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Flaubert’s Parrot

Julian Barnes, 18 August 1983

... you call it a tale or a text, Un Coeur Simple echoes on in the brain. Others agree. Let me cite David Hockney in his autobiography: ‘The story really affected me, and I felt it was a subject I could get into and really use.’ In 1974 Mr Hockney produced a pair of etchings: a burlesque version of Félicité’s view of Abroad (a monkey stealing away with ...

Who had the most fun?

David Bromwich: The Marx Brothers, 10 May 2001

Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx 
by Stefan Kanfer.
Penguin, 480 pp., £7.99, April 2001, 0 14 029426 0
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The Essential Groucho 
by Groucho Marx, edited by Stefan Kanfer.
Penguin, 254 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 0 14 029425 2
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... beret – and pedal to his office’ in downtown Beverly Hills, there to whistle up to the second-storey window, from which his secretary lowered a basket. For twenty minutes more or less, he would read and respond to letters, write cheques, salute passers-by, ‘dictate an answer or two by shouting them up’. On his bicycle again to shop at the grocery ...

Bitchy Little Spinster

Joanne O’Leary: Queens of Amherst, 3 June 2021

After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet 
by Julie Dobrow.
Norton, 448 pp., £13.99, January 2020, 978 0 393 35749 3
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... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...

A City of Sand and Puddles

Julian Barnes: Paris, 22 April 2010

Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris 
by Graham Robb.
Picador, 476 pp., £18.99, April 2010, 978 0 330 45244 1
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The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps 
by Eric Hazan, translated by David Fernbach.
Verso, 384 pp., £20, February 2010, 978 1 84467 411 4
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... floor – the shopkeeper living on the mezzanine – apartments for the aristocracy on the second storey (the ‘noble’ floor before the invention of the lift), and workers in the attics. This mix had not yet completely disappeared even in the early 1960s. Hazan hates façadisation – wherein a building’s front is preserved while everything behind is ...

Into the Underworld

Iain Sinclair: The Hackney Underworld, 22 January 2015

... be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify. And ...

The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... That slab cost £39 million. How is it going to be paid for? By planning permission to build a 20-storey tower block right there. Hackney will give the developers half the value of the site, along with planning permission. You build high to achieve a small footprint. Most of the development will be buy-to-let investments, offshore finance. Huge amounts of ...

Black and White Life

Mark Greif: Ralph Ellison, 1 November 2007

Ralph Ellison: A Biography 
by Arnold Rampersad.
Knopf, 657 pp., $35, April 2007, 978 0 375 40827 4
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... Ellison like to make lists of the amazing prodigies that flowed to him from his single novel. David Remnick, writing in the New Yorker in 1994, noted the ‘National Book Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres, a place in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a position at New York University as ...

Lace the air with LSD

Mike Jay: Brain Warfare, 4 February 2021

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control 
by Stephen Kinzer.
Henry Holt, 384 pp., £11.99, November 2020, 978 1 250 76262 7
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... incident, ‘an employee of the Department of the Army’ had crashed to his death through a 13th-storey hotel window after being dosed with LSD. But the commission had apparently reached a dead end. All records had been destroyed, and ‘all persons directly involved … were either out of the country and not available for interview or were ...

Underwater Living

James Meek, 5 January 2023

... to brainstorm ideas to save the club. Kempster was on holiday, so the owner and boss of Chestnut, David Newton, sat in for him. Newton – who was not a Bostonian, or a Boston United supporter – said later that he experienced a sentimental epiphany. ‘I sat there with a lump in my throat,’ Newton told the Boston Standard. ‘I spent the rest of the day ...

Somerdale to Skarbimierz

James Meek, 20 April 2017

... to manufacturing the base product, in 1831, with the help of a steam engine, in a rented four-storey building in a back alley in Birmingham. In the early years his cocoa got a warrant from Queen Victoria but by 1861, when his sons George and Richard took over the factory, now in different premises, the business was on the brink. A new product the Cadburys ...

Loafing with the Sissies

Colm Tóibín: The Trials of Andy Warhol, 10 September 2020

Warhol: A Life as Art 
by Blake Gopnik.
Allen Lane, 931 pp., £35, March, 978 0 241 00338 1
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... than almost anyone around him earned’. In 1960 he could afford to spend $60,000 on a four-storey house at Lexington Avenue and 89th Street, paying half in cash.Warhol made it clear that ‘he did not want to be known as the I. Miller show guy.’ But his work as an artist did not have the same success as his commercial work. In the early 1950s he ...

In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

Rebecca Solnit: Losing San Francisco, 8 February 2024

... vacated Salesforce East, which stands next to yet another new high-rise, the mostly residential 58-storey Millennium Tower, which opened in 2009. The marketing brochure for Millennium Tower called it the first ‘ultra-luxury high-rise … a sophisticated oasis in the heart of SoMa’s tech capital’, though by 2015 its faulty construction had led to tilting ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Swimming on the 52nd Floor, 24 September 2015

... iced water, was a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you ...

Why are you still here?

James Meek: Who owns Grimsby?, 23 April 2015

... extremely popular. And if political correctness is seen as strongly bound to Labour, the Lib Dems, David Cameron, the EU, the BBC, the Guardian and, in Grimsby, Melanie Onn, the movement against it is strongly connected to Ukip, Jeremy Clarkson, the Daily Mail and, in Grimsby, Austin Mitchell.Before he stood aside, there was speculation Mitchell would be the ...

Every Field, Every Yard

James Meek: Return to Kyiv, 10 August 2023

... tapering sides marked with corrugated rings, like a rocket engine scratched from the final cut of David Lynch’s Dune. The concert was at the top, and in order to get to it I passed through an exhibition of art created since the invasion, Ty Yak? How Are You? One of the curators, the artist Katya Libkind, had left a comment on the walls: ‘Basically it’s ...

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