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Serious Mayhem

Simon Reynolds: The McLaren Strand, 10 March 2022

The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren: The Biography 
by Paul Gorman.
Constable, 855 pp., £14.99, November 2021, 978 1 4721 2111 0
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... feeling ‘lost in dead tissue’ as he later put it, and increasingly frustrated by the small-mindedness of the Teddy Boy contingent. He and Westwood relaunched the shop as Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, then as SEX, and then Seditionaries, each incarnation associated with an increasingly confrontational look inspired respectively by motorbike ...

I eat it up

Joanne O’Leary: Delmore Schwartz’s Decline, 21 November 2024

The Collected Poems 
by Delmore Schwartz, edited by Ben Mazer.
Farrar, Straus, 699 pp., £40, April 2024, 978 0 374 60430 1
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... When Schwartz appeared one day carrying Hart Crane’s The Bridge, she was appalled that such a small book cost three dollars. Even summer camp offered no respite: Rose came along to help out and humiliated her son by following him around.In 1931, Schwartz went to the University of Wisconsin. In his excellent biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an ...

The Lives of Ronald Pinn

Andrew O’Hagan, 8 January 2015

... in the City and making new selves for themselves. But Ronnie seemed happy to stick with the same small group of friends in South London. Some time in 1983, his girlfriend broke with him and took up with a guy they both knew called Coxy. Ronnie couldn’t understand it – the guy turned out to be no good – but he found another girl, Sharon, ‘a girl with ...

The Best Stuff

Ian Jack: David Astor, 2 June 2016

David Astor: A Life in Print 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 400 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 0 224 09090 2
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... Nancy Astor, a nightmare we would all want to be woken from. Too much money and too much mother; small wonder that Isaiah Berlin decided David Astor was ‘a neurotic, muddled, complicated, politically irresponsible, unhappy adventurer, permanently resentful of somebody or something … a typical poor little American rich boy’. But on the evidence of ...

On the imagining of conspiracy

Christopher Hitchens, 7 November 1991

Harlot’s Ghost 
by Norman Mailer.
Joseph, 1122 pp., £15.99, October 1991, 0 7181 2934 2
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A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs 
by Theodore Draper.
Hill and Wang, 690 pp., $27.95, June 1991, 0 8090 9613 7
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... was surely there to be read, but they would not allow it to be heard. The Commission had announced Stephen Foster when they were actually playing Wagner. Surely, critics who had followed the true score should have pointed that out?A good question, but perhaps one that only literature can answer. ‘Critics’ – the press, the academics, the think-tankers ...

Trained to silence

John Mepham, 20 November 1980

The Sickle Side of the Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. V, 1932-1935 
edited by Nigel Nicolson.
Hogarth, 476 pp., £12.50, September 1979, 0 7012 0469 9
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Leave the Letters till we’re dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. VI, 1936-41 
edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman.
Hogarth, 556 pp., £15, September 1980, 0 7012 0470 2
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The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. III: 1925-1930 
edited by Anne Olivier Bell.
Hogarth, 384 pp., £10.50, March 1980, 0 7012 0466 4
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Virginia Woolf 
by Michael Rosenthal.
Routledge, 270 pp., £7.95, September 1979, 0 7100 0189 4
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Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon 
by Maria DiBattista.
Yale, 252 pp., £11, April 1980, 0 300 02402 9
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... is concerned. They turn the sickle side of the moon to [the] world: the globe to the other.’ To Stephen Spender she wrote in more violent terms, suggesting not so much self-absorption as self-demolition: ‘I dont think you can get your words to come till youre almost unconscious; and unconsciousness only comes when youve been beaten and broken and gone ...

If I Turn and Run

Iain Sinclair: In Hoxton, 1 June 2000

45 
by Bill Drummond.
Little, Brown, 361 pp., £12.99, March 2000, 0 316 85385 2
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Crucify Me Again 
by Mark Manning.
Codex, 190 pp., £8.95, May 2000, 0 18 995814 6
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... prints, photographs of photographs. In the Zone there are essentially two types of pitch: small photographs (such as these) or very large photographs, such as those by Marc Atkins in the Foundry, on the corner of Great Eastern Street.* Both are self-conscious, uneasy about the urban landscape, careful to avoid the bathos of head-on romanticism. An art ...

