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Diary

Colin McGinn: A Philosopher in LA, 4 September 1986

... apartment had the standard LA wall-to-wall shaggy carpet and saloon-style doors into the ‘kitchen area’. Strolling the murky corridors of the apartment building, I could hear the sounds of daytime game-shows emanating from behind the closed doors of my reclusive neighbours; and occasionally I would glimpse a night-attired spectral figure gliding to ...

Uncle Vester’s Nephew

Graham Coster, 27 February 1992

Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession 
by Greil Marcus.
Viking, 256 pp., £17.99, February 1992, 0 670 83846 2
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Rythm Oil: A Journey through the Music of the American South 
by Stanley Booth.
Cape, 254 pp., £16.99, October 1991, 0 224 02779 4
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... so bombed out one day on barbiturates that while his girlfriend was preparing their lunch in the kitchen he passed out into the starter. Elvis is not a broad church: if you’re not fundamentalist then you’re indifferent. Uncle Vester, thus, is either another messenger at the shrine or another unfortunate chorus-sweller in the vaudeville farce we ...

A Toast at the Trocadero

Terry Eagleton: D.J. Taylor, 18 February 2016

The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England since 1918 
by D.J. Taylor.
Chatto, 501 pp., £25, January 2016, 978 0 7011 8613 5
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... Dickens), and neither do most authors from roughly the second half of the 20th century onwards. Martin Amis is not M.L. Amis. Between these two periods, however, this largely male habit of self-designation spreads thick and fast: H.G., T.S., W.B., E.M., D.H., L.P., W.H. and so on. No doubt some doctoral student will one day explain why. Perhaps it has to do ...

The man who would put to sea on a bathmat

Elizabeth Lowry: Anne Carson, 5 October 2000

Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan) 
by Anne Carson.
Princeton, 147 pp., £18.95, July 1999, 0 691 03677 2
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Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse 
by Anne Carson.
Cape, 149 pp., £10, July 1999, 0 224 05973 4
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... questions. Economy of the Unlost is a compact yet supple series of essays (first aired in the Martin Classical Lectures series delivered annually at Oberlin College) complementing her previous long essay on a classical theme, Eros the Bittersweet (1986). Erudite and entertaining, effortlessly able to play across a range of associations, the book traces a ...

We want our Mars Bars!

Will Frears: Arsène Who?, 7 January 2021

My Life in Red and White 
by Arsène Wenger, translated by Daniel Hahn and Andrea Reece.
Weidenfeld, 352 pp., £25, October 2020, 978 1 4746 1824 3
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... an Arsenal tattoo. On the morning Arsène Wenger announced his retirement, my wife came into the kitchen and asked if I’d booked my flight yet. I’m not a huge reader of football autobiographies, though, and I’m not sure why anyone who isn’t a fan would read one (or read a piece about one, for that matter). I wouldn’t read Ferguson’s or Clough’s ...

As God Intended

Rosemary Hill: Capability Brown, 5 January 2012

The Omnipotent Magician: Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown 1716-83 
by Jane Brown.
Chatto, 384 pp., £20, March 2011, 978 0 7011 8212 0
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... modern taste. ‘How to Clump my Avenues,’ he wondered in his notes, ‘How to Fence the Kitchen Garden, south Border etc, Whether the Road to the House would not be better Higher Up … consult about Water in the park … which kind of Evergreens for the W Front?’ These were the questions he intended to put to Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, then ...

Lady This and Princess That

Joanna Biggs: On Buchi Emecheta, 7 March 2024

In the Ditch 
by Buchi Emecheta.
Penguin, 147 pp., £9.99, August 2023, 978 0 241 57812 4
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The Joys of Motherhood 
by Buchi Emecheta.
Penguin, 264 pp., £9.99, September 2022, 978 0 241 57813 1
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... between 6 a.m. and whenever the kids woke up, she wrote, and then typed up her ideas at the kitchen table, ‘with the noise of children coming in and out and banging the doors’. She sent her stories out on a Tuesday and received her rejections by Friday for years, until Richard Crossman, who had become editor of the New Statesman in 1970 after six ...

Antigone in Galway

Anne Enright, 17 December 2015

... history, Ireland’s reputation abroad. Maps, photocopies, ledgers and certificates littered the kitchen table. Over the course of an hour, two people rang Corless’s mobile, looking for female relatives who may have been in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. They might already have asked the nuns and the county council and the Health Board, but even babies ...

