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Vigah

Elizabeth Drew: JFK, 20 November 2003

John F. Kennedy: An Unfinished Life 1917-63 
by Robert Dallek.
Allen Lane, 838 pp., £25, September 2003, 0 7139 9737 0
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... himself ‘entitled to seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly’. Kennedy said that David Cecil’s biography of Lord Melbourne, which depicted young aristocrats having a good time while performing heroic feats in the service of Queen and country, was one of his favourite books. When Kennedy was about to run for the Senate, according to ...

Room Theory

Adam Mars-Jones: Joseph O’Neill, 25 September 2014

The Dog 
by Joseph O’Neill.
Fourth Estate, 241 pp., £16.99, July 2014, 978 0 00 727574 8
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... and this must be what I yearn for.’ ‘I think that what I’ve wanted, most of all, is someone nice and safe to hang out with.’ Plus, despite his failure to reproduce with Jenn, ‘I have always wanted daughters.’ Nevertheless he disqualifies himself from future relationships (‘never again me-woman’). He has a strategy of ‘jerking off at least ...

Lucky Lad

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Harold Evans, 17 December 2009

My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times – An Autobiography 
by Harold Evans.
Little, Brown, 515 pp., £25, September 2009, 978 1 4087 0203 1
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... the Daily Mail. In his memoir Cold Cream, Mount says drily that great editors are rarely nice men, ‘and David English was a great editor.’ Harry Evans defies that rule. And now that the 20th century has turned into the 21st, the English press is diverse but not financially vigorous; compared with the 1890s or ...

The Subtleties of Frank Kermode

Michael Wood, 17 December 2009

... of the exquisite divinatory intelligence required to make proper use of that knowledge’. Nice work if you can do it, as Cole Porter didn’t quite say. Kermode is not Housman and not a diviner. But he does devote much exquisite intelligence to matters of divination – even and especially of secular affairs. He would like to believe we could do ...

Tricky Minds

Michael Wood: Dostoevsky, 5 September 2002

Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet 1871-81 
by Joseph Frank.
Princeton, 784 pp., £24.95, May 2002, 0 691 08665 6
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... Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.’ And again, in Constance Garnett’s much ...

Check out the parking lot

Rebecca Solnit: Hell in LA, 8 July 2004

Dante's Inferno 
by Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders.
Chronicle, 218 pp., £15.99, May 2004, 0 8118 4213 4
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... Disneyland too has a monorail, and though on my first visit to the Getty I thought of it as a nice tribute to its sister amusement park, we perplexed everyone around us by walking up the unfrequented road the quarter mile or so to the museum. Altitude correlates neatly with economic clout in urban and suburban California, so although the presumed point of ...

When were you thinking of shooting yourself?

Sophie Pinkham: Mayakovsky, 16 February 2017

Mayakovsky: A Biography 
by Bengt Jangfeldt, translated by Harry Watson.
Chicago, 616 pp., £26.50, January 2015, 978 0 226 05697 5
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Volodya: Selected Works 
by Vladimir Mayakovsky, edited by Rosy Carrick.
Enitharmon, 312 pp., £14.99, November 2015, 978 1 910392 16 4
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... Moscow, where he cultivated a Byronic image and gained a reputation for insolence. He fell in with David Burlyuk, a Cubist painter who recognised his poetic talent, and the two of them got together with the avant-garde poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh to release the first Futurist almanac, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. They announced that ...

From Lying to Leering

Rebecca Solnit: Penis Power, 19 January 2017

... white man, vote for me, and even that Sanders implicitly conveyed that message. The Vox journalist David Roberts did a word-frequency analysis on Clinton’s campaign speeches and concluded that she mostly talked about workers, jobs, education and the economy, exactly the things she was berated for neglecting. She mentioned jobs almost 600 ...

Peaches d’antan

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Henry James’s Autobiographies, 11 August 2016

Autobiographies: ‘A Small Boy and Others’; ‘Notes of a Son and Brother’; ‘The Middle Years’ and Other Writings 
by Henry James, edited by Philip Horne.
Library of America, 848 pp., £26.99, January 2016, 978 1 59853 471 9
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... Cruickshank’s ‘vividly terrible’ illustrations of Oliver Twist, whose pictures of the ‘nice’ people and scenes seemed to him almost more frightening than the sinister ones. Sent to bed while one of his older cousins read aloud from the first instalment of David Copperfield, he managed to hide himself and listen ...

The Only Alphabet

August Kleinzahler: Ashbery’s Early Life, 21 September 2017

The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life 
by Karin Roffman.
Farrar, Straus, 316 pp., £25.50, June 2017, 978 0 374 29384 0
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... ceiling and statuary in the alcoves. John, Momma and Grandma stayed on the 18th floor. ‘Very nice,’ he recorded in his diary. He returned a celebrity, but, more than a year after his brother’s death, he found himself still grieving. Roffman quotes a poem, ‘The History of My Life’, that Ashbery wrote sixty years later: Once upon a time there were ...

Thriving on Chaos

Patrick Cockburn: After al-Baghdadi, 21 November 2019

... to St Petersburg; 131 shot or bombed in the Paris attacks of 2015; 86 run down by a truck in Nice the following year; 593 killed in an operation in the Philippines the year after that; 311 killed when attackers opened fire during Friday prayers at a mosque in Sinai; 149 killed by a suicide bomber at an election rally in Pakistan – not to mention the ...

Man Is Wolf to Man

Malcolm Gaskill: C.J. Sansom, 23 January 2020

Tombland 
by C.J. Sansom.
Pan Macmillan, 866 pp., £8.99, September 2019, 978 1 4472 8451 2
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... memoirs written late in life. When we first meet him he’s in his mid-thirties, lives in a nice house in Chancery Lane, has a horse called Chancery, works in the Court of Chancery – you get the idea. Sansom has given his hero his own passion for the law, its stately, logical protocols, its civility and rationalism. Shardlake has a gimlet eye and a ...

What’s fair about that?

Adam Swift: Social Mobilities, 23 January 2020

Social Mobility and Its Enemies 
by Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin.
Pelican, 272 pp., £8.99, September 2018, 978 0 241 31702 0
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Social Mobility and Education in Britain 
by Erzsébet Bukodi and John Goldthorpe.
Cambridge, 249 pp., £19.99, December 2018, 978 1 108 46821 3
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The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged 
by Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison.
Policy, 224 pp., £9.99, January, 978 1 4473 3610 5
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... income. Responding to the increasingly prevalent view that Britain had a serious mobility problem, David Cameron’s coalition government rebranded Labour’s Child Poverty Commission as the Social Mobility Commission, with Alan Milburn as its head. Milburn gave a lot of attention to recruitment to elite positions – his flagship report was on fair access to ...

Whatever Made Him

Sheila Fitzpatrick: The Bauman Dichotomy, 10 September 2020

Bauman: A Biography 
by Izabela Wagner.
Polity, 510 pp., £25, June, 978 1 5095 2686 4
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... the longer term it would be necessary to enable him to enter a scientific path,’ a nice way of saying he should be shunted into academia, where he was already studying part-time. The problem was evidently that he was a Jew, and specifically that his father – always a man of Zionist sympathies, with a daughter in Israel – had visited the ...

Short Cuts

Deborah Friedell: Reading J.D. Vance, 24 October 2024

... any memory of his existence’ and so changed her son’s name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel: ‘Hamel’ was the name of her next husband; she wanted to preserve the ‘J.D.’, but the Donald had to go. He’s only been known as ‘J.D. Vance’ – sometimes with dots, sometimes without – since 2014, when he changed his name to honour ...

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