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What Is He Supposed To Do?

David Cannadine, 8 December 1994

The Prince of Wales 
by Jonathan Dimbleby.
Little, Brown, 620 pp., £20, November 1994, 0 316 91016 3
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... Parker-Bowles, it is as easy to understand why the Princess encouraged her friends to talk to Andrew Morton as it is to understand that the Prince was horrified and humiliated when Diana: Her True Story appeared. For someone as lonely, insecure and unhappy as Charles, it proved impossible to maintain a dignified silence, and the temptation to reply has ...

Fine Women

Neil Rennie, 6 July 1989

The Pacific since Magellan. Vol. III: Paradise Found and Lost 
by O.H.K. Spate.
Routledge, 410 pp., £40, January 1989, 0 415 02565 6
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Captain Bligh: The Man and his Mutinies 
by Gavin Kennedy.
Duckworth, 321 pp., £14.95, April 1989, 0 7156 2231 5
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The Sublime Savage: James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian 
by Fiona Stafford.
Edinburgh, 208 pp., £22.50, November 1988, 0 85224 569 6
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... Cook and Banks came in their turn to observe the celestial Venus, and to discover a new kind of noble savage, the nubile savage, revealed to English readers in Hawkesworth’s florid but basically faithful rendition of their journals. To these readers, shocked or delighted by the ‘spectacle’ of public copulation in Tahiti which Hawkesworth made public ...

Think Tiny

Mark Ford: Nancification, 17 July 2008

The Nancy Book 
by Joe Brainard.
Siglio, 144 pp., $39.50, April 2008, 978 0 9799562 0 1
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... stolid features and purposeful stomp sketched on a sheet of Old Master drawings between noble profiles, sorrowing Madonnas, plaintive putti and snarling lions); ‘If Nancy Was the Bright’s Disease’ (an alarmed Nancy grimacing inside a diseased kidney taken from a medical journal); ‘If Nancy Was André Breton at 18 Months’ (her head imposed ...

Reasons for Liking Tolkien

Jenny Turner: The Hobbit Habit, 15 November 2001

... it. The prose, which started out quite dry and comic, starts clogging with archaic words and faux-noble cadences; ‘noisome’, ‘fell’, ‘fair and foul’, ‘wains’ and ‘wights’ and ‘wroth’. ‘Well, bless my beard!’ That’s Gandalf in Chapter 2 of Volume I. ‘Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an ...
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 
by Brian Boyd.
Chatto, 783 pp., £25, January 1992, 0 7011 3701 0
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... judicious account of Nabokov’s life in the States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day ...

Vermin Correspondence

Iain Sinclair, 20 October 1994

Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play 
by Ben Watson.
Quartet, 597 pp., £25, May 1994, 0 7043 7066 2
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Her Weasels Wild Returning 
by J.H. Prynne.
Equipage, 12 pp., £2, May 1994
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... through those counterculture years. Watson’s early chapters are beta rhythm blasts, pitching the noble Zappa against the entropy of sunrise capitalism’s spectacle obsessed fetishism. Bad shopping plus bad sex equals great poetry. (Who else but Zappa would rhyme ‘afternoon’ with ‘tampoon’?) The in-your-face critique, originally rehearsed through ...

Diary

Conor Gearty: On Michael Collins, 28 November 1996

... business. His sisters were no ordinary country girls. The family’s guardian and relative Andrew Cusack, a draper in the town, arranged for them to be sent as boarders up to Dublin to be educated in Padraig Pearse’s experimental school, St Ita’s. This was an extraordinary decision for any family in Ireland at that time, even more so for one from ...

The Manners of a Hog

Christopher Tayler: Buchan’s Banter, 20 February 2020

Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan 
by Ursula Buchan.
Bloomsbury, 479 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4088 7081 5
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... to Scots in the British Empire. Julius Victor, in The Three Hostages (1924), is an unequivocally noble character, though Buchan spoils the effect by having another heroic character call him ‘the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul’. A self-referential passage in the same book has someone explaining how to write a mystery novel. You take three images at ...

