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Absolute Modernity

Paul Driver, 26 September 1991

Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life 
by Jean-Michel Nectoux, translated by Roger Nichols.
Cambridge, 646 pp., £45, April 1991, 0 521 23524 3
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Pierre Boulez 
by Dominique Jameux, translated by Susan Bradshaw.
Faber, 422 pp., £25, March 1991, 9780571137442
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Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship 
by Pierre Boulez, translated by Stephen Walsh.
Oxford, 316 pp., £40, August 1991, 0 19 311210 8
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... biography shades into and out of musical explanation, with heavier-duty exegesis always to look forward to in the second part of the volume. Nectoux’s organisation of material is not dissimilar, but more satisfying: a vivid and copious chronological narrative constantly subject to essay-length interpolations on pertinent musicological topics. Both books ...

Taking Refuge in the Loo

Leland de la Durantaye: Peter Handke, 22 May 2014

Versuch über den Pilznarren: Eine Geschichte für sich 
by Peter Handke.
Suhrkamp, 217 pp., £14.70, September 2013, 978 3 518 42383 7
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Peter Handke im Gespräch, mit Hubert Patterer und Stefan Winkler 
Kleine Zeitung, 120 pp., £15.36, November 2012, 978 3 902819 14 7Show More
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... monster’. Salman Rushdie nominated him ‘International Moron of the Year’ for 1999. Susan Sontag said that there were many many people who would never pick up one of his books again. Presenting the matter in the starkest possible terms, the human rights worker and novelist Jonathan Littell remarked in 2008: When a family is sitting in its house ...

Too Many Pears

Thomas Keymer: Frances Burney, 27 August 2015

The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney 1786-91, Vols III-IV: 1788 
edited by Lorna Clark.
Oxford, 824 pp., £225, September 2014, 978 0 19 968814 2
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... referred to in works by others, and that she dreads ‘any thing, every thing, that brings me forward into Print’. Throughout the diary she defends Johnson’s one-time confidante, Hester Thrale Piozzi, who had been ostracised after marrying her daughter’s music teacher; Burney even intercedes on Piozzi’s behalf in a custody battle. But she’s ...

Hurt in the Guts

Joe Dunthorne: A Masterpiece and a Disaster, 1 April 2021

Michael Kohlhaas 
by Heinrich von Kleist, translated by Michael Hofmann.
New Directions, 112 pp., £11.99, April 2020, 978 0 8112 2834 3
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... Kleist wrote to his sister. He was ‘blissfully happy’, he told his cousin, and looking forward to this ‘most splendid and pleasurable of deaths’. Vogel called it ‘their great voyage of discovery’ and, writing to the husband and daughter she was leaving behind, said: ‘I am dying a death such as few mortals have enjoyed … exchanging ...

A Girl Called Retina

Tom Crewe: You’ll like it when you get there, 13 August 2020

British Summer Time Begins: The School Summer Holidays, 1930-80 
by Ysenda Maxtone Graham.
Little, Brown, 352 pp., £18.99, July 2020, 978 1 4087 1055 5
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... air with a bat in an ethereal, ladylike, lightly bouncing way. ‘I’d been well trained and came forward to the ball,’ she demonstrated.(Italics are important in Maxtone Graham’s work. So much is conveyed by that forward.)Another benefit of the oral method is that it captures much that an ordinary history would excise ...

Peachy

David Thomson: LA Rhapsody, 27 January 2022

Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis and Los Angeles, California 
by Matthew Specktor.
Tin House, 378 pp., $17.95, July 2021, 978 1 951142 62 9
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... seeing someone else,’ she said. The air around us was halogen-rich, glowing. She leaned forward to kiss me again. ‘I don’t think I like him very much.’Do you see how perilously an author can find himself in a scene with Tuesday Weld?Let’s try to be cool and explanatory. Specktor was born in 1966, a year before Bonnie and Clyde; he will have ...
... to soothe a crying infant. All she seemed to do was pop round when Tania was feeding Sally and Susan and ask Geoffrey round to the pub for a drink. He’d go, too. ‘Of course Erica has turned lesbian,’ he said, eventually. ‘Well, I can understand that. Why should a woman make do with a man, when she can have another woman?’ And Erica faded out of ...

How do we know her?

Hilary Mantel: The Secrets of Margaret Pole, 2 February 2017

Margaret Pole: The Countess in the Tower 
by Susan Higginbotham.
Amberley, 214 pp., £16.99, August 2016, 978 1 4456 3594 1
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... defeated observers, as if her life stretched back into a fabulous era when dragons roamed. Susan Higginbotham’s carefully written book comes with a misleading cover puff: ‘At last, a biography of one of the most fascinating women of the Tudor period’, who has ‘too long been overlooked’. But Margaret Pole, one of the great magnates of Tudor ...

