Little Old Grandfather

Thomas Meaney: Djilas and Stalin, 19 May 2016

Conversations with Stalin 
by Milovan Djilas, translated by Michael Petrovich.
Penguin, 160 pp., £9.99, January 2014, 978 0 14 139309 4
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... became an active member of the Communist Party, responsible for organisation at the university. King Alexander’s secret police arrested him in 1933 for carrying a gun he planned to use to break party members out of jail. He won the respect of the underground for his courage under torture. In Yugoslavia, as elsewhere across Europe, prisons were the school ...

Which red is the real red?

Hal Foster, 2 December 2021

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror 
Whitney Museum of American Art/Philadelphia Museum of Art, until 13 February 2022Show More
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... already in the Savarin can? It also calls up a fool’s cap, and early on Johns was both king and pawn of a New York art world revved up by a new market. (He knew it too: the bronze Ballantines were said to be provoked by a remark from de Kooning that Leo Castelli could sell anything, even two beer cans.)In short, painting as rebus has its ...

We know it intimately

Christina Riggs: Rummaging for Mummies, 22 October 2020

A World beneath the Sands: Adventurers and Archaeologists in the Golden Age of Egyptology 
by Toby Wilkinson.
Picador, 510 pp., £25, October, 978 1 5098 5870 5
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... when it reached London: ‘Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801’ and ‘Presented by King George III’.On 27 September 1822, Jean-François Champollion wrote his Lettre à M. Dacier, presenting to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres his system for reading Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, derived from the Rosetta Stone. He finally set ...

Two Americas and a Scotland

Nicholas Everett, 27 September 1990

Collected Poems, 1937-1971 
by John Berryman, edited by Charles Thornbury.
Faber, 348 pp., £17.50, February 1990, 0 571 14317 2
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The Dream Songs 
by John Berryman.
Faber, 427 pp., £17.50, February 1990, 0 571 14318 0
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Poems 1959-1979 
by Frederick Seidel.
Knopf, 112 pp., $19.95, November 1989, 0 394 58021 4
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These Days 
by Frederick Seidel.
Knopf, 50 pp., $18.95, October 1989, 0 394 58022 2
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A Scottish Assembly 
by Robert Crawford.
Chatto, 64 pp., £5.99, April 1990, 0 7011 3595 6
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... inevitable fixture that it can accommodate the most disparate material. Here is section 175: Old King Cole was a merry old soul and a merry old soul was Henry He called for his butts – he called for his bowl – he called for his fiddlers three in vain. Blank prose took hold of Henry’s soul considering all the deaths and considering. There is a little ...

A Kind of Scandal

A.D. Nuttall, 19 August 1993

Shakespeare and Ovid 
by Jonathan Bate.
Oxford, 292 pp., £35, May 1993, 0 19 812954 8
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... nor the darkness of sexual desire has changed so very much.’ He also writes that the allusion in Richard II to Phaethon universalises the King’s situation and that this in its turn contributes to ‘the enduring power’ of Shakespearean tragedy. I would guess that such sentences will attract a now almost automatic ...

Strong Government

Linda Colley, 7 December 1989

The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1788 
by John Brewer.
Unwin Hyman, 289 pp., £28, April 1989, 0 04 445292 6
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Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution 
by John Gascoigne.
Cambridge, 358 pp., £32.50, June 1989, 0 521 35139 1
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Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 
by C.A. Bayly.
Longman, 295 pp., £16.95, June 1989, 0 582 04287 9
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... the sun overshadowed. Oxford seemed both theologically and politically more attractive to the new king, and to his minister Lord North, who became its Chancellor in 1772. Cambridge meanwhile languished under a Whig, latitudinarian, and consequently out-of-favour aristocrat, Lord Grafton, who inconsiderately refused either to give up his Chancellorship or to ...

Public Works

David Norbrook, 5 June 1986

The Faber Book of Political Verse 
edited by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 481 pp., £17.50, May 1986, 0 571 13947 7
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... all the more so in the final text from which the poet dropped those conservative martyrs Richard III and the Duke of Wellington. Paulin has described Geoffrey Hill as being ‘parasitic’ on Eliot’s imagination, but has always claimed to like the sonnet ‘Idylls of the King’ which provoked all the London ...

