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Closet Virtuoso

Seamus Perry: Magic Mann, 24 February 2022

The Magician 
by Colm Tóibín.
Viking, 438 pp., £18.99, September 2021, 978 0 241 00461 6
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... of the Walsungs’, which culminates in a giddy Wagnerian scene of sibling incest, proved much too close to the bone for his outraged father-in-law. Later, Arnold Schoenberg was startled to find in Doctor Faustus a composer in league with the devil whose fame depended chiefly on inventing the twelve-tone system. A presentation copy from Mann inscribed ‘For ...

Between the Raindrops

David Bromwich: The Subtlety of James Stewart, 12 December 2002

James Stewart at the NFT 
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... lasted because they have psychological depth. Two other front-rank directors who favoured him were Frank Capra and John Ford: Capra served Stewart extremely well and was more than reciprocally rewarded three times, in You Can’t Take It with You, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. Ford called on him for a pair of late films. In Two Rode ...

Memories We Get to Keep

James Meek: James Salter’s Apotheosis, 20 June 2013

All That Is 
by James Salter.
Picador, 290 pp., £18.99, May 2013, 978 1 4472 3824 9
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Collected Stories 
by James Salter.
Picador, 303 pp., £18.99, May 2013, 978 1 4472 3938 3
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... end, his affection for his friend Arnaud, to whom he recommends the shirtmaker – the circle does close. Asked by Edward Hirsch, who interviewed him for the Paris Review, how he ‘hit upon’ his ‘distinctive, beautiful and implacable’ prose style, Salter answered tersely, almost evasively: ‘I like to write. I’m moved by writing. One can’t analyse ...

Partnership of Loss

Roy Foster: Ireland since 1789, 13 December 2007

Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006 
by Paul Bew.
Oxford, 613 pp., £35, August 2007, 978 0 19 820555 5
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... him is power relations, policy struggles, and the competing claims on the nation. Bew pays close attention to the preoccupation of many Victorian intellectuals with Ireland, and deals with the ideas of Mill and others without falling into the jejeune generalisations of post-colonial critique. He presents, among other specimens, an unfamiliar James ...

Don’t like it? You don’t have to play

Wyatt Mason: David Foster Wallace, 18 November 2004

Oblivion: Stories 
by David Foster Wallace.
Abacus, 329 pp., £12, July 2004, 0 349 11810 8
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... and b) deficient in what US higher education considers written English facility’. It is as frank and, at the same time, as delicately worded an attempt at ‘presenting himself as an advocate of SWE’s utility rather than as a prophet of its innate superiority’ as possible. Nonetheless, and not surprisingly, a number of students on the receiving end ...

Trees are complicated

Maureen N. McLane: H.D. casts a spell, 2 February 2023

HERmione 
by H.D..
New Directions, 281 pp., £14.99, November 2022, 978 0 8112 2209 9
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Winged Words: The Life and Work of the Poet H.D. 
by Donna Krolik Hollenberg.
Michigan, 360 pp., £68, June 2022, 978 0 472 13301 7
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... her lover (and Bryher’s then husband) Kenneth Macpherson, led to her involvement in the journal Close Up, and in 1930 she acted alongside Paul Robeson in the film Borderline. Her traumatic experience of pregnancy and childbirth, which Hollenberg explored sensitively in H.D.: The Poetics of Childbirth and Creativity (1991), also had a generative effect on ...

Chop-Chop Spirit

Sean Jacobs: Festac ’77 Revisited, 9 May 2024

Last Day in Lagos 
by Marilyn Nance, edited by Oluremi C. Onabanjo.
Fourthwall, 299 pp., £37.50, October 2022, 978 0 9947009 9 5
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... was Amílcar Cabral, who led Guinea-Bissau’s revolt against Portuguese colonialism. He was a close ally of Kwame Nkrumah, the president of Ghana. A few weeks after the conference in Havana, Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup. He had become an unpopular and authoritarian ruler, but there were rumours that the CIA had a hand in his downfall, unhappy ...

The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... they are construction workers, possibly Polish, saving their wages and choosing to kip down close to where the action is. The tsunami of speculative capital, wanton destruction, hole digging; the throwing up of apartment blocks, dormitory hives, warehouse conversions along the murky waterways. A new development calling itself Adelaide Wharf, and ...

The Road to Reading Gaol

Colm Tóibín, 30 November 2017

... metal bunk beds riveted to the wall, with a small table and two stools opposite, and a metal sink close to the small window, high in the wall across from the door, and a toilet on the other side of a small partition. The idea of what it might be like to be here all day and night, cooped up with another person, was fully palpable.The jail was temporarily open ...

The Murmur of Engines

Christopher Clark: A Historian's Historians, 5 December 2024

Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 373 pp., £30, November 2024, 978 1 80429 767 4
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... historian Bernhard Schwertfeger called in 1929 ‘the world war of the documents’. Renouvin was close to Raymond Poincaré, president of France between 1913 and 1920 and prime minister intermittently during the 1920s. After the cessation of hostilities, Poincaré’s record in office came under hostile scrutiny from French historians, most of them men of ...

Paul de Man’s Past

Christopher Norris, 4 February 1988

... knowledge of his subsequent work.It has often been argued by hostile commentators – among them, Frank Lentricchia – that deconstruction is just a species of ‘textualist’ mystification, a last-ditch retreat from politics and history into the realm of evasive rhetorical strategies. Now this charge has a certain plausibility when applied to those early ...

Insupportable

John Bayley, 19 February 1987

A Choice of Kipling’s Prose 
by Craig Raine.
Faber, 448 pp., £12.50, January 1987, 0 571 13735 0
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Kipling’s Kingdom: His Best Indian Stories 
by Charles Allen.
Joseph, 288 pp., £14.95, January 1987, 0 7181 2570 3
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... a sort of Shakespearian lack of differentiation. Yet at the same time it is a mystique which lies close to the heart of Kipling’s method, and gives it that unique reality/unreality blend which is so hypnotically effective. Kipling’s method makes details of living larger than life, and memorable for that reason, but at the same time its emphasis ...
Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction 
by Philip Fisher.
Harvard, 290 pp., £18.50, May 1999, 0 674 83859 9
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... group in a medium shot. By the time the bride has been called ‘voluptuous’, we are somehow close enough to see her eyelashes. On Fisher’s reading, the shift occurs because Whitman, as narrator, in stealth has supplanted the bridegroom and is inviting the reader to join him. But this need not follow if one supposes that the eye of the mind has a more ...

The Pleasures of Poverty

Barbara Everett, 6 September 1984

A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Letters and Diaries 
by Barbara Pym, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym.
Macmillan, 320 pp., £12.95, July 1984, 0 333 34995 4
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... the decade after she had achieved publication, problems remained. In a letter written to her close friend Bob Smith (who published the first appreciative essay on her novels) Barbara Pym lightly passes on the information from Cape that ‘8 Americans and 10 Continental publishers saw and “declined” ... Excellent Women and they are still plodding on ...

A View of a View

Marina Warner: Melchior Lorck, 27 May 2010

Melchior Lorck 
edited by Erik Fischer, Ernst Jonas Bencard and Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen.
Royal Library Vandkunsten, 808 pp., €300, August 2009, 978 87 91393 61 7
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... before Dürer died, Lorck drew a severe portrait of his great predecessor. He emulated Dürer’s close scrutiny of his subjects, but he also had a quirky, even comic imagination and a taste for odd juxtapositions and discrepancies of scale. In a superb sketch in chalk on blue paper, held in the prints and drawings collection of the British Museum, a large ...

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