How many speed bumps?

Gavin Francis: Pain, 21 August 2014

The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers 
by Joanna Bourke.
Oxford, 396 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 0 19 968942 2
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... his impressions might be more useful than whatever Mr Lagnari would tell me. He was leaning forward in bed, propped up on a few pillows, his face more withered and pale than it had been the week before. He winced at the smallest movement, and held his hands over the pit of his stomach as if protecting it. The room was just wider than his double bed. He ...

Newtopia

Christopher Hitchens, 24 August 1995

To Renew America 
by Newt Gingrich.
HarperCollins, 260 pp., £18, July 1995, 9780060173364
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... is a very upbeat, Horatio Alger-style recasting of the celebrated ‘Third Wave’ hypothesis put forward by Alvin and Heidi Toffler. It owes something, indirectly, to the work on the ‘Second Industrial Revolution’ authored by the late Ernest Mandel. And it has some truth to it, even if it is here stated so blithely as to resemble a conservative News from ...

Regrets, Vexations, Lassitudes

Seamus Perry: Wordsworth’s Trouble, 18 December 2008

William Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’: A Casebook 
edited by Stephen Gill.
Oxford, 406 pp., £19.99, September 2006, 0 19 518092 5
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... much further than raising some money for their Continental trip. If they had all been looking forward to a new adventure together, however, that soon came to nothing: the poets went their separate ways almost as soon as they arrived in Germany. Coleridge headed for the bright lights of Ratzeburg, a pretty and expensive place, where he threw himself ...

Diary

David Denby: Deaths on Camera, 8 September 2016

... in a blur: you can hear the shot, but you can see the revolver only in slow motion. The car moves forward, brushing Tensing. He falls to the ground. As his body cam jumps and spins, he rights himself and chases after the car, which comes to a stop down the street with a sickening noise as it hits a telephone pole. In the front seat, Samuel DuBose is dead. The ...

Starting up

Peter Clarke, 6 November 1986

The German Slump: Politics and Economics 1924-1936 
by Harold James.
Oxford, 469 pp., £30, March 1986, 0 19 821972 5
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The Making of Keynes’s General Theory 
by Richard Kahn.
Cambridge, 327 pp., £20, May 1984, 9780521253734
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Towards the Managed Economy: Keynes, the Treasury and the Fiscal Policy Debate of the 1930s 
by Roger Middleton.
Methuen, 244 pp., £25, September 1985, 0 416 35830 6
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Keynes and his Contemporaries 
edited by G.C. Harcourt.
Macmillan, 195 pp., £22.50, October 1985, 0 333 34687 4
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The Policy Consequences of John Maynard Keynes 
edited by Harold Wattel.
Macmillan, 157 pp., £29.50, April 1986, 0 333 41340 7
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... do it?’ As a member of the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry, moreover, Keynes looked forward eagerly to debating it with Sir Richard Hopkins, the Treasury’s official spokesman. Yet this contest, for one reason or another, was never joined on level terms, for neither in the Treasury Memorandum of 1929, countering the Liberal scheme, nor in ...

I am Gregor Samsa

Eric Korn, 7 January 1993

Virtual Reality 
by Howard Rheingold.
Secker, 415 pp., £19.99, October 1992, 0 436 41212 8
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Cyberpunk 
by Katie Hafner and John Markoff.
Fourth Estate, 368 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 1 872180 94 9
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Glimpses of Heaven, Visions of Hell: Virtual Reality and its Implications 
by Barrie Sherman and Phil Judkins.
Hodder, 224 pp., £12.99, July 1992, 0 340 56905 0
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... a steering wheel or a tiller without fatal muddle. Pilots can learn to pull the stick back or forward to climb. Diplomats and social climbers steer conversations around rocks, whirlpools and Sargasso seas. Exchange dealers operate in money-space, in which a currency out of alignment is a tower that must be shored up or encouraged profitably to fall. Poker ...

How Dare He?

Jenny Turner: Geoff Dyer, 11 June 2009

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi 
by Geoff Dyer.
Canongate, 295 pp., £12.99, April 2009, 978 1 84767 270 4
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... on a Friday night when, relieved that it was over for another week, they could down tools and look forward to two days of uninterrupted idleness.’ He’s sitting in hot sunshine outside a café in Taormina, supposedly researching his subject’s ‘savage pilgrimage’ but actually getting on with what turns out to be the book’s real business, which is to ...

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