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This Is Not That Place

Thomas Jones: David Eggers escapes from Sudan, 21 June 2007

What Is the What 
by Dave Eggers.
Hamish Hamilton, 475 pp., £18.99, June 2007, 978 0 241 14257 8
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... my arms just reaching her nose and my head resting comfortably on the top of the couch, with a nice view of the set. Perfect. She looks up at me and rolls her eyes. I give her a thumbs up. Then she spits green fluid into the half-moon receptacle. Achak doesn’t watch much TV in the refugee camps, but he goes to school, plays with his friends, obsesses ...

Shtum

John Lanchester: Alastair Campbell’s Diaries, 16 August 2007

The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries 
edited by Alastair Campbell and Richard Stott.
Hutchinson, 794 pp., £25, July 2007, 978 0 09 179629 7
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... ideally generates new headlines at least three or four times a day, especially when there is a nice fast-breaking scandal or moral panic to hammer away at. Politicians don’t feel that the press represents anyone apart from itself, and think it is arrogant and unaccountable, and the press feels the same things about the politicians, and both are right. As ...

One’s Self-Washed Drawers

Rosemary Hill: Ida John, 29 June 2017

The Good Bohemian: The Letters of Ida John 
edited by Rebecca John and Michael Holroyd.
Bloomsbury, 352 pp., £25, May 2017, 978 1 4088 7362 5
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... excellent’ flat she shared with Gwen Salmond and Gwen John had ‘a charming studio room and nice spots of drawings & photographs on the walls’ and ‘two … Jap prints’ bought for 2d from the bouquinistes by the Seine. ‘Gwen John is sitting before a mirror carefully posing herself,’ Ida wrote. ‘She has been at it for half an hour. It is for ...

Growing Pains

Laleh Khalili: New Silk Roads, 18 March 2021

The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century 
by Jonathan E. Hillman.
Yale, 294 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 0 300 24458 8
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... and its immobilisation in infrastructure – a ‘spatial fix’, in the words of the geographer David Harvey – is one progenitor of Xi’s grand initiative. China’s treatment by the US is another.In October 2011, Obama’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced the birth of ‘America’s Pacific Century’ in an article for Foreign ...

Heaven’s Waiting Room

Alex Harvey: When Powell met Pressburger, 20 March 2025

The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger 
edited by Nathalie Morris and Claire Smith.
BFI, 206 pp., £30, October 2023, 978 1 83871 917 3
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... your life.’Powell began his career as a studio hand on silent films at the Victorine studios in Nice. He was ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’, as he put it, to Rex Ingram, a flamboyant Irish director known for making extravagant epics. Ingram’s Mare Nostrum (1926) was ‘a great film to come in on’, Powell wrote, ‘a spectacular film, full of enormous ...

I want to love it

Susan Pedersen: What on earth was he doing?, 18 April 2019

Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History 
by Richard J. Evans.
Little, Brown, 800 pp., £35, February 2019, 978 1 4087 0741 8
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... on to Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding and Petronius, and then had a go at Proust, Mann, Boswell and David Hume. He took a turn through French literature then doubled back to the English Romantics. He read Cicero and Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and ...

Adjusting the Mechanism

Colin Burrow: Robert Graves, 11 October 2018

Robert Graves: From a Great War Poet to ‘Goodbye to All That’, 1895-1929 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 461 pp., £25, August 2018, 978 1 4729 2914 3
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The Reader over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose 
by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge.
Seven Stories, 613 pp., £30, September 2017, 978 1 60980 733 7
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... April 1925 Robert Graves visited her unexpectedly and stayed too long. She described him as ‘a nice ingenuous rattle headed young man’, and declared ‘the poor boy is all emphasis protestation and pose.’ By 1925 Graves had good reason to be ‘rattle headed’. He had survived Charterhouse school, which he hated. He got through by learning to box, by ...

