Back to Life

Christopher Benfey: Rothko’s Moment, 21 May 2015

Mark Rothko: Towards the Light in the Chapel 
by Annie Cohen-Solal.
Yale, 296 pp., £18.99, February 2015, 978 0 300 18204 0
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... the letdown, you may feel called on to provide some compensatory emotion of your own, like the young TV producer in Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, as she contemplates the Rothko reproductions on her walls: ‘She still felt – or could, if she kept the overhead light off and the posterish flatness of her pictures remained unrevealed, the way ...

Each Scene for Itself

David Edgar: The Brecht Centenary, 4 March 1999

War Primer 
by Bertolt Brecht, edited by John Willett.
Libris, 170 pp., £35, February 1998, 1 870352 21 1
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Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches 
by John Willett.
Methuen, 320 pp., £12.99, February 1998, 0 413 72310 0
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Brecht and Method 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 184 pp., £19, November 1998, 1 85984 809 5
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... is an important, consciously Marxist strand of British postwar playwriting – from John Arden and Edward Bond in the Fifties and Sixties to John McGrath and Howard Brenton in the Seventies and Eighties – which has sought to renew and develop the Brecht project as a whole. But just as there is hardly a line of dialogue in the post-Caretaker British theatre ...

Lethal Pastoral

Paul Keegan: Housman’s Lethal Pastoral, 17 November 2016

Housman Country: Into the Heart of England 
by Peter Parker.
Little, Brown, 446 pp., £25, June 2016, 978 1 4087 0613 8
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... In a 1910 lecture on Swinburne, Housman recollected being told by Hardy that when he was a young man in London ‘there was a whole army of young men like himself, not mutually acquainted, who nevertheless, as they met in the streets, could recognise one another as spiritual brethren by a certain outward sign. This ...

Wild Hearts

Peter Wollen, 6 April 1995

Virginia Woolf 
by James King.
Hamish Hamilton, 699 pp., £25, September 1994, 0 241 13063 8
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... led, in due course, to Weaver taking charge of the publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by the Egoist Press and, eventually, finding a publisher for Ulysses. Woolf’s interest in feminism and Modernism was very different from Marsden’s or Weaver’s. Nonetheless, their independent efforts indicate that there was a natural affinity ...

Simplicity

Marilyn Butler: What Jane Austen Read, 5 March 1998

Jane Austen: A Life 
by David Nokes.
Fourth Estate, 578 pp., £20, September 1997, 1 85702 419 2
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Jane Austen: A Life 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 341 pp., £20, October 1997, 0 670 86528 1
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... work on the Romantic writers, Austen included, has been obsessed with money for over a decade now. Edward Copeland’s Women Writing about Money (1995) gets more thoroughly into the topic than a biographer can, and David Nokes provides even more insights than Tomalin into (say) Austen and legacy-hunting. In fact Tomalin’s considerable strengths are surely of ...

On Some Days of the Week

Colm Tóibín: Mrs Oscar Wilde, 10 May 2012

Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde 
by Franny Moyle.
John Murray, 374 pp., £9.99, February 2012, 978 1 84854 164 1
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The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition 
by Oscar Wilde, edited by Nicholas Frankel.
Harvard, 295 pp., £25.95, April 2011, 978 0 674 05792 0
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... remember thinking that the perfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and his two young children, suggested some deliberate artistic composition. Wilde’s younger son, Vyvyan, born in 1886, remembered him being ‘a real companion’ to himself and his brother. He had ‘so much of the child in his own nature that he delighted in playing our ...

Diary

Melanie McFadyean: In the Wrong Crowd, 25 September 2014

... and sent to jail,’ Detective Inspector John McFarlane said after the conviction of 17 of the 20 young people jointly charged with the murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in March 2010: ‘the law on joint enterprise is clear and unforgiving.’ To be found guilty of murder as an individual it must be proved beyond reasonable doubt ...

The G-Word

Mark Mazower: The Armenian Massacres, 8 February 2001

The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-16: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Falloden by Viscount Bryce Uncensored Edition 
by James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, edited by Ara Sarafian.
Gomidas Institute, 677 pp., £32, December 2000, 0 9535191 5 5
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... led to demands for political reform and military revitalisation. In 1908 the revolt of the Young Turks brought to power a group of officers determined to halt the Empire’s decline. Like the ideologies of similar groups elsewhere – there were coups in Greece, Serbia and Portugal around this time – theirs was a confused amalgam of liberal ...

