Seventeen Million Words

Richard Poirier, 7 November 1985

The Inman Diary: A Public and Private Confession 
edited by Daniel Aaron.
Harvard, 1661 pp., £35.95, March 1986, 0 674 45445 6
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... here and there, much awkwardness of concept, as much juvenility as sapiency ... Hate living I may, disdain people I may, long for oblivion I may; nonetheless I find existence exciting, people stimulating, oblivion not near. If I pass on to a small section of posterity the ...

The General vanishes

Douglas Johnson, 18 September 1986

De Gaulle. Vol. I: Le Rebelle 
by Jean Lacouture.
Seuil, 869 pp., frs 99, April 1984, 2 02 006969 5
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De Gaulle. Vol. II: Le Politique 
by Jean Lacouture.
Seuil, 724 pp., frs 120, April 1984, 2 02 008933 5
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Charles de Gaulle: A Biography 
by Don Cook.
Secker, 432 pp., £15, February 1984, 0 436 10676 0
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Jean Moulin et le Conseil National de la Résistance 
Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent/Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 192 pp., frs 40, February 1983, 2 222 03428 0Show More
De Gaulle et la nation face aux problèmes de défense 1945-1946 
Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent/Institut Charles-de-Gaulle, 317 pp., frs 110, May 1982, 2 259 01109 8Show More
De Gaulle 
by Sam White.
Harrap, 239 pp., £9.95, November 1985, 0 245 54213 2
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... as the accepted leader of a new republic; and his actions during the famous événements of May 1968. In all these areas historians are obliged to take an interest in the personal element. However strong the pull of events, a great deal of importance has to be attached to de Gaulle’s own intentions. It has long been assumed that one of the reasons why ...

Giacometti and Bacon

David Sylvester, 19 March 1987

Giacometti: A Biography 
by James Lord.
Faber, 592 pp., £25, June 1986, 0 571 13138 7
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... is now published here on another page. However, a biography which elicits that sort of response may always be doing so because it is particularly penetrating. I find this biography difficult to assess fairly because of the irritation it provokes both through its crass handling of the English language and through its snide attitude towards the supporting ...

How to be Viennese

Adam Phillips, 5 March 1987

Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist 
by Edward Timms.
Yale, 468 pp., £20, October 1986, 0 300 03611 6
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Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths: Selected Aphorisms of Karl Kraus 
translated by Harry Zohn.
Carcanet, 128 pp., £3.94, May 1986, 0 85635 580 1
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... reporting of events, had to be interpreted now as artistic genres concealing vested interests. In May 1916, in the middle of the war, it was still not clear to Kraus what play of Shakespeare’s was actually being performed. By October 1918 he was clear that it was Hamlet. A certain vigilance was required, Kraus began to realise, to deal with the ...

Kurt Weill in Europe and America

David Drew, 18 September 1980

The days grow short 
by Ronald Sanders.
Weidenfeld, 469 pp., £14.95, July 1980, 0 297 77783 1
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Kurt Weill in Europe 
by Kim Kowalke.
UMI Research Press/Bowker, 589 pp., £25.50, March 1980, 0 8357 1076 9
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... and colour the composer of My Fair Lady might well have selected for his biography. Although one may suspect that two specifications worked out at a mid-Atlantic marketing conference have been accidentally switched, the American and the British designs reflect, in their sharp differences of character and aim, the problem central to any consideration of ...

Sahib and Son

J.I.M. Stewart, 22 December 1983

‘Oh Beloved Kids’: Rudyard Kipling’s Letters to his Children 
edited by Elliot Gilbert.
Weidenfeld, 225 pp., £10.95, October 1983, 0 297 78296 7
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... Professor Gilbert conjectures that this loss, and a similar and later loss to which we shall come, may be attributable to ‘the confusion of moving’ when John changed schools. It is much more probable that the relevant letters have been suppressed or destroyed because covering periods of difficulty in the relations between father and son which Mrs Kipling ...

Gehenna

Walter Kendrick, 2 August 1984

The Brothers Singer 
by Clive Sinclair.
Allison and Busby, 176 pp., £8.95, April 1983, 0 85031 275 2
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The Penitent 
by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated by Joseph Singer.
Cape, 170 pp., £7.95, March 1984, 0 224 02192 3
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... Singer, which even apes one of Joshua’s (and Dostoevsky’s) titles. Generous intentions may help to excuse the fact that a good quarter of Sinclair’s short book is devoted to summarising – for some reason, and disconcertingly, in the past tense – the plots of Joshua’s novels. It is assumed that we know enough about Bashevis’s work to get ...