Dreams of the Decades

Liz Jobey: Bill Brandt, 8 July 2004

Bill Brandt: A Life 
by Paul Delany.
Cape, 336 pp., £35, March 2004, 0 224 05280 2
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Bill Brandt: A Centenary Retrospective 
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... for his own psychic traumas. In this reading Delany is following Brandt’s earlier critics, David Mellor and Ian Jeffrey, who identified in Brandt’s photographs coded expressions of his disturbed psyche. They contain what Delany identifies as ‘symbols and obsessions peculiar to himself’.Ever since Brandt became the focus of academic study in the ...

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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... him as ‘quite miserable-looking … so thin, so little, so miserable’. The art critic David Bourdon thought his art collection ‘stank’ and took the view that Warhol was nothing more than ‘a window trimmer and chichi East Side gadabout who hung around with trashy people’. In the world of commercial art, as photography began to overtake ...

On the Salieri Express

John Sutherland, 24 September 1992

Doctor Criminale 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Secker, 343 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 436 20115 1
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The Promise of Light 
by Paul Watkins.
Faber, 217 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 571 16715 2
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The Absolution Game 
by Paul Sayer.
Constable, 204 pp., £13.99, June 1992, 0 09 471460 6
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The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman 
by Louis de Bernières.
Secker, 388 pp., £14.99, August 1992, 0 436 20114 3
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Written on the Body 
by Jeanette Winterson.
Cape, 190 pp., £13.99, September 1992, 0 224 03587 8
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... out of the small worlds mapped in Eating people is wrong and The British Museum is falling down. David Lodge’s latest, Paradise News, crosses at least ten time zones from Rummidge, over the Pacific Rim, to Hawaii. Doctor Criminale clocks up fewer frequent-flyer miles, but short-hauls hectically. The narrative opens in London, flies to Vienna, boards the ...

Wobbly, I am

John Kerrigan: Famous Seamus, 25 April 2024

The Letters of Seamus Heaney 
edited by Christopher Reid.
Faber, 820 pp., £40, October 2023, 978 0 571 34108 5
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... greatest thing since, say, Charles Olson.’ This might be Larkin to Kingsley Amis, and it’s a nice sting in the tail that we can be sure Heaney and Longley thought Olson no great thing. Even less expected is a postcard to David Hammond, a singer and TV director and one of Heaney’s closest friends, sent during a stay ...

In the Potato Patch

Jenny Turner: Penelope Fitzgerald, 19 December 2013

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life 
by Hermione Lee.
Chatto, 508 pp., £25, November 2013, 978 0 7011 8495 7
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... into the reading room.’ And it’s used defensively, to protect her privacy. ‘Have written to David Godwin pretending not to understand exactly and hope that will keep him at bay.’ After Offshore, Fitzgerald wrote six more novels, of which two more were nominated for the Booker. Since her death in 2000 it has become common to talk of her as one of the ...

What’s the point of HS2?

Christian Wolmar, 17 April 2014

... France, where things seem to happen faster, though that isn’t always the case: the TGV goes to Nice, but not yet on a high-speed line, as a result of local protests. Jim Steer is HS2’s biggest fan. The former chief railway planner at the Strategic Rail Authority and founder of the transport consultancy Steer Davies Gleave, he believes the project is ...

Why do white people like what I write?

Pankaj Mishra: Ta-Nehisi Coates, 22 February 2018

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy 
by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Hamish Hamilton, 367 pp., £16.99, October 2017, 978 0 241 32523 0
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... Baldwin died’. Philip Roth has been led to histories of American racism by Coates’s books. David Brooks credits him for advancing an ‘education for white people’ that evidently began after ‘Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings’. Even USA Today thinks that ‘to have such a voice, in such a moment, is a ray of light.’ Coates ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... Molineux) long since lost in the mists. The issue also contains a consideration of the sociologist David Riesman, since no intellectual journal back then was complete without a Riesman snorkel dive; a piece by Paul de Man (remember him?) which begins on the stirring note, ‘Ever since the war, American criticism has remained relatively stagnant’; and an ...

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