Sisyphus at the Selectric

James Wolcott: Undoing Philip Roth, 20 May 2021

Philip Roth: The Biography 
by Blake Bailey.
Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021, 978 0 224 09817 5
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Philip Roth: A Counterlife 
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021, 978 0 19 984610 8
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Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth 
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020, 978 0 525 50524 2
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... had her: how the phrase just rolls off the wrist. Memories of Ava weren’t enough to warm Roth on winter nights, as the string of candidates for the role of Jane Eyre dwindled to one. ‘Twelve years ago,’ Taylor writes,I saw him through his last love, for a young person less than half his age whose family strongly disapproved of the association and who ...

Alas! Deceived

Alan Bennett: Larkin the Librarian, 25 March 1993

Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life 
by Andrew Motion.
Faber, 570 pp., £20, April 1993, 0 571 15174 4
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... too. He found that he shared his interest in dirty books with ‘the sensitive and worldly-wise’ Robert Conquest and together they went on expeditions, trawling the specialist shops for their respective bag in a partnership that seems both carefree and innocent. Unusual, too, as I had always thought that porn, looking for it and looking at it, was something ...

Life Pushed Aside

Clair Wills: The Last Asylums, 18 November 2021

... Another drawing was done with a nurse’s blue pencil on the flyleaf of a volume of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.‘These drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a ...

Confronting Defeat

Perry Anderson: Hobsbawm’s Histories, 17 October 2002

... be put on them. Yet they remain conventional, and surprisingly unaffected by contrary indications. Robert Brenner has shown, pretty conclusively, how little the onset of the Slump in America can be explained by wage repression, or the end of the postwar boom by wage explosion. He has also proposed a genuine theoretical explanation, of the kind Kondratiev was ...
... published in 2009 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Cottam power station in Nottinghamshire, Robert Davis quotes one of the employees: There was so much wastage during the CEGB days. It was like they had money to burn. The stores were always full and we had spares for everything. Bureaucracy was part of the problem. If you signed stuff out of the ...

Ten-Foot Chopsticks

James Meek: The North-East Transition, 4 December 2025

... they’re not scratching till the next pay cheque, they can put the heat on and eat during the winter months. Blyth’s got the potential, with the green industrial revolution, to be magnificent.’How much does Blyth care about a fossil fuel-free future? Resources have been poured into it. The UK’s first offshore wind farm was built in Blyth in ...

In the Streets of Londonistan

John Upton: Terror, Muslims and the Met, 22 January 2004

... performs the same function. On sale are various leaflets: reprints of articles by John Pilger and Robert Fisk, discourses on the evils of Christianity and what to do if arrested by the security services. A well-thumbed copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is going for a tenner. Further down the street, past the steel crowd-control barriers which line ...

The Divisions of Cyprus

Perry Anderson, 24 April 2008

... of the puzzlement felt on this score in London,’ records the leading scholar of the subject, Robert Holland: ‘It remains … a notable fact that it was the British who, in the first instance, had to screw the Turks up to a pitch of excitement about Cyprus, not the other way round.’1 When the requisite excitement eventually came, London did not flinch ...

Different Speeds, Same Furies

Perry Anderson: Powell v. Proust, 19 July 2018

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time 
by Hilary Spurling.
Hamish Hamilton, 509 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 241 14383 4
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... to the tonal parabola of A Dance. Association of its curve with spring, summer, autumn and winter is contested by some, though its last words certainly allude to the seasons. What is undeniable, however, and insufficiently emphasised, is the buoyant – if certainly also often ironic – sense of adventure and high spirits of the first four volumes of ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... and Kerr-Bell suggest, however, that the TMO became more intermeshed with the council under Robert Black, who was chief executive at the time of the refurbishment. ‘He instilled a culture where you couldn’t complain,’ I was told. I contacted Black, trying to get him to respond to this allegation, but he preferred not to. The Grenfell Action ...