Bravo, old sport

Christopher Hitchens, 4 April 1991

Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Post-War America 
by Neil Jumonville.
California, 291 pp., £24.95, January 1991, 0 520 06858 0
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... such as Clement Greenberg, Delmore Schwartz, Harold Rosenberg and, to a different degree, Malcolm Cowley – those who found Partisan Review an alternative to callow nativism, a transatlantic lifeline to Eliot, Malraux, Silone. To give the roll-call of magazines, as Jumonville does, is to tell off from the New York Review of Books by way of ...

His Very Variousness

Ferdinand Mount: Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments, 4 December 2025

Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin 
by Kevin J. Hayes.
Oxford, 480 pp., £30.99, September 2025, 978 0 19 755426 5
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Ingenious: A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist 
by Richard Munson.
Norton, 288 pp., £23.99, December 2024, 978 0 393 88223 0
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... the Atlantic, Franklin did in fact father an illegitimate child by an unknown mother. This child, William, was also to father an illegitimate son, Temple Franklin, who did the same thing when he was supposedly under the moral protection of his grandfather in Paris twenty years later. No strait laces about the Franklins, though the biographers seem a little ...

Umbah-Umbah

Jerome McGann, 22 June 1989

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century 
by Greil Marcus.
Secker, 496 pp., £14.95, June 1989, 0 436 27338 1
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... Christopher Gray’s Leaving the 20th Century, Abiezer Coppe, Georges Bataille. Oddly, the name William Blake never passes the lips(tick) of this book. Marcus uses as well the reminiscences and recapitulations of various people who were swept up in the storms raised by these people: for example, Henri Lefebvre, Michele Bernstein, Richard Huelsenbeck, ...

The Young Man One Hopes For

Jonathan Rée: The Wittgensteins, 21 November 2019

Wittgenstein’s Family Letters: Corresponding with Ludwig 
edited by Brian McGuinness, translated by Peter Winslow.
Bloomsbury, 300 pp., £20, November 2018, 978 1 4742 9813 1
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... dons, then it is contradicted by the memoirs of some of Wittgenstein’s devoted friends (Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, Con Drury and others), and by a fascinating collection of family letters, published in German in 1996 and now available in English.Wittgenstein’s father was a self-made industrialist who saw himself as the Carnegie of Austria and took pride ...

The Last Witness

Colm Tóibín: The career of James Baldwin, 20 September 2001

... treatment of religion and a Harlem only barely understood south of 125th Street, was compared to William James and William Faulkner. In Paris in 1950 Baldwin had read A Portrait of the Artist and its hero’s story was not lost on him. The need to do battle with religion and his own oppressed nation, some of whose members ...

With What Joy We Write of the New Russian Government

Ferdinand Mount: Arthur Ransome, 24 September 2009

The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome 
by Roland Chambers.
Faber, 390 pp., £20, August 2009, 978 0 571 22261 2
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... a large mouth from which more often than not a pipe protruded, and a hearty disposition.’ Malcolm Muggeridge immediately took to Arthur Ransome when he first met him in Cairo in 1929. Most people did. The philosopher R.G. Collingwood, a close friend from their shared childhood in the Lake District, gave Ransome his entire life savings to pay his legal ...

Eye Contact

Peter Campbell: Anthony van Dyck, 16 September 1999

Anthony van Dyck 1599-1641 
by Christopher Brown and Hans Vlieghe.
Royal Academy, 360 pp., £22.50, May 1999, 9780847821969
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Anthony van Dyck: A Life, 1599-1641 
by Robin Blake.
Constable, 435 pp., £25, August 1999, 9780094797208
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... be found in the black-dressed merchants and clerics of Genoa or Antwerp. In his catalogue essay, Malcolm Rogers quotes William Sanderson, his near-contemporary, as saying that Van Dyck was the first painter that ‘e’er put ladies’ dress into a careless romance’, and goes on to quote Herrick’s ‘Whenas in silks my ...

Memories of Lindsay Anderson

Alan Bennett, 20 July 2000

... of his life map out his career: Richard Harris (This Sporting Life), Albert Finney (Billy Liar), Malcolm McDowell (If ...) and Frank Grimes. None of them seems to have come across (if that, indeed, was what he wanted). They were all incorrigibly male and not all were over-blessed with imagination. Frank Grimes, around whom Lindsay built much of his later ...

