Exercises and Excesses

Frank Kermode: Kazuo Ishiguro, 14 May 2009

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall 
by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Faber, 221 pp., £14.99, May 2009, 978 0 571 24498 0
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... concerns a splendidly promising young Hungarian cellist, Tibor, who is taken up by a woman, a self-proclaimed cello virtuoso, who means to teach him to be truly great. This she does without touching a cello herself. She is given a name (Eloise McCormack) and a habitation (Portland, Oregon, though she spends a lot of time in the most expensive hotel in ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Class’, 12 March 2009

The Class 
directed by Laurent Cantet.
May 2008
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... The other kind of class has the pupils reading The Diary of Anne Frank and trying their hands at self-portraits. This is a complete mess. It’s not just that the pupils are no good at the exercise. They are embarrassed and oppressed by it, and Marin doesn’t understand why they are being difficult. He manages to describe Souleymane’s digital photographs ...

At the Royal Academy

Peter de Bolla: Abstract Expressionism, 15 December 2016

... American but all of whom worked in the United States between 1930 (Jackson Pollock’s haunted self-portrait) and 1979 (Joan Mitchell’s joyful Salut Tom, which pulsates with fluid light). One might suppose that the very term ‘abstract expressionism’ – it was coined in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates writing in the New Yorker about paintings by ...

Short Cuts

Christian Lorentzen: The Trump Regime, 1 December 2016

... Bolton and Giuliani’s taunting of Iran, and constant minor scandals of back-stabbing and self-dealing in the family-run White House. All the while, Pence, Priebus and Ryan will be quietly dismantling the federal government.18 ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Meaney: Ersatz Tyrants, 4 May 2017

... example.) Snyder believes that in their triumphalism, the liberals of the 1990s entered ‘a self-induced intellectual coma’, and lowered their guard. But he doesn’t see much reason to revisit the course that liberal democracy itself took. The ‘problem of oligarchy’, the ‘gerrymandered system’ and the ‘odd American idea that giving money to ...

Short Cuts

Lucy Prebble: Harvey Weinstein, 2 November 2017

... you don’t only abuse your position professionally and personally, you also alter their sense of self. Men and women new to the industry are incredibly vulnerable to the view and approbation of someone powerful and respected. And their sense of what is and is not appropriate is smashed for their whole professional life. On top of that, there is emotional ...

At Kettle’s Yard

Eleanor Birne: The Reopening, 22 March 2018

... in the Grenfell Tower fire at the age of 24, two days after she had been invited to contribute. Self-portraits made in wet-plate collodion tintypes, as used in the early photography of the 1860s and 1870s, they show Saye interacting with objects from Gambian spiritual rituals, including cowrie shells and a cow horn: they look like a fabulous intersection ...

Not Recommended Reading

Eliot Weinberger, 7 September 2017

... by Donovan Bayley    Richard Panton falls down the stairs and is separated from his subliminal self, which takes the form of a midget. With this loss, Panton himself shrinks and becomes an identical midget. They argue. The midget Panton beats the subliminal midget to death and regains his usual size. Fortunately, Mrs Panton has been away the whole ...

At Tate Modern

Eleanor Birne: Fahrelnissa Zeid, 21 September 2017

... painting, which she started to do all day, shut away in the studio in their Istanbul flat. ‘Self-Portrait’ (1944). You wouldn’t know it from the wall texts at the Tate, or from its generally very helpful catalogue, but depression was a recurring battle. A new biography by Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, a cultural historian who as a teenager was taught to ...

Nabokov’s Dreams

John Lanchester, 10 May 2018

... meaning, they have Nabokov’s charm. His tendency to act out versions of his loftiest, lordliest self – a ‘set of attitudes, prejudices, habits, remarks, performances which is highly visible, highly stylised, and which I find dull and narrow’, as Michael Wood put it – is not present. Instead we find him struggling with sleep, dreaming about ...

Lost Property

Andrew O’Hagan, 20 December 2018

... what it would be like to swap identities. What if I hadn’t lost my bag but had found a self? What if my lost property belonged to someone else now, all those white T-shirts and black jeans and pullovers from Joe Bloggs? It seemed a writer’s problem to me, the first of many, and I enjoyed the scheme of unreason, the daft possibilities, as I ...

At the Royal Academy

Daniel Soar: Renzo Piano, 3 January 2019

... of the Juche Idea in Pyongyang – except it’s a monument to capital rather than revolutionary self-reliance. Both towers are steep pyramids, stretched vertically until they reach insane heights above the river they stand beside, with a viewing platform at the top drawing tourists from all quarters to see the low-rise city from an impossible angle. In ...

Big Books

Adam Mars-Jones, 8 November 2018

... as an Angus Suttie teapot is from the dailiness of pouring out a brew. The colossal book in its self-claimed place imposed a ritual of consultation rather than immersion. Open it at random and see what you get, emulating the Early Church practice that looked for guidance from the sortes Virgilianae. ‘Sillystial teen’urgers, all coughing ...

At Piano Nobile

Eleanor Birne: Jean Cooke, 18 April 2019

... of his trousers, his bare ankles, his mustard-yellow slippers. Cooke had many modes. A melancholic self-portrait from 1954 (not included in this show) recalls the work of the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker with its intense dark-eyed stare; the woman in The Black Hat from 1970 is Modigliani-ish in the glowing yellow of her skin, the inclination of her ...

Genius or Suicide

Judith Butler: Trump’s Death Drive, 24 October 2019

... mania takes the form of an unrelenting fight, an obsessional pursuit of his enemies, a limitless self-aggrandisement, his weaponised messages fired out into the world as a barrage of daily tweets, keeping going at all costs – because what would happen if he stopped? How odd that Trump may well give us back the law as he is forced to submit to the law and ...