At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Roma’, 24 January 2019

... But in Roma he stays at home, or goes back home: to Mexico, to the past, to the family. The title may not suggest home to many of us: we’re not bound to know that Roma is the name of a neighbourhood in Mexico City, any more than we have to remember that Petty France is in London and Little Italy in New York. But then home isn’t always what we think it ...

Gun Love

Paul Theroux, 23 April 2026

... Greene’s biographers (Norman Sherry) dates this attempt to July 1924; a more recent biographer (Richard Greene) writes: ‘By Christmas 1923, after a total of six plays, he gave up Russian roulette.’ A poem Greene wrote about it, ‘The Gamble’ (‘I slip a charge into one chamber’), appeared in his collection Babbling April, in 1925. Another of his ...

Harrison Rex

Carey Harrison, 7 November 1991

Conversations with Marlon Brando 
by Lawrence Grobel.
Bloomsbury, 177 pp., £14.99, September 1991, 9780747508168
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George Sanders: An Exhausted Life 
by Richard Vanderbeets.
Robson, 271 pp., £15.95, September 1991, 0 86051 749 7
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Rex Harrison: A Biography 
by Nicholas Wapshott.
Chatto, 331 pp., £16, October 1991, 0 7011 3764 9
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Me: Stories of my Life 
by Katharine Hepburn.
Viking, 418 pp., £16.99, September 1991, 0 670 83974 4
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... in his disenchantment with this freedom. Little wonder, since his life, pleasingly chronicled by Richard Vanderbeets, began in St Petersburg amid aristocratic Anglo-Russian relatives whose licensed eccentricities would have spoiled anyone for Hollywood. ‘From his great carved bed’ – this was a favourite uncle at play – ‘a .22 calibre pistol in his ...

Stand the baby on its head

John Bayley, 22 July 1993

The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales 
edited by Alison Luire.
Oxford, 455 pp., £17.95, May 1993, 0 19 214218 6
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The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales 
edited by Angela Carter.
Virago, 230 pp., £7.99, July 1993, 1 85381 616 7
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... in Andrew Lang’s Crimson Fairy Book. In the new ones, however accomplished and diverting they may be, the meaning is clear but coyly hidden, as in many modern fictions; although the examples sought out by Alison Lurie have as much cunning and high spirits in them as the old tales. In Ursula LeGuin’s ‘The Wife’s Tale’ (1982) it takes us a few pages ...

Who’s Got the Moxie?

A. Craig Copetas, 23 March 1995

The Mexican Tree Duck 
by James Crumley.
Picador, 247 pp., £15.99, May 1994, 0 330 32451 9
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One to Count Cadence 
by James Crumley.
Picador, 338 pp., £5.99, May 1994, 0 330 32450 0
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... popworld of Beavis and Butthead and the fortysomething editors who deify Rosanne Arnold and Richard Nixon on the same page. Editors once made yearly scouting trips up to the North Country, just to avoid getting sucked into the black hole of fad and revisionism. These trips, which took place in the spring and always in a four-wheel-drive ...

Looking for a Crucifixion

Robert Alter, 9 September 1993

The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered 
by Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise.
Element, 286 pp., £14.95, November 1992, 0 85230 368 8
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... hinted at in the text, has recently been trumpeted by the journalists Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh in The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, which is largely a popularisation of Robert Eisenman’s theories. Unsurprisingly, Baigent and Leigh contribute an effusive blurb to this book. Eisenman for his part has been putting himself forward as the ...

More aggressive, dear!

Zachary Leader, 31 July 1997

My Aces, My Faults 
by Nick Bollettieri and Dick Schaap.
Robson, 346 pp., £17.95, June 1997, 1 86105 087 9
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... men in the quarter-finals at Wimbledon? Twenty-four hours earlier, Tim Henman had beaten Richard Krajicek, last year’s winner and the No. 4 seed. In his first match Greg Rusedski had eliminated Mark Philippousis, winner at Queen’s and the No. 7 seed. Although both Britons (Rusedski was raised in Canada but his mother is British) had already ...

Diary

Jonathan Steinberg: My Jolly Corner, 17 May 1984

... at a once familiar corner. Part of it was gone. The Walgreen’s drug store where, as teenagers, Richard and I had tormented Louie, was gone, replaced by a huge, white, faceless department store, as was the jewellers where I had stood for hours desperately wanting those hideous rings with heavy red and purple stones in them. In almost every other way ...

The Limit

Rosemary Hill, 2 November 1995

Christopher Wood: An English Painter 
by Richard Ingleby.
Allison and Busby, 295 pp., £25, May 1995, 0 85031 849 1
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Barbara Hepworth: A Life of Forms 
by Sally Festing.
Viking, 343 pp., £20, May 1995, 0 670 84203 6
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... explained to his mother. What he did not tell her was how he had landed such a grand invitation. Richard Ingleby cannot tell us either, but Kahn was the first of many men and women to be charmed by Wood. His good looks and ‘friendliness’, the quality that people singled out as the key to his appeal, enabled him to drift with apparent inevitability to the ...

