This Is Not That Place

Thomas Jones: David Eggers escapes from Sudan, 21 June 2007

What Is the What 
by Dave Eggers.
Hamish Hamilton, 475 pp., £18.99, June 2007, 978 0 241 14257 8
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... wretched, delightful; and always compelling, always surprising. Both as a child and later as a young man, Achak comes forcefully across as a person of considerable charm, intelligence, wit and resilience; he only very rarely sounds a little too like Dave Eggers. Two stories unfold simultaneously in What Is the What. It begins, vividly and against ...

Rongorongo

John Sturrock: The Rosetta Stone, 19 September 2002

Keys of Egypt 
by Lesley Atkins and Roy Atkins.
HarperCollins, 335 pp., £7.99, September 2001, 0 00 653145 8
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The Rosetta Stone: The Story of the Decoding of Hieroglyphics 
by Robert Solé and Dominique Valbelle, translated by Steven Rendall.
Profile, 184 pp., £7.99, August 2002, 1 86197 344 6
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Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts 
by Andrew Robinson.
McGraw Hill, 352 pp., £25.99, June 2002, 0 07 135743 2
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The Man who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris 
by Andrew Robinson.
Thames and Hudson, 168 pp., £12.95, April 2002, 0 500 51077 6
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... the sweeter for involving the frustration of an English competitor, the grouchy polymath Thomas Young – to whom much of the credit goes, on the other hand, for having cracked the cursive script. Young had the advantage of being able to go along to Bloomsbury should he feel the need to take another look at the ...

V-2 into Space

Adam Mars-Jones: Michael Chabon, 2 March 2017

Moonglow 
by Michael Chabon.
HarperCollins, 448 pp., £18.99, January 2017, 978 0 00 754891 0
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... of the desk-bound and lionised, and J.M. Coetzee too showed signs of becoming a chronic case. Now Michael Chabon has produced Moonglow, supposedly based on conversations from 1989 between a writer called Michael Chabon and his dying grandfather, an engineer for whom space travel in general and rockets in particular were an ...

‘I’m coming, my Tetsie!’

Freya Johnston: Samuel Johnson’s Shoes, 9 May 2019

Samuel Johnson 
edited by David Womersley.
Oxford, 1344 pp., £95, May 2018, 978 0 19 960951 2
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... born in Market Square, slap bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and immediately deposited their ambitions in him. Michael, the son of a labourer, had ...

Philip’s People

Anna Della Subin, 8 May 2014

... when I put my foot on it, mature kava roots will spring from the ground, the old men will become young again, and there will be no more sickness or death.’ His audience applauded the story, but Baylis soon realised that no one in the crowd had heard it before. As the weeks passed on the island – and with a book to write – Baylis became more and more ...

On Mary Ruefle

Emily Berry, 14 December 2023

... my outer adult is a child.’The remark recalls her prose piece ‘Personalia’: ‘When I was young, a fortune-teller told me that an old woman who wanted to die had accidentally become lodged in my body … Now I am an old woman who wants to die and lodged inside me is a young woman dying to live; I work on her.’ In ...

New Looks, New Newspapers

Peter Campbell, 2 June 1988

The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 
by Jon Wozencroft.
Thames and Hudson, 160 pp., £14.95, April 1988, 0 500 27496 7
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The Making of the ‘Independent’ 
by Michael Crozier.
Gordon Fraser, 128 pp., £8.95, May 1988, 0 86092 107 7
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... by parasites and symbiotes. The Face, which seemed to have hit the wavelength of the high-spending young, was as vulnerable to having its style imitated as a fashion house with a hot spring collection. Advertisers copied it and other magazines, from the Tatler to City Limits, commissioned a Brody look: his was the style of the readers they wanted. The ...

Out of the Pound Loney

Ronan Bennett: The demonising of Gerry Adams, 5 March 1998

Man of War, Man of Peace? The Unauthorised Biography of Gerry Adams 
by David Sharrock and Mark Devenport.
Macmillan, 488 pp., £16.99, November 1997, 0 333 69883 5
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... doubt the dominant figure within Sinn Féin – ‘the most important Irish Republican since Michael Collins’, as Sharrock and Devenport put it – his character, history and intentions are crucially important. What we need to know is what the authors ask in their title: is he a peacemaker or a warmonger? Gerry Adams was born in West Belfast in October ...

