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Why Twice?

Rosemary Hill: Fire at the Mack, 24 October 2024

The Mack: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art 
by Robyne Calvert.
Yale, 208 pp., £35, April, 978 0 300 23985 0
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... tenements in which he grew up, with their high ceilings, bay windows and brightly tiled wally close (central stairwell).The school’s headmaster, Francis Newbery, was also an influence on the eventual design. His teaching methods emphasised that ‘students should be individualised as well as classified … the personality of the student should not be ...

Falling in love with Lucian

Colm Tóibín: Lucian Freud’s Outer Being, 10 October 2019

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth, 1922-68 
by William Feaver.
Bloomsbury, 680 pp., £35, September 2019, 978 1 4088 5093 0
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... friend called Jane all his life. ‘I don’t think he had the faintest idea what laundry was,’ Frank Auerbach said. ‘He put it into this basket and it came back from Jane immaculately laundered.’ After he left school, his father took a piece of sculpture – a sandstone horse, almost two feet high, ‘three legs serving convincingly as four’ – that ...

In the Potato Patch

Jenny Turner: Penelope Fitzgerald, 19 December 2013

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life 
by Hermione Lee.
Chatto, 508 pp., £25, November 2013, 978 0 7011 8495 7
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... the quest of her final book.) What other things made up Fitzgerald’s ‘burden’? Well, Frank Kermode was right early on, in this paper (22 November 1979), when he noticed the fascination with water, in its many forms and depredations: damp, flood, rain, drowning, ‘the dead man’s stench of river water’, the ‘long-awaited torrents’ that ...

Brecht’s New Age

Margot Heinemann, 1 March 1984

Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches 
by John Willett.
Methuen, 274 pp., £12.50, February 1984, 0 413 50410 7
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Brecht: A Biography 
by Ronald Hayman.
Weidenfeld, 423 pp., £18.50, September 1983, 0 297 78198 7
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... from diaries and letters on his early relationships with Paula Banholzer (who bore his first son, Frank, killed in the Wehrmacht in 1942) and Marianne Zoff (his first wife, mother of his actress daughter Hanne Hiob) shows him by no means the gay seducer happily loving and leaving them. His attitudes at this stage, not untypical of the sexually-emancipated of ...
... the crisis over the Zimbabwe report, only as a familiar Lonrho ploy. In private conversation with close associates Rowland speaks of Maxwell as ‘that four-to-five’: a version of the rhyming slang for Jew, ‘four-to-two’, which rates Maxwell’s assets at from four to five million. Not at all in Rowland’s league. Let’s look at the sequence of events ...

Self-Deceptions of Empire

David Bromwich: Reinhold Niebuhr, 23 October 2008

The Irony of American History 
by Reinhold Niebuhr.
Chicago, 174 pp., £8.50, June 2008, 978 0 226 58398 3
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... by which I donate my conscious will to a larger and unthinking not-me. The process, indeed, is close to the fictive transfer of properties that we come to know in allegories and in dreams; and there is no doubt, says Niebuhr, that this ‘combination of unselfishness and vicarious selfishness’ is the main element that goes to form the sentiment of ...

Wire him up to a toaster

Seamus Perry: Ordinary Carey, 7 January 2021

A Little History of Poetry 
by John Carey.
Yale, 303 pp., £14.99, March 2020, 978 0 300 23222 6
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... Jonson articulates in ‘A Farewell to the World’ when, refusing the far-flung in favour of the close to hand, he vows to ‘make my strengths, such as they are,/Here in my bosom, and at home’. Ordinariness here is both a fit habitation for the heart and a way of using language: ‘I loved “such as they are”,’ Carey recalls nicely in An Unexpected ...

Mr Toad’s Wild Ride

Jessica Olin: Leaving Graceland, 5 December 2024

From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir 
by Lisa Marie Presley with Riley Keough.
Macmillan, 281 pp., £25, October 2024, 978 1 0350 5104 5
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... barrelling through fences and running over people’s feet: ‘I would drive … real fast and close by the fans and yell obscenities at them. “Fuck you! Fucker!” They’d just sit there and smile and wave.’When Elvis shows up at Lisa Marie’s school in LA for a parent-teacher evening, the swagger is unmistakable:I knew he was coming, and I ...

