On Laura Kasischke

Stephanie Burt: Laura Kasischke, 2 August 2018

“... fictive, prospective or real (floods, kidnappings, automobile accidents, the Beast of St John); fairy tales; shopping malls, hospitals, high street stores, dinner parties, graves. All these places and events can break people, or contain those who are broken. She can even put many of these things in the same poem. ‘Sensual Pleasures’ (another new ...”

Under the Staircase

Karl Whitney: Hans Jonathan, Runaway Slave, 19 October 2017

The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan 
by Gisli Palsson, translated by Anna Yates.
Chicago, 288 pp., £19, October 2016, 978 0 226 31328 3Show More
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“... by a man who worked in a local shop. The surveyor wrote in his journal that his guide was ‘very brown skinned, with coal-black woolly hair. His father is a European, but his mother is a negress … He is from the West Indies, and has no surname … but calls himself Hans Jonathan.’ Hans Jonathan left only a few traces of himself in the historical ...”

At the Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh

Tom Crewe: Roger Fenton, 16 November 2017

“... socialising with officers and generals as he went.) Memorialising again, he cajoled a Captain Brown and his servant back into their winter dress: they squint uncomfortably into the sun from underneath fur hats. Members of the Eighth Hussars were choreographed around a cook spooning out food: a woman stands at the back, removed from the main group, with a ...”

Doing the bores

Rosemary Ashton, 21 March 1991

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Duke–Edinburgh Edition. Vols XVI-XVIII: 1843-4 
edited by Clyde Ryals and Kenneth Fielding.
Duke, 331 pp., £35.65, July 1990, 9780822309192Show More
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“... hair; bright-laughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate, of sallow-brown complexion, almost Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy; – smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical-metallic, – fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech and speculation free and plenteous: I do ...”

Wittgenstein and the Simple Object

Norman Malcolm, 21 February 1980

Notebooks 1914-16 
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, edited by G.H. von Wright and G.E.M. Anscombe, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe.
Blackwell, 140 pp., £8.95, October 1980, 0 631 10291 4Show More
Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann 
edited by Brian McGuinness, translated by Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness.
Blackwell, 266 pp., £9.95, August 1980, 0 631 19470 3Show More
The Central Texts of Wittgenstein 
by Gerd Brand, translated by Robert Innis.
Blackwell, 182 pp., £10, October 1980, 0 631 10921 8Show More
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“... and the Vienna Circle, Brian McGuinness quotes from a letter that Wittgenstein wrote to John Maynard Keynes in 1924: ‘You ask in your letter whether you could do anything to make it possible for me to return to scientific work. The answer is, No: there’s nothing that can be done in that line, because I myself no longer have any strong inner ...”

Party Man

David Marquand, 1 July 1982

Tony Crosland 
by Susan Crosland.
Cape, 448 pp., £10.95, June 1982, 9780224017879Show More
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“... I had become an admirer. Gaitskell was dead, and the revisionists needed a champion. George Brown was too unreliable, and Roy Jenkins too remote. Crosland seemed to be the man. After all, he was the high priest of revisionism. He had charted its course in happier days. Who better to lead it through the storms that followed Gaitskell’s death? For most ...”

Errata

Christopher Ricks, 2 December 1982

T.S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage 
edited by Michael Grant.
Routledge, 408 pp., £25, July 1982, 0 7100 9226 1Show More
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“... a footnote; Latin ones are not. Nine lines from ‘another great poet’ (quoted by someone called Brown and Browne) stand without attribution or reference. Cross-reference within Eliot’s work, which is one way in which an editor could be truly helpful (especially as to the uncollected or stray prose), is disdained: so that Allen Tate’s remark that ...”

Steely Women in a World of Wobbly Men

David Runciman: The Myth of the Strong Leader, 20 June 2019

“... to be as formidable as Thatcher had been, a steely woman in a world of wobbly men. Even Gordon Brown, with his ceaseless personal ambition, believed that politicians only get a few chances to make a lasting difference and he longed to take the opportunities on offer as effectively as she had. The fact that they all failed in these lofty goals shows how ...”

On Thatcher

“... long, new right ideology has been translated into policy: but no one calls it Thatcherism.Gordon Brown, 2 February 1989I realise​ it’s too much to expect a sense of our common lot from this government (‘you common lot’ more often the note), but since Mrs Thatcher has schooled half the nation to put its foot in the face of the other half it’s not so ...”

Pound & Co.

August Kleinzahler: Davenport and Kenner, 26 September 2019

Questioning Minds: Vols I-II: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner 
edited by Edward Burns.
Counterpoint, 1817 pp., $95, October 2018, 978 1 61902 181 5Show More
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“... of the English Department. Davenport was keen on the idea but the then governor of California, Pat Brown, Jerry’s father, cut the university’s funding, putting paid to the possibility of new appointments. Davenport ended up teaching at Haverford College in Pennsylvania for two years and then took a job at the University of Kentucky, ‘the remotest offer ...”

Reports from the Not Too Distant Canon

Frank Kermode, 23 May 2002

The Invasion Handbook 
by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 201 pp., £12.99, April 2002, 0 571 20915 7Show More
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“... upon in a side street: oh it was wretched an unsmiling woman served us bowls of soup – dull brown and greasy – it was intimate and unclean like eating in a hospital with a dying man all we tasted was unhope So the vernacular style can support such flights. But this vernacular poet is also a very literary poet, and often, when he is at his most ...”

Love, Lucia

Lucia Berlin: Letters to August Kleinzahler, 4 August 2005

“... Virgin Mary, who took care of me … Fight with Hope devastating. Only person I had then was Uncle John who was rarely there or sober. The disillusion when he hit the kid and dog was Awful for me. The year or so left was lonely hell. Only reason i’m telling you this is that i know i have dealt with these few years ad nauseum. Problem is everytime I am ...”

Freedom

Lyndall Gordon, 18 September 1980

Olive Schreiner: A Biography 
by Ruth First and Ann Scott.
Deutsch, 383 pp., £9.95, May 1980, 0 233 97152 1Show More
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“... by backward-yearning. Her forward-looking Dreams are located in the landscape of her past: flat brown earth stretching to remote horizons, fierce African heat that throbs slowly against the skin, scorched prickly bush, dust drying the nostrils. It was to this scene that she returned in her deadness in 1890, not to the colonial towns or lush valleys of the ...”

Diary

Zachary Leader: Oscar Talk at the Huntington, 16 April 1998

“... many of them) that Amis received: several hundred from Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and others. These letters help supply the answers to niggling editorial puzzles: for example, the identity of ‘Bluebell’ (Conquest’s dog), or ‘engine driver Hunt’, from a passage in a letter reading ‘Praed, Hood, Gilbert ...”

Helluva Book

Mark Lawson, 3 September 1987

Love is colder than death: The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder 
by Robert Katz and Peter Berling.
Cape, 256 pp., £12.95, June 1987, 0 224 02174 5Show More
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“... classic slob biography – to be compared with Bob Woodward’s Wired, about the grossed-out comic John Belushi, and almost any book about Elvis Presley – and Mr Katz is a first-rank slob biographer. A vital element in such a project is the contrast between subject and biographer: the dull, ascetic and probably jogging yuppy sees in the fluid-spilling and ...”
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