Outside Swan and Edgar’s

Matthew Sweet: The life of Oscar Wilde, 5 February 1998

The Wilde Album 
by Merlin Holland.
Fourth Estate, 192 pp., £12.99, October 1997, 1 85702 782 5
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Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art 
by Julia Prewitt Brown.
Virginia, 157 pp., $30, September 1997, 9780813917283
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The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde 
edited by Peter Raby.
Cambridge, 307 pp., £37.50, October 1997, 9780521474719
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Wilde The Novel 
by Stefan Rudnicki.
Orion, 215 pp., £5.99, October 1997, 0 7528 1160 6
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Oscar Wilde 
by Frank Harris.
Robinson, 358 pp., £7.99, October 1997, 1 85487 126 9
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Moab is my Washpot 
by Stephen Fry.
Hutchinson, 343 pp., £16.99, October 1997, 0 09 180161 3
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Nothing … except My Genius 
by Oscar Wilde.
Penguin, 82 pp., £2.99, October 1997, 0 14 043693 6
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... one of the most familiar scenes from the life of Wilde: the bad moment outside Swan and Edgar’s. Richard Ellmann’s biography says that, as Wilde caught sight of ‘the painted boys on the pavement’ outside the department store, he was struck by an overwhelming sense of catastrophe. Holland traces the story back to 1930 and to Ada Leverson, who – he ...

Bees in a Deserted Hive

Daniel Soar: Nikolai Gumilev, 27 April 2000

The Pillar of Fire 
by Nikolai Gumilev, translated by Richard McKane.
Anvil, 252 pp., £12.95, August 1999, 0 85646 310 8
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... alien, but Gumilev is at home with them: his stars hang low. In translation, and particularly in Richard McKane’s (the second book-length selection to be published in English), Gumilev’s language can sound sadly clumsy as well as strange. Gumilev would never have allowed his unicorns to ‘prance’: the Russian is neutral, carrying no other sense than ...

Pacesetter

Adrienne Mayor: Carthage, 24 June 2010

Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Mediterranean Civilisation 
by Richard Miles.
Allen Lane, 520 pp., £30, March 2010, 978 0 7139 9793 4
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... luxury [that] played to every Western European stereotype … about the decadent Orient’, as Richard Miles puts it in his impressive new history of Carthage. Pointing out that Rome’s triumph over Carthage ‘provided an attractive blueprint’ and ‘metaphor’ to justify French domination in North Africa, Miles dismisses Salammbô as ‘the most ...

Misappropriation

Colin Kidd: Burke, 4 February 2016

Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke 
by Richard Bourke.
Princeton, 1001 pp., £30.95, September 2015, 978 0 691 14511 2
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Training Minds for the War of Ideas: Ashridge College, the Conservative Party and the Cultural Politics of Britain, 1929-54 
by Clarisse Berthezène.
Manchester, 214 pp., £75, June 2015, 978 0 7190 8649 6
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The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. IV: Party, Parliament and the Dividing of the Whigs, 1780-94 
edited by P.J. Marshall and Donald Bryant.
Oxford, 674 pp., £120, October 2015, 978 0 19 966519 8
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... wit, cerebral depth and a marvellous turn of phrase. But reductionism of this sort won’t do, as Richard Bourke shows in his erudite and compelling study of Burke’s political life. Burke’s earliest works, before his engagement to the Rockingham Whigs, were concerned with fundamental questions in political philosophy and aesthetics. The Tory ...

Why go high?

Adam Shatz, 19 November 2020

... excluded from the New Deal and Fair Deal. White anger later found a grim and calculating ally in Richard Nixon, with his ‘Southern strategy’, his appeals to the ‘silent majority’ and his calls for ‘law and order’ in America’s cities.Yet no American president has so flagrantly pandered to white grievance as Donald Trump, even as he has praised ...
From Author to Reader: A Social Study of Books 
by Peter Mann.
Routledge, 189 pp., £8.95, October 1982, 0 7100 9089 7
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David Copperfield 
by Charles Dickens, edited by Nina Burgis.
Oxford, 781 pp., £40, March 1981, 0 19 812492 9
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Martin Chuzzlewit 
by Charles Dickens, edited by Margaret Cardwell.
Oxford, 923 pp., £45, December 1982, 0 19 812488 0
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Books and their Readers in 18th-Century England 
edited by Isabel Rivers.
Leicester University Press, 267 pp., £15, July 1982, 0 7185 1189 1
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Mumby’s Publishing and Bookselling in the 20th Century 
by Ian Norrie.
Bell and Hyman, 253 pp., £12.95, October 1982, 0 7135 1341 1
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Reading Relations 
by Bernard Sharratt.
Harvester, 350 pp., £18.95, February 1982, 0 7108 0059 2
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... satisfactorily described. The consumption of all kinds of book is problematic. Purchased books may not be read; books which are read may be taken or mistaken in a multitude of ways. There is no ratings system which will tell us for books, as for television, what gratifies and what does not. All we have are the crude and ...