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... Television Was a Baby Crawling towards That Deathchamber.’ These words are by Allen Ginsberg, writing in 1961, the title of a poem anathematising America. ‘It is here, the long Awaited bleap-blast light that Speaks one red tongue like Politician.’ The most chilling word in Ginsberg’s title strikes me as ‘That ...

Places Never Explained

Colm Tóibín: Anthony Hecht, 8 August 2013

The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht 
edited by Jonathan Post.
Johns Hopkins, 365 pp., £18, November 2012, 978 1 4214 0730 2
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... bombing crews – I feel sympathetic and sorry for both of them. Jarrell wrote to his wife about Allen Tate’s ‘Ode to Our Young Pro-Consuls of the Air’, a poem which ends with the Dalai Lama being exterminated from the air, saying it was ‘certainly poor and annoying … I thought the Dalai Lama almost the only touch of imagination.’ When he wrote ...

Bad News

Iain Sinclair, 6 December 1990

Weather 
by John Farrand.
Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 239 pp., $40, June 1990, 1 55670 134 9
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Weather Watch 
by Dick File.
Fourth Estate, 299 pp., £14.99, November 1990, 1 872180 12 4
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Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment 
edited by J.T. Houghton, G.J. Jenkins and J.J. Ephraums.
Cambridge, 365 pp., £40, September 1990, 9780521403603
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Crop Circles: The Latest Evidence 
by Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews.
Bloomsbury, 80 pp., £5.99, October 1990, 0 7475 0843 7
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The Stumbling Block, Its Index 
by B. Catling.
Book Works, £22, October 1990, 9781870699051
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... of Liberation for the Demystification of Violence at the Roundhouse. His sobering report had Allen Ginsberg and R.D. Laing, Trocchi, Michael X, and other disparate luminaries of the International Times devouring every word. We wanted to hear the worst, the spidery voice of doom: the prophetic voice of the Ancient of Days, Blake’s voice hallucinated in ...

The Caviar Club

Azadeh Moaveni: Rebel with a Hermès Scarf, 9 September 2021

The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Rejected and Rediscovered Modern Art 
by Donna Stein.
Skira, 277 pp., £38, March, 978 88 572 4434 1
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Epic Iran 
V&A, until 12 September 2021Show More
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... home and studio in Hertfordshire. During her visit she impressed him by correctly identifying a wood carving as a Miró, and he wrote soon afterwards to offer her ten major pieces. Four of his sculptures eventually came to Tehran, including two massive bronzes that have reclined in the museum gardens ever since.Pahlavi made overtures to Andy Warhol through ...

Horror like Thunder

Germaine Greer: Lucy Hutchinson, 21 June 2001

Order and Disorder 
by Lucy Hutchinson, edited by David Norbrook.
Blackwell, 272 pp., £55, January 2001, 0 631 22061 5
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... all things without them jar But in their breasts raised up a civil war. According to Anthony à Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses, and Sidney Lee who follows Wood in the DNB, Order and Disorder is the work of Sir Allen Apsley (1616-83). The poem described by Lee as ‘rarely ...

Much like the 1950s

David Edgar: The Sixties, 7 June 2007

White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties 
by Dominic Sandbrook.
Little, Brown, 878 pp., £22.50, August 2006, 0 316 72452 1
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Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles 
by Dominic Sandbrook.
Abacus, 892 pp., £19.99, May 2006, 0 349 11530 3
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... glimpse of public opinion’ is provided by hostile editorials in the Daily Telegraph and the Wood Green, Southgate and Palmers Green Weekly Herald. Sandbrook’s most substantial charge against the British antiwar and student movements is that they were an ersatz creation, copying ‘the style of American protest movements because they thought they were ...

The Leopard

James Meek: A Leopard in the Family, 19 June 2014

... the dead feline, and it’s there, the nutty smell of gun oil from weapons heated in the sun, the wood smoke smell from Belli’s clothing, and mixed with all these ranker odours, the sweet, rather mysterious scents that were ever about the high forest.’ The beaters slung the leopard from a pole and carried it back to the plantation bungalows, singing a ...

Copying the coyote

Richard Poirier, 18 October 1984

The Principles of Psychology 
by William James, introduced by George Miller.
Harvard, 1302 pp., £14.95, December 1983, 0 674 70625 0
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A Stroll with William James 
by Jacques Barzun.
Chicago, 344 pp., £16, October 1983, 0 226 03865 3
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Becoming William James 
by Howard Feinstein.
Cornell, 377 pp., $24.95, May 1984, 0 8014 1617 5
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Essays in Psychology 
by William James, edited by Frederick Burkhardt and Fredson Bowers.
Harvard, 467 pp., £32, April 1984, 0 674 26714 1
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... taken upstairs by Henry James Sr to bless his three-month-old son William. It was, as Gay Wilson Allen remarks in his biography of James, ‘a prophetic event for the future philosopher of Pragmatism’.) ‘shakespeare,’ Emerson says, ‘will never be made by the study of Shakespeare,’ and he warns on another occasion that ‘meek young men grow up in ...

