At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Miami Vice’, 17 August 2006

Miami Vice 
directed by Michael Mann.
August 2006
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... is said. This calls for well-judged ham acting of the kind impeccably displayed by Al Pacino and Robert de Niro in Heat; and in Miami Vice both José (John Ortiz) and Jesus (Luis Tosar) make a fair show of being as sinister as they are supposed to be. The problem is that Colin Farrell, as Crockett, is not up to this kind of ...

Dude, c’est moi

Edmund Gordon: Padgett Powell, 3 February 2011

The Interrogative Mood 
by Padgett Powell.
Profile, 164 pp., £9.99, November 2010, 978 1 84668 366 4
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... when you were a girl, that is true. How have you become Céline? I love you anyway. Love, Self The transplanted features of a realist novel are still recognisable here – that detail of the boys with their ‘skateboards aloft like swords’, for example – but the tendency is towards the free association and creepy lyricism of Mrs ...

At MoMA

Hal Foster: ‘Inventing Abstraction’, 7 February 2013

... in past shows (Sonia Terk and Sophie Taeuber, for example, get equal billing with their husbands, Robert Delaunay and Hans Arp). At long last such movements as Italian Futurism and Polish Constructivism are given their due, and lesser figures like the Britons Lawrence Atkinson and Duncan Grant, and the Americans Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan ...

At Tate Britain

Anne Wagner: ‘Salt and Silver’, 21 May 2015

... men who learned Talbot’s process and used it: the brilliant Scottish portraitists D.O. Hill and Robert Adamson, with their studies of Newhaven fisherfolk, the rather less gifted Rev. Calvert Jones, the Frenchman Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, who, though trained in chemistry, had to learn the elements of photography from a Lille chemist said to have ...

At Tate Liverpool

Alice Spawls: Leonora Carrington, 23 April 2015

... put it: ‘I ran away to Paris. Not with Max. Alone.’ In Paris she completed her first major self-portrait, Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937). A wild-haired Leonora dressed in riding clothes sits in a room with her hyena familiar; behind her on the wall hangs a rocking horse, and through the window a second horse gallops. The painting features many of the ...

Hoo-Hooing in the Birch

Michael Hofmann: Tomas Tranströmer, 16 June 2016

Bright Scythe: Selected Poems 
by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Patty Crane.
Sarabande, 207 pp., £13, November 2015, 978 1 941411 21 6
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... called Memories Look at Me – was almost a sideline for him, occasional, but unusually pure and self-consistent. Poetry was reserved for encounters with the unsettling (das Unheimliche, as German has it), for sinister or joyful impossibilities, for moments when existence abruptly swelled or dwindled. Words like ‘mystical’ and ‘surreal’ get tossed ...

Cumin-coated

Colin Burrow: Two Novels about Lost Bellinis, 14 August 2008

The Bellini Card 
by Jason Goodwin.
Faber, 306 pp., £12.99, July 2008, 978 0 571 23992 4
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The Bellini Madonna 
by Elizabeth Lowry.
Quercus, 343 pp., July 2008, 978 1 84724 364 5
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... as well as with himself: a sort of art-historical Humbert Humbert with traces of Clive Linley, the self-obsessed composer in Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam. He also has an Irish Catholic background replete with sodomitical priests and echoes of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This upbringing has made him unable to separate a love of art from sexual ...

Over the Rainbow

Slavoj Žižek: Populist Conservatism, 4 November 2004

... From the standard perspective which holds that economic agency is based on the rational pursuit of self-interest, the inconsistency of this stance is obvious: populist conservatives are literally voting themselves into economic ruin. Less taxation and increased deregulation means more freedom for the corporations that are driving impoverished farmers out of ...

Everything You Know

Ian Sansom: Hoods, 3 November 2016

Hood 
by Alison Kinney.
Bloomsbury, 163 pp., £9.99, March 2016, 978 1 5013 0740 9
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... 21st-century version of Aristotle’s Poetics – and for that matter of Cicero’s On the Orator, Robert McKee’s Story, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the entire works of Syd Field, and just about every other book ever written that pretends to reveal the ways fiction, drama or poetry ‘work’ – is tvtropes.org, the ...

On Fanny Howe

Ange Mlinko: Fanny Howe, 5 October 2017

... the intention is different. She never rejected first-person experience as a basis of her lyrics; Robert Lowell’s Notebook poems were an early influence (‘When Lowell relaxed into the sonnet form, he gave us a new kind of poetry notebook,’ she once wrote). In light of this, her poems’ fragmentary brevity suggests a kind of exploded sonnet, and they ...

At Burlington House

Ben Walker: William Smith’s Geological Maps, 7 January 2021

... quitted with disgust, the cheering fields regained,’ he wrote years later. His self-imposed exile ended only when Sir John Johnstone – who em­ployed him as a land steward on his ­est­ate in Hackness – brought Smith’s maps to the attention of the Royal Geographical Society.A second map exists at Bur­lington House, behind another ...

Goodness me

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 26 October 1989

Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice: A Politician’s Psycho-Biography of Margaret Thatcher 
by Leo Abse.
Cape, 288 pp., £13.95, September 1989, 0 224 02726 3
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... cowering in their consulting-rooms, and better certainly than any political scientist. Take Robert McKenzie, the television psephologist and master of the swingometer, a figure well-known in the Sixties, but now safely dead – and, as we shall see, without heirs who might want to sue on his behalf. A TV producer once had the idea of filming Abse and ...

See you in court, pal

John Lanchester: The Microsoft Trial, 30 September 1999

The Nudist on the Late Shift 
by Po Bronson.
Secker, 248 pp., £10, August 1999, 0 436 20477 0
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Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane 
by Michael Malone.
Aurum, 598 pp., £18.99, April 1999, 1 85410 638 4
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Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet 
by Michael Woolf.
Orion, 364 pp., £7.99, June 1999, 0 7528 2606 9
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The Cathedral and the Bazaar: revised edition 
by Eric S. Raymond.
O'Reilly, 256 pp., £11.95, February 2001, 0 596 00108 8
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... the impossible. Bear in mind that even in this group there are sharp differences in ability. As Robert X. Cringely, a (pseudonymous) commentator on the computer business who in 1991 published Accidental Empires, the first and still the best book on the growth of the industry, explains: at the extreme edge of the normal distribution, there are programmers ...

His Own Prophet

Michael Hofmann: Read Robert Lowell!, 11 September 2003

Collected Poems 
by Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter.
Faber, 1186 pp., £40, July 2003, 0 571 16340 8
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... It was reading Robert Lowell that brought me to poetry at the age of 19, in 1976. I had borrowed a friend’s omnibus edition of Life Studies and For the Union Dead, and something in me said: ‘This is it!’ I don’t remember the poem I first had that response to, but most likely it was in Part IV of Life Studies, ‘Dunbarton’ or ‘For Sale’, or perhaps ‘Waking in the Blue ...

For Want of a Dinner Jacket

Christopher Tayler: Becoming O’Brian, 6 May 2021

Patrick O’Brian: A Very Private Life 
by Nikolai Tolstoy.
William Collins, 608 pp., £10.99, October 2020, 978 0 00 835062 8
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... who inherited $5000, began to reappraise his relationship with his father. Years later, in a self-published biography, the son would depict Forester as a manipulative fabulist, a distant, self-centred parent, a cold-hearted philanderer, and an insecure snob who was evasive about his origins as Cecil Smith from ...