The Spree

Frank Kermode, 22 February 1996

The Feminisation of American Culture 
by Ann Douglas.
Papermac, 403 pp., £10, February 1996, 0 333 65421 8
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Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the Twenties 
by Ann Douglas.
Picador, 606 pp., £20, February 1996, 0 330 34683 0
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... Douglas strongly insists, may provoke some opposition. For example, she says more than once that Hemingway proved to be a better writer about the war than Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon, even though they saw a lot more fighting than he did, precisely because he was not, as they were, hampered by a literary education and training in ‘conventional ...

A Winter Mind

John Burnside, 25 April 2013

... nine seconds and one frame. As Penn’s film opens, an old man, wonderfully characterised by Ernest Borgnine, is seen getting up in the morning, complaining about the darkness of the apartment he apparently shares with his wife (whom we do not see) and then, while he shaves and gets dressed, chatting more generally about the past and about the business ...

The Subtleties of Frank Kermode

Michael Wood, 17 December 2009

... intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work’) Kermode says of Hemingway that ‘he wanted perfection of the life as well as of the work but accepted the Romantic myth that you can’t have both (the truth being that you can’t have either).’ Poor old Ernest: wrong twice. Kermode’s ...