What’s wrong with that man?

Christian Lorentzen: Donald Antrim, 20 November 2014

The Emerald Light in the Air: Stories 
by Donald Antrim.
Granta, 158 pp., £12.99, November 2014, 978 1 84708 649 5
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... Drinking is part of the equation. I don’t mean to make it sound as if Antrim has become John O’Hara with a cell phone. No, a disciple of Barthelme conquers the territory of Cheever and Updike – it’s stunning. ‘Another Manhattan’, from 2008, the longest and most wrenching of these pieces, begins as if it’s going to be a simple farce or ...

Micro-Shock

Adam Mars-Jones: Kazuo Ishiguro, 5 March 2015

The Buried Giant 
by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Faber, 345 pp., £20, March 2015, 978 0 571 31503 1
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... three-legged-race quality in consequence), but slowing the tempo has been an effective device for John Updike in The Witches of Eastwick and Hilary Mantel in Beyond Black. Both of these writers compensate with a stronger evocation of atmosphere, a finer descriptive grain, while Ishiguro opts for deceleration without a thickening of texture. There’s plenty ...

A bout de Bogart

Jenny Diski, 19 May 2011

Tough without a Gun: The Extraordinary Life of Humphrey Bogart 
by Stefan Kanfer.
Faber, 288 pp., £14.99, February 2011, 978 0 571 26072 0
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... good stuff to come along. In his personal life, in bars or on manly roustabouts with the likes of John Huston and the Rat Pack, Bogart was inclined to believe in ‘Bogart’ just as his fans did. ‘Bogart’s a hell of a nice guy until around 11.30 p.m. After that, he thinks he’s Bogart,’ a Beverly Hills restaurant owner once said. But there is ...

Everybody behaved perfectly

Eric Hobsbawm: Hilde’s Two Husbands, 25 August 2011

Scientist Spies: A Memoir of My Three Parents and the Atom Bomb 
by Paul Broda.
Troubador, 333 pp., £17.50, April 2011, 978 1 84876 607 5
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... Britain in the era of anti-Fascism. Broda’s protagonists do not belong in the shadowy world of John le Carré’s intelligence professionals or agents, or even the milieu of full-time Communist Party or Comintern functionaries, let alone the Party cadres trained into total identification with Moscow in institutions like the Lenin School. Their life was ...

Who’s in, who’s out?

Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka: The Nonproliferation Complex, 23 February 2012

... of thousands of civilians. In Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to al-Qaida, John Mueller argues that the nonproliferation regime was responsible for these deaths, and for the staggering material costs of the war, and asks whether they were a price worth paying to prevent Saddam from getting a bomb – a bomb he would never have been able ...

Forty Thousand Kilocupids

Marina Warner: The Femfatalatron, 31 July 2014

The Erotic Doll: A Modern Fetish 
by Marquard Smith.
Yale, 376 pp., £35, January 2014, 978 0 300 15202 9
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... trauma. Smith aims to create a visual essay on the model of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas or John Berger’s celebrated montages in Ways of Seeing, but his album doesn’t yield meaning through thoughtful juxtaposition or surprising diachronic analogy; just bunching the pictures together, without a full discussion, leaches them of meaning, ignores the ...

How much meat is too much?

Bee Wilson, 20 March 2014

Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat 
by Philip Lymbery, with Isabel Oakeshott.
Bloomsbury, 426 pp., £12.99, January 2014, 978 1 4088 4644 5
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Planet Carnivore 
by Alex Renton.
Guardian, 78 pp., £1.99, August 2013
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... need to be some ‘democratic, accountable and supranational body’, similar to the one that John Boyd Orr hoped would be set up by the UN after the war: a World Food Board. This would integrate ‘transport, human and animal health, the environment, agriculture and aquaculture and financial systems’ and guide ‘food production, trade and ...

How should we think about the Caliphate?

