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Pilgrim’s Progress

Michael Davie, 4 December 1980

The Letters of Evelyn Waugh 
edited by Mark Amory.
Weidenfeld, 664 pp., £14.95, September 1980, 0 297 77657 6
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... fully explained by clichés about adolescent revolt. The first girl with whom Evelyn fell in love, Olivia Plunket Greene, was a Catholic, and it was a Waugh family theory that it was she who first turned him against his parents – as it was certainly she who first gave Alec the unkind nickname of ‘Baldhead’. The Plunket Greenes had links with a very ...

Rudy Then and Rudy Now

James Wolcott, 16 February 2023

Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor 
by Andrew Kirtzman.
Simon and Schuster, 458 pp., £20, September 2022, 978 1 9821 5329 8
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... eyes. The most devastating portrait of Rudy in oily disarray was a New York Magazine profile by Olivia Nuzzi, on his return from Ukraine.She described an early afternoon car ride with him to the restaurant at the Mark, a five-star Upper East Side hotel. Sitting in the back seat with her, his fly unzipped, saliva dripping down his chin, he sang her an aria ...

What he did

Frank Kermode, 20 March 1997

W.B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage 
by R.F. Foster.
Oxford, 640 pp., £25, March 1997, 0 19 211735 1
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... share his friend Symons’s taste for dancing girls); his first affair in his late twenties, with Olivia Shakespear, brief, Gonne-clouded, but the foundation of a long friendship; his more casual relationships with Florence Farr and Mabel Dickinson, who gave him a terrible scare when she claimed she was pregnant. The marriage to George Hyde-Lees, and the Wild ...

Herberts & Herbertinas

Rosemary Hill: Steven Runciman, 20 October 2016

Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman 
by Minoo Dinshaw.
Penguin, 767 pp., £30, September 2016, 978 0 241 00493 7
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... Sword of Honour, the three wartime volumes of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time and Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy all dealt with the war itself, but the neo-Romanticism of the 1950s also created the appetite for richly coloured quasi-history which made T.H. White’s tetralogy The Once and Future King a bestseller. Like Macaulay, Runciman ...

It’s me, it’s me, it’s me

David Thomson: The Keynotes of Cary Grant, 5 November 2020

Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend 
by Mark Glancy.
Oxford, 550 pp., £22.99, October, 978 0 19 005313 0
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Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise 
by Scott Eyman.
Simon and Schuster, 556 pp., £27.10, November, 978 1 5011 9211 1
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... fellow might never have known a home. We honour such ghosts less now – movie stars, I mean (Olivia de Havilland closed up that room in July) – and that may be for the best. It’s time to be wary of role models: they say more about advertising than they reveal of human nature. But if you want to get a handle on American movies and desirable ...

Only in the Balkans

Misha Glenny: The Balkans Imagined, 29 April 1999

Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination 
by Vesna Goldsworthy.
Yale, 254 pp., £19.95, May 1998, 0 300 07312 7
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Imagining the Balkans 
by Maria Todorova.
Oxford, 270 pp., £35, June 1997, 9780195087505
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... of Balkan images in English literature from Byron through The Prisoner of Zenda, Dracula, Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy and beyond. It is thoroughly enjoyable to read and peppered with hilarious or hair-raising quotations from some of Britain’s most admired authors. A literary critic, Goldsworthy very occasionally commits the sort of error she ...

That Night at Farnham

Anne Barton, 18 August 1983

Homosexuality in Renaissance England 
by Alan Bray.
Gay Men’s Press, 149 pp., £7.95, September 1982, 0 907040 16 0
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Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare 
by Linda Bamber.
Stanford, 211 pp., $18.50, June 1982, 0 8047 1126 7
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Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare 
by Lisa Jardine.
Harvester, 202 pp., £18.95, June 1983, 0 7108 0436 9
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... Edward II and his friends and a performance of Twelfth Night at The Globe, except that Viola and Olivia must have worn a few more clothes. Within Edward II itself, Dr Jardine opines, the effect produced by the sight of Gaveston embracing the king, and the boy-actor who played Isabella fawning on ‘her’ husband, would have been much the same. This argument ...

