When you die you’ll go to hell

Wendy Steiner, 27 May 1993

Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes 
by Helen Benedict.
Oxford, 309 pp., £22.50, February 1993, 0 19 506680 4
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Reproducing Rape: Domination through Talk in the Courtroom 
by Gregory Matoesian.
Polity, 256 pp., £45, February 1993, 0 7456 1036 6
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... of the Bible Belt, these stories helped to establish contemporary rape myths by picturing a pure, white, middle or upper-class victim assailed by a poor black who attacked his betters by dirtying their proudest possession – their women. The legacy of this stereotype is still with us. The fascination of the press with the Portuguese character of New Bedford ...

Late Picasso at the Tate

David Sylvester, 1 September 1988

... behind the point of intersection, one board is deflected by 30 degrees; the colours are black, white, touches of grey, and the natural colour of the wood. It must be one of the few sculptures in the world every aspect of which – there are essentially eight aspects, each at a point of the compass – presents a view which works and a view which is totally ...

Oscar and Constance

Tom Paulin, 17 November 1983

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Hamish Hamilton, 185 pp., £7.95, April 1983, 0 241 10964 7
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The Importance of Being Constance: A Biography of Oscar Wilde’s Wife 
by Joyce Bentley.
Hale, 160 pp., £8.75, May 1983, 0 7090 0538 5
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Mrs Oscar Wilde: A Woman of Some Importance 
by Anne Clark Amor.
Sidgwick, 249 pp., £8.95, June 1983, 9780283989674
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... all mean-looking, which consoled me, for I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face. Little white-washed cells, so tragically tidy, but with books in them. In one I found a translation of Dante, and a Shelley. Strange and beautiful it seemed to me that the sorrow of a single Florentine in exile should, hundreds of years afterwards, lighten the sorrow of ...

Aromatic Splinters

John Bayley, 7 September 1995

The Poems of John Dryden: Vol. I, 1649-1681; Vol. II, 1682-1685 
edited by Paul Hammond.
Longman, 551 pp., £75, February 1995, 0 582 49213 0
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... is also a jumper in, a superb starter. What about the opening of The Hind and the Panther? A Milk white Hind, immortal and unchang’d, Fed on the lawns and in the forest rang’d. Or of Absalom and Achitophel? In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin, Before polygamy was made a sin, When man on many multiplied his kind, Ere one to one was cursedly ...

Had I been born a hero

Helen Deutsch: Female poets of the eighteenth century, 21 September 2006

Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre 
by Paula Backscheider.
Johns Hopkins, 514 pp., £43.50, January 2006, 0 8018 8169 2
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... to the masculine canon was a drawing, a doodle really, by Dorothy, Lady Burlington, the wife of Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, a great patron of art and architecture to whom Pope dedicated the last of his Moral Essays. Lady Burlington sketched Pope at a game of cards – perhaps ombre (aptly enough, an Englishing of the Spanish for ‘man’), the game ...

Who’s the big one?

Irina Aleksander: Gary Shteyngart, 22 May 2014

Little Failure: A Memoir 
by Gary Shteyngart.
Hamish Hamilton, 368 pp., £16.99, February 2014, 978 0 241 14665 1
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... cropped hair and a tight-lipped, sly smile. She sits in front of an empty plate and a glass of white wine, and is wielding what looks like a butter knife. Semyon is mostly bald and has a greying goatee. His eyelids weigh heavy, which makes him look a little angry, or maybe just tired. His cutlery is untouched, and his arms are hidden under the table, as if ...

Diary

Keith Thomas: Two Years a Squaddie, 5 February 2015

... and spires of the university city flash past, so near and yet so remote. Until the publication of Richard Vinen’s superb history, the best accounts of National Service were fictional: David Lodge’s Ginger, You’re Barmy is a particularly successful evocation of the miseries and absurdities of the conscript’s life.* But Vinen, who was born in 1963, when ...

Writing French in English

Helen Cooper: Chaucer’s Language, 7 October 2010

The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War 
by Ardis Butterfield.
Oxford, 444 pp., £60, December 2009, 978 0 19 957486 5
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... all the more fiercely protected for that. More controversial was the war cemetery with its rows of white and black crosses: white for those who had died fighting for France, black for the boys who had been taken off in lorries from their classes one day for conscription into Hitler’s armies and had never returned. It was a ...

