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Ruling Imbecilities

Andrew Roberts, 7 November 1991

The Enemy’s Country: Words, Contexture and Other Circumstances of Language 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 153 pp., £19.95, August 1991, 0 19 811216 5
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... anthologies. In other words (though Hill does not use this term), Pound’s poem comes dangerously close to kitsch. This raises the question of how far ‘Envoi (1919)’ may be read as a critique of a culture in which certain forms of beauty seem unavailable. As Hill implies, the melopoeia of the poem is drawn into logopoeia since its verbal music stands in ...

Not Mackintosh

Chris Miele, 6 April 1995

‘Greek’ Thomson 
edited by Gavin Stamp and Sam McKinstry.
Edinburgh, 249 pp., £35, September 1994, 0 7486 0480 4
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... The individual elements of the Caledonian Road Church are not, in themselves, unusual, and have close parallels in the work of more prosaic Glaswegian architects, such as Charles Wilson, whose Free Church College of 1855-7 also features a portico raised above a high base and highlighted by towers. What distinguishes Thomson from even his most talented ...
Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs and an Interview 
by Thom Gunn.
Faber, 230 pp., £14.99, July 1994, 0 571 17196 6
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... the knack/Of looking fierce in pins and black,/The suburbs wouldn’t want you back’), and the frank versions of a gay overworld (‘Yet when I’ve had you once or twice/I may not want you any more’) would have made him a guru here; I presumed that his recent elegies on the deaths of friends from Aids would have made him a central figure in the literary ...

Two Sad Russians

Walter Kendrick, 5 September 1985

The Confessions of Victor X 
edited by Donald Rayfield.
Caliban, 143 pp., £7.95, October 1984, 9780904573947
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Novel with Cocaine 
by M. Ageyev, translated by Michael Henry Heim.
Picador, 174 pp., £7.95, February 1985, 0 330 28574 2
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... suicide, but there is no record of him after his Confessions end. Even the publication of a frank sexual memoir – the best way, Rayfield rather oddly claims, ‘to focus public attention on your identity’ – did little to rescue Victor from oblivion. The Confessions were written, in French, in either 1908 or 1912 (Rayfield’s ‘Preface’ and ...

Eternal Feminine

Ian Gregson, 7 January 1993

Landlocked 
by Mark Ford.
Chatto, 51 pp., £5.99, February 1992, 0 7011 3750 9
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The English Earthquake 
by Eva Salzman.
Bloodaxe, 64 pp., £5.95, May 1992, 1 85224 177 2
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Bleeding Heart Yard 
by William Scammell.
Peterloo, 63 pp., £6.95, May 1992, 1 871471 28 1
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The Game: Tennis Poems 
by William Scammell.
Peterloo, 48 pp., £6, June 1992, 1 871471 27 3
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Marconi’s Cottage 
by Medbh McGuckian.
Bloodaxe, 110 pp., £6.95, May 1992, 1 85224 197 7
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... wheat only rustled through its rosary once more. The most obvious influence on Ford is Frank O’Hara, with whom he shares a tendency to exclaim (‘What a life!’, ‘Hurrah!’, ‘What a thought!’, ‘Hush!’, ‘Hark!’), a desire to register the vertiginous rush of the present moment – for which driving with no hands is a vivid ...

Diary

Stephen Smith: What about Somalia?, 11 February 1993

... MREs when they discovered that Moslem extremists in Somalia were backed by Sudan, which itself had close ties with Iran. Other rumours suggest that the White House was galvanised by Washington lobbying. Last November, Fred Cuny, styled as the Red Adair of the relief business, persuaded Paul Wolfowitz, the head of the Defence Department’s policy ...

Diary

Nick McDonell: A Friendly Fighting Force, 5 March 2020

... Theory of Proxy Warfare’, Major Amos Fox argued that the US doesn’t talk about its proxies in frank enough terms. ‘Phrases such as security force assistance, training and advising, partnered force and by, with and through are all misleading and meant to soften or hide the coarseness of proxy warfare.’ The italicised phrases (his) will be grimly ...