Charmed Life

John Bayley, 15 September 1983

The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pasternak 
by Richard Freeborn.
Cambridge, 256 pp., £27.50, January 1983, 0 521 24442 0
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Boris Pasternak: His Life and Art 
by Guy de Mallac.
Souvenir, 450 pp., £14.95, February 1983, 0 285 62558 6
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Pasternak: A Biography 
by Ronald Hingley.
Weidenfeld, 294 pp., £12.95, August 1983, 9780297782070
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Selected Poems 
by Boris Pasternak, translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France.
Allen Lane, 160 pp., £7.50, February 1983, 0 7139 1497 1
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Poets of Modern Russia 
by Peter France.
Cambridge, 240 pp., £20, February 1983, 0 521 23490 5
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Russian Literature since the Revolution 
by Edward Brown.
Harvard, 413 pp., £20, December 1982, 0 674 78203 8
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... asks Hingley, querying de Mallac’s rather coy observation that his hero, like the young Tolstoy, ‘was not above calling on ladies of easy virtue,’ and that this ‘will be documented by some later, less bashful biographer’. But can it be? asks Hingley. There is no evidence one way or another. De Mallac’s suggestion is illustrative of ...

By All Possible Art

Tobias Gregory: George Herbert, 18 December 2014

Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert 
by John Drury.
Penguin, 396 pp., £9.99, April 2014, 978 0 14 104340 1
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... the marriage was evidently a happy one, and George Herbert enjoyed a close relationship with his young stepfather. Walton depicts Magdalen as a helicopter parent, at least in the case of her eldest son, Edward; when he went up to Oxford she moved the whole family along with him, and continued there with him, and still kept ...

Hauteur

Ian Gilmour: Britain and Europe, 10 December 1998

This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair 
by Hugo Young.
Macmillan, 558 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 333 57992 5
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... domination, while inclining heavily towards the latter. Nobody is better qualified than Hugo Young to tell the sad tale of Britain’s fumblings with her neighbours since 1945. As well as having been a close observer of the British and American scene for some thirty years, he seems to have interviewed nearly everybody alive who had much to do with his ...

Likeable Sage

Sheldon Rothblatt, 17 September 1981

Matthew Arnold: A Life 
by Park Honan.
Weidenfeld, 496 pp., £9.95, August 1981, 0 297 77824 2
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... incessantly about income and nursed social slights while prattling on about duty. Yes, the young Matthew Arnold, even the aging, egregiously corpulent Matthew Arnold, was a dandy who enjoyed titles, women in smart attire, the company of a Rothschild, the compliments of Disraeli, the wealth of a Hudson River estate (where in 1883 he went to see Delanos ...

Just How It was

Anne Hollander: The work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, 7 May 1998

Tête à Tête: Portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson 
edited by E.H. Gombrich.
Thames and Hudson, 144 pp., £32, February 1998, 9780500542187
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Henri Cartier-Bresson: Europeans 
edited by Jean Clair.
Thames and Hudson, 231 pp., £29.95, January 1998, 0 500 28052 5
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... past absorbed by Cartier-Bresson also comprised such giants of photography as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen – and look! here’s Stieglitz himself, whose portrait Cartier-Bresson took in 1946, the lastyear of the great forerunner’s life. Stieglitz’s face has a weary look not unlike that of Robert Flaherty, father of the documentary film, another ...

Seventy Years in a Colourful Trade

Andrew O’Hagan: The Soho Alphabet, 16 July 2020

Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia 
by Darren Coffield.
Unbound, 364 pp., £25, April 2020, 978 1 78352 816 5
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... them, look after the elderly, remember you are nothing, and keep the cheapskates at bay.When I was young, I had a thing for the after-places, which didn’t have patrons, or, heaven forfend, members, but habitués. There were a few Chinese restaurants in Gerrard Street which had shebeens in the back. You had to drink and not fight – these were the only rules ...

Disguise-Language

Andrew O’Hagan: Christopher Isherwood’s Artifice, 26 December 2024

Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out 
by Katherine Bucknell.
Chatto, 852 pp., £35, June 2024, 978 0 7011 8638 8
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... His first sexual fantasy was of lying naked on a battlefield. Such are the images that can speed a young person into prose, living out the reality of a martyred mother and a dead father. His first attempt at authorship was ‘The History of My Friends’, a tiny manuscript he dictated to his mother. It taught him, Bucknell writes, that ‘friendship could be ...