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Booze and Fags

Christopher Hitchens, 12 March 1992

Tobacco: A History 
by V.G. Kiernan.
Radius, 249 pp., £18.99, December 1991, 0 09 174216 1
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The Faber Book of Drink, Drinkers and Drinking 
edited by Simon Rae.
Faber, 554 pp., £15.99, November 1991, 0 571 16229 0
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... is a different matter. Uncollected in the Faber anthology is a moment in Michael Wharton’s ‘Peter Simple’ memoir when one of the more heroic Fleet Street pub-performers kept a long-postponed appointment with his doctor. After tapping and humming away, the quack inquired mildly; ‘D’you drink at all?’ Well-primed for the routine, and knowing that ...

At Pallant House

Eleanor Birne: Pauline Boty, 6 February 2014

... She danced on Ready Steady Go!, modelled for David Bailey, introduced Bob Dylan to London, broke Peter Blake’s heart, was part-owner of a frock shop in Carnaby Street, married and gave birth to a daughter all before dying in 1966 at the age of 28. Her story was remembered but her pictures weren’t: most languished in her brother’s garage until a Pop Art ...

Fetch the Chopping Knife

Charles Nicholl: Murder on Bankside, 4 November 2021

... generation proved no less avaricious. The eldest son, Henry, was drowned by his brothers, John and Peter, so they could get at his inheritance, but when they ‘sat upon the division of the landes’ they were confronted with ‘the sight of a bear’, which they take to be a ‘sprite’. (This reprises a scene featuring a bear in the popular comedy ...

Knowledge Infinite

D.J. Enright, 16 August 1990

The Don Giovanni Book: Myths of Seduction and Betrayal 
edited by Jonathan Miller.
Faber, 127 pp., £6.99, July 1990, 0 571 14542 6
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... and the eternal’, where the stone figure of the Commendatore is undeniably a case in point. Peter Gay explores the opera’s ‘hidden agenda’, long ago exposed to the light of Freudian day: in this Oedipal reading, Mozart’s ‘unconscious rage against his father, disciplinarian and exploiter’, is reflected in Don Giovanni’s unsuccessful attempt ...

Less and More

Adam Begley, 15 September 1988

Elephant, and Other Stories 
by Raymond Carver.
Collins Harvill, 124 pp., £9.95, August 1988, 0 00 271912 6
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The Tidewater Tales 
by John Barth.
Methuen, 655 pp., £12.95, August 1988, 0 413 18770 5
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... into a potent Carver story. Olga, Chekhov’s wife, addresses a young and bewildered hotel porter who has offered to bring breakfast on a tray: No breakfast, the woman said. Not yet at any rate. Breakfast wasn’t the important thing this morning. She required something else. She needed him to go out and bring back a mortician. Did he understand ...

Stalking Out

David Edgar: After John Osborne, 20 July 2006

John Osborne: A Patriot for Us 
by John Heilpern.
Chatto, 528 pp., £25, May 2006, 0 7011 6780 7
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... something simple, something English’ expressed by Look Back in Anger’s protagonist, Jimmy Porter, is, for Rebellato, a call for the reassertion of imperial virility after the emasculation of large tracts of the empire in the Attlee years. ‘The whole revolution in British theatre,’ Rebellato argues, ‘can be seen as responding to the linguistic ...

Who was the enemy?

Bernard Porter: Gallipoli, 21 May 2015

Gallipoli 
by Alan Moorehead.
Aurum, 384 pp., £25, April 2015, 978 1 78131 406 7
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Gallipoli: A Soldier’s Story 
by Arthur Beecroft.
Robert Hale, 176 pp., £12.99, March 2015, 978 0 7198 1654 3
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Gallipoli 1915 
by Joseph Murray.
Silvertail, 210 pp., £12.99, April 2015, 978 1 909269 11 8
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Gallipoli: The Dardanelles Disaster in Soldiers’ Words and Photographs 
by Richard van Emden and Stephen Chambers.
Bloomsbury, 344 pp., £25, March 2015, 978 1 4088 5615 4
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... Brigade is another – that the British seem almost to revel in, even to gain strength from. As Peter Cook said in Beyond the Fringe, ‘we need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.’ The general verdict today is that it could never have worked. The strategy was foolish and hopeless. One major of the Gurkhas thought that ...

