A Young Woman Who Was Meant to Kill Herself

Jeremy Harding: Charlotte Salomon, 8 March 2018

Life? Or Theatre? 
by Charlotte Salomon.
Duckworth, 840 pp., £125, September 2017, 978 1 715 65247 0
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Charlotte 
by David Foenkinos, translated by Sam Taylor.
Canongate, 224 pp., £8.99, January 2018, 978 1 78211 796 4
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Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory 
by Griselda Pollock.
Yale, 542 pp., £45, March 2018, 978 0 300 10072 3
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Charlotte Salomon: ‘Life? Or Theatre?’ A Selection of 450 Gouaches 
by Judith Belinfante and Evelyn Benesch.
Taschen, 599 pp., £30, November 2017, 978 3 8365 7077 0
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... her in the camp at some point in the summer of 1940: the diligent Mary Felstiner; Foenkinos; Jacqueline Rose in Women in Dark Times (2014); Belinfante in her essay for the Taschen selection; Griselda Pollock in her momentous new study, Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory. There is no official trace of Salomon or anyone else detained at the ...

We must think!

Jenny Turner: Hannah Arendt’s Islands, 4 November 2021

Hannah Arendt 
by Samantha Rose Hill.
Reaktion, 232 pp., £11.99, August 2021, 978 1 78914 379 9
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... the worst:expect the best:andtake what comes‘Not a Hannah Arendt quote! :/’ Samantha Rose Hill, then the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Centre at Bard College in New York State, tweeted back, across the hours and the Atlantic Ocean. ‘I know! ’Twas sweet gift,’ Stonebridge replied, then added: ‘We should make our own.’‘One ...

No Crying in This House

Jackson Lears: The Kennedy Myth, 7 November 2013

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy 
by David Nasaw.
Allen Lane, 896 pp., £12.35, September 2013, 978 0 14 312407 8
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Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch 
by Barbara Perry.
Norton, 404 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 393 06895 5
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... self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf links or the ski slopes as in Windsor Castle. After making millions in banking, real estate and film distribution, the father wants to devote his life to public service, and to ...

At the British Museum

Francis Gooding: Picasso’s Prints, 20 March 2025

... squalor of the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. His paintings at that time were moving from blue to rose, the melancholy underworld of syphilitics and absinthe drinkers displaced by an arcadia of particoloured acrobats and harlequins – dreams of an itinerant life in the pink, where the toad-like Herod of Salome appears as a portly jester, dressed in red, his ...

Cards on the Table

Mary Ann Caws: Robert Desnos and Surrealism for the masses, 3 June 2004

Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvellous in Everyday Life 
by Katharine Conley.
Nebraska, 270 pp., £37.95, March 2004, 0 8032 1523 1
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... rather often) translate. Then with the whole thing: how the face related to the language, how Jacqueline Lamba – his second wife, whom I knew, loved and spent a great deal of time with – admired and in fact adored him even after they had separated. So, I have put my personal Surrealist cards on the table. Conley, who devoted herself to automatism in ...

‘We’re identical’

Christopher Tayler: Elena Ferrante, 8 January 2015

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay 
by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein.
Europa, 419 pp., £11.99, September 2014, 978 1 60945 233 9
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... the camp-trash director John Waters’s jokey blurb – carries much the same order of insight as Jacqueline Susann saying, post-Portnoy, that she’d like to meet Roth but wouldn’t want to shake his hand. Elena Greco, the heroine of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, shares quite a few biographical details with Olga. These details make her look like a ...

A Different Life

Thomas Laqueur: Can cellos remember?, 9 October 2025

Cello: A Journey through Silence to Sound 
by Kate Kennedy.
Apollo, 468 pp., £10.99, August, 978 1 80328 704 1
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... played one. But the modern history of comparison begins in the early 19th century when Stradivari rose to superstardom, his aura spread to his Italian colleagues and the modern copy came to stand in relation to an ‘original’. This was largely due to the work of a French luthier, Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, who bought from a collector a trove of Stradivarius ...

Reasons for Liking Tolkien

Jenny Turner: The Hobbit Habit, 15 November 2001

... Hannibal Lecter books. There are some gates sex shuts more firmly even than death does.As Jacqueline Rose suggested in The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984), children’s books tend to display anxieties about sex in much the same proportion as they try to pretend it doesn’t exist. Hence, perhaps, the fashion ...

I adore your moustache

James Wolcott: Styron’s Letters, 24 January 2013

Selected Letters of William Styron 
edited by Rose Styron and R. Blakeslee Gilpin.
Random House, 643 pp., £24.99, December 2012, 978 1 4000 6806 7
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... other favourite hobby. Guest lists meant something then. The novelist William Styron and his wife, Rose (respected worldwide as a human rights activist), had drawing power as party hosts, the cultural cachet to net composers, playwrights, directors, ratfink fabulists and a former president’s daughter to toast the holidays and air out their egos. Such dos ...

Enemies For Ever

James Wolcott: ‘Making It’, 18 May 2017

Making It 
by Norman Podhoretz.
NYRB, 368 pp., £13.98, May 2017, 978 1 68137 080 4
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... through the minds of the inhabitants of this snowglobe world. ‘Did so-and-so have dinner at Jacqueline Kennedy’s apartment last night? Up five points. Was so-and-so not invited by the Lowells to meet the latest visiting Russian poet? Down one-eighth. Did Partisan Review neglect to ask so-and-so to participate in a symposium? Down two.’ Setbacks that ...

Diary

Adam Mars-Jones: Not the Marrying Kind, 20 March 2014

... from bar mitzvah to auto-da-fé. I had already told my mother, not making a very good job of it. Rose-tinted spectacles is the rule when looking back at the past, though ‘pink cataracts’ might be the more accurate phrase. Researchers have found ways of correlating people’s wishful impressions with hard data, checking the age at which children learned ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... about it in Chapter 11 of Moser, or in Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis (2012) – highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single mother living on a shoestring, got right to ...

Isn’t that . . . female?

Patricia Lockwood: My Dame Antonia, 20 June 2024

Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories 
by A.S. Byatt.
Vintage, 444 pp., £9.99, November 2023, 978 1 5291 1299 3
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... moment everything is in proportion; the next, sights brighten, outlines sharpen, the scent of a rose becomes monstrous. Frederica, who by the time of Babel Tower has fled the shock of Stephanie’s death into an isolating and brutal marriage with Nigel, eventually breaks free and makes a new life for herself in London. She reads manuscripts and appears on ...

Why children’s books?

Katherine Rundell, 6 February 2025

... were you a Redwall mouse, have a feast of ‘tender freshwater shrimp garnished with cream and rose leaves, devilled barley pearls in acorn purée, apple and carrot chews, marinated cabbage stalks steeped in creamed white turnip with nutmeg’.It’s easier to trust a writer who writes great food: they are a person who has paid attention to the ...

At the Crime Scene

Adam Shatz: Robbe-Grillet’s Bad Thoughts, 31 July 2014

A Sentimental Novel 
by Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated by D.E. Brooke.
Dalkey Archive, 142 pp., £9.50, April 2014, 978 1 62897 006 7
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... to prominence, we never learn if Mathias, a travelling watch salesman, has killed the precocious Jacqueline or merely fantasised about doing so: the crime scene, but not his anxious search for an alibi, has been erased from the narrative (‘the abnormal, excessive, suspicious, inexplicable time amounted to forty minutes – if not fifty’). Not only are we ...