Where be your jibes now?

Patricia Lockwood: David Foster Wallace, 13 July 2023

Something to Do with Paying Attention 
by David Foster Wallace.
McNally Editions, 136 pp., $18, April 2022, 978 1 946022 27 1
Show More
Show More
... wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into colour. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.’ He did not feel that, maybe, but he could make a man who did. ‘I don’t remember what I did with all my real attention, what-all it was going towards,’ Fogle says. It ...

A Rumbling of Things Unknown

Jacqueline Rose: Marilyn Monroe, 26 April 2012

... a young black woman who would end up a follower of Malcolm X. Monroe, it turned out, was the only white star who had ever interested Christine. In fact she identified with her: ‘She’s been hurt. She knows the score … I don’t read the gossip stuff. That’s what comes out of her movies. She’s someone who was abused. I could identify with her. I never ...

Paisley’s Progress

Tom Paulin, 1 April 1982

... for example, in a speech which Paisley made in 1973, the year the House of Commons approved a White Paper for a Northern Ireland Assembly. During the Commons debate, Paisley said this: In many senses we have been caught up in a struggle that goes far beyond the basic differences between two sections of the community. There are other elements in the ...

You have to take it

Joanne O’Leary: Elizabeth Hardwick’s Style, 17 November 2022

A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick 
by Cathy Curtis.
Norton, 400 pp., £25, January, 978 1 324 00552 0
Show More
The Uncollected Essays 
by Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Alex Andriesse.
NYRB, 304 pp., £15.99, May, 978 1 68137 623 3
Show More
Show More
... Hardwick recalled, ‘skinny, smoking, and he was quite surprised that I had read everything.’ William Phillips, who co-edited Partisan Review with Rahv, described her as ‘one of our most cutting minds’, ‘charming even when most devastating or malicious’. Isaiah Berlin said she was ‘much more bitchy’ than Mary McCarthy, ‘but sharper and more ...

No Illusions

John Kerrigan: Syntax of Slavery, 20 November 2025

Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades 
by David Eltis.
Cambridge, 442 pp., £30, February, 978 1 009 51897 0
Show More
Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery 
by Ana Lucia Araujo.
Chicago, 640 pp., £32, October 2024, 978 0 226 77158 8
Show More
The Zorg: A Tale of Greed, Murder and the Abolition of Slavery 
by Siddharth Kara.
Doubleday, 304 pp., £22, October, 978 1 5299 6432 5
Show More
Zong! 
by m. nourbeSe philip.
Silver Press, 256 pp., £13.99, November 2023, 978 0 9957162 4 7
Show More
Show More
... evil doers’. Leyland also became a partner in a bank jointly run by the Liverpool abolitionist William Roscoe, whom Melville singled out as ‘good and great’. Lawyer, art collector, botanist and public benefactor, Roscoe was elected MP for the city, after the usual round of bribery, in 1806, just in time to make himself unpopular by voting for ...

Remembering the taeog

D.A.N. Jones, 30 August 1990

People of the Black Mountains. Vol. II: The Eggs of the Eagle 
by Raymond Williams.
Chatto, 330 pp., £13.99, August 1990, 0 7011 3564 6
Show More
In the Blue Light of African Dreams 
by Paul Watkins.
Heinemann, 282 pp., £13.99, August 1990, 0 09 174307 9
Show More
Friedrich Harris: Shooting the hero 
by Philip Purser.
Quartet, 250 pp., £12.95, May 1990, 0 7043 2759 7
Show More
The Journey Home 
by Dermot Bolger.
Viking, 294 pp., £13.99, June 1990, 0 670 83215 4
Show More
Evenings at Mongini’s 
by Russell Lucas.
Heinemann, 262 pp., £12.95, January 1990, 0 434 43646 1
Show More
Show More
... of the Vikings’ leader. Moving on 300 years, Williams tells of the fairly notorious William de Braos, the Lord of Brecon in King John’s time: he was said to be always prating of God and putting on pious airs, but he invited the leading Welsh princes to a party at Abergavenny and killed them all, sending men out afterwards to kill their wives ...

Petal by Petal

C.K. Stead, 27 May 1993

E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962 
edited by George Firmage.
Liveright, 1102 pp., £33, January 1993, 0 87140 145 2
Show More
Show More
... Remarks considered by the French censor to be anti-French and pro-German in letters by his friend William Slater Brown, and Cummings’s staunch refusal to dissociate himself from them, or even to say that he ‘hated the Boche’, resulted in their being incarcerated together for three months while the possibility that they were spies was investigated. The ...