AmeriKKKa

Thomas Sugrue: Civil Rights v. Black Power, 5 October 2006

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice 
by Raymond Arsenault.
Oxford, 690 pp., £19.99, March 2006, 0 19 513674 8
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... Not surprisingly, a number of the Freedom Riders later became important advocates of black power. William Worthy and Conrad Lynn – two of the members of the original Journey of Reconciliation – created the all-black Freedom Now Party less than two years after the Rides ended. By 1965, CORE had jettisoned its integrationism for an emphasis on black-led ...

Seedy Equations

Adam Mars-Jones: Dealing with James Purdy, 18 May 2023

James Purdy: Life of a Contrarian Writer 
by Michael Snyder.
Oxford, 444 pp., £27, January, 978 0 19 760972 9
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... and remained a champion.Purdy was born in Ohio in 1914, the second of three sons. His father, William, was a banker unwisely turned property developer. After William lost large sums of money, Purdy’s parents divorced, and his mother, Vera, began running a boarding house. Richard, his older brother, had a successful ...

Look Me in the Eye

Julian Bell: Art and the Brain, 8 October 2009

Splendours and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness 
by Semir Zeki.
Wiley-Blackwell, 234 pp., £16.99, November 2008, 978 1 4051 8557 8
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Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki 
by John Onians.
Yale, 225 pp., £18.99, February 2008, 978 0 300 12677 8
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Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images 
by Barbara Maria Stafford.
Chicago, 281 pp., £20.50, November 2008, 978 0 226 77052 9
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... the present interest in neuroaesthetics. (The other, a 1999 paper by Vilayanur Ramachandran and William Hirstein entitled ‘The Science of Art’ and published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, was a sparky jeu d’esprit; as Ramachandran later admitted, ‘We mainly did it for fun.’) Here was a clear-spoken, scrupulous expositor of science ...

There isn’t any inside!

Adam Mars-Jones: William Gaddis, 23 September 2021

The Recognitions 
by William Gaddis.
NYRB, 992 pp., £24, November 2020, 978 1 68137 466 6
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JR 
by William Gaddis.
NYRB, 784 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 68137 468 0
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... idea of literature, and a peculiar division of labour between writer and reader. Their author, William Gaddis, who won the National Book Award with JR, might actually have felt short-changed by the accolade of the imprint, to judge by a riff in JR deploring the way ‘longer works of fiction [are] now dismissed as classics and … largely unread due to the ...

Death (and Life) of the Author

Peter Wollen: Kathy Acker, 5 February 1998

... performer and avant-gardist, one of the first women to make her mark as a conceptual artist. William Burroughs is usually mentioned as the single most important influence on Acker’s writing, but, although he plainly was extremely important to her, the context in which she read Burroughs had already been set by the cultural formation that she had ...

Thoughts about Boars and Paul Celan

Lawrence Norfolk: The Ways of the Boar, 6 January 2011

... and rider would need three-quarters of a mile to catch a boar with a 50-yard head start. In 1914, Malcolm Crawford, ‘the Bengal hog hunter’, remarked on the boar’s skill in ‘jinking’, or making sudden changes of direction, even ramming his snout into the ground at full speed and using it as a fulcrum on which to spin. Pindar in his Third Nemean Ode ...

The Road to Chandrapore

Eric Stokes, 17 April 1980

Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics 
by Kenneth Ballhatchet.
Weidenfeld, 199 pp., £9.50, January 1980, 0 297 77646 0
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Queen Victoria’s Maharajah: Duleep Singh 1838-1898 
by Michael Alexander and Sushila Anand.
Weidenfeld, 326 pp., £9.95, February 1980, 0 297 77656 8
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... the European force on whose bayonets British rule in the last resort depended. In the 1830s Lord William Bentinck’s economy-conscious administration and a more censorious European opinion stirred by Evangelical religion led to the discontinuance of many lock hospitals and to an attack on what Bishop Daniel Wilson called the ‘licensed brothels’ which ...