Bobit, 311 pp., $24.95, September 1999, 0 9624857 6 4
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... members of the jury at the 1990 retrial he won for William Brooks, the murderers of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King and the little girls killed in a Birmingham church, all white men with black victims, were not executed or in some cases even convicted: ‘Don’t let anyone tell you that there has to be a death ...

On a Chinese Mountain

Frank Kermode, 20 November 1986

The Royal Beasts 
by William Empson.
Chatto, 201 pp., £12.95, November 1986, 0 7011 3084 9
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Essays on Shakespeare 
by William Empson.
Cambridge, 246 pp., £25, May 1986, 0 521 25577 5
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... then, the apparent romanticism achieved, they become scientific again.’ Much later, Empson told Martin Dodsworth that the structural idea had been ‘to take a story and interpose a scene of apparently total irrelevance in the middle’: we can now confirm the accuracy of that recollection as well as offering belated congratulations to the Granta ...

Cleaning Up

Tom Nairn, 3 October 1996

The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 
by Ben Kiernan.
Yale, 477 pp., £25, April 1996, 0 300 06113 7
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... They had royal connections. Pol Pot’s cousin was a palace dancer and ‘favourite wife’ to a king. An elder brother found employment as a lackey, and the future dictator joined him at court when he was six. As Kiernan points out, ‘he never worked a rice field or knew much of village life ... few Cambodian childhoods were so removed from their ...

Ruthless and Truthless

Ferdinand Mount: Rotten Government, 6 May 2021

The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism 
by Peter Oborne.
Simon and Schuster, 192 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 3985 0100 3
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Political Advice: Past, Present and Future 
edited by Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose.
I.B. Tauris, 240 pp., £21.99, February 2021, 978 1 83860 120 1
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... and strangely neglected. As the bargaining reached its frenzied climax, leading Brexiters such as Martin Howe QC, a member of the Eurosceptic Tory MP Bill Cash’s self-styled Star Chamber, said that Johnson should reject the EU’s ‘one-sided and damaging trade agreement’: ‘Once the EU has pocketed its huge concessions on goods, with the UK getting ...

The Raging Peloton

Iain Sinclair: Boris Bikes, 20 January 2011

... of a cycling club soon to be obliterated in the First War. Poets cycling by default: according to Martin Amis the poet is defined as a person who is incapable of driving a car. Philip Larkin, the great Eeyore of English verse, pushing his bike through a Hull graveyard, white raincoat and clips, misted spectacles, for a John Betjeman documentary. David ...

Into the Eisenshpritz

Elif Batuman: Superheroes, 10 April 2008

Life, in Pictures: Autobiographical Stories 
by Will Eisner.
Norton, 493 pp., £18.99, November 2007, 978 0 393 06107 9
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Epileptic 
by David B..
Cape, 368 pp., £12.99, March 2006, 0 224 07920 4
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Shortcomings 
by Adrian Tomine.
Faber, 108 pp., £12.99, September 2007, 978 0 571 23329 8
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Misery Loves Comedy 
by Ivan Brunetti.
Fantagraphics, 172 pp., £15.99, April 2007, 978 1 56097 792 6
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... all Jewish. Eisner has changed their names, but a glossary at the back provides the key: ‘Jack King’ (né Klingensteiner) is based on Jack Kirby (né Jacob Kurtzberg), co-creator of Captain America and The Fly; ‘Ken Corn’ is based on Bob Kane (né Kahn), creator of Batman. The bespectacled Jews in their workshop, manufacturing superheroes under ...

Enemies For Ever

James Wolcott: ‘Making It’, 18 May 2017

Making It 
by Norman Podhoretz.
NYRB, 368 pp., £13.98, May 2017, 978 1 68137 080 4
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... boys; both Jewish; both were ladled with mother-love as sons, Mailer fussed over as ‘the little king’ and Podhoretz doted on by the women in his family as destiny’s darling, cooing over ‘the blue of my eyes, at the thick curliness of my hair, at the streak of grey on its side (proof, they said, echoing an ancient superstition, that I was among the ...

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