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Big Bad Wolfe

John Sutherland, 18 February 1988

The Bonfire of the Vanities 
by Tom Wolfe.
Cape, 659 pp., £11.95, February 1988, 0 224 02439 6
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... eskimo in his igloo, the bedouin in his tent or the Englishman in his semi really lust for deep green marble floors, Tiffany glassware, five-foot-wide walnut staircases, private lifts and faux-Sheraton cabinets that roll back to reveal television screens. But the zest of Wolfe’s depiction of modern times arises in largest part from his endearingly ...

Swanker

Ronald Bryden, 10 December 1987

The Life of Kenneth Tynan 
by Kathleen Tynan.
Weidenfeld, 407 pp., £16.95, September 1987, 9780297790822
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... Tynan was the first, and flamboyantly the foremost, of their number. In fact, his father Sir Peter Peacock, chairman of the family chain of Midland drapery stores, could easily have sent him to a public school, and wished to. But his mother, Letitia Rose Tynan, feared that if he left home, he might discover his parents’ guilty secret. She and Sir ...

The Unhappy Vicar

Samuel Hynes, 24 January 1980

Orwell: The Transformation 
by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams.
Constable, 240 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 0 09 462250 7
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... with painful photographs of urban poverty in Wales, Newcastle, Coatbridge, Limehouse, Bethnal Green, Stepney, Poplar, St Pancras and Durham (there’s not a single photograph of Wigan): to counteract Orwell’s odd views. Before The Road to Wigan Pier was published, Orwell was in Spain, on the second of his journeys of ‘political’ enlightenment. There ...

Weirdo Possible Genius Child

Daniel Soar: Max Porter, 23 May 2019

Lanny 
by Max Porter.
Faber, 213 pp., £12.99, March 2019, 978 0 571 34028 6
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... never solved. One person he particularly impresses is an artist, getting on in years, called Peter Blythe, who was – someone says at a dinner party – ‘pretty famous back in the day’. He is in fact still famous outside the village, busy putting on a new exhibition at a Mayfair gallery, but most locals think him eccentric or ludicrous or dangerous ...

Tummy-Talkers

Jonathan Rée: Ventriloquists, 10 May 2001

Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism 
by Steven Connor.
Oxford, 449 pp., £25, November 2000, 0 19 818433 6
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... his act may look dull and formulaic: he simply got uppity with a luckless straight man called Peter Brough and showered him with childish insults. But he was able to bring on a troop of co-stars – Max Bygraves (‘I’ve arrived … and to prove it, I’m here!’), Tony Hancock, Gilbert Harding, Harry Secombe, Beryl Reid, Bernard Miles and Hattie ...

Diary

James Meek: Waiting for the War to Begin, 28 July 2016

... adviser. On the door hangs a whiteboard declaring: ‘Chemical Threat Medium, Clothing State Green’. I ask Suzanne, a BBC producer, where their security guy gets his information. ‘He reads the papers,’ she says. Britain and America are the two most liberal democracies in the world, the brigadier says, and if they think Saddam … No, here’s ...

Museums of Melancholy

Iain Sinclair: Silence on the Euston Road, 18 August 2005

... bodies could not be reassembled, bones picked from the mud. ‘The government of the time,’ Peter Ashley wrote in his English Heritage booklet, Lest We Forget (2004), ‘refused to acknowledge the concept of the repatriation of the dead, so these monuments became the focal points for grief.’ The fallen of King’s Cross are uniformly capitalised: a ...

How to Grow a Weetabix

James Meek: Farms and Farmers, 16 June 2016

... it’s a patchwork of oblongs of open ground stretching to the horizon, blocks of single shades of green, brown and yellow, marked at the join by hedges and lines of trees and narrow lanes. Farmed fields, in other words. We perceive the countryside as if farmed fields were the default state, as if the two were synonymous. But why should this be true, when so ...

