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What are we telling the nation?

David Edgar: Thoughts about the BBC, 7 July 2005

Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC 
by Georgina Born.
Vintage, 352 pp., £10.99, August 2005, 0 09 942893 8
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Building Public Value: Renewing the BBC for a Digital World 
BBC, 135 pp.Show More
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... the BBC when Alan Yentob insisted that an aristocratic ex-Battle of Britain pilot be played by David Jason; ITV loved it, but made similar demands. Eventually, back at the BBC, the play got its perfect casting – Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Joanna Lumley – and was ‘bought’ in 1998 by the then BBC2 controller Mark Thompson for broadcast at ...

Dun and Gum

Nicholas Jose: Murray Bail, 16 July 1998

Eucalyptus 
by Murray Bail.
Harvill, 264 pp., £12.99, July 1998, 1 86046 494 7
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... of Henry Lawson’s 1892 classic. Bail approaches Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ through Russell Drysdale’s well-known painting of the same name. In Lawson, the wife finds a strength of her own while maintaining a firm sense of connection with her absent drover husband. In Bail, the wife has run off with the drover, abandoning her suburban dentist ...

Haley’s Comet

Paul Driver, 6 February 1997

The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Weidenfeld, 431 pp., £25, September 1996, 0 297 81720 5
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... The entire Vienna State Opera decamped to London at the Third’s behest in 1947. Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin, Tippett, Betjeman and Fred Hoyle became familiar voices. Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas made a poet’s living in what Thomas called ‘the thin puce belfries’ of the Third. Guided by the producer Douglas Cleverdon, Under Milk Wood and ...

Can’t you take a joke?

Jonathan Coe, 2 November 2023

Different Times: A History of British Comedy 
by David Stubbs.
Faber, 399 pp., £20, July, 978 0 571 35346 0
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... sense of humour’: a phenomenon everyone considers to be distinctive but no one can define. As David Stubbs writes in Different Times, his impressive survey of British comedy on stage, radio, film and television, ‘it’s not so much a case of Britain producing comedy as comedy producing Britain.’ The book provides a good opportunity to look at our ...

The Ultimate Socket

David Trotter: On Sylvia Townsend Warner, 23 June 2022

Lolly Willowes 
by Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Penguin, 161 pp., £9.99, October 2020, 978 0 241 45488 6
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Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life 
by Frances Bingham.
Handheld Press, 344 pp., £15.99, May 2021, 978 1 912766 40 6
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... including the charismatic sculptor and Bloomsbury habitué Stephen Tomlin, and the novelist David Garnett, whose publishing connections were to prove invaluable. Now in her late twenties, Warner was hungry for new experiences. In July 1922, while she was browsing in the cheap section of Whiteley’s Department Store in Bayswater, she noticed a map of ...

Cause and Effect

A.J. Ayer, 15 October 1981

Hume and the Problem of Causation 
by Tom Beauchamp and Alexander Rosenberg.
Oxford, 327 pp., £15, August 1981, 0 19 520236 8
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The Science of Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith 
by Knud Haakonssen.
Cambridge, 240 pp., £17.50, September 1981, 0 521 23891 9
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... I can, why the insertion of the concept of temporal priority into that of causality is not, as Russell once said it was, a purely arbitrary stipulation. David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, which is usually judged to be his principal contribution to philosophy, though he himself preferred his later and more polished ...

At the Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh

Tom Crewe: Roger Fenton, 16 November 2017

... heat that had succeeded an iron winter: already in March, the month of Fenton’s arrival, William Russell of the Times was cursing the hand-knitted mittens still arriving in their thousands from worried mothers. The rising temperatures interfered disastrously with the chemicals, necessitating longer exposure times, cooking the nitrate, drying out the plates ...

Das Nuffa Dat and BigGloria3

Elaine Showalter: Up and Down the Academic Ladder, 1 November 2001

Academic Instincts 
by Marjorie Garber.
Princeton, 187 pp., £11.95, February 2001, 9780691049700
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Postmodern Pooh 
by Frederick Crews.
North Point, 175 pp., $22, October 2001, 0 86547 626 8
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... describing them as respected colleagues, admired teachers or wise critics. One reviewer, Russell Jacoby, has called her ‘a bad girl with only the nicest things to say’. To enter academic controversy effectively, however, originality, wit, ingenuity and tact are not enough; you also have to be willing to risk offending someone, and that ...