The Killing of Blair Peach

David Renton, 22 May 2014

... there were non-SPG officers ahead of him in Beachcroft Avenue. Cass noted drily that, after ‘no small investigation’, he had found this was untrue. Here is one of the exchanges between Murray and the interviewing officer: [Murray] was seen on 17.5.79 at 8.30 p.m. I said to him: ‘This is a very serious business. I understand you made a 991 ...

How far shall I take this character?

Richard Poirier: The Corruption of Literary Biography, 2 November 2000

Bellow: A Biography 
by James Atlas.
Faber, 686 pp., £25, November 2000, 0 571 14356 3
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... Bellow has read and taught all his life, allows Buck Mulligan in Ulysses to give a comic twist to Stephen Dedalus’s similar pretensions that he is of divine origins and divinely inspired: I’m the queerest young fellow that you ever heard. My mother’s a jew, my father’s a bird. With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree. So here’s to disciples and ...

Sex on the Roof

Patricia Lockwood, 6 December 2018

Evening in Paradise: More Stories 
by Lucia Berlin.
Picador, 256 pp., £14.99, November 2018, 978 1 5098 8229 8
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Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs 
by Lucia Berlin.
Picador, 160 pp., £12.99, November 2018, 978 1 5098 8234 2
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... comprised of stories that were previously collected in editions by Black Sparrow and other small presses, and Welcome Home, a little uncut ruby of a memoir that is appearing for the first time. Left unfinished when Berlin died in 2004, it is extended to a respectable length by a selection of letters, mostly to her friends Ed and Helene Dorn. The lack ...

On Resistance

Adam Phillips, 14 August 2025

... felt at once more imperative and more difficult to imagine and discuss. I want to ask whether the small world of psychoanalysis has anything even implicitly to offer – or even to say – on this subject, mindful of how grandiose and strangely irrelevant psychoanalysis can sometimes seem when applied, beyond the consulting room, to political life. To resist ...

Auden Askew

Barbara Everett, 19 November 1981

W.H. Auden: A Biography 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Allen and Unwin, 495 pp., £12.50, June 1981, 0 04 928044 9
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Early Auden 
by Edward Mendelson.
Faber, 407 pp., £10, September 1981, 0 571 11193 9
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... Carpenter’s excellent life of Auden has a nice turn of phrase in recounting the moment when Stephen Spender, arrived in an Oxford of the later Twenties which was pervaded by the legend of Auden, at last met his fellow undergraduate and ‘found the reality just as remarkable as that legend’. The story appears to have come from Spender, himself ...

Book of Bad Ends

Paul Keegan: French Short Stories, 7 September 2023

The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol I 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 483 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46199 0
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The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol II 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 352 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46205 8
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... are on their own fact-finding mission to planet Earth. The question is whether the encounter of small with large will reveal anything of interest, or if aliens are merely a version of us, and here a version of elsewhere.Flaubert admired Candide extravagantly (even claiming to have translated it into English) because it showed that the con brio of a story ...

There isn’t any inside!

Adam Mars-Jones: William Gaddis, 23 September 2021

The Recognitions 
by William Gaddis.
NYRB, 992 pp., £24, November 2020, 978 1 68137 466 6
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JR 
by William Gaddis.
NYRB, 784 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 68137 468 0
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... guilt-imbued and looking for art to heal the wounds of religion, already a version of Stephen Dedalus? By the end of the book, in self-imposed exile, he’s even answering to the name of Stephen.Other ambitious 20th-century American writers have tried to find a way of synthesising the internal perspective and ...

Cute, My Arse

Seamus Perry: Geoffrey Hill, 12 September 2019

The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 148 pp., £20, April 2019, 978 0 19 882952 2
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... St Paul’s’ (a building which he completed in 1710). Hill’s poem lives locally in these small, self-delighting verbal graces that can have the air of deft contrivance or happy accident, while its more momentous and even ominous compulsions work themselves out on the grand scale, as though occupying some other part of the poet’s mind. ‘Again I ...

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