Playing with terror

Christopher Ricks, 21 January 1982

The Comfort of Strangers 
by Ian McEwan.
Cape, 134 pp., £5.95, October 1981, 0 224 01931 7
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... on the backside – and Eva and Maria did not make a sound.’ Or a wife is being punished, it may be: ‘As they descended the first flight of stairs, they heard a sharp sound that, as Mary said later, could as easily have been an object dropped as a face slapped.’ Such negations are alive, everywhere and diversely. ‘For reasons they could no longer ...

Goddesses and Girls

Nicholas Penny, 2 December 1982

... purring, sighing, winking. Hope’s account of Titian’s painting is upsetting chiefly because it may be taken to suggest an affinity between a painting by an old master and such vulgar imagery. Hope’s account is also upsetting, however, because many art-historians prefer art not to be too easy to enjoy or to understand. Works of art which move us ...

A Novel without a Hero

Christopher Ricks, 6 December 1979

The Mangan Inheritance 
by Brian Moore.
Cape, 336 pp., £5.50
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... the victory of the un-heroic over the heroic’: ‘“Heroic” and “un-heroic” may both be misunderstood, unless we admit that for “heroic” we may substitute “barbarian”, for “un-heroic”, “civilised”. The second pair of terms tilts the scales of approval towards the English, as the first ...

Homage to the Provinces

Michael Wood, 28 May 1992

Barcelona 
by Robert Hughes.
Harvill, 575 pp., £20, May 1992, 0 00 272078 7
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Barcelonas 
by Manuel Vazquez Montalban, translated by Andrew Robinson.
Verso, 210 pp., £17.95, May 1992, 0 86091 353 8
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Cities of Spain 
by David Gilmour.
Murray, 214 pp., £17.95, March 1992, 0 7195 4833 0
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Red City, Blue Period: Social Movements in Picasso’s Barcelona 
by Temma Kaplan.
California, 266 pp., $30, April 1992, 0 520 07507 2
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... beneath you; beyond it the Mediterranean. Très beau panorama, the Michelin guide says, as well it may, since the name is not the nonsense word it looks but the Devil’s Latin, part of the sentence in which he offered to Christ the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them: Haec omnia tibi dabo si cadens adoraveris me, ‘All these things will I give ...

After-Lives

John Sutherland, 5 November 1992

Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography 
by Ian Hamilton.
Hutchinson, 344 pp., £18.99, October 1992, 0 09 174263 3
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Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy 
by Michael Millgate.
Oxford, 273 pp., £27.50, June 1992, 0 19 811276 9
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The Last Laugh 
by Michael Holroyd.
Chatto, 131 pp., £10.99, December 1991, 0 7011 4583 8
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Trollope 
by Victoria Glendinning.
Hutchinson, 551 pp., £20, September 1992, 0 09 173896 2
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... when it enters the public domain. Welcome as the so-called ‘unexpurgated’ Sons and Lovers may be, it is objectionable that by going to such lengths to establish a new copyright Cambridge University Press should lock up the text for another 50 years. Ideally Lawrence’s novel and its surviving manuscript materials should be declared unprotected public ...

Manly Love

John Bayley, 28 January 1993

Walt Whitman: From Moon to Starry Night 
by Philip Callow.
Allison and Busby, 394 pp., £19.99, October 1992, 0 85031 908 0
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The Double Life of Stephen Crane 
by Christopher Benfey.
Deutsch, 294 pp., £17.99, February 1993, 0 233 98820 3
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... like the Casement diaries, or even those jottings about payment to sailors in Paris which Housman may or may not have left among his surviving writings. Leaves of Grass, especially the ‘Calamus’ section, may be as easy to interpret now as The Shropshire Lad, but neither gives us any ...

Ethnic Cleansers

Stephen Smith, 8 October 1992

Four Hours in My Lai: A War Crime and its Aftermath 
by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim.
Viking, 430 pp., £17.99, May 1992, 0 670 83233 2
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Tiger Balm: Travels in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia 
by Lucretia Stewart.
Chatto, 261 pp., £10.99, June 1992, 0 7011 3892 0
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... Vietnam’s future rather than preserve its past. It is quite likely that as a journalist, one may want for sensitivity about intruding on grief; it is possible that as a foreigner in Vietnam, one may intrude on it without knowing it: while Four Hours in My Lai is ostensibly an inquiry into the massacre of up to four ...

Queen Croesus

David Cannadine, 13 February 1992

Royal Fortune: Tax, Money and the Monarchy 
by Phillip Hall.
Bloomsbury, 294 pp., £18.99, February 1992, 0 7475 1133 0
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... into its wealth leaves the field wide open for journalistic speculation. The British people may feel they have a ‘right to be informed’: but that right has been consistently disregarded, and the ‘authentic information’ has been deliberately withheld. Yet it is not only the lack of hard data about the extent of the royal fortune which is ...