Versailles with Panthers

James Davidson: A tribute to the Persians, 10 July 2003

From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire 
by Pierre Briant, translated by Peter Daniels.
Eisenbrauns, 1196 pp., $79.50, January 2002, 1 57506 031 0
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Ancient Persia from 550 BC to 650 AD: reissue 
by Josef Wiesehöfer, translated by Azizeh Azodi.
Tauris, 332 pp., £35, April 2001, 1 85043 999 0
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... was arrested. A couple of weeks later the conqueror himself arrived. ‘Cyrus entered Babylon, green branches were spread in front of him – peace reigned. Cyrus sent greetings to all Babylon.’ The British Museum also holds Cyrus’ own account of the conquest on the Cyrus Cylinder. There, Nabonidus is accused of being a cruel dictator, of removing gods ...

The Case of Agatha Christie

John Lanchester, 20 December 2018

... woman with a position in the world. The hot road spun away behind her; towns rose from the green landscape, crowded close about her with their inn-signs and petrol-pumps, their shops and police and perambulators, then reeled back and were forgotten. June was dying among the roses, the hedges were darkening to a duller ...

Diary

Andrew O’Hagan: The Hearing of Rosemary West, 9 March 1995

... in front of the court itself, a timid-looking, hair-waxed gentleman stops for the cameras. It’s Peter Badge, the Chief Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate: the hearing will take place before him, and he will make the decision as to whether there’s a case to be tried or not. He looks like a little chaffinch. ‘Mr Badge,’ we are told later, ‘is ...

Mr Toad

John Bayley, 20 October 1994

Evelyn Waugh 
by Selina Hastings.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 600 pp., £20, October 1994, 1 85619 223 7
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... Waugh, as his last stories reveal, could not do without his Ambrose Silks and Agatha Runcibles and Peter Pastmasters. But one must not press the analogy too far. Waugh did become interested in himself as a literary model – very much so – and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a masterpiece of self-portraiture, one of the very best in English fiction. Even so ...

Frock Consciousness

Rosemary Hill: Fashion and frocks, 20 January 2000

The Penguin Book of 20th-Century Fashion Writing 
edited by Judith Watt.
Viking, 360 pp., £20, November 1999, 0 670 88215 1
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Twentieth-Century Fashion 
by Valerie Mendes and Amy de la Haye.
Thames and Hudson, 288 pp., £8.95, November 1999, 0 500 20321 0
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A Century of Fashion 
by François Baudot.
Thames and Hudson, 400 pp., £19.95, November 1999, 0 500 28178 5
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The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860-1914 
by Christopher Breward.
Manchester, 278 pp., £45, September 1999, 0 7190 4799 4
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Black in Fashion 
by Valerie Mendes.
Victoria & Albert Museum, 144 pp., £35, October 1999, 1 85177 278 2
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... Street is worth a chapter of sociohistorical analysis of the interwar garçonne: ‘Emma – in green sacque that looks exactly like démodé window-curtain, sandals and varnished toe-nails ... Am struck by presence of many pairs of horn-rimmed spectacles and marked absence of evening dress ... Strange man enters into conversation with me ... (Query: Who ...

Images of Displeasure

Nicholas Spice, 22 May 1986

If not now, when? 
by Primo Levi, translated by William Weaver.
Joseph, 331 pp., £10.95, April 1986, 0 7181 2668 8
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The Afternoon Sun 
by David Pryce-Jones.
Weidenfeld, 214 pp., £8.95, March 1986, 0 297 78822 1
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August in July 
by Carlo Gebler.
Hamish Hamilton, 188 pp., £9.95, March 1986, 0 241 11787 9
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... Their square shoulders proclaim: Dienst ist Dienst. Worse still:   On the German autobahn, a green road-sign points to Dachau. The name is proclaimed in the largest lettering, as though it were quite normal. Carpenters had recently restored the concentration camp, and surrounding wire and watch-towers, the huts. More than authentic, the place was in ...

Golden England

Martin Wiener, 3 December 1981

Condition of England 
by Lincoln Allison.
Junction, 221 pp., £12.50, August 1981, 0 86245 032 2
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... their past. Allison points to the environmental planning which has restricted development and, in Peter Hall’s phrase, ‘contained urban England’. Such restriction is in one sense costly – the price of land and population density have been raised – but it was a price well worth paying for the protection of a countryside unsurpassed in the ...

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