Renée kept a crocodile

Lucie Elven: ‘Portrait of an Unknown Lady’, 1 June 2023

Portrait of an Unknown Lady 
by María Gainza, translated by Thomas Bunstead.
Harvill Secker, 188 pp., £14.99, March 2022, 978 1 78730 324 9
Show More
Show More
... some optical apparatus at a pair of Sylvester the Cats up on the wall; they were separated by a white space, and I had to use my eye muscles to bring them together, pulling them both into the middle so that one lay on top of the other. Looking at [Alexia] across the restaurant table, during my annual visitation, was like seeing two obdurately discrete ...

The Vanishing Brothel

Linda Nochlin, 6 March 1997

A Life of Picasso. Vol. II: 1907-1917 
by John Richardson and Marilyn McCully.
Cape, 500 pp., £30, November 1996, 0 224 03120 1
Show More
Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man 
by Norman Mailer.
Little, Brown, 398 pp., £25, November 1996, 0 316 88173 2
Show More
Picasso and the Spanish Tradition 
edited by Jonathan Brown.
Yale, 208 pp., £30, November 1996, 0 300 06475 6
Show More
Show More
... of Art Masterpieces: with Fouquet’s Agnès Sorel as the Virgin, where the sitter’s globular white breast thrusts it-self provocatively out at the viewer above a tightly-laced bodice; and with Grünewald’s green, twisted, lacerated body of Christ on the Cross, which, since it figured suffering and Christianity, both outside the pale in my progressive ...

A Magazine of Wisdom

Linda Colley, 4 September 1997

Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature 
by Nicholas Robinson.
Yale, 214 pp., £30, October 1996, 0 300 06801 8
Show More
The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Vol. III: Party, Parliament and the American War 1774-80 
edited by Warren Elofson and John Woods.
Oxford, 713 pp., £75, September 1996, 0 19 822414 1
Show More
Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire 
by Frederick Whelan.
Pittsburgh, 384 pp., £39.95, December 1996, 0 8229 3927 4
Show More
Show More
... he was the sixth most caricatured individual in Britain; and only three other politicians, William Pitt the Younger, Charles James Fox and North, featured in prints more. Yet, as Robinson points out, before 1778 visual representations of Burke were rare: and this is suggestive. In retrospect, Burke’s speeches in the 1760s and early 1770s, warning of ...

Scientific Antlers

Steven Shapin: Fraud in the Lab, 4 March 1999

The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science and Character 
by Daniel Kevles.
Norton, 509 pp., £21, October 1998, 0 393 04103 4
Show More
Show More
... you can take a gene coding for a specific antibody from one highly inbred strain of mice (white) and stick it into the fertilised egg of another strain (black). That ‘transgene’ comes to be carried in each cell of the host mouse’s body, and you can easily see why there should be much practical as well as conceptual interest in exactly what the ...

In the Gasworks

David Wheatley, 18 May 2000

To Ireland, I 
by Paul Muldoon.
Oxford, 150 pp., £19.99, March 2000, 0 19 818475 1
Show More
Bandanna 
by Paul Muldoon.
Faber, 64 pp., £7.99, February 1999, 0 571 19762 0
Show More
The Birds 
translated by Paul Muldoon, by Richard Martin.
Gallery Press, 80 pp., £13.95, July 1999, 1 85235 245 0
Show More
Reading Paul Muldoon 
by Clair Wills.
Bloodaxe, 222 pp., £10.95, October 1998, 1 85224 348 1
Show More
Show More
... initialled Amergin. This ur-bard’s ‘Alphabet Calendar’ receives an ingenious reading in The White Goddess, Muldoon reminds us, where its Protean swagger (‘I am a stag: of seven tines/I am a flood: across a plain’) is shown to conceal an alphabet of druidic tree-lore. Amergin probably wouldn’t have recognised the Roman alphabet; Ogham would have ...

Hormone Wars

A. Craig Copetas, 23 April 1992

Crazy Cock 
by Henry Miller.
HarperCollins, 202 pp., £14.99, March 1992, 0 00 223943 4
Show More
The Happiest Man Alive 
by Mary Dearborn.
HarperCollins, 368 pp., £18.50, July 1991, 0 00 215172 3
Show More
Show More
... Michael Fraenkel; fashion editor: Earl of Selvage (aka Henry Miller); and Lawrence Durrell and William Saroyan as the literary editors. As Dearborn notes in a wonderful chapter on life at the Villa Seurat, Miller’s Paris address, ‘most of the editors were appointed without first being consulted: Saroyan, for example, claimed never to have met Miller in ...