Antigone on Your Knee

Terry Eagleton, 6 February 2020

A Cultural History of Tragedy: Vols I-VI 
edited by Rebecca Bushnell.
Bloomsbury Academic, 1302 pp., £395, November 2019, 978 1 4742 8814 9
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... works of one canonical name to another, though the second and third categories are slightly too close for comfort, as are the last two. In any case, while families are certainly central to some types of tragedy, they are rather less conspicuous in 20th-century theatre, and there are other subjects which are at least as important – martyrdom, for ...

Learning to Say ‘Cat’

Edmund Gordon: ‘Lean Fall Stand’, 17 June 2021

Lean Fall Stand 
by Jon McGregor.
Fourth Estate, 288 pp., £14.99, April, 978 0 00 820490 7
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... wrong thing to say.’Compared to its predecessors, Lean Fall Stand – written in a conventional close third person – is technically unassuming. There are points when the subject matter calls for something more inventive, however, as in the series of diminishing paragraphs that depict Doc’s stroke: the first runs for six and a half pages, the last ...

Terror Was Absolute

Chris Mullin: Vietnam, 18 July 2019

Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-75 
by Max Hastings.
Collins, 722 pp., £9.99, May 2019, 978 0 00 813301 6
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... He was an eyewitness to many of the key events in the country’s post-1945 history and was on close terms with senior members of Hanoi’s ruling elite. In September 1990, disillusioned by the corruption and incompetence of the government, he went into exile in Paris. His memoir, Following Ho Chi Minh (1994), as well as a series of interviews he gave to ...
A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein 
by John Kerr.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 608 pp., £25, February 1994, 1 85619 249 0
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... sexual wishes in his patients’ dreams and was given his marching orders), Eugen Bleuler, (Miss) Frank Miller (altruistically given to analysing her own poems), Otto Weininger (a suicide), Johann Jakob Honegger Jr (a suicide), Krafft-Ebing, Goethe, Nietzsche, Leopold Löwenfeld, Wilhelm Stekel, James Jackson Putnam, Karl Abraham, Otto Rank, Otto Gross ...

Blimey

Gillian Darley: James Stirling, 7 September 2000

Big Jim: The Life and Work of James Stirling 
by Mark Girouard.
Pimlico, 323 pp., £14, March 2000, 9780712664226
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... Sandy Wilson, the designer of the British Library, who met him soon afterwards and became a close friend, had ‘never met anyone who was so deeply convinced of his own significance’. Despite the dead-end jobs and unsuccessful competition entries, Stirling embarked on adult life in the voracious fashion in which he would continue to live: food, drink ...

Not a desire to have him, but to be like him

Slavoj Žižek: Highsmith is the One, 21 August 2003

Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith 
by Andrew Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 534 pp., £25, June 2003, 0 7475 6314 4
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... Roman Empire’ – on which she based her decision to make her home in ‘old Europe’. As Frank Rich put it, she ‘made a life’s work of her ostracisation from the American mainstream and her own subsequent self-reinvention’. Wilson’s book provides a lot of material for what Freud called ‘wild analysis’. We learn, for example, that five ...

I-need-to-work!

Lizzy Davies: ‘The Night Cleaner’, 3 November 2011

The Night Cleaner 
by Florence Aubenas, translated by Andrew Brown.
Polity, 184 pp., £14.99, 0 7456 5199 2
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... that brings tourists to Normandy. She split shifts and worked nights, earning at a rate perilously close to the minimum wage, at that time €8.71 an hour (it went up to €9 in January). The Night Cleaner records her time among those for whom the job of supermarket cashier is ‘prestigious’ and a refuse collector is ‘well paid’. When she arrived in ...

‘I worry a bit, Joanne’

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘The Casual Vacancy’, 25 October 2012

The Casual Vacancy 
by J.K. Rowling.
Little, Brown, 503 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 4087 0420 2
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... It sounds a bit too much like a fairy tale, just the area Rowling is leaving behind with her frank descriptions of drug-taking and grotty sex. Perhaps that’s why she adds in a fourth use of the cyber-curse, to break the pattern, though this last one is slightly different and the rule-of-three seems to persist. A character who pops up for just long ...

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