They roared with laughter

Amber Medland: Nella Larsen, 6 May 2021

Passing 
by Nella Larsen.
Macmillan, 160 pp., £10.99, June 2020, 978 1 5290 4028 9
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... 1934 both relationships were over. In 1936, she fell in with the actress Edna Thomas and her lover Olivia Wyndham, hopping between Midtown galleries, dancing at the Savoy. Soon, she meddled in a lovers’ spat, and that was over too. Peterson seemed to be replacing her in Van Vechten’s affections and Larsen cut them both off. The correspondence simply ...

Between the Raindrops

David Bromwich: The Subtlety of James Stewart, 12 December 2002

James Stewart at the NFT 
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... of his leading ladies, including Ginger Rogers and Marlene Dietrich, as well as Norma Shearer, Olivia de Havilland and others, with no hard feelings on either side except in the case of Dietrich. Maybe he ‘walked between the raindrops’, as a marvelling collaborator once said. But reports are just as consistent about less flattering traits. Though he ...

I, Lowborn Cur

Colin Burrow: Literary Names, 22 November 2012

Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature 
by Alastair Fowler.
Oxford, 283 pp., £19.99, September 2012, 978 0 19 959222 7
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... Much of the music of Twelfth Night emerges from its not quite anagrammatical names (Malvolio, Olivia, Viola; Illyria, Elysium) from which the rude corporeality of the names Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek are pointedly excluded. The fluidity of names anagrammatically reassembled was without doubt a powerful theatrical resource for Shakespeare, and names ...

Don’t look back

Toril Moi: Rereading Duras, 13 April 2023

The Easy Life 
by Marguerite Duras, translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan.
Bloomsbury, 208 pp., £12.99, December 2022, 978 1 5266 4865 5
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... From the​ 1970s to the 1990s anyone who, like me, was interested in French women writers, feminist theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis couldn’t avoid Marguerite Duras. Lacan himself had said of Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein that ‘Marguerite Duras turns out to know what I teach without me,’ and I remember dutifully trying to make sense of that novel within the Lacanian framework ...

My son has been poisoned!

David Bromwich: Cold War movies, 26 January 2012

An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War 
by J. Hoberman.
New Press, 383 pp., £21.99, March 2011, 978 1 59558 005 4
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... Auditorium to celebrate the tenth anniversary of US-Soviet relations, complete with a speech by Olivia de Havilland … The next day, John Wayne learns that the Selective Service board has extended his 3-A deferment. Hot dog! The star celebrates Thanksgiving Day by carving turkeys at the canteen, even as Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin meet in Tehran to ...

His Peach Stone

Christopher Tayler: J.G. Farrell, 2 December 2010

J.G. Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries 
edited by Lavinia Greacen.
Cork, 464 pp., €19.95, September 2010, 978 1 85918 476 9
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... Bovril treatment, and the writers he respected or got on with were often women: Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Margaret Drabble, Alison Lurie. The letters from Farrell’s years of post-Booker fame are an education in the glamour of English literary celebrity. ‘I don’t want to be interfering about your azalea,’ he writes to Drabble, ‘but ...

Toots, they owned you

John Lahr: My Hollywood Fling, 15 June 2023

Hollywood: The Oral History 
edited by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson.
Faber, 739 pp., £25, November 2022, 978 0 571 36694 1
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... from any other form of employment because it was for exclusive personal services,’ according to Olivia de Havilland, who won an important legal victory for artistic freedom by challenging the accepted rule that studios had the right to suspend a contract player for rejecting a role.At the top of this money tree was Louis B. Mayer. Forget about his ...

Neutered Valentines

David Bromwich: James Agee, 7 September 2006

‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, ‘A Death in the Family’, Shorter Fiction 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 818 pp., $35, October 2005, 1 931082 81 2
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Film Writing and Selected Journalism 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 748 pp., $40, October 2005, 1 931082 82 0
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Brooklyn Is 
by James Agee.
Fordham, 64 pp., $16.95, October 2005, 0 8232 2492 9
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... listening to a learned authority answer every question but the one you asked. Other actresses – Olivia de Havilland, Jean Simmons – were to be recipients of these neutered valentines, a good-bad speciality of Agee’s criticism. The dandyism teeters on the brink of self-parody when he devotes three paragraphs to the child Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me in ...

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