Diary

Peter Wollen: In the Tunnel, 28 April 1994

... 19th century by Edward Watkin of the Southeastern Railway Company and his partner and engineer, William Low. Despite the success of the great Alpine tunnels – Saint-Gotthard, Simplon, Mont Cenis – it is doubtful that Watkin and Low could have succeeded with their project of tunnelling under sea over such a distance, given the technology and the ...

End of Empire

Philip Towle, 22 February 1990

... as one resistance movement achieves some success, others take heart. Because of Algeria’s large white population the French hoped to retain their colony there after Tunisia and Morocco had won their independence: the ferocious Algerian war of independence was the result. The British fondly imagined that they would still be running Africa decades after India ...

Good Things

Michael Hofmann, 20 April 1995

Heart’s Journey in Winter 
by James Buchan.
Harvill, 201 pp., £14.99, April 1995, 9780002730099
Show More
Show More
... themselves in the wrong lives: Adam Murray in his friend Johnny’s, John Chadwick in his rival William Nelson’s, Richard Verey in absolutely anyone’s but his own, Richard Fisher in that of the American spy Polina Mertz. The governing myth, I think, is Grimm’s. It is the story of the ferryman who presses the oars into the hands of a passenger, who is ...

Oque?

John Bayley, 30 November 1995

Byrne 
by Anthony Burgess.
Hutchinson, 150 pp., £14.99, October 1995, 0 09 179204 5
Show More
Show More
... dislike (not envy) of Graham Greene, on these grounds, emerges in a couplet from Byrne: And white men go to pieces, as we’ve seen, In overlauded trash by Graham Greene. Greene achieved a bogus newness, in Burgess’s view, by laboriously making grace and sin the novelties of a kind of fiction which was no more than the old sentimental sensationalism ...
After Hannibal 
by Barry Unsworth.
Hamish Hamilton, 242 pp., £16, September 1996, 0 241 13342 4
Show More
Show More
... converting a house for their retirement. The Greens are so entirely married they even look alike: white-haired, spry, with candid blue eyes. They will prove Monti’s pattern only partial, for in their case it’s the dream house that’s going to crumble, not the dream itself, which is the fabric of their relationship. They’re wrestling ineptly with ...

Bounty Hunter

John Sutherland, 17 July 1997

Riders of the Purple Sage 
by Zane Grey.
Oxford, 265 pp., £4.99, May 1995, 0 19 282443 0
Show More
The Man of the Forest: The Authorised Version 
by Zane Grey.
Nebraska, 383 pp., $15, September 1996, 0 8032 7062 3
Show More
The Thundering Herd: The Authorised Version 
by Zane Grey.
Nebraska, 400 pp., $16, September 1996, 0 8032 7065 8
Show More
Show More
... until the Forties. They were aided by films (and in the Forties and Fifties a TV series) starring William Boyd – a star who in the geriatric last stages of his career had barely a hop left in him. At the crucial stage of Zane Grey’s career, 1905-8, Lina took charge as her husband’s literary agent, editor and financial patron. Using his wife’s ...

Morituri

D.A.N. Jones, 23 May 1985

Secret Villages 
by Douglas Dunn.
Faber, 170 pp., £8.95, April 1985, 0 571 13443 2
Show More
Miss Peabody’s Inheritance 
by Elizabeth Jolley.
Viking, 157 pp., £7.95, April 1985, 0 670 47952 7
Show More
Mr Scobie’s Riddle 
by Elizabeth Jolley.
Penguin, 226 pp., £2.95, April 1985, 0 14 007490 2
Show More
The Modern Common Wind 
by Don Bloch.
Heinemann, 234 pp., £9.95, May 1985, 0 434 07551 5
Show More
Fiskadoro 
by Denis Johnson.
Chatto, 221 pp., £9.50, May 1985, 0 7011 2935 2
Show More
Show More
... sexy nurses and then put out to dry in the sun, pinned up in shawls. Mr Scobie reads the Bible and William Blake, and then he makes up little riddles. One of them is about dying – but nobody wants to hear about that: it is held to be a tasteless riddle. This is a comedy to make the reader doleful. Don Bloch, an American, writes about hospitals and medicine ...

Sweet Home

Susannah Clapp, 19 May 1983

Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems 1927-1979 
Chatto/Hogarth, 287 pp., £10.95, April 1983, 0 7011 2694 9Show More
Show More
... the New York Public Library, persuaded Bishop to take up poetry rather than medicine after Vassar; William Carlos Williams reported after a reading: ‘Marianne Moore had a little girl named Elizabeth Bishop in tow. It seems she writes poetry.’ Moore is hymned here in one of Bishop’s less successful poems. ‘Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore’ celebrates ...