Harrison Rex

Carey Harrison, 7 November 1991

Conversations with Marlon Brando 
by Lawrence Grobel.
Bloomsbury, 177 pp., £14.99, September 1991, 9780747508168
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George Sanders: An Exhausted Life 
by Richard Vanderbeets.
Robson, 271 pp., £15.95, September 1991, 0 86051 749 7
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Rex Harrison: A Biography 
by Nicholas Wapshott.
Chatto, 331 pp., £16, October 1991, 0 7011 3764 9
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Me: Stories of my Life 
by Katharine Hepburn.
Viking, 418 pp., £16.99, September 1991, 0 670 83974 4
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... been that first impressions deceive, that beneath the angular features and the schoolmarm manner may, perhaps, lie a less mannish sweetness, denied to the camera in scene after scene. So bony is her prose style that the same tantalising process is visited on the reader, and as on screen, alternating the terse and the yielding, she seduces us. Over the erotic ...

Scrapbook

Edward Pearce, 26 July 1990

A Sparrow’s Flight: Memoirs 
by Lord Hailsham.
Collins, 463 pp., £17.50, July 1990, 0 00 215545 1
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... affection for that uncomplicated scoundrel is foolish. The Hogg view of his Tory colleagues may not be backed by much detail, but we get the message. Maudling was a lightweight, Macleod a first-rater, Edward Boyle is rightly adored, Margaret Thatcher did right by Quintin and so, despite differences, should be seen as a good thing. There are ...

Stand the baby on its head

John Bayley, 22 July 1993

The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales 
edited by Alison Luire.
Oxford, 455 pp., £17.95, May 1993, 0 19 214218 6
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The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales 
edited by Angela Carter.
Virago, 230 pp., £7.99, July 1993, 1 85381 616 7
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... in Andrew Lang’s Crimson Fairy Book. In the new ones, however accomplished and diverting they may be, the meaning is clear but coyly hidden, as in many modern fictions; although the examples sought out by Alison Lurie have as much cunning and high spirits in them as the old tales. In Ursula LeGuin’s ‘The Wife’s Tale’ (1982) it takes us a few pages ...

Disinformation

Phillip Knightley, 8 July 1993

Deadly Illusions: The First Book from the KGB Archives 
by John Costello and Oleg Tsarev.
Century, 538 pp., £18.99, June 1993, 9780712655002
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... actually made two documentaries with the help of the KGB. The first, Comrade Philby, went out in May 1990. The second, Strange Neighbours, about the American spy couple, Peter and Helen Kroger, who acted as a communications link between London and Moscow for Gordon Lonsdale and the Portland spy-ring, went out in November 1991. Both were co-productions, in ...

Diary

Elisa Segrave: Revved Up on Solpadeine, 22 July 1993

... one of the nurses, says I might be able to go carrying the drain heavily disguised by a shawl. I may be on television as it is the launch of a famous person’s book. When they’ve gone I read the Observer. There’s a two-page spread on breast cancer. ‘If three or more lymph glands are affected, 30 per cent of women survive for ten years.’ I don’t ...

The Synaptic Years

Jenny Diski, 24 June 1993

And When Did You Last See Your Father? 
by Blake Morrison.
Granta, 215 pp., £14.99, May 1993, 0 14 014240 1
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Eating Children 
by Jill Tweedie.
Viking, 314 pp., £15.99, May 1993, 0 670 84911 1
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... cent our fathers – no getting away from that. Thank you very much, Mendel, Crick and Watson. We may deny genetic destiny, and speak contemptuously of reductionism, but I suspect that the nature half of the nature/nurture debate troubles us deeply and perpetually, like a grumbling appendix. You can only hold onto the fantasy of turning out to be a foundling ...

Cry Treedom

Jonathan Bate, 4 November 1993

Forests: The shadow of Civilisation 
by Robert Pogue Harrison.
Chicago, 288 pp., £19.95, May 1992, 0 226 31806 0
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... with Burke; at the very least, as David Bromwich proposes in quite another context, they may have to embrace a Burkean language but wrest it to non-Burkean ends. This means that the relationship with ‘New Historicism’ and its marxisant traditions will inevitably be uneasy. When Harrison notices a human dwelling-place in Constable’s Study of the ...

