Heroes of Our Time

Karl Miller, 19 May 1988

The Monument 
by T. Behrens.
Cape, 258 pp., £11.95, May 1988, 0 224 02510 4
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The Passion of John Aspinall 
by Brian Masters.
Cape, 360 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 0 224 02353 5
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... Waiting in the wings is a book by him about Ursula, entitled Style, which, according to Graham Greene, who was sent the manuscript, might be edited for publication. There may be a cult in the making – and one could imagine a film by Antonioni, whose scriptwriter, Mark Peploe, was intrigued by J. Behrens in his last days. Ursula’s life resembles John ...

The Common Law and the Constitution

Stephen Sedley, 8 May 1997

... It is in their judgments that you will first find the tests of lawful decision-making which Lord Greene later summarised in the much-cited Wednesbury case, a decision which introduced no new doctrine of law and of which the outcome (upholding a highly questionable ban on children going to the cinema on Sundays) exemplifies the state of torpor into which ...

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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... Loach and Garnett were ready to move on from the BBC, where the liberal regime overseen by Hugh Greene was coming to an end. Loach had already made one thoroughly unsatisfactory venture into feature film with Poor Cow (1967), co-starring Carol White and Terence Stamp, the latter fresh from John Schlesinger’s grandiose Far from the Madding Crowd. He and ...

I’m always in the club

Christian Lorentzen: Peter Matthiessen in Paris, 5 February 2026

True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen 
by Lance Richardson.
Chatto, 709 pp., £30, October 2025, 978 1 78474 301 7
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... Best Writers (2016), Joel Whitney suggested that among those Matthiessen was surveilling was Richard Wright, who was living in Paris after breaking with the Communist Party in 1944.Richardson does not rule out Wright as an initial target, but working from Matthiessen’s unpublished accounts of his CIA work, one of which is called ‘THE PARIS REVIEW ...

Last Night Fever

David Cannadine: The Proms, 6 September 2007

... but also to educate them in new musical trends, and major works by Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Richard Strauss were premiered at the Proms before the First World War. But in the beginning, Wood’s programmes were much less demanding, often consisting of many short items, so as not to bore the audience. This was especially true of the early final ...

What are we allowed to say?

David Bromwich, 22 September 2016

... only a mild demur regarding the medical evidence) the judgment by the cultural theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic that ‘the immediate short-term harms of hate speech include rapid breathing, headaches, raised blood pressure, dizziness, rapid pulse rate, drug-taking, risk-taking behaviour and even suicide.’ He has to treat the nonsense ...

A Rumbling of Things Unknown

Jacqueline Rose: Marilyn Monroe, 26 April 2012

... Zanuck, leaving Hollywood for New York to set up her own film company with the photographer Milton Greene (she made sure she controlled 51 per cent of the stock). It was a scandal. Although the project was short-lived, she was at that moment the only star to have taken on the moguls and won. Fox agreed to give her script and director approval on all her films ...

Different Speeds, Same Furies

Perry Anderson: Powell v. Proust, 19 July 2018

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time 
by Hilary Spurling.
Hamish Hamilton, 509 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 241 14383 4
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... under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight hundred from Richard Ellmann. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was 62; Graham ...