A bout de Bogart

Jenny Diski, 19 May 2011

Tough without a Gun: The Extraordinary Life of Humphrey Bogart 
by Stefan Kanfer.
Faber, 288 pp., £14.99, February 2011, 978 0 571 26072 0
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... They Fall – Bogart’s final film – and after a moment growls ‘Bogie’ in American-accented French. Before I viewed that breathless moment, I was too young to have seen or wanted to see an actual Bogart movie, and not enough time had yet passed for Bogart to become an emblem of another period. After A bout de souffle, I went to all the NFT’s regular ...

The Unlikeliest Loophole

Eamon Duffy: Catherine of Aragon, 28 July 2011

Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen 
by Giles Tremlett.
Faber, 458 pp., £9.99, April 2011, 978 0 571 23512 4
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... for sure who planted the idea of annulling the marriage in Henry’s head. According to Henry, the French ambassador, in the course of negotiations for a marriage between Princess Mary and a member of the French royal family, suggested that Mary might be a bastard because of the doubts surrounding the papal dispensation for ...

Wine Flasks in Bordeaux, Sail Spires in Cardiff

Hal Foster: Richard Rogers, 19 October 2006

Richard Rogers: Architecture of the Future 
by Kenneth Powell.
Birkhäuser, 520 pp., £29.90, December 2005, 3 7643 7049 1
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Richard Rogers: Complete Works, Vol. III 
by Kenneth Powell.
Phaidon, 319 pp., £59.95, July 2006, 0 7148 4429 2
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... It sounds like a modern fairytale: in 1971 two architects, neither of them French, win the most important commission in Paris since the war, the design for the Centre Pompidou, and become famous overnight. The two – a 38-year-old Englishman called Richard Rogers and a 35-year-old Italian called Renzo Piano – design an exuberant building that delights some and outrages others: a glass box supported by a superstructure of steel and concrete, each façade a playful grid of prefabricated columns and diagonal braces, with a transparent escalator tube that snakes up the front, and other service tubes, picked out in primary colours, that run up the other sides ...

In Fiery Letters

Mark Ford: F.T. Prince, 8 February 2018

Reading F.T. Prince 
by Will May.
Liverpool, 256 pp., £75, December 2016, 978 1 78138 333 9
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... writers, the novelist Dan Jacobson. Prince’s delicate health and precocious interest in French Symbolist poetry, in particular the work of Mallarmé, Verlaine and Valéry, set him apart from his fellow pupils at Kimberley’s Christian Brothers College. In his late teens a chance conversation with the philosopher J.N. Findlay, whom he met on a ...

So Much Smoke

Tom Shippey: King Arthur, 20 December 2018

King Arthur: the Making of the Legend 
by Nicholas Higham.
Yale, 380 pp., £25, October 2018, 978 0 300 21092 7
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... Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books,’ David Dumville wrote in 1977; and he was backed up by, for instance, J.N.L. Myres in 1986: ‘No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.’ In his new book, Nicholas Higham cites neither opinion but certainly ...

What’s Missing

Katrina Navickas: Tawney, Polanyi, Thompson, 11 October 2018

The Moral Economists: R.H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E.P. Thompson and the Critique of Capitalism 
by Tim Rogan.
Princeton, 263 pp., £30, December 2017, 978 0 691 17300 9
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... the legacy of their ancestors, those who became class conscious as a result of the Industrial and French Revolutions. Polanyi also taught for the WEA in London and for the Oxford extramural department in the 1930s, but according to Rogan, Polanyi’s Damascene conversion occurred when he fled Hungary for Austria following the failed revolution of 1919. He ...

Ghosting

Hal Foster: Dead to the World, 29 July 2021

Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons 
by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Zone, 320 pp., £28, April 2021, 978 1 942130 47 5
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... for other protagonists in the genre, whether it be the prototypical Odysseus, the 16th-century French peasant Martin Guerre, who has to displace an impostor, or Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, who is received so badly that he relinquishes all claims, including to his own name: ‘But now I am buried underneath the living, under papers, under acts, under the ...

Socialism without Socialism

Peter Jenkins, 20 March 1986

Socialist Register 1985/86: Social Democracy and After 
edited by Ralph Miliband, John Saville, Marcel Liebman and Leo Panitch.
Merlin, 489 pp., £15, February 1986, 9780850363395
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... here, taken a sharp anti-Soviet and pro-American turn: indeed, for the first time since the French Revolution the intellectuals appear to have no left-wing project of any kind. In Britain, where Marxist intellectuals are accustomed to addressing themselves to the fact of the Labour Party, the debate has taken a more practical, and even ...