Owen Bennett-Jones: In the Caliphate, 17 July 2014

... sentenced to death. All this has happened with the support of the West: the US secretary of state, John Kerry, recently handed over half a billion dollars to the Sisi regime. And the situation in Syria has led some to wonder whether, compared to the jihadis, Assad might after all be the best option. The West would be more than tempted to back any suitable ...

Hourglass or Penny-Farthing?

Christopher Tayler: Damon Galgut, 31 July 2014

Arctic Summer 
by Damon Galgut.
Atlantic, 357 pp., £17.99, May 2014, 978 0 85789 718 3
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... The Master), plus recentish likenesses of H.G. Wells, Byron, Woolf, Keats, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, John Clare and others. Of these it has most in common thematically with The Master – James makes a fleeting appearance, getting Forster’s name wrong – but Galgut doesn’t seek to inhabit his subject’s inner life or to assimilate him into his own ...

In the Soup

David Trotter: Air Raid Panic, 9 October 2014

The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908-41 
by Brett Holman.
Ashgate, 290 pp., £70, June 2014, 978 1 4094 4733 7
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... or more precisely of the difference between two moments: the summer of 1915, when the novel by John Buchan on which it’s based began to appear in serial form, in the middle of one world war; and the summer of 1935, when the odds on the imminent outbreak of another were shortening by the day. The film takes from the novel its title, the name of the ...

Whalers v. Sealers

Nicholas Guyatt: Rebellion on the Tryal, 19 March 2015

Empire of Necessity: The Untold History of a Slave Rebellion in the Age of Liberty 
by Greg Grandin.
Oneworld, 360 pp., £25, May 2014, 978 1 78074 410 0
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... unco-operative. Cereno and Bartleby, by contrast, confound their challengers with what John Updike called ‘a defensive catatonia’. But while ‘Bartleby’ unmasks the agonies of alienated labour and points to unsettling continuities between Northern and Southern workforces, ‘Benito Cereno’ never becomes a full-throated assault on chattel ...

Woman/Manly

Kristin Dombek: Kim Gordon, 19 March 2015

Girl in a Band 
by Kim Gordon.
Faber, 288 pp., £14.99, February 2015, 978 0 571 31383 9
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... their parking lots filled with SUVs.She writes of her father’s jazz records, most importantly John Coltrane. She had a schizophrenic older brother, who teased and bullied her throughout her childhood, leading her to turn off completely, to which she attributes what others have called her remote, detached demeanour, and the need to express the feelings she ...

Grey Panic

T.J. Clark: Gerhard Richter, 17 November 2011

... its long depressive state – into something beautiful as opposed to correct or clever. John Cage, for some of us, is an even lesser god than Duchamp, but in the final room at Tate, where a suite of big abstracts done under Cage’s auspices is hung, it does not matter. The imperfect lusciousness of the canvases, each nearly ten feet square (the ...

Hairy Fairies

Rosemary Hill: Angela Carter, 10 May 2012

A Card from Angela Carter 
by Susannah Clapp.
Bloomsbury, 106 pp., £10, February 2012, 978 1 4088 2690 4
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... wasn’t thinking of anything that expensive’ – was sent in 1987, five years before John Major announced the ‘amicable separation’ of the royal couple. The image and the attitude are a sharp reminder of the mood of the decade that saw Carter’s reputation revive. It was, appropriately, a time when monstrous females stalked the land. Diana ...

Rotten, Wicked, Tyrannical

Bernard Porter: The Meek Assassin, 5 July 2012

Why Spencer Perceval Had to Die: The Assassination of a British Prime Minister 
by Andro Linklater.
Bloomsbury, 296 pp., £18.99, May 2012, 978 1 4088 2840 3
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... is the only British prime minister ever to have been assassinated? But both he and his nemesis, John Bellingham, are more interesting than this implies, and the fatal act that brought them together, Andro Linklater thinks, is more significant and also more mysterious. They have been the subject of two previous books, by Mollie Gillen (1972) and David ...