Cadres

Eric Hobsbawm: Communism in Britain, 26 April 2007

The Lost World of British Communism 
by Raphael Samuel.
Verso, 244 pp., £19.99, November 2006, 1 84467 103 8
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Communists and British Society 1920-91 
by Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn.
Rivers Oram, 356 pp., £16.99, January 2007, 978 1 85489 145 7
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Bolshevism and the British Left, Part One: Labour Legends and Russian Gold 
by Kevin Morgan.
Lawrence and Wishart, 320 pp., £18.99, March 2007, 978 1 905007 25 7
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... full of melancholy empathy for an irrecoverable past, Communism is seen as ‘a doomed, flawed but noble faith’. But Samuel did not write his now reissued book until the 1980s, and then as an unhappy commentary on the disintegration of the Party he had left behind thirty years earlier. In fact, the disintegration of the movement has made possible the current ...

The Unstoppable Upward

James Wolcott: ‘The Life of Saul Bellow’, 24 January 2019

The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005 
by Zachary Leader.
Cape, 864 pp., £35, November 2018, 978 0 224 10188 2
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... list just ahead of John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. We shall never see the noble likes of such bestseller lists again. Twenty years after his debut with Dangling Man (1944), after an already notable run that included The Adventures of Augie March (his breakthrough virtuoso solo), Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King, Bellow had hit ...

The Satoshi Affair

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 June 2016

... to me and it was as if he was dropping a sugar lump into my tea. He typed the words, ‘Here I am, Andrew,’ and rested his fingers. ‘This gives us that little block there,’ he said, before verifying the signature. He looked sheepish and resigned in his blue checked shirt. ‘Welcome to the bit I was hoping to bury,’ he said. He leaned back and I ...

For his Nose was as sharpe as a Pen, and a Table of greene fields

Michael Dobson: The Yellow Shakespeare, 10 May 2007

William Shakespeare, Complete Works: The RSC Shakespeare 
edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.
Macmillan, 2486 pp., £30, April 2007, 978 0 230 00350 7
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... out that it was Lewis Theobald who first decided that in Act II Scene iii of Twelfth Night Sir Andrew Aguecheek has sent sixpence to Feste for his ‘leman’, rather than, as the Folios have it, for his ‘lemon’. (‘But the Clown was neither Pantler, nor Butler,’ Theobald crowed. ‘The Poet’s Word was certainly mistaken by the Ignorance of the ...

‘My God was bigger than his’

Colin Kidd: The Republicans, 4 November 2004

The Right Nation: Why America Is Different 
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.
Allen Lane, 450 pp., £14.99, August 2004, 0 7139 9738 9
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Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet 
by James Mann.
Penguin, 448 pp., $16, September 2004, 0 14 303489 8
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Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image 
by David Greenberg.
Norton, 496 pp., £9.99, November 2004, 0 393 32616 0
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America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism 
by Anatol Lieven.
HarperCollins, 274 pp., £18.99, October 2004, 0 00 716456 4
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... the Democratic side of American political culture. Lieven traces the phenomenon back to the era of Andrew Jackson and describes the formation during the 1830s of a resilient tradition of ‘Jacksonian nationalism’. Although he recognises that occasional eruptions of nativism on the other side of American politics – the anti-Catholic ...

Other People’s Capital

John Lanchester: Conrad and Barbara Black, 14 December 2006

Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge 
by Tom Bower.
Harper, 436 pp., £20, November 2006, 0 00 723234 9
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... Ravelston, his private company.’ Black was now on the lookout for a big acquisition. A remark by Andrew Knight caused him to begin looking at the Daily Telegraph, which was owned by the Berry family and presided over by Michael Berry, now Lord Hartwell. Hartwell was 75, a serious and decent man presiding over a newspaper that had in many respects gone to ...

White Power

Thomas Meaney, 1 August 2019

Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America 
by Kathleen Belew.
Harvard, 330 pp., £23.95, April 2018, 978 0 674 28607 8
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Revolutionaries for the Right Anti-Communist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War 
by Kyle Burke.
North Carolina, 337 pp., June 2018, 978 1 4696 4073 0
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... Reagan arrived. Here was a president who quoted Rambo, referred to the Vietnam War as ‘the noble cause’ and told veterans that they had been ‘denied permission to win’. Reagan not only made it clear that he intended to open new fronts in the Cold War, he even appeared to some on the far right to be paying tribute to their tactics. In 1981 a ...

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