Heaven’s Waiting Room

Alex Harvey: When Powell met Pressburger, 20 March 2025

The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger 
edited by Nathalie Morris and Claire Smith.
BFI, 206 pp., £30, October 2023, 978 1 83871 917 3
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... Allan Gray (whose real name was Józef Żmigrod); the German art director Hein Heckroth; and the French and German cinematographers Georges Périnal and Erwin Hillier. The company also had the financial backing of J. Arthur Rank, a wealthy Methodist industrialist from Yorkshire: ‘Not since the time of the Renaissance popes has a group of artists found a ...

Speak for yourself, matey

Adam Mars-Jones: The Uses of Camp, 22 November 2012

How to Be Gay 
by David Halperin.
Harvard, 549 pp., £25.95, August 2012, 978 0 674 06679 3
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... height,’ he said, ‘and the weight of your chin, I’d recommend a hat with a broader brim.’ David Halperin’s new book, How to Be Gay, addresses the mysterious persistence of discredited elements from pre-Stonewall gay male culture. In theory camp should have been rendered obsolete by the arrival of models of gay behaviour not driven by the old toxic ...

Sins of the Three Pashas

Edward Luttwak: The Armenian Genocide, 4 June 2015

‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’: A History of the Armenian Genocide 
by Ronald Grigor Suny.
Princeton, 520 pp., £24.95, March 2015, 978 0 691 14730 7
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... resisted vast numbers of soldiers, gendarmes and would-be looters until they were evacuated by French warships. Musa Dagh is also the site of Turkey’s single remaining Armenian village, Vak’if, resettled in 1918 when the area was under French rule. Werfel’s characters are his own, but the book starts with very ...

I’d smash you in the face

Thomas Meaney: MAGA’s Debt to Buckley, 22 January 2026

Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America 
by Sam Tanenhaus.
Random House, 1040 pp., £33, June 2025, 978 0 375 50234 7
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... the family hacienda, Great Elm, staffed it with Mexican servants, took out a large loan from a French bank and settled down to raise a family in which William Jr, born in 1925, was the sixth of ten children.Great Elm was a hive of reaction. At the dinner table William Jr excelled at parroting his father’s opinions. The children were taught the sins of ...

We Are Conquerors

Adam Shatz: Ben-Gurion’s Obsession, 24 October 2019

A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion 
by Tom Segev.
Head of Zeus, 804 pp., £30, August 2019, 978 1 78954 462 6
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... David Ben-Gurion​ , the founder of the state of Israel, was brooding, explosive, often on the verge of collapse: every obstacle he faced was a ‘catastrophe’. He dabbled in mysticism, consulted fortune-tellers, claimed to see flying saucers, and lived according to his whims. At one point he went on an unannounced holiday from his duties as prime minister to take driving lessons on the French Riviera; on another occasion, he spent a week studying Buddhism in Burma, and tried to persuade his teachers that he’d stumbled on a contradiction in their doctrine no one else had unearthed ...

Not Even a Might-Have Been

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Chips’s Adventures, 19 January 2023

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1024 pp., £35, March 2021, 978 1 78633 181 6
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1938-43 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1120 pp., £35, September 2021, 978 1 78633 182 3
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1943-57 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1168 pp., £35, September 2022, 978 1 5291 5172 5
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... to find the hotel full of ‘very young rosy-faced English officers on leave with nice young French ladies who clumsily pretend in broken English to be their wives’. This ‘bon ville’ was Cabourg, Proust’s Balbec. Channon dined with Princesse Soutzo: ‘I was between Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau … Proust has always been kind to me and I ...

Hate, Greed, Lust and Doom

Sean O’Faolain, 16 April 1981

William Faulkner: His Life and Work 
by David Minter.
Johns Hopkins, 325 pp., £9.50, January 1981, 0 8018 2347 1
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... to wander, our batteries go dead, our hearing-aid ceases to function. I have to say what Professor David Minter is far too sensitive a critic not to know well, often hints but never says outright. Large regions of Faulkner’s novels are inaudible. In the racing sense as well as the literary sense let us have a glance at his form in that alleged masterpiece ...