Via ‘Bret’ via Bret

J. Robert Lennon: Bret Easton Ellis, 24 June 2010

Imperial Bedrooms 
by Bret Easton Ellis.
Picador, 178 pp., £16.99, July 2010, 978 0 330 44976 2
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... he still manages to lift five, six times while he’s choking on his own hot blood. That’s Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of this brilliant, revolting, original and entirely debased piece of literary kitsch. Bateman presents himself as a decent guy who just happens (‘I find myself’) to be a serial killer as well – much as Ellis had come to be ...

Naderland

Jackson Lears: Ralph Nader’s novel, 8 April 2010

Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! 
by Ralph Nader.
Seven Stories, 733 pp., $27.50, September 2009, 978 1 58322 903 3
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... unsafe design. Moving to Washington in 1963, he took a job as a part-time consultant for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the assistant secretary of labour, who assigned him to prepare a report on car safety. The result was Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), a compound of eye-glazing charts, moral vitriol and wrenching anecdotal detail. Nader soon testified before Abraham ...

Ismism

Evan Kindley: Modernist Magazines, 23 January 2014

The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I: Britain and Ireland 1880-1955 
edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker.
Oxford, 976 pp., £35, May 2013, 978 0 19 965429 1
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The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II: North America 1894-1960 
edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker.
Oxford, 1088 pp., £140, July 2012, 978 0 19 965429 1
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The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume III: Europe 1880-1940 
edited by Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker and Christian Weikop.
Oxford, 1471690 pp., £145, March 2013, 978 0 19 965958 6
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... apologetics after the German occupation in 1940; the Bauhaus-affiliated die neue linie was, Patrick Rössler writes, ‘a figurehead … and fig leaf’ for the modernist movement under the Third Reich, allowing the Nazis to make a token display of open-mindedness and cultural tolerance. In the US and Britain political commitments were more ...

You’ve listened long enough

Colin Burrow: The Heaneid, 21 April 2016

Aeneid: Book VI 
translated by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 53 pp., £14.99, March 2016, 978 0 571 32731 7
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... Seamus Heaney so skilfully used in both his poems and his prose, he relates (in an essay on Patrick Kavanagh from 1985) that one of his aunts ‘planted a chestnut in a jam jar’ in the year of his birth. In due course the seedling was planted out and grew to a fine height. Heaney says that ‘over the years I came to identify my own life with the life ...

Who is Lucian Freud?

Rosemary Hill: John Craxton goes to Crete, 21 October 2021

John Craxton: A Life of Gifts 
by Ian Collins.
Yale, 383 pp., £25, May, 978 0 300 25529 4
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... his suicide in 1948. Joan Leigh Fermor, a former secretary to Osbert Lancaster, was the wife of Patrick Leigh Fermor, famous at that time for his activities during the war, including the controversial kidnapping of the German commander on Crete. The third was Barbara Hutchinson, whose mother, Mary, a cousin of Lytton Strachey, had been a Bloomsbury hostess ...

Diary

Dani Garavelli: Salmond v. Sturgeon, 1 April 2021

... of failing to properly investigate allegations against the party’s chief whip at Westminster, Patrick Grady. The irony is that actions designed to make it easier and safer to report sexual harassment have served to shore up existing barriers; a policy designed to help women take on powerful men has demonstrated only the potential costs of doing so.On 18 ...

At the House of Mr Frog

Malcolm Gaskill: Puritanism, 18 March 2021

The Puritans: A Transatlantic History 
by David D. Hall.
Princeton, 517 pp., £20, May 2021, 978 0 691 20337 9
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The Journey to the Mayflower: God’s Outlaws and the Invention of Freedom 
by Stephen Tomkins.
Hodder, 372 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 4736 4911 8
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... Anabaptists, who were also puritans, found the entire ritual of baptism obnoxious. The historian Patrick Collinson’s definition of puritans as ‘the hotter sort of Protestants’ was deliberately vague: they are too diverse to be easily grouped together. Eventually the Anabaptists split, into Mennonites, Hutterites and Amish.The heat was generated by ...