I and My Wife

Bee Wilson: Eva Braun, 5 January 2012

Eva Braun: Life with Hitler 
by Heike Görtemaker, translated by Damion Searls.
Allen Lane, 324 pp., £25, October 2011, 978 1 84614 489 9
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... Jews in Germany. Her older sister, Ilse Braun, worked as a receptionist for a Jewish doctor called Martin Marx, who fled to the States in 1938. We don’t know what Eva thought of this, one way or another, though after the war Ilse claimed that her sister objected to the ‘impossibility of our having two such opposite jobs’. The three Braun girls were ...

Twinge of Saudade

Chal Ravens: Abbamania, 26 December 2024

The Book of Abba: Melancholy Undercover 
by Jan Gradvall, translated by Sarah Clyne Sundberg.
Faber, 324 pp., £20, October 2024, 978 0 571 39098 4
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Bright Lights Dark Shadows: The Definitive Biography of Abba 
by Carl Magnus Palm.
Omnibus, 697 pp., £14.99, October 2024, 978 1 915841 47 6
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... of Hi-NRG disco. Alongside the rococo fizz of their wedding playlist hits, Abba were masters of kitchen-sink realism – the diaristic ‘The Day before You Came’, the post-divorce tremors of ‘The Winner Takes It All’ – but could also dish out drippy platitudes without embarrassment: ‘Happy New Year’, ‘Thank You for the Music’, ‘The Way ...

Wright and Wrong

Peter Campbell, 10 November 1988

Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright 
by Brendan Gill.
Heinemann, 544 pp., £20, August 1988, 0 434 29273 7
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... what was Wright’s legacy? The split-level ranch house, Gill says. Open planning perhaps, the kitchen as part of the living space, bands of windows and glass doors opening onto patios – these have formal beginnings in the Oak Park prairie houses, and practical realisation in the small Usonian houses. Wright’s other innovations established a style for ...

Diary

Charles Simic: New England in the Recession, 20 January 2011

... no down payment, but who could possibly afford to heat that many bedrooms, bathrooms and a huge kitchen? Too far from Boston and the larger Massachusetts and New Hampshire cities to commute to work, and with the long, cold winters making them undesirable vacation homes, they made no sense except to the banks and construction companies. Some claimed that ...

You can only talk for so long

Rosa Lyster: Start with the Goya, 20 October 2022

Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber: The Extraordinary Life of Rose Dugdale 
by Sean O’Driscoll.
Sandycove, 368 pp., £18.99, June 2022, 978 1 84488 555 8
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The Woman Who Stole Vermeer: The True Story of Rose Dugdale and the Russborough House Art Heist 
by Anthony M. Amore.
Pegasus, 272 pp., £12.99, February 2022, 978 1 64313 529 8
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... including two Gainsboroughs, three Rubenses, four Guardis and Velázquez’s earliest known work, Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus. The whole thing was over in less than fifteen minutes. As was widely reported at the time, the group’s leader struck both of the Beits as enormously composed and in control, with an unfaltering eye for the most valuable ...

We shall not be moved

John Bayley, 2 February 1984

Come aboard and sail away 
by John Fuller.
Salamander, 48 pp., £6, October 1983, 0 907540 37 6
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Children in Exile 
by James Fenton.
Salamander, 24 pp., £5, October 1983, 0 907540 39 2
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‘The Memory of War’ and ‘Children in Exile’: Poems 1968-1983 
by James Fenton.
Penguin, 110 pp., £1.95, October 1983, 0 14 006812 0
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Some Contemporary Poets of Britain and Ireland: An Anthology 
edited by Michael Schmidt.
Carcanet, 184 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 85635 469 4
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Nights in the Iron Hotel 
by Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 48 pp., £4, November 1983, 0 571 13116 6
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The Irish Lights 
by Charles Johnston and Kyril Fitzlyon.
Bodley Head, 77 pp., £4.50, September 1983, 0 370 30557 4
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Fifteen to Infinity 
by Ruth Fainlight.
Hutchinson, 62 pp., £5.95, September 1983, 0 09 152471 7
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Donald Davie and the Responsibilities of Literature 
edited by George Dekker.
Carcanet, 153 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 9780856354663
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... gridiron or to ‘the iron beds of Phnom Pen’, ‘the same stuff I am made from’: Here in my kitchen I am forced to look and listen. I cannot ignore it. Several things here get up the reader’s nose. There is the implication that while the sensitive poet in her kitchen is forced to look and listen, we in ours are too ...

Father! Father! Burning Bright

Alan Bennett, 9 December 1999

... over to the queue marked Computer Sciences, leaving Midgley faced with Mr Horsfall and Martin. Mr Horsfall did not dye his hair nor wear an earring. His hair was now fashionably short but only because he had never got round to wearing it fashionably long. Nor had his son Martin ever ventured under the drier; his ...

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