At Tate Britain

Gaby Wood: Paula Rego, 7 October 2021

... grown to equal the brutality of her everyday life. As she reads of ‘bleak shores’ and ‘death-white realms’, the illustrated birds take flight. She forms of these places ‘an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive’.In Rego’s hands this communion with ...

Pure Vibe

Christopher Tayler: Don DeLillo, 5 May 2016

Zero K 
by Don DeLillo.
Picador, 274 pp., £16.99, May 2016, 978 1 5098 2285 0
Show More
Show More
... reveries. In some ways, the middle-period novels that made him famous do the same, only better: White Noise (1985) is a non-stop sequence of witty routines with a more ingenuous straight man than usual and an uncharacteristically warm current of ‘eerie feeling’ for suburban family life. But slipping a few sugar cubes into his medicine bag isn’t the ...

Lola did the driving

Inigo Thomas: Pevsner’s Suffolk, 5 May 2016

Suffolk: East, The Buildings of England 
by James Bettley and Nikolaus Pevsner.
Yale, 677 pp., £35, April 2015, 978 0 300 19654 2
Show More
Show More
... feel about the placing of such an establishment in this location, has a magical quality … The white dome, which is the outer shell of the containment building that protects the reactor and its steam generator, is about 230 ft (70 metres) high and can be glimpsed from miles around. Pevsner, admirer of Gropius and risk-taker that he was, had no obvious ...

The Frowniest Spot on Earth

Will Self: Life in the Aerotropolis, 28 April 2011

Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next 
by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay.
Allen Lane, 480 pp., £14.99, March 2011, 978 1 84614 100 3
Show More
Show More
... Quarter. Lindsay is told that ‘nobody walks in Dubai,’ but this should be modified: nobody white walks in Dubai. Everywhere I went – along the baking sidewalks of Sheikh Zayed Road, through the dust clouds boiling into the phantasm of Tiger Woods Design’s golf development – I encountered brown and black men, on foot, parted from their families ...

Barbarism with a Human Face

Slavoj Žižek: Lenin v. Stalin in Kiev, 8 May 2014

... A recent biopic, Andrei Kravchuk’s Admiral, celebrates the life of Aleksandr Kolchak, the White commander who governed Siberia between 1918 and 1920. But it’s worth remembering the totalitarian potential, as well as the outright brutality, of the White counter-revolutionary forces during this period. Had the ...

Miss Lachrymose

Liz Brown: Doris Day’s Performances, 11 September 2008

Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door 
by David Kaufman.
Virgin, 628 pp., £29.95, June 2008, 978 1 905264 30 8
Show More
Show More
... we imagine between her face and her mask.’ The images of Doris Day (that blonde hair, those white teeth) and her personas as the spunky girl next door, the tightly wound career woman and the gung-ho housewife have been fixed for years now, but the person who played Doris Day is less clear. It’s difficult even to know what to call her. The band leader ...

A Wonder and a Scandal

Peter Campbell: Titian, 5 April 2001

Titian: The Complete Paintings 
by Filippo Pedrocco and Maria Agnese Chiari Moreto Weil.
Thames and Hudson, 336 pp., £50, March 2001, 0 500 09297 4
Show More
Show More
... in terms of life-likeness, on what Titian achieved in the first decades of the 16th century. William Rossetti compared Titian to Shakespeare – both were universal geniuses, both loyal to their home towns. A deeper resemblance is the impossibility in either case of identifying a coherent character, a voice in the work. Titian makes you think about what ...

A Dangerously Liquid World

John Sutherland: Alcoholics Anonymous, 30 November 2000

Bill W. and Mr Wilson: The Legend and Life of AA’s Co-Founder 
by Matthew Raphael.
Massachusetts, 206 pp., £18.50, June 2000, 1 55849 245 3
Show More
Show More
... With its ten million members, it’s bigger than the Freemasons, the Rotarians, the TUC, the White Aryan Resistance, the Samaritans, the KKK, the Women’s Institute and – in terms of weekly attendance – the Church of England. But if AA is big, so is alcoholism. If you accept the modest estimate that 10 per cent of the adult population of this ...

Zest

David Reynolds: The Real Mrs Miniver, 25 April 2002

The Real Mrs Miniver 
by Ysenda Maxtone Graham.
Murray, 314 pp., £17.99, November 2001, 0 7195 5541 8
Show More
Mrs Miniver 
by Jan Struther.
Virago, 153 pp., £7.99, November 2001, 1 85381 090 8
Show More
Show More
... into the war. No evidence is cited for this statement, possibly made when Struther stayed at the White House in June 1943, and it bears the hallmark of FDR’s usual hyperbole in conversation. What one can say is that the impact of Mrs Miniver was both a cause and an effect of the sea-change in American opinion during the summer of 1940. Opinion polls in the ...