Elective Outsiders

Jeremy Harding, 3 July 1997

Conductors of Chaos: A Poetry Anthology 
edited by Iain Sinclair.
Picador, 488 pp., £9.99, June 1996, 0 330 33135 3
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Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne 
by N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge.
Liverpool, 196 pp., £25, April 1996, 0 85323 840 5
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Carl Rakosi: Poems 1923-41 
edited by Andrew Crozier.
Sun & Moon, 209 pp., $12.99, August 1995, 1 55713 185 6
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The Objectivists 
edited by Andrew McAllister.
Bloodaxe, 156 pp., £8.95, May 1996, 1 85224 341 4
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... stay in London thirty years ago, there is an interesting exchange with the psychiatrist David Cooper. Sinclair: It seems to me that what has emerged from this Congress [the Dialectics of Liberation] is the necessity for what has been described as madness – as one of the few active means of keeping society alive ... Cooper: Yes, I think we’ve ...

The Ironist

J.G.A. Pocock: Gibbon under Fire, 14 November 2002

Gibbon and the ‘Watchmen of the Holy City’: The Historian and His Reputation 1776-1815 
by David Womersley.
Oxford, 452 pp., £65, January 2002, 0 19 818733 5
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... controversy by whose lurid light his subsequent work was prejudged and has been judged ever since. David Womersley – now Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford – stands at the head of those scholars who try to situate Gibbon in his 18th-century context, thus raising and trying to answer many questions, of which that just framed is central to the ...

Fed up with Ibiza

Jenny Turner: Sybille Bedford, 1 April 2021

Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life 
by Selina Hastings.
Chatto, 432 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 1 78474 113 6
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... happy days’). Her mother, Bedford once said, ‘instilled into me the idea that it was a very grand thing to be a writer … Being brought up to talk about Dostoevsky at breakfast was a great advantage. I owe her an enormous amount.’Sybille Bedford attempted to process the story of her origins in four novels, each a differently disguised autobiography ...

Vuvuzelas Unite

Andy Beckett: The Trade Union Bill, 22 October 2015

Trade Union Bill (HC Bill 58) 
Stationery Office, 32 pp., July 2015Show More
Trade Union Membership 2014: Statistical Bulletin 
Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 56 pp., June 2015Show More
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... counterproductive and ideologically driven’. In September, the Tory civil libertarian David Davis told Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News, an unlikely place to hear a defence of unions, that ‘there are bits of [the bill] which look OTT, like requiring pickets to give their names to the police force. What is this? This isn’t Franco’s Britain.’ The ...

His Own Sort of Outsider

Philip Clark: Tippett’s Knack, 16 July 2020

Michael Tippett: The Biography 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 750 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4746 0602 8
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... as the trial approached, his attitude changed perceptibly. Writing to his friend the journalist David Ayerst, Tippett declared himself ‘very much at peace and ready to go’.On 21 August 1943, at 7.30 a.m. precisely, after serving two months of his three-month sentence, Tippett was released from Wormwood Scrubs. He was met by Britten and Pears, who would ...

Cheerfully Chopping up the World

Michael Wood: Film theory, 2 July 1998

The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium 
by Gilberto Perez.
Johns Hopkins, 466 pp., £25, April 1998, 0 8018 5673 6
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On the History of Film Style 
by David Bordwell.
Harvard, 322 pp., £39.95, February 1998, 0 674 63428 4
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Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine 
by D.N. Rodowick.
Duke, 260 pp., £46.95, October 1997, 0 8223 1962 4
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The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema 
by Jean Mitry, translated by Christopher King.
Athlone, 405 pp., £45, February 1998, 0 485 30084 2
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Signs and Meaning in the Cinema 
by Peter Wollen.
BFI, 188 pp., £40, May 1998, 0 85170 646 0
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... same thing, but not sketchily, and across a very wide range of films; and the central argument of David Bordwell’s book is similar. Perez is interested in ‘the properties and possibilities of the medium’, but thinks that what distinguishes them is their variousness. ‘Most theorists have attempted to define the nature of film as something ...