What Happened to Obama?

August Kleinzahler: The Rise and Fall of Barack Obama, 18 October 2007

Dreams from My Father 
by Barack Obama.
Canongate, 442 pp., £12.99, September 2007, 978 1 84767 091 5
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The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream 
by Barack Obama.
Canongate, 375 pp., £14.99, May 2007, 978 1 84767 035 9
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Obama: From Promise to Power 
by David Mendell.
Amistad, 406 pp., $25.95, August 2007, 978 0 06 085820 9
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... major presidential candidate has ever had, and is mistrusted even by her natural constituency – white, educated, middle-aged, female registered Democrats – not to mention right-wing evangelical male yahoos in the red states who’ll be goddamned before they vote for some pushy left-wing bitch. In March, Obama had drawn a crowd of ten thousand or so ...

Hm, hm and that was all

Rosemary Hill: Queen Mary, 6 December 2018

The Quest for Queen Mary 
by James Pope-Hennessy, edited by Hugo Vickers.
Zuleika, 335 pp., £25, September 2018, 978 1 9997770 3 6
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... and by 1953 had established a reputation as a biographer. Two volumes on the life of Richard Monckton-Milnes, the late Georgian politician and socialite, were followed by a life of Monckton-Milnes’s son, Lord Crewe. The latter was the quid pro quo for access to the archives and was, Pope-Hennessy admitted, ‘less than inspired’. Its ...

Your hat sucks

Gill Partington: UbuWeb, 1 April 2021

Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics and Poetics of UbuWeb 
by Kenneth Goldsmith.
Columbia, 328 pp., £20, July 2020, 978 0 231 18695 7
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... might expect. As well as Slonimsky’s hymn to Castoria, there are Samuel Beckett’s radio plays, Richard Serra’s video art, Maurice Blanchot’s mystery novels and a 1971 promotional disc made by Salvador Dalí for the Crédit Commercial de France. One of UbuWeb’s specialities is the B-sides and rarities overshadowed by an artist’s greatest hits. Want ...

Diary

Fraser MacDonald: Remembering Nan Shepherd, 23 January 2025

... was made from the Quarry Wood wall. Sure enough, another slide showed the boulders chipped bone-white and crushed into a foundation. Growing up in Cults, I felt the presence of this past – walls, cairns, excavations – almost like the imprint of flagstones under linoleum. As Shepherd put it in The Quarry Wood, ‘the stones summed up existence.’ My ...

The Chase

Inigo Thomas: ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’, 20 October 2016

... wrote of ‘blind Orion hungry for the morn’ in Endymion, while Turner’s near contemporary Richard Horne wrote an epic poem, Orion, the year before Turner exhibited Rain, Steam and Speed. Charles Lamb’s version of the Odyssey appeared in 1808: ‘Then came by a thundering ghost, the large-limbed Orion, the mighty hunter, who was hunting there the ...

Don’t go quietly

David Trotter: Ken Loach’s Fables, 6 February 2025

Kes 
by David Forrest.
BFI, 112 pp., £12.99, May 2024, 978 1 83902 564 8
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... Then we’re introduced to the three leading characters, Rube (Geraldine Sherman), Sylvie (Carol White) and Eileen (Vickery Turner), by means of a pan down from a sign for Clapham Junction station which fits them exactly to a place and time. The play’s loose, episodic structure allows for improvisation. What Loach was to call a ‘go-in-and-grab-it type of ...

Where Life Is Seized

Adam Shatz: Frantz Fanon’s Revolution, 19 January 2017

Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté 
by Frantz Fanon, edited by Robert Young and Jean Khalfa.
La Découverte, 688 pp., £22, October 2015, 978 2 7071 8638 6
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... Author​ of the anti-racist jeremiad Black Skin, White Masks; spokesman for the Algerian Revolution and author of The Wretched of the Earth, the ‘bible’ of decolonisation; inspiration to Third World revolutionaries from the refugee camps of Palestine to the back streets of Tehran and Beirut, Harlem and Oakland; founder, avant la lettre, of post-colonialism; hero to the alienated banlieusards of France, who feel as if the Battle of Algiers never ended, but simply moved to the cités: Frantz Fanon has been remembered in a lot of ways, but almost all of them have foregrounded his advocacy of resistance, especially violent resistance ...