On V.R. Lang

Mark Ford, 4 July 2024

... Roman-striped skirt. As if it were a movie, she was glamorous and aloof. The girl I was talking to said: “That’s Bunny Lang. I’d like to give her a good slap.”’ If Lang’s truncated life ever was made into a movie, this scene might open it.As Rosa Campbell points out in her introduction to The Miraculous Season, a new and expanded selection of ...

Cartwheels down the aisle

Barbara Newman: Byzantine Intersectionality, 26 September 2024

Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender and Race in the Middle Ages 
by Roland Betancourt.
Princeton, 274 pp., £28, March 2023, 978 0 691 24354 2
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... and spent their last twelve years cohabiting chastely in a single cell. Andronicus, it’s said, never recognised his former wife.What did it mean – physically as well as metaphysically – to ‘become male’? In his provocative study of Byzantine sex and gender, Roland Betancourt points out that more than the adoption of masculine dress was at ...

‘I’m coming, my Tetsie!’

Freya Johnston: Samuel Johnson’s Shoes, 9 May 2019

Samuel Johnson 
edited by David Womersley.
Oxford, 1344 pp., £95, May 2018, 978 0 19 960951 2
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... easily and strongly his feelings were affected. ‘It was a love-match on both sides,’ Johnson said simply. He was born in Market Square, slap bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and ...

Diary

August Kleinzahler: Remembering Thom Gunn, 4 November 2004

... like it at the time, but it was a gift, really. About me personally he seldom took issue. If I said something judgmental about someone he’d give me a look. I was once walking down the street in Berkeley with another poet, quite famous, a truly reprehensible shit. He doesn’t care for me either. We’ve just had a rather uncomfortable cup of coffee ...

Squealing to Survive

John Lahr: Clancy was here, 19 July 2018

Black Sunset: Hollywood Sex, Lies, Glamour, Betrayal and Raging Egos 
by Clancy Sigal.
Icon, 352 pp., £12.99, May 2018, 978 1 78578 439 2
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The London Lover: My Weekend that Lasted Thirty Years 
by Clancy Sigal.
Bloomsbury, 274 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 4088 8580 2
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... of its high rollers and low riders. ‘This is where it’s happening and I’m part of it,’ he said about the thrill of Hollywood in its heyday; the compulsion to be near the hot centre never left his restless heart. Somehow he was always in the frame, writing his name on the barbarous history of his times. ‘Clancy was here’ was the motive for his ...

Streamlined Smiles

Rosemary Dinnage: Erik Erikson, 2 March 2000

Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik Erikson 
by Lawrence Friedman.
Free Association, 592 pp., £15.95, May 1999, 9781853434716
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... had by then had a long, long life; his period of renown as psychologist, author and sage could be said to have begun in the mid-1950s, when his book Childhood and Society began to take off; it peaked in 1970, when his picture appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine and a Berkeley sociologist quoted by Friedman ...

I hope it hurt

Jo Applin: Nochlin’s Question, 4 November 2021

Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader 
edited by Maura Reilly.
Thames and Hudson, 472 pp., £28, March 2020, 978 0 500 29555 7
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Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? 
by Linda Nochlin.
Thames and Hudson, 111 pp., £9.99, January, 978 0 500 02384 6
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... in 1970 by the New York gallerist Richard Feigen. It was a genuine inquiry. He would love, he said, to show women artists. The problem was he couldn’t find any good enough. Stumped for an answer at the time, Nochlin continued to consider the question. Her response came a year later in the form of an essay that appropriated Feigen’s question for its ...

Bunches of Guys

Owen Bennett-Jones: Just the Right Amount of Violence, 19 December 2013

Decoding al-Qaida’s Strategy: The Deep Battle against America 
by Michael Ryan.
Columbia, 368 pp., £23.15, September 2013, 978 0 231 16384 2
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The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organisations 
by Jacob Shapiro.
Princeton, 352 pp., £19.95, July 2013, 978 0 691 15721 4
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... Another senior al-Qaida figure, Abu al Walid al-Masri, put it even more bluntly. Bin Laden, he said, had led his followers to ‘the abyss’. A decade later those concerns seemed to have been vindicated. By 2011 al-Qaida had been reduced to a few bands of men hiding in the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Distracted by the need to evade ...

How to Get Ahead at the NSA

Daniel Soar, 24 October 2013

... as it has been technically possible for it to access is widely accepted. In response to Edward Snowden’s leaks, the NSA put out a statement in August to expand on the public description of its mission, defining signals intelligence (or SIGINT) – its primary job – as ‘the production of foreign intelligence through the collection, processing ...

Saint Shakespeare

Barbara Everett, 19 August 2010

... change can ever be fully explained. ‘We prove, we do not explain our birth,’ Marianne Moore said. There is always an element of the random in the historical which demands respect. If Shakespeare himself was a romancing artist, old-fashioned beside sophisticated and newly classicising contemporaries, it was perhaps because freer methods allowed him to ...

Bandini to Hackmuth

Christopher Tayler: John Fante, 21 September 2000

Ask the Dust 
by John Fante.
Rebel Inc, 198 pp., £6.99, September 1999, 0 86241 987 5
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Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante 
by Stephen Cooper.
Rebel Inc, 406 pp., £16.99, May 2000, 9781841950228
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... relationship. Unreasonably, Bandini has just been abusing her shoes: ‘I hate you,’ she said. I felt her hatred. I could smell it, even hear it coming out of her, but I sneered again. ‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘Because there must be something pretty fine about a guy who rates your hatred.’ Then she ...

Jingoes

R.W. Johnson: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War, 6 May 2004

The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War 
by Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw.
Cambridge, 379 pp., £45, May 2003, 0 521 82453 2
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... at the same time not antagonising the National Party government to no good purpose: we must, he said, walk a tightrope through civil war, revolution and any other form of mayhem, and be waiting at the end to embrace the winner. ‘Some sort of war might well have broken out in 1899 even if gold had never been discovered in the Transvaal in 1886,’ Hyam and ...

Alan Bennett writes about his new play

Alan Bennett: ‘The Habit of Art’, 5 November 2009

... where the dons dined and, hearing those harsh, quacking tones without knowing whose they were, I said to my neighbour that it sounded like the voice of the devil. Someone better informed put me right. It was Auden, at that time still with blondish hair and the face yet to go under the harrow.I don’t think I’d read much of his poetry or would have ...

Disguise-Language

Andrew O’Hagan: Christopher Isherwood’s Artifice, 26 December 2024

Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out 
by Katherine Bucknell.
Chatto, 852 pp., £35, June 2024, 978 0 7011 8638 8
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... detected through the thicket of names. ‘A wonderful, dainty, very loving little novelist’, he said of his friend Christopher Isherwood. As with many of those who are dependent for their status on the high status of others – none more than Spender, who thought ‘continually of those who were truly great’ – there appeared to be a measure of disdain ...

How does he come to be mine?

Tim Parks: Dickens’s Children, 8 August 2013

Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens 
by Robert Gottlieb.
Farrar, Straus, 239 pp., £16.99, December 2012, 978 0 374 29880 7
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... sisters. In the event, baby Dora died only months after her fictional namesake. The last boy was Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, named after the aristocrat and hugely popular novelist, who, needless to say, was a friend of Dickens and published in Household Words. With the one exception of Dora, then (a tribute to his own genius perhaps, since he felt that ...