Not Enough Delilahs

Andrew O’Hagan: Lillian Ross, 4 July 2019

Picture 
by Lillian Ross.
NYRB, 219 pp., £14.99, June 2019, 978 1 68137 315 7
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... and the sentences are good.The door of Huston’s suite was opened by a conservatively attired young man with a round face and pink cheeks. He introduced himself as Arthur Fellows. ‘John is in the next room getting dressed,’ he said. ‘Imagine getting a layout like this all to yourself! That’s the way the big ...

The New Deal

Tom Crewe, 17 August 2017

... a political genius is laughable. But that is not to say he didn’t put his finger on something. Young people are sick of being short-changed compared with past generations. Mrs May must fix it. Or next time Britain will buy the Marxists’ fool’s gold – and the Tories will be helpless to prevent the inevitable horrors that will follow.’The Sun ...

A Circular Motion

James Butler: Protest, what is it good for?, 8 February 2024

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution 
by Vincent Bevins.
Wildfire, 336 pp., £25, October 2023, 978 1 0354 1227 3
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The Populist Moment: The Left after the Great Recession 
by Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello.
Verso, 214 pp., £10.99, September 2023, 978 1 80429 248 8
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... case is exemplary. Bevins follows the story of the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL), a small group of young, non-party radicals in São Paulo who protested against a 20 cent rise in the city bus fare. Some were middle-class students; others – like Mayara, a strong voice in the book – came from anarcho-punk subcultures and had service jobs in bars or ...

Even paranoids have enemies

Frank Kermode, 24 August 1995

F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism 
by Ian MacKillop.
Allen Lane, 476 pp., £25, July 1995, 0 7139 9062 7
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... strong for disliking the editors of the Times Literary Supplement (successively Alan Pryce-Jones, Arthur Crook and John Gross) and indeed held the whole London literary world in contempt as a self-serving clique. He became a lecturer in 1936, already over forty, and a full lecturer at 52. MacKillop deals with this scandalously slow ascent in great detail and ...

The Real Magic

David Sylvester, 8 June 1995

A Biographical Dictionary of Film 
by David Thomson.
Deutsch, 834 pp., £25, November 1994, 0 233 98859 9
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... not a single example of Buñuel or Rossellini or of Cocteau or Fritz Lang or von Sternberg or Arthur Penn or Pasolini or Warhol or Woody Allen, nor a film directed or choreographed by Busby Berkeley, nor, amazingly, a film starring either Garbo or Fred Astaire, nor Shoah. Instead, it finds room for The Quiet Man and The Bridge on the River Kwai, three ...

Lucky Kim

Christopher Hitchens, 23 February 1995

The Philby Files. The Secret Life of the Master Spy: KGB Archives Revealed 
by Genrikh Borovik, edited by Phillip Knightley.
Little, Brown, 382 pp., £18.99, September 1994, 0 316 91015 5
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The Fifth Man 
by Roland Perry.
Sidgwick, 486 pp., £16.99, October 1994, 0 283 06216 9
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Treason in the Blood: H. St John Philby, Kim Philby and the Spy Case of the Century 
by Anthony Cave Brown.
Hale, 640 pp., £25, January 1995, 9780709055822
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My Five Cambridge Friends 
by Yuri Modin.
Headline, 328 pp., £17.99, October 1994, 0 7472 1280 5
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Looking for Mr Nobody: The Secret Life of Goronwy Rees 
by Jenny Rees.
Weidenfeld, 291 pp., £18.99, October 1994, 0 297 81430 3
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... the usual story: the high excitement of the Thirties; the precedence given in Cambridge circles to young men of background and pelf who possessed physical charm; the subordination of all ends and means to anti-Nazism. I had, in very truth, heard all this before. With the patriarchal Victor Navasky, editor of the Nation, as my witness, I drummed my ...

See stars, Mummy

Rosemary Hill: Barbara Comyns’s Childhood, 9 May 2024

Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence 
by Avril Horner.
Manchester, 347 pp., £30, March, 978 1 5261 7374 4
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... it will be born dead.”’Comyns was writing with hindsight about herself as a naive young woman who knew nothing about birth control. ‘I had a kind of idea if you controlled your mind and said “I won’t have any babies” very hard, they most likely wouldn’t come. I thought that was what was meant by birth control.’ But Sophia soon ...