On the Interface

Nick Richardson: M. John Harrison, 15 July 2021

Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020 
by M. John Harrison.
Comma, 288 pp., £9.99, August 2020, 978 1 912697 28 1
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The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again 
by M. John Harrison.
Gollancz, 272 pp., £7.99, April, 978 0 575 09636 3
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... in his twenties. Towards the end of the decade he moved from Warwickshire to London, where he met Michael Moorcock, then the editor of the science fiction magazine New Worlds. Harrison took over from Moorcock soon afterwards, and remained at the helm until 1975, during which time New Worlds became associated with the experimental current in science fiction ...

Extreme Understanding

Jenny Diski: Irmgard Keun, 10 April 2008

Child of All Nations 
by Irmgard Keun, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Penguin, 195 pp., £14.99, January 2008, 978 0 7139 9907 5
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... he ever completely forgets about us.’ Always, always, ever, in this eloquent translation by Michael Hofmann. She knows how it is with fathers: Sometimes my father loves us, and sometimes he doesn’t. When he doesn’t, we can’t do anything about it, my mother and me . . . Any steps we might take only have the effect of delaying even more the time ...

Subjects or Aliens?

Matthew Kelly: Postwar Irish Migration, 9 October 2008

The Irish in Postwar Britain 
by Enda Delaney.
Oxford, 232 pp., £55, September 2007, 978 0 19 927667 7
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... her flat so she could watch Neil Jordan’s biopic about the nationalist politician and guerrilla Michael Collins. In the closing sequence, Collins’s fiancée, Kitty, buys her wedding dress, Michael is assassinated by anti-Treatyites in the wilds of County Cork, and Sinead O’Connor sings ‘She Moves through the ...

Termagant

Ian Gilmour: The Cliveden Set, 19 October 2000

The Cliveden Set: Portrait of an Exclusive Fraternity 
by Norman Rose.
Cape, 277 pp., £20, August 2000, 0 224 06093 7
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... it. The origins of the so-called ‘set’ lay in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the bunch of young men, mostly from New College, Oxford, whom Lord Milner summoned or took with him to rebuild South Africa after the Boer War. With their mission completed by the foundation of the Union of South Africa, they returned to England but maintained some cohesion ...

Old Dad dead?

Michael Neill: Thomas Middleton, 4 December 2008

Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works 
edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino.
Oxford, 2016 pp., £85, November 2007, 978 0 19 818569 7
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Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works 
edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino.
Oxford, 1183 pp., £100, November 2007, 978 0 19 818570 3
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... note for the recent National Theatre production of The Revenger’s Tragedy, and its angry young author is further imagined as an early avatar of John Osborne. But it is Hals, with his fondness for exaggerated quirks of character and his unabashed relish of bourgeois vulgarity, who provides the best equivalent for the aspect of Middleton’s art that ...

Even paranoids have enemies

Frank Kermode, 24 August 1995

F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism 
by Ian MacKillop.
Allen Lane, 476 pp., £25, July 1995, 0 7139 9062 7
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... at the time of its submission a Syndic of the Press, and Watson was very rude to me, the publisher Michael Black preferred not to submit a proposal to the Syndicate. I hope and believe this is not true, and that Black, a serious Leavisian with whom I was quite genially associated for a good many years, knew me well enough to understand that such a ...

Tousy-Mousy

Anne Barton: Mary Shelley, 8 February 2001

Mary Shelley 
by Miranda Seymour.
Murray, 665 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 7195 5711 9
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Mary Shelley in Her Times 
edited by Betty Bennett and Stuart Curran.
Johns Hopkins, 311 pp., £33, September 2000, 0 8018 6334 1
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Mary Shelley's Fictions 
edited by Michael Eberle-Sinatra.
Palgrave, 250 pp., £40, August 2000, 0 333 77106 0
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... such excellent studies in the accurately entitled Literary Lives series (published by Palgrave) as Michael O’Neill’s Percy Bysshe Shelley (1989) or Caroline Franklin’s Byron (2000), not-very-literary biographies, some running to four hundred and more pages, continue to accumulate in the bookshops. There (presumably) they attract readers far more ...