Wobble in My Mind

Colm Tóibín: Lizzie, Cal and Caroline, 7 May 2020

The Dolphin Letters, 1970-79: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell and Their Circle 
edited by Saskia Hamilton.
Faber, 560 pp., £35, January, 978 0 571 35741 3
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The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972-73 
by Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton.
Farrar, Straus, 224 pp., £11.99, December 2019, 978 0 374 53827 9
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... in July 1970, he had another breakdown and was admitted to Greenwoods Nursing Home in St John’s Wood. This was too much for Blackwood. ‘I am going away,’ she wrote to say. ‘If I see you when you are so sick I know everything between us will become distorted and destroyed. Your sickness is so distressing to me and I am so bound up with you that I ...

Honey, I forgot to duck

Jackson Lears: Reagan’s Make-Believe, 23 January 2025

Reagan: His Life and Legend 
by Max Boot.
Liveright, 836 pp., £35, October 2024, 978 0 87140 944 7
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... eyes would light up with that sparkle normally reserved only for riding horses and chopping wood,’ a White House aide reported. Reagan clung to the belief that SDI could create an impermeable shield which would protect Americans from nuclear attack – a view no serious scientist shared. The Russians had experimented with missile defence systems and ...

Reasons for Liking Tolkien

Jenny Turner: The Hobbit Habit, 15 November 2001

... by Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins, which has published the Tolkien oeuvre since taking over Allen and Unwin in 1990. Humphrey Carpenter’s 1977 authorised biography and his 1981 edition of the Letters were also originally published by Allen and Unwin and are now with HarperCollins.I don’t want to defend Tolkien or ...

Lecherous Goates

Tobias Gregory: John Donne, 20 October 2016

John Donne 
edited by Janel Mueller.
Oxford, 606 pp., £95, July 2015, 978 0 19 959656 0
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... or worse? Interesting as these questions are, if you focus on them too narrowly you can miss the wood for the trees. Some of Donne’s best religious poems have nothing to do with inter or intra-confessional controversy or division. ‘If Poisonous Minerals’ points out how strange it is that Christianity’s threat of eternal torture applies only to ...

Even My Hair Feels Drunk

Adam Mars-Jones: Joy Williams, 2 February 2017

The Visiting Privilege 
by Joy Williams.
Tuskar Rock, 490 pp., £16.99, November 2016, 978 1 78125 746 3
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Ninety-Nine Stories of God 
by Joy Williams.
Tin House, 220 pp., £16.95, July 2016, 978 1 941040 35 5
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... for not being commented on – there’s no weary acknowledgment of her parents’ love of Edgar Allen Poe. The arbitrarily invoked Gothic strain is taken fairly far: ‘Sometimes in the night she would call out this name, her own, “Lenore!” in a strong urgent voice, and Helen in her own room would shudder and cry a little.’ Then there are heightened ...

How to Grow a Weetabix

James Meek: Farms and Farmers, 16 June 2016

... houses in Kipton Orchard, terraced houses where airmen and their families lived in Kipton Wood. The promised gym, swimming pool and church never materialised, and there’s no school or doctor’s surgery, but residents say things have got better since the bank called in its loan to the developer and took on the responsibility of refurbishing homes ...

Elective Outsiders

Jeremy Harding, 3 July 1997

Conductors of Chaos: A Poetry Anthology 
edited by Iain Sinclair.
Picador, 488 pp., £9.99, June 1996, 0 330 33135 3
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Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne 
by N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge.
Liverpool, 196 pp., £25, April 1996, 0 85323 840 5
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Carl Rakosi: Poems 1923-41 
edited by Andrew Crozier.
Sun & Moon, 209 pp., $12.99, August 1995, 1 55713 185 6
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The Objectivists 
edited by Andrew McAllister.
Bloodaxe, 156 pp., £8.95, May 1996, 1 85224 341 4
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... very good indeed. In The Kodak Mantra Diaries, Sinclair’s record of a film project based on Allen Ginsberg’s stay in London thirty years ago, there is an interesting exchange with the psychiatrist David Cooper. Sinclair: It seems to me that what has emerged from this Congress [the Dialectics of Liberation] is the necessity for what has been described ...

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