Post-Mortem

Michael Burns, 18 November 1993

Death and the After-Life in Modern France 
by Thomas Kselman.
Princeton, 413 pp., £40, March 1993, 0 691 00889 2
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... As in Catholic and Protestant homes, the aim was to facilitate the passage of the dead (‘May the angels take thee into paradise’) and to comfort the grief-stricken through familiar rituals that imposed order on the chaos of loss. Psychologists, psycho-historians, sociologists and cultural anthropologists have all weighed in on the meaning of these ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: On Peregrine Worsthorne, 4 November 1993

... claim of being a gentleman. In upholding McCarthyism while he was in Washington, for example, he may well have had to meet objections from his superiors at the Times, but he can hardly be said to have occupied a position of signal isolation or courage. Yet he writes as if his prejudice took nerve. Similarly, he describes making a scene at the house of Brian ...

On the Rwandan Border

Stephen Smith, 9 June 1994

... incidentally, the less they suggest the kind of Heart of Darkness-incarnate savagery that we may secretly yearn to ascribe to them. Toasting the engagement of the BBC’s man in the region, Roger Hearing, with a bottle of champagne which, a proud best man, I had resourcefully procured one night, I swallowed hard as he told me of witnessing killings at ...

The Kiss

Gaby Wood, 9 February 1995

Jean Renoir: Letters 
edited by Lorraine LoBianco and David Thompson, translated by Craig Carlson, Natasha Arnoldi and Michael Wells.
Faber, 605 pp., £25, October 1994, 0 571 17298 9
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... kind of battle with the Hollywood system. Given Ingrid Bergman’s own circumstances, she may have been thinking of his marital adventures. Soon after his father’s death in 1919, he married Catherine Hessling, one of Pierre-Auguste’s models. He began to make films as a showcase for her talents (or at least, ambitions) and their marriage broke down ...

Who’s Got the Moxie?

A. Craig Copetas, 23 March 1995

The Mexican Tree Duck 
by James Crumley.
Picador, 247 pp., £15.99, May 1994, 0 330 32451 9
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One to Count Cadence 
by James Crumley.
Picador, 338 pp., £5.99, May 1994, 0 330 32450 0
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... beef market would fall.’ There’s a lesson floating around in One to Count Cadence, though it may be too late and too caustic for digestion so many years, illegal arms-deals and political scandals alter the Vietnam War. ‘You didn’t like killing those cats.’ says Private First-Class Joe Morning to his protagonist Sgt Krummel, ‘but something inside ...
Hans Memling: The Complete Works 
by Dirk de Vos.
Thames and Hudson, 431 pp., £95, October 1994, 0 500 23698 4
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... words, quite literally provided lustre. The proposal is convincing about Memling’s career. It may be, as Israel proposes, that art history is, or should be, ‘essentially an adjunct of history itself’. But what sort of an account of paintings would be offered under such a regime? The pun on lustre – in painting and in the social world – speaks to ...

E-less in Gaza

John Sturrock, 10 November 1994

A Void 
by Georges Perec, translated by Gilbert Adair.
Harvill, 285 pp., £15.99, October 1994, 0 00 271119 2
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... this is a book written under a peculiarly taxing constraint. To do without the letter e in English may be marginally more difficult than to do without it in French. Perec was denied the use of some invaluable linguistic forms: je, se, le, ce, elle, de, les, des, avec, après, quel, que, est: the list is potentially very long, and frightening. Written ...

I Love You Still

Russell Jacoby, 9 February 1995

Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research 
by Claus-Dieter Krohn, translated by Rita Kimber and Robert Kimber.
Massachusetts, 255 pp., $15.95, July 1994, 0 87023 864 7
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... influence good. He hardly recognises – strange in a historian of refugees – that isolation may be necessary and justified; and that it might lead to more important contributions either to scholarship or to public life than immediate acceptance. He seems oblivious to the fact that ‘influence’ does not stand outside history. His brief discussion of ...