Miss Dior, Prodigally Applied

Ian Patterson: On Jilly Cooper, 18 May 2017

Mount! 
by Jilly Cooper.
Corgi, 610 pp., £7.99, February 2017, 978 0 552 17028 4
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... things brought about the marketisation of the English house as a design brand, selling a concept Patrick Wright described as the world of Brideshead, ‘a countervailing and predominantly rural world based on private values and culturally sanctioned hierarchy, where history is venerated as tradition and culture is based on ancestry and descent’. The ...

Diary

Helen Sullivan: A City of Islands, 1 December 2022

... coral reef islands off Pohnpei have shrunk or disappeared totally in the past decade according to Patrick D. Nunn, a professor of geography and sustainability at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. Two more are likely to go over the next few years.Among the recipients of Panuelo’s letter were the four Pacific nations that recognise ...

Madman Economics

William Davies: What the hell is going on?, 20 October 2022

... interest rates have to go up and it’s a good thing,’ Truss’s maverick economic guru, Patrick Minford, told the Times in July. ‘A normal level is more like 5-7 per cent.’ House prices are now set to fall at least 10 per cent over the next year, while anyone who took out a two-year fixed-rate mortgage in summer 2021 may find that their interest ...

En famille

Douglas Johnson, 16 August 1990

Little Gregory 
by Charles Penwarden.
Fourth Estate, 247 pp., £13.99, August 1990, 1 872180 31 0
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... Yard, who has written an introduction to Penwarden’s book, does not think so. However, a certain Patrick Thomas, aged 24, was in March 1990 brought to trial, accused of having murdered a nine-year-old child in February 1984. The President of the Court, at Valence, defined some of the questions that came under discussion as being ...

Here comes the end of the world

Michael Hofmann, 23 July 1992

Bohin Manor 
by Tadeusz Konwicki, translated by Richard Lourie.
Faber, 240 pp., £12.99, July 1992, 0 571 14437 3
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... Konwicki give a fascinating picture of Poland – no, they are Poland, as Juan Rulfo is Mexico, or Patrick White Australia. Further, they contain some of the funniest, most outrageous, acid and lugubrious writing I have ever read. I don’t think I have ever been spoken to by an author the way I have by Konwicki. The first of these four books is The Polish ...

Say what you will about Harold

Christopher Hitchens, 2 December 1993

Wilson: The Authorised Life 
by Philip Ziegler.
Weidenfeld, 593 pp., £20, September 1993, 0 297 81276 9
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... In the case of Smethwick, he had been robbed of the Parliamentary presence of the tenth-rate Patrick Gordon Walker, who he wished to make Foreign Secretary in preference to the even more hideous George Brown, and was thus subjected to the vast annoyance of a by-election which he went on to mishandle badly. In the case of the brutish conduct of ...

Talking about Northern Ireland

Tom Wilson, 27 February 1992

All in a Life 
by Garret FitzGerald.
Macmillan, 674 pp., £25, October 1991, 0 333 47034 6
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... terrorists who can evade conviction by threatening to kill all hostile witnesses. Mr Patrick Cooney, a former Fine Gael Minister of Justice, has recommended detention, both in the North and in the South, with the successful experience of 1956-62 in mind. But that would mean an infringement of civil rights. It is a cruel dilemma, and one which ...

Et in Alhambra ego

D.A.N. Jones, 5 June 1986

Agate: A Biography 
by James Harding.
Methuen, 238 pp., £12.95, April 1986, 0 413 58090 3
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Subsequent Performances 
by Jonathan Miller.
Faber, 253 pp., £15, April 1986, 0 571 13133 6
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... great actresses and six only. These are Bernhardt, Réjane, Mrs Kendal, Ellen Terry, Duse and Mrs Patrick Campbell.’ The times have changed. If there are any great actresses in 1986, nobody is writing plays for them. Agate met a Frenchwoman in 1917, married and speedily divorced her. He wanted London guardsmen. Arnold Bennett noted in his diary: J.E. Agate ...