So, puss, I shall know you another time

Peter Campbell, 8 December 1988

The World through Blunted Sight 
by Patrick Trevor-Roper.
Allen Lane, 207 pp., £16.95, August 1988, 0 7139 9006 6
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Visual Fact over Verbal Fiction 
by Carl Goldstein.
Cambridge, 244 pp., £40, September 1988, 0 521 34331 3
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Hockney on Photography: Conversations with Paul Joyce 
Cape, 192 pp., £25, October 1988, 0 224 02484 1Show More
Portrait of David Hockney 
by Peter Webb.
Chatto, £17.95, November 1988, 0 7011 3401 1
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... years. So we got straight in the car. And I must have told half a dozen people, key people ... ’ Peter Webb’s ‘portrait’ is, like one of Hockney’s own coloured-pencil drawings of his friends, a mixture of the objective and the flattering. Hockney’s life, from his time at the Royal College to the present day, has been easy to publicise. His pictures ...

Other People’s Mail

Bernard Porter: MI5, 19 November 2009

The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 
by Christopher Andrew.
Allen Lane, 1032 pp., £30, October 2009, 978 0 7139 9885 6
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... became involved with over the last 50 years – the Profumo affair; the John Stonehouse mystery; Peter Wright; a score of famous spy cases; the Northern Ireland conflict; the miners’ strikes; the Gibraltar shootings; the Lockerbie bombing; ‘Room 101’; the thrilling escape of the defector Oleg Gordievsky; the killing of WPC Yvonne Fletcher; and the 7/7 ...

Put it in your suitcase

Nicholas Penny: Sotheby’s, 18 March 1999

Sotheby’s: Bidding for Class 
by Robert Lacey.
Little, Brown, 354 pp., £20, May 1998, 0 316 64447 1
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Sotheby’s: Inside Story 
by Peter Watson.
Bloomsbury, 325 pp., £7.99, May 1998, 0 7475 3808 5
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... bits of the ‘brilliantly flawed lifetimes’, as he puts it, of the dreadful Duke and Duchess. Peter Watson’s Sotheby’s: Inside Story is also related to a television programme – one that appeared the year before, in 1997. Here the auction house was accused of conniving in the sale of illegally excavated and exported antiquities and of organising the ...

White Lies

James Campbell: Nella Larsen, 5 October 2006

In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Colour Line 
by George Hutchinson.
Harvard, 611 pp., £25.95, June 2006, 0 674 02180 0
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... in Darkness, which contained a character evidently based on him. It began: ‘People said Henry Porter was a Negro.’ In the version that was finally published, this was altered to read ‘was an illegitimate’ – making nonsense of many passages that follow. (The original distinction survives in the French translation, Ciel de nuit: ‘avait du sang ...

Eye Contact

Peter Campbell: Anthony van Dyck, 16 September 1999

Anthony van Dyck 1599-1641 
by Christopher Brown and Hans Vlieghe.
Royal Academy, 360 pp., £22.50, May 1999, 9780847821969
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Anthony van Dyck: A Life, 1599-1641 
by Robin Blake.
Constable, 435 pp., £25, August 1999, 9780094797208
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... is comical, or ignore each other and look out of the picture at you (as Van Dyck and Endymion Porter do in the oval double portrait from the Prado). Alternatively, one of them may look at you, and the other at his (or her) partner or at some unspecified point outside the picture, as in the portrait of Lord Digby and Lord Russell – either way, the missed ...

A life, surely?

Jenny Diski: To Portobello on Angel Dust, 18 February 1999

The Ossie Clark Diaries 
edited by Henrietta Rous.
Bloomsbury, 402 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7475 3901 4
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... longer before I die – I fall to brooding about that devastating term of abuse of our times, the Peter Pan crow of complacency: Get a life. I am impressed and rather envious of those who use the phrase: that they can be so certain that they know what a life is, and so convinced that they have one. From the note of disdain with which the phrase is spoken, it ...

Enlightenment Erotica

David Nokes, 4 August 1988

Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America 
by Peter Wagner.
Secker, 498 pp., £30, March 1988, 0 436 56051 8
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’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorised Sexuality during the Enlightenment 
edited by Robert Purks Maccubin.
Cambridge, 260 pp., £25, March 1988, 0 521 34539 1
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The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature 
edited by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown.
Methuen, 320 pp., £28, February 1988, 0 416 01631 6
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... of Sporting Ladies (c. 1770) is typical of many entries from whores’ directories included by Peter Wagner in Eros Revived. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, published regularly between 1760 and the early 1790s, prided itself on providing up-to-date information for the sporting gentlemen of London, including full details of starting prices and hot ...

Secession

Michael Wood, 23 March 1995

The Stone Raft 
by José Saramago, translated by Giovanni Pontiero.
Harvill, 263 pp., £15.99, November 1994, 0 00 271321 7
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... to sober eyes. But there would be a real liberation in it too. If we wanted to refer to Cole Porter or Philip Marlowe or Lassie, we could do it without being suspected of trying for the popular touch; if we came across Thomas Aquinas, we wouldn’t have to pretend we found the thought in an old cookbook. This may sound utopian (or nightmarish: chacun son ...

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