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Chumship

James Lasdun: Upper West Side Cult, 27 July 2023

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy and the Wild Life of an American Commune 
by Alexander Stille.
Farrar, Straus, 418 pp., $30, June, 978 0 374 60039 6
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... it: ‘the adjectives Pearce and Newton chose to describe the everyday life of mother and child are “phobic”, “psychotic” and “miserable”; common nouns are “anger”, “jealousy” and “blackmail”.’In 1955 Clement Greenberg, critic-in-chief to New York’s avant-garde art scene, had a breakdown after being dumped by the young ...

Hogshit and Chickenshit

Michael Rogin, 1 August 1996

Washington Babylon 
by Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein.
Verso, 316 pp., £31.95, May 1996, 1 85984 092 2
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... violence) chip into television sets, invent epidemics of teen pregnancy, pre-teen murder and child abuse (the Attorney-General Janet Reno brought that obsession from Florida to ignite the conflagration at Waco) and sponsor regulation of the family relations of the poor. Like Gingrich and Bob Dole, Clinton proposes to help poor children by ending their ...

I wish she’d been a dog

Elaine Showalter, 7 February 1991

Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart 
by Charlotte Margolis Goodman.
Texas, 394 pp., $24.95, May 1990, 0 292 74022 0
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Jean Stafford: A Biography 
by David Roberts.
Chatto, 494 pp., £16.95, August 1988, 0 7011 3010 5
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... to Lowell, she explained that her therapy at Payne Whitney had helped her understand how as a child she learned to mutilate herself ‘in order to gain pity and love’. In her finest novel, The Mountain Lion (1947), written during the turbulent final year of their marriage, the young heroine Molly pours acid over her hand after quarrelling with her ...

All in the Family

Sylvia Lawson, 3 December 1992

Letters to Sartre 
by Simone de Beauvoir and Quintin Hoare.
Radius, 531 pp., £20, December 1991, 0 09 174774 0
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Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvior, 1926-1939 
edited by Simone de Beauvior, translated by Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee.
Hamish Hamilton, 448 pp., £20, November 1992, 9780241133361
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... of the life lived as it was; and the way you look at her relations with Sartre, with his own child prodigy’s life, and at their milieu is unavoidably a political matter. Some authorities insist on regarding her as a great philosopher’s rather tiresome consort: Arthur C. Danto, who wrote the lively Modern Masters essay on Sartre, is at pains to ...

Maisie’s Sisters

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Sargent’s Daughters, 5 August 2010

Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting 
by Erica Hirshler.
MFA, 262 pp., £23.95, October 2009, 978 0 87846 742 6
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... to the left is eight-year-old Mary Louisa, named after her mother and also known as ‘Isa’. The child sitting on the floor with the rosy-cheeked doll between her legs is Julia, the youngest at four. In old age she remembered that she had christened the doll ‘Popau’ – the nickname of the right-wing politician and journalist Paul de Cassagnac, famous ...

The Moral Solipsism of Global Ethics Inc

Alex de Waal: Human rights, democracy and Amnesty International, 23 August 2001

Like Water on Stone: The Story of Amnesty International 
by Jonathan Power.
Allen Lane, 332 pp., £12.99, May 2001, 0 7139 9319 7
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Future Positive: International Co-operation in the 21st Century 
by Michael Edwards.
Earthscan, 292 pp., £12.99, September 2000, 1 85383 740 7
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East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia 
by Daniel Bell.
Princeton, 369 pp., £12.50, May 2000, 0 691 00508 7
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... they just don’t apply in a Singaporean context,’ says the Seni0r Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. (Bell bases Lee’s arguments on his published writings and speeches, which he skilfully edits into a debate with an imaginary American interlocutor.) Lee may have an ...

What does a snake know, or intend?

David Thomson: Where Joan Didion was from, 18 March 2004

Where I Was From 
by Joan Didion.
Flamingo, 240 pp., £14.99, March 2004, 0 00 717886 7
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... just as in the Sierra in winter there can be small cavities beneath several feet of snow – a child can be running along in the fun and the chatter and go straight down a hole and be lost for ever. How long does the child stay alive in the white hole, waiting, wondering and helpless? Don’t ask. Joan Didion is from ...
The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen 
introduced by Angus Wilson.
Cape, 782 pp., £8.50, February 1981, 0 224 01838 8
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Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation 
by Hermione Lee.
Vision, 225 pp., £12.95, July 1981, 9780854783441
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... It is probably not irrelevant that Elizabeth Bowen to all intents lost her father when she was a child (his mind became temporarily unhinged), and that her mother died when she was 13. Although she had warm-hearted relatives to love and care for her, she could guess what it might be like to be as lonely and unbefriended as Portia Quayne. Such a novel as I ...