Ladies and Gentlemen

Patricia Beer, 6 May 1982

The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17 
by Jane Marcus.
Macmillan, 340 pp., £9.95, April 1982, 0 333 25589 5
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The Harsh Voice 
by Rebecca West, introduced by Alexandra Pringle.
Virago, 250 pp., £2.95, February 1982, 0 86068 249 8
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The Meaning of Treason 
by Rebecca West.
Virago, 439 pp., £3.95, February 1982, 0 86068 256 0
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1990 
by Rebecca West.
Weidenfeld, 190 pp., £10, February 1982, 9780297779636
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... and in this its title supports me, for, though West is discussing Robert Elsmere, The Case of Richard Meynell and Daphne, the ethos that Mrs Humphry Ward puts forward is the only thing that really interests her. Even when she comments that on every relevant page the face of the heroine Catherine Leyburn ‘works with emotion and is illuminated by a ...

Pay me for it

Helen Deutsch: Summoning Dr Johnson, 9 February 2012

Samuel Johnson: A Life 
by David Nokes.
Faber, 415 pp., £9.99, August 2010, 978 0 571 22636 8
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Selected Writings 
by Samuel Johnson, edited by Peter Martin.
Harvard, 503 pp., £16.95, May 2011, 978 0 674 06034 0
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The Brothers Boswell: A Novel 
by Philip Baruth.
Corvus, 336 pp., £7.99, January 2011, 978 1 84887 446 6
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The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. 
by John Hawkins, edited by O.M. Brack.
Georgia, 554 pp., £53.50, August 2010, 978 0 8203 2995 6
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... the prompting of the popular press and an anonymous letter to Lord Bute led to a pension from the king in 1762. Too poor to complete his Oxford degree though more learned than his tutor, Johnson, like Richard Savage, his friend and the subject of his first biography, ‘having no profession, became by necessity an ...

I sizzle to see you

John Lahr: Cole Porter’s secret songs, 21 November 2019

The Letters of Cole Porter 
edited by Cliff Eisen and Dominic McHugh.
Yale, 672 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 0 300 21927 2
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... a dilettante and in the doldrums about cracking the code of American musical success, Porter told Richard Rodgers: ‘I’ll write Jewish tunes.’ In Porter’s shift to the heavily chromatic minor key with its unmistakable Mediterranean flavour, he found a rhythmic correlative which engineered the crossover to Broadway. ‘It is surely one of the ironies of ...

Afloat with Static

Jenny Turner: Hey, Blondie!, 19 December 2019

Face It 
by Debbie Harry.
HarperCollins, 352 pp., £20, October 2019, 978 0 00 822942 9
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... So the baby was put up for adoption, and Angela became Deborah, with parents called Cathy and Richard Harry, also known as Caggie and Dick. Caggie’s family had once owned a bank in Ridgewood, New Jersey; Dick worked as a salesman for Alkan Silk Woven Labels in Paterson. A sister, Martha, arrived six years later. ‘My little accidental family’ gets ...

Just one of those ends

Michael Wood: Apocalypse Regained, 13 December 2001

Apocalypse Now Redux 
directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
August 2001
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Marlon Brando 
by Patricia Bosworth.
Weidenfeld, 216 pp., £12.99, October 2001, 0 297 84284 6
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... The horror!’ as his epigraph for that work. The implication is that Kurtz sees himself as the king who must die so that kingship may live and the land be saved from its sickness. Willard has stumbled out of the 20th century and into a timeless zone of magic and sacrifice, and the viewer of the film is looking at a kind of scrapbook of Modernist ...

Cheering us up

Ian Jack, 15 September 1988

In for a Penny: The Unauthorised Biography of Jeffrey Archer 
by Jonathan Mantle.
Hamish Hamilton, 264 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 241 12478 6
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... colour problem of the South, but hints at his opinion of the situation by regarding Martin Luther King and the late President Kennedy as his two idols. Whilst in his final year, Archer led a small demonstration against the final quashing of the death sentence appeal made by Carl [sic] Chessman. It was a move that brought him his first newspaper interview and ...

This Sporting Life

R.W. Johnson, 8 December 1994

Iain Macleod 
by Robert Shepherd.
Hutchinson, 608 pp., £25, November 1994, 0 09 178567 7
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... committee to examine NHS expenditure: the crucial brief was written by two young welfare radicals, Richard Titmuss and Brian Abel-Smith. He also set up the first committee to investigate the effects of smoking: both the Treasury and Lord Salisbury wanted to suppress its Report and Macleod, anxious to placate such powerful colleagues, chain-smoked his way ...

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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... survived, so many still to come); the post-traumatic shock of being allowed into the showpiece. King’s College, the part the grockles are never allowed to photograph (too squalid, these ranks of distressed vinyl chairs). It’s unreal: all these floaters drifting in from the street, straight past the uniforms, unmolested; an atmosphere of subdued ...