Here was a plague

Tom Crewe, 27 September 2018

How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed Aids 
by David France.
Picador, 624 pp., £12.99, September 2017, 978 1 5098 3940 7
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Patient Zero and the Making of the Aids Epidemic 
by Richard A. McKay.
Chicago, 432 pp., £26.50, November 2017, 978 0 226 06395 9
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Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1989-90 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 314 pp., £9.99, May 2018, 978 1 78487 387 5
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Smiling in Slow Motion: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1991-94 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 388 pp., £9.99, August 2018, 978 1 78487 516 9
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The Ward 
by Gideon Mendel.
Trolley, 88 pp., £25, December 2017, 978 1 907112 56 0
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... a constellation of needs that are dealt with in straight society outside the arena of sex,’ Richard Goldstein argued in the Village Voice in 1983. ‘For gay men, sex, that most powerful implement of attachment and arousal, is also an agent of communion, replacing an often hostile family and even shaping politics. It represents an ecstatic break with ...

Flat-Nose, Stocky and Beautugly

James Davidson: Greek Names, 23 September 2010

A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names. Vol. V.A Coastal Asia Minor: Pontos to Ionia 
edited by T. Corsten.
Oxford, 496 pp., £125, March 2010, 978 0 19 956743 0
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... acquaintance of my grandfather said that was the name of the nicest girl he had ever known. This nice Doreen seems to have made quite an impact given the surge in Doreens between the wars. Perhaps as a reaction to this spectacular outbreak of fashion in naming, lumbering several generations with names that quickly came to sound modish, old-fashioned or just ...

Strap on an ox-head

Patricia Lockwood: Christ comes to Stockholm, 6 January 2022

The Morning Star 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken.
Harvill Secker, 666 pp., £20, September 2021, 978 1 910701 71 3
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... journalist; Emil, the worst young lyricist in the world; Solveig, a nurse; Turid, addicted to some nice-sounding drug called Sobril; Iselin, the teen girl Knausgaard should have been writing about the whole time; Vibeke (picture not found); Egil, the writer and documentarian, the near mad, the pillar-sitter. We find them in a seaside town in southern ...

Not in the Mood

Adam Shatz: Derrida’s Secrets, 22 November 2012

Derrida: A Biography 
by Benoît Peeters, translated by Andrew Brown.
Polity, 629 pp., £25, November 2012, 978 0 7456 5615 1
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... his family – 15 of them – camped out at the Derridas’ flat outside Paris, before moving to Nice. Derrida, who would return to Algeria only twice, often spoke of his ‘nostalgeria’; he continued to insist that ‘a different type of settlement’ might have led to less suffering. Peeters suggests that Derrida had Algeria in mind when he expressed the ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

... only four o’clock it’s already closing, with boards being put up against the windows and the nice young counter assistant, the daughter of the pharmacist who did Talking Heads for her O levels, hopes that I will be going straight home. For my part I’ve been looking round the shop to see what would come to hand should rioters burst in from the (utterly ...

Memoirs of a Pet Lamb

David Sylvester, 5 July 2001

... there was a lot of rushing about that I certainly couldn’t control and didn’t even desire. A nice boy called Alan Mindel slipped on some polished linoleum as he raced around, hit his chin on the veneer of a rosewood dressing-table, and had to have a couple of stitches put in. My mother reacted with fury and gave me a beating in front of several ...

Buy birthday present, go to morgue

Colm Tóibín: Diane Arbus, 2 March 2017

Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer 
by Arthur Lubow.
Cape, 734 pp., £35, October 2016, 978 0 224 09770 3
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Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov 
by Alexander Nemerov.
Fraenkel Gallery, 106 pp., $30, March 2015, 978 1 881337 41 6
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... have it, ‘ugly’ or ‘genetic freaks’ or ‘pariahs’ and ‘miserable-looking’ was not nice; it may have told us as much about Arbus as a poor little rich girl filled with mischief as it did about her subjects. Whether we like it or not, Arbus was a little minx. She took her pain out on other people but the question remains: since she was a ...

Lost in the Void

Jonathan Littell: In Ciudad Juárez, 7 June 2012

... here that Hollywood stars used to come, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller or Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, for a quickie divorce followed by a huge party, or a discreet abortion. ‘Juárez’s bad reputation goes back thirty years,’ says Arnulfo Gómez, the owner of the Gato Félix, on the Avenida Juárez near the bridge. There used to be ten or ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Finding My Métier, 4 January 2018

... say, the occasional bullying blackbird or (a regular visitor) the woodpecker.29 August, Paris. A nice experience this afternoon when with Lynn we go into a creperie opposite the St Germain covered market hoping for some tea, in the window a solitary piece of cake. The young woman in charge smilingly refuses to serve it to us as it is part of an experiment ...

Secrets are best kept by those who have no sense of humour

Alan Bennett: Why I turned down ‘Big Brother’, 2 January 2003

... the anthem of youth and disaffection. Now there was Elvis, Bill Haley and even our own Cliff Richard. Still, we would go along to hear Dudley play, particularly when Peter Cook’s The Establishment opened in New York where Dudley alternated at the piano with Teddy (‘Fly Me to the Moon’) Wilson. But knowing nothing of its history or development and ...

We look at it and see ourselves

Bruce Cumings: Fantasies of Korea, 15 December 2005

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty 
by Bradley Martin.
Dunne, 868 pp., $29.95, October 2004, 0 312 32221 6
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Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea 
by Jasper Becker.
Oxford, 300 pp., £16.99, November 2004, 9780195170443
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... came from. The opaque and uncontrolled Other excites exterminationist impulses: it would be nice to say that this is merely McInerney’s view, but the pattern runs deep in American history. In contrast to Becker, Martin, also a journalist, has strained to provide a balanced account. His interest in the Hermit Kingdom dates at least from his first visit ...

A Short History of the Trump Family

Sidney Blumenthal: The First Family, 16 February 2017

... don’t know him well. I don’t know him well, but I have found him over the years to be a very nice man.’ In 2014, Cinque’s website posted an article stating: ‘Joseph Cinque, president of the AAHS, has been attending Mr Trump’s party for the past 16 years. It is somewhat of a New Year’s Eve tradition for him and of course, he has become dear ...

Serious Mayhem

Simon Reynolds: The McLaren Strand, 10 March 2022

The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren: The Biography 
by Paul Gorman.
Constable, 855 pp., £14.99, November 2021, 978 1 4721 2111 0
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... were in the mid 1970s coming to represent a sort of alternative establishment. His antipathy to Richard Branson was partly a matter of distaste for what Virgin represented (a music-first ethos of drift-and-discovery and whimsical eccentricity), but also a creeping fear, once the Pistols had joined the label, that the perpetually grinning Branson, in his ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1998, 21 January 1999

... his balls from the waiting cameras. By chance I am reading French and Germans, Germans and French, Richard Cobb’s book on France under occupation in the First and Second World Wars and, on the same day as Tebbit’s letter, come across this: ‘Perhaps homosexuals will always welcome some dramatic turn in national fortunes or misfortunes as an opportunity to ...

The Ostrich Defence

Azadeh Moaveni: Trafficking Antiquities, 5 October 2023

... intact. ‘My first reaction was that it was probably a forgery,’ Gabolde told me. ‘It was too nice to be true.’The Louvre Abu Dhabi, first conceived in 2005, has undertaken the greatest antiquities spending spree in at least two generations. The Emiratis are paying the Louvre more than a billion dollars for its name, expertise and crucial loans that ...