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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... rape reported to have taken place in 2015 at the home of one of the Times’s book critics. Norton halted shipments and cancelled a second print run; the panels, interviews and book festival events instantly vaporised. What began as a parade float was a runaway dumpster fire.Let us backtrack a bit. Not too far back: just far enough to present a portrait ...

If It Weren’t for Charlotte

Alice Spawls: The Brontës, 16 November 2017

... A Secret Sisterhood, who devote part of their book to Charlotte’s ‘hidden’ friendship with Mary Taylor, a friendship which is mostly hidden in the sense that we know relatively little about it: there are only a few surviving letters between them, and Taylor’s correspondence with Gaskell. It’s not uninteresting to learn more about Taylor, who moved ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2000, 25 January 2001

... timetable of the Resurrection would just have suited the programme-makers; the angel appearing to Mary Magdalene in the garden was probably Alan Titchmarsh. 17 February. Though she complains about having to put on so much make-up and even more about the bore of taking it all off, Maggie Smith seems to enjoy transforming herself into Miss Shepherd, today ...