Alzheimer’s America

Mark Greif: Don DeLillo, 5 July 2007

Falling Man 
by Don DeLillo.
Picador, 246 pp., £16.99, May 2007, 978 0 330 45223 6
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... up in the apartment of his estranged wife. Lianne is a freelance copy-editor, the mother of his child. She is a quiet New Yorker who holds the family together: her son, her aged mother, and now, once again, Keith. The opening two sections of the book treat the days and weeks after the towers’ fall. Keith might have been just another aggressive DeLilloan ...

What’s Happening in the Engine-Room

Penelope Fitzgerald: Poor John Lehmann, 7 January 1999

John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure 
by Adrian Wright.
Duckworth, 308 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 7156 2871 2
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... He has said a good deal already – the little boy who wants to be like his father, the sheltered child who doesn’t need to know the time or even the season because James, the always reliable butler, deals with that, the illusion of a dedication to poetry. Adrian Wright, in this new biography, refers several times to Lehmann’s half-commitment (in spite of ...

Valet of the Dolls

Andrew O’Hagan: Sinatra, 24 July 2003

Mr S.: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra 
by George Jacobs and William Stadiem.
Sidgwick, 261 pp., £16.99, June 2003, 0 283 07370 5
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... they send workaday reality into situations where reality is a stranger, and behave like the older child at the magic show, the one who sees how the trick is done and can’t help shouting out the news, again and again, until the magician is undone and the children are depressed. Jacobs, unknown to himself, has clearly spent his life yearning to be the ...

‘I intend to support white rule’

Ian Hamilton: Allen Tate, 24 May 2001

Allen Tate: Orphan of the South 
by Thomas Underwood.
Princeton, 447 pp., £21.95, December 2000, 0 691 06950 6
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... sharpened by comments on his physical appearance (he had a strangely bulbous head and as a child was reckoned to be hydrocephalic), his intense and platitudinous solemnity, his late-won and unsmiling Roman Catholicism. Tate once said that all his poems sprang from the suffering that comes from disbelief, and perhaps his love pursuits were similarly ...

Architectures of Containment

Clair Wills: Ireland’s Lost Children, 20 May 2021

Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes 
Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Government of Ireland, 2865 pp., October 2020Show More
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... rates, post-mortem practices, including the use of bodies for anatomical study in hospitals, child welfare, adoption practices, and – in some of the homes – the use of babies for vaccine trials without their mothers’ consent. In April 2019 the commission published its first significant report, which focused on the burial, or the lack of proper ...

New Ways of Killing Your Father

Colm Tóibín, 18 November 1993

Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History 
by R.F. Foster.
Allen Lane, 305 pp., £22.50, October 1993, 0 7139 9095 3
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... to 1798, but there is nothing, as far as I know, at Scullabogue. Its memory was erased from what a child could learn about 1798. It was a complication in our glorious past, and it was essential for our past to be glorious if our present, in what Roy Foster in his new book of essays calls ‘the disillusioned tranquillity of the Free State’, was to have any ...

End of the Century

John Sutherland, 13 October 1988

Worlds Apart 
by David Holbrook.
Hale, 205 pp., £10.95, September 1988, 9780709033639
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Story of My Life 
by Jay McInerney.
Bloomsbury, 188 pp., £11.95, August 1988, 0 7475 0180 7
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Forgotten Life 
by Brian Aldiss.
Gollancz, 284 pp., £11.95, September 1988, 0 575 04369 5
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Incline Our hearts 
by A.N. Wilson.
Hamish Hamilton, 250 pp., £11.95, August 1988, 0 241 12256 2
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... be confused with the evil progressivism of the Little Red Schoolbook, with its instructions to the child on drug-taking, and the therapeutic use of porn and oral sex. One has to equate Anthea’s book with Holbrook’s own English for the Rejected (1964), a work which significantly influenced primary-school teaching in this country. Anthea receives an ...

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