Disorderly Cities

Richard J. Evans: WW2 Town Planning, 5 December 2013

A Blessing in Disguise: War and Town Planning in Europe, 1940-45 
edited by Jörn Düwel and Niels Gutschow.
DOM, 415 pp., €98, August 2013, 978 3 86922 295 0
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... planning utopias have never been popular except with political elites. Peter Willmott and Michael Young, in Family and Kinship in East London (1957), painted a dire picture of community warmth in the old East End giving way to anomie and alienation in the new towns to which bombed-out families were forced to move. In the end, the destruction of European ...

Splashed with Stars

Susannah Clapp: In Stoppardian Fashion, 16 December 2021

Tom Stoppard: A Life 
by Hermione Lee.
Faber, 977 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 0 571 31444 7
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... the idea of facing off an authentic and an assumed self towards the end of Leopoldstadt, when two young men face each other for the first time since Kristallnacht: one is ‘a writer of funny books’ who was taken to England as a child; the other is a mathematician whose family stayed in Vienna. For one, being Jewish has been crucial; for the other, it has ...

Don’t tread on me

Brigid von Preussen: Into Wedgwood’s Mould, 15 December 2022

The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain 
by Tristram Hunt.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 0 241 28789 7
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... designed by his best modellers. In this classicised allegory of colonial success, Hope, a young woman in flowing robes, reaches out to Peace with her olive branch, Art with her palette, and Labour, with a sledgehammer over his shoulder. A ship in the background shows the arrival of the colonists while a horn of plenty spills its contents onto the ...

Cunt Art

Jo Applin: Ten Rounds with Judy Chicago, 9 June 2022

The Flowering: The Autobiography of Judy Chicago 
by Judy Chicago.
Thames and Hudson, 416 pp., £30, July 2021, 978 0 500 09438 9
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... Walter Hopps opened the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard, with a line-up of largely unknown young male artists they called ‘the studs’. As Chicago later put it, ‘no women artists were taken seriously. The men sat around Barney’s and talked about cars, motorcycles and their joints. I knew nothing about cars, less about motorcycles, and certainly ...

Christopher Hitchens states a prosecution case

Christopher Hitchens, 25 October 1990

Crossman: The Pursuit of Power 
by Anthony Howard.
Cape, 361 pp., £15.95, October 1990, 0 224 02592 9
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... 1934 he told his BBC listeners that ‘the spirit of the youth movement still inspires many of the young officers in the labour camps and fills many students with the belief that they are digging the foundations of a new German socialism.’ Not that Crossman, in praising what he called the ‘idealism’ of the Hitler Youth, shared these ideals himself. More ...

How not to do it

John Sutherland, 22 July 1993

The British Library: For Scholarship, Research and Innovation: Strategic Objectives for the Year 2000 
British Library, 39 pp., £5, June 1993, 0 7123 0321 9Show More
The Library of the British Museum: Retrospective Essays on the Department of Printed Books 
edited by P.R. Harris.
British Library, 305 pp., £35, June 1993, 0 7123 0242 5
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... touts in the Euston Road offering desperate American scholars seats for arm-and-a-leg prices. Young women with thesis deadlines will be prostituting their bodies for a carrel. If you want a foretaste of what the BL of the future will be like, imagine the bank of six British Library Online Catalogue terminals in the Round Reading Room: any time you want to ...

Booze and Fags

Christopher Hitchens, 12 March 1992

Tobacco: A History 
by V.G. Kiernan.
Radius, 249 pp., £18.99, December 1991, 0 09 174216 1
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The Faber Book of Drink, Drinkers and Drinking 
edited by Simon Rae.
Faber, 554 pp., £15.99, November 1991, 0 571 16229 0
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... own lips and passing it to Bette Davis (Now, Voyager). With approval, he cites the mass meeting of young women at Teheran University; every pouting lip framing a cigarette in protest at a Khomeini fatwah against smoking for females. In spite of the misogyny of certain styles of smoking (pipes, of course, and Rudyard Kipling’s hearty attitude towards cigars ...

Hereditary Genius

A.W.F. Edwards, 6 August 1981

Statistics in Britain 1865-1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge 
by Donald MacKenzie.
Edinburgh, 306 pp., £12.50, April 1981, 0 85224 369 3
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... K was mine (K.P. not C.P.).’ MacKenzie carefully surveys the political development of the young Pearson (‘the poverty and squalor of Victorian England, and the complacent superficiality of Cambridge University, are themes that begin to appear in his thought’), and there is ample evidence that by the time he became seriously involved in the ...