Cinematically Challenged

Adam Mars-Jones, 19 September 1996

The Cinema of Isolation 
by Martin Norden.
Rutgers, 385 pp., $48, September 1994, 0 8135 2103 3
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... in point would be The Elephant Man (1980), a still from which appears on the cover of the book. David Lynch’s film may indeed demonstrate ‘time-worn points of view’ in some ways, and its central figure may indeed combine the stereotypes of the Sweet Innocent and the Saintly Sage (Norden is inordinately fond of categories like these and the ‘Elderly ...

Hi, Louise!

Stephanie Burt: Frank O’Hara, 20 July 2000

In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O’Hara and American Art 
by Russell Ferguson.
California, 160 pp., £24.50, October 1999, 0 520 22243 1
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The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets 
by David Lehman.
Anchor, 448 pp., $16.95, November 1999, 0 385 49533 1
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Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters 
by Marjorie Perloff.
Chicago, 266 pp., £13.50, March 1998, 0 226 66059 1
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... O’Hara, and a 1999 exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Russell Ferguson. O’Hara collaborated with the Action Painters and the proto-Pop artists Joe Brainard, Norman Bluhm, Mike Goldberg, Franz Kline, Al Leslie and Larry Rivers, on paintings, prints, collages, ‘artists’ books’ and short films: these comprise ...

A Few Home Truths

Jonathan Rée: R.G. Collingwood, 19 June 2014

R.G. Collingwood: ‘An Autobiography’ and Other Writings, with Essays on Collingwood’s Life and Work 
edited by David Boucher and Teresa Smith.
Oxford, 581 pp., £65, December 2013, 978 0 19 958603 5
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... touch with an impersonal and unchangeable world of ‘concepts’ and ‘propositions’. Bertrand Russell extended the realist argument to mathematics and logic, and – so the story went – showed that philosophy could be practised with a degree of dispassionate scientific rigour that had never been dreamed of before. As an undergraduate, Collingwood was ...

The Person in the Phone Booth

David Trotter: Phone Booths, 28 January 2010

... three variously damaged ex-servicemen who have become friends on the flight home. Homer (Harold Russell) plays piano in the near foreground, while Al (Fredric March) looks on, and Fred (Dana Andrews) makes a call he would rather not make from a booth in the distant background. Wyler filmed the scene in long shot, with both planes of action in sharp ...

An Elite Worth Joining

David Trotter: Preston Sturges, 13 April 2023

Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges 
by Stuart Klawans.
Columbia, 366 pp., £22, January, 978 0 231 20729 4
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... Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Wyler, a close friend of Sturges, cast a wounded veteran, Harold Russell, in the role of a returning amputee. But this demand for authenticity doesn’t make for an updated version – O Brother Marine, Where Art Thou? – of the book Sullivan had once set out to film. Instead, it produces a new and more complex narrative ...

Boom and Bust

Margaret Anne Doody, 19 June 1997

A History of the Breast 
by Marilyn Yalom.
HarperCollins, 331 pp., £15.99, March 1997, 0 04 440913 3
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... or republican breast and the domestic virtuous bosom, were quite open about breast-feeding. When David Copperfield is introduced to Mrs Micawber, ‘a thin and faded lady, not at all young’, she is ‘sitting in the parlour ... with a baby at her breast’. ‘This baby was one of twins; and I may remark here that I hardly ever, in all my experience of the ...

Grail Trail

C.H. Roberts, 4 March 1982

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail 
by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln.
Cape, 445 pp., £8.95, January 1982, 0 224 01735 7
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The Foreigner: A Search for the First-Century Jesus 
by Desmond Stewart.
Hamish Hamilton, 181 pp., £9.95, October 1981, 0 241 10686 9
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Satan: The Early Christian Tradition 
by Jeffrey Burton Russell.
Cornell, 258 pp., £14, November 1981, 0 8014 1267 6
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... large Jewish population, and Guillem himself was a Jew, perhaps a practising one, of the house of David. (Other versions not quoted here treat him as a Christian hero who ended his days as a monk.) Attempting to explain what they see as the quite extraordinary importance attached to Merovingian descent, the connections between the Merovingians and the Grail ...

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