Golf Grips and Swastikas

William Feaver: Francis Bacon’s Litter, 26 February 2009

Francis Bacon: Incunabula 
edited by Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels.
Thames and Hudson, 224 pp., £39.95, September 2008, 978 0 500 09344 3
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... he chose to disparage, not least the work of former friends and rival contemporaries. When David Sylvester once asked what precisely was so deplorable about it (a ‘kind of caution’ perhaps?), Bacon’s response was studiedly offhand. ‘Well,’ he drawled, clearing his throat. ‘Well . . . Illustration surely ...

Short Cuts

Andrew O’Hagan: Ulysses v. O.J. Simpson, 28 July 2016

... Kardashian (you knew it was only a matter of time before the Kardashians came into it), played by David Schwimmer in the TV series, was perfectly certain in life of his friend’s innocence, yet, in TV-land, certainty is just a crease to be ironed out by the ‘journey’. In the first episode, we see Kardashian talking to his shy young children at the ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’, 16 November 2023

... East Coast, where euphemisms are easily understood, and a phrase like ‘painting houses’ means contract killing, as it does in Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). Though the obvious does occasionally have to be explained. As Michael Corleone says in The Godfather Part II, ‘if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.’ It’s ...

At the Royal Academy

Craig Clunas: Art of the Emperors, 1 December 2005

... publicity material. Sheng shi hua zhang is a sonorous and vaguely archaic-sounding phrase which means something like ‘Splendours of an Age of Prosperity’, apt for the Qing era when the Chinese emperors ruled the largest and most populous empire on the globe. It is also a term with contemporary resonances, widely used to describe such phenomena as a new ...

In Some Sense True

Tim Parks: Coetzee, 21 January 2016

The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy 
by J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz.
Harvill Secker, 198 pp., £16.99, May 2015, 978 1 84655 888 7
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J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time 
by David Attwell.
Oxford, 272 pp., £19.99, September 2015, 978 0 19 874633 1
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... psychotherapy one is not trying to establish objective truth’ but rather to find ‘a means of containing experience, in the sense of giving it form and meaning’. This will usually involve going over and over the most difficult of life’s events rather than avoiding them, since ‘more often than not the truth is what works.’ ‘I can’t ...

Understanding Forwards

Michael Wood: William James, 20 September 2007

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism 
by Robert Richardson.
Mariner, 622 pp., £15, September 2007, 978 0 618 43325 4
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... of the man!’ Walter Benjamin thought a philosophy that couldn’t account for fortune-telling by means of coffee grounds couldn’t be a real philosophy. Many have thought just the reverse, of course. One mention of coffee grounds and the like, and we are no longer talking about philosophy. But then these are just the people Benjamin was out to provoke, and ...

Destiny v. Democracy

David Runciman: The New Deal, 25 April 2013

Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time 
by Ira Katznelson.
Norton, 706 pp., £22, April 2013, 978 0 87140 450 3
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... 1938 congressional midterms was barely 35,000. This remarkably limited franchise was achieved by means of elaborate rules – including a poll tax – designed to make voting both difficult and expensive; it was backed up by threats of violence to anyone who challenged the status quo. The aim, of course, was to make sure the electorate remained exclusively ...

Go for it, losers

David Trotter: Werner Herzog’s Visions, 30 November 2023

Every Man for Himself and God against All 
by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Bodley Head, 355 pp., £25, October, 978 1 84792 724 8
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... always been a maker of projects rather than films: that is, of projects whose primary but by no means only expression is a film. Fitzcarraldo, the most demanding of them all, is a film about a project. Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald López (1862-97), the opera-loving rubber baron, once got a boat across an isthmus by having it taken apart on one side and ...

The Party in Government

Conor Gearty, 9 March 1995

... have noticed anything at all. The grasping mediocrity of this administration’s members is by no means its worst fault but it is the most beneficial to the nation if it is what eventually leads to its timely collapse. The resignations are the best-publicised outgrowth of governmental decay. The litany of names reads like the cast-list of some bizarre ...

American Manscapes

Richard Poirier, 12 October 1989

Manhood and the American Renaissance 
by David Leverenz.
Cornell, 372 pp., $35.75, April 1989, 0 8014 2281 7
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... as to the value of revered works of literature need every so often to be dispelled, even if it means that some people swear off the canon altogether. For most others, the results aren’t likely to be so decisive or long-lasting. Like the warnings issued about cigarettes, the cautions about eggs, alcohol and chocolate, or the recent scare in the US about ...

Feasting on Power

John Upton: David Blunkett’s Criminal Justice Bill, 10 July 2003

... David Blunkett’s latest Criminal Justice Bill, this Government’s 12th piece of such legislation since coming to power in 1997, will go a long way to producing a caste of untouchables in this country: those accused of committing a crime. It will strip away safeguards that have taken centuries to accrue, and alienate criminal suspects further from society as a whole ...

Siding with Rushdie

Christopher Hitchens, 26 October 1989

The Rushdie File 
edited by Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland.
Fourth Estate/ICA, 268 pp., £5.95, July 1989, 0 947795 84 7
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CounterBlasts No 4: Sacred Cows 
by Fay Weldon.
Chatto, 43 pp., £2.99, July 1989, 0 7011 3556 5
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Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation 
by Timothy Brennan.
Macmillan, 203 pp., £29.50, September 1989, 0 333 49020 7
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... genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by ...

Don’t Look Down

Nicholas Spice: Dull Britannia, 8 April 2010

Family Britain 1951-57 
by David Kynaston.
Bloomsbury, 776 pp., £25, November 2009, 978 0 7475 8385 1
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... immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over everything there hung the threat of another, probably terminal war. The dawn of the postwar era was cold and dark and bleak, but there was a touch of pink in the ...

Writing the Night

Hugh Haughton, 25 January 1996

Selected Poems 
by David Gascoyne.
Enitharmon, 253 pp., £8.95, November 1994, 1 870612 34 5
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... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...

Cooking it up

Rupert Christiansen, 19 January 1989

Maria: Callas Remembered 
by Nadia Stancioff.
Sidgwick, 264 pp., £13.95, April 1988, 0 283 99645 5
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Callas at Juilliard: The Master Classes 
by John Ardoin.
Robson, 300 pp., £16.95, April 1988, 0 86051 504 4
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Callas as they saw her 
edited by David Lowe.
Robson, 264 pp., £6.95, April 1988, 9780860514961
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The Great Caruso 
by Michael Scott.
Hamish Hamilton, 322 pp., £16.95, June 1988, 0 241 11954 5
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Chaliapin 
by Victor Borovsky.
Hamish Hamilton, 630 pp., £25, April 1988, 0 241 12254 6
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... of surtitles would suggest.) It disdains understatement or ambiguity. Profligate with its means, opera characteristically fails to support its compulsive gesturing with adequate syntax: a two-minute Lied by Wolf concentrates more musical argument into its dramatic adventure than an hour of Cavalleria Rusticana. The grand original principle of dramma ...