Open in a Scream

Colm Tóibín, 4 March 2021

Francis Bacon: Revelations 
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.
William Collins, 869 pp., £30, January, 978 0 00 729841 9
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... alarming queer by showing him to be melancholy, haunted, as solitary as he was social, with many close friendships and a few intense, complex relationships with lovers. And an artist who was exacting and ambitious and uncompromising. Perhaps the most affecting sentence in this book is the last: ‘In the morning, work.’Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in ...

Call me Ahab

Jeremy Harding: Moby-Dick, 31 October 2002

Moby-Dick, or, The Whale 
by Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker.
Northwestern, 573 pp., £14.95, September 2001, 0 8101 1911 0
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Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in 
by C.L.R. James.
New England, 245 pp., £17.95, July 2001, 9781584650942
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Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival 
by Clare Spark.
Kent State, 744 pp., £46.50, May 2001, 0 87338 674 4
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Lucchesi and the Whale 
by Frank Lentricchia.
Duke, 104 pp., £14.50, February 2001, 9780822326540
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... 19th-century illustrations of the disastrous possibilities that could befall a whaling boat at close quarters with a whale. In the best of them, the overriding sense is of physical disproportion, as if the boats and the men belong in the background of the composition but have unaccountably crept forward, becoming minuscule beside this or that part of their ...

A Degree of Light-Heartedness

Christopher Clark: Merkel’s Two Lives, 20 February 2025

Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021 
by Angela Merkel with Beate Baumann, translated by Alice Tetley-Paul et al.
Macmillan, 709 pp., £35, November 2024, 978 1 0350 2075 1
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... the first female party leader in German history. Kohl never forgave her. ‘I brought my assassin close to me,’ he later recalled, overlooking the gross errors of judgment by which he had precipitated his downfall. ‘I put the snake on my own arm.’ Leading the charge against Kohl was a high-risk enterprise. It could have gone horribly wrong. But ...

Homicide in Colombia

Malcolm Deas, 22 March 1990

... sea, which was then many days distant, but even drew the line at going to see the River Magdalena, close enough for someone of even the feeblest geographical curiosity. Under the waving palm-trees Nuñez read the Nineteenth Century, the Economist, the Revue des Deux Mondes and that sort of thing (he was an early enthusiast for Freud’s paper on ...
Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida 
edited by John Sturrock.
Oxford, 190 pp., £5.50, January 1980, 0 19 215839 2
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... any given age, according to whether the ‘sign’ and the ‘thing’ are perceived as distant, close, contained within each other, excluded from each other, parodying each other, and so on. And there will be a trope for each. But all these tropes, for Foucault himself, are part of a vast historical catachresis, a bacchanal of misnaming, a naivety without ...

Ashes

Nicholas Spice, 19 December 1985

The Assault 
by Harry Mulisch, translated by Claire Nicolas White.
Collins Harvill, 204 pp., £8.95, November 1985, 0 00 271011 0
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All Our Yesterdays 
by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Angus Davidson.
Carcanet, 300 pp., £9.95, March 1985, 0 85635 593 3
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Family Sayings 
by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by D.M. Low.
Carcanet, 181 pp., £7.95, May 1984, 0 85635 504 6
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The Little Virtues 
by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Dick Davis.
110 pp., £6.95, June 1985, 0 85635 553 4
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Strange Loop 
by Amanda Prantera.
Cape, 175 pp., £8.50, June 1984, 0 224 02210 5
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The Cabalist 
by Amanda Prantera.
Cape, 184 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 224 02326 8
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... refinements, as Ginzburg and Mulisch know: they place the tragedies they imagine tantalisingly close to the end of the war. Shortly after Cenzo Rena and the hostages are executed, the British arrive in San Costanzo. Anton Steenwijk’s family is destroyed when ‘almost all of Europe had been liberated and was rejoicing, eating, drinking, making love, and ...

Outside in the Bar

Patrick McGuinness: Ten Years in Sheerness, 21 October 2021

The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness 
by Patrick Wright.
Repeater, 751 pp., £20, June, 978 1 913462 58 1
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... of Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em on Sheppey in 1975, the year after Johnson arrived. In the episode Frank Spencer takes his driving test for the tenth time, and hundreds of locals stood on the beach to watch Crawford, who was known for doing his own stunts, drive a blue Hillman Imp off Sheerness jetty. Crawford is Sheppey showbiz royalty: his mother, Doris ...

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