Olivier Rex

Ronald Bryden, 1 September 1988

Olivier 
by Anthony Holden.
Weidenfeld, 504 pp., £16, May 1988, 0 297 79089 7
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... The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing David Copperfield’s opening speculation whether he would turn out the hero of his own life story. The object of this is to characterise the young Olivier as a Dickens child, a version of David, and his father, the widowed ...

The Right Kind of Pain

Mark Greif: The Velvet Underground, 22 March 2007

The Velvet Underground 
by Richard Witts.
Equinox, 171 pp., £10.99, September 2006, 9781904768272
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... that they were far better as a live band than in anything captured on record. Yet they all do. David Fricke, in his notes accompanying Peel Slowly and See, the Polygram reissue of their four albums with out-takes, quotes Morrison, Reed and Tucker all complaining about the failure to capture their live work, and he alludes to unrecorded work like ‘Sweet ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Swimming on the 52nd Floor, 24 September 2015

... iced water, was a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you ...

The Last Years of Edward Kelley, Alchemist to the Emperor

Charles Nicholl: Edward Kelly, 19 April 2001

... old magus, and Kelley as his unscrupulous deceiver and exploiter. He is described as a ‘grand Imposter’, an ‘egregious scoundrel’, and a ‘terrible zombie-like figure’. This last comment – the phrase is Edith Sitwell’s – glances at a ten-acious feature of the Kelley legend: it is said that he had no ears, having had them cut off in ...

Chasing Steel

Ian Jack: Scotland’s Ferry Fiasco, 22 September 2022

... but the ship itself was realised by others. In Glasgow, John Robertson made the engine and David Napier the boiler, while John Wood in Port Glasgow built the wooden hull and installed the machinery. The result was a marvel, the prototype of a steamer fleet that would revolutionise travel on the Clyde by 1820, when two dozen of them sailed every day ...

Death in Belgravia

Rosemary Hill, 5 February 2015

A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan 
by Laura Thompson.
Head of Zeus, 422 pp., £20, November 2014, 978 1 78185 536 2
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... on the landing wall. The japes were taking a nightmarish turn and in an uneasy political climate grand schemes were getting more serious. In 1974 another Clermont habitué and founder of the SAS, Colonel David Stirling, formed GB75, a vigilante group to be mobilised in the event of civil unrest.Veronica Lucan was not only ...

The Ant and the Steam Engine

Peter Godfrey-Smith: James Lovelock, 19 February 2015

A Rough Ride to the Future 
by James Lovelock.
Allen Lane, 184 pp., £16.99, April 2014, 978 0 241 00476 0
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... real features of the living world. Some of the best recent work on this topic has been done by David Queller and Joan Strassmann, of Washington University in St Louis, in their studies of insects and of stranger beasts, such as tiny amoebas which join to form crawling colonies. Queller and Strassmann classify systems using two dimensions, co-operation and ...

Divide and divide and divide and rule

Yonatan Mendel: The Arab-Israeli Conflict, 6 October 2016

1929: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 
by Hillel Cohen, translated by Haim Watzman.
Brandeis, 312 pp., £20, November 2015, 978 1 61168 811 5
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... Neither the conventional ‘winners’ nor the stereotypical ‘losers’, they play a part in the grand political story which, though crucial, is often overlooked. Cohen was born in 1961 into a National Religious family; his father was of Jewish Afghan origin, his mother of Jewish Polish descent. As a teenager he lived in a settlement in the West Bank. He ...

How peculiar it is

Rosemary Hill: Gorey’s Glories, 3 June 2021

Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey 
by Mark Dery.
William Collins, 512 pp., £9.99, October 2020, 978 0 00 832984 6
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... he was more robust than Mr Earbrass. His ‘meticulous’ art boards, the production editor David Hough recalled, did not need editing and suggestions were not welcome. There was he said, ‘a bit of a ruckus’ over the hyphen in The Haunted Tea-Cosy.By 1963, successive changes of job and imprint had left Gorey stranded as an unhappy employee of ...