Say thank you

Clive James: Witty Words in Pretty Mouths, 23 May 2002

Fast-Talking Dames 
by Maria DiBattista.
Yale, 365 pp., £19.95, June 2001, 0 300 08815 9
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... the preservation of Hollywood’s greatest period of achievement. Hollywood itself never was, and Peter Bogdanovich’s originality as a curator lay in his awareness that it never would be. (Until the prospect of sales to television saved the day, Hollywood’s instinctive homage to a great original film was not only to remake it, but to burn its ...

The Ticking Fear

John Kerrigan: Louis MacNeice, 7 February 2008

Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems 
edited by Peter McDonald.
Faber, 836 pp., £30, January 2007, 978 0 571 21574 4
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Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems 
edited by Michael Longley.
Faber, 160 pp., £12.99, April 2007, 978 0 571 23381 6
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I Crossed the Minch 
by Louis MacNeice.
Polygon, 253 pp., £9.99, September 2007, 978 1 84697 014 6
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The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography 
by Louis MacNeice, edited by E.R. Dodds.
Faber, 288 pp., £9.99, September 2007, 978 0 571 23942 9
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... a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points out, a Complete Poems would be considerably larger than the 600-odd pages of verse plus seven appendices of fugitive poems, prefaces and ...

Fear in Those Blue Eyes

David Runciman: Thatcher in Her Bubble, 3 December 2015

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. II: Everything She Wants 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 821 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 7139 9288 5
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... to appear to be setting the terms of the dispute. She remained reliant on her energy secretary, Peter Walker, whom she didn’t trust and feared would do ‘a fudge, like Pym and the Foreign Office in the Falklands had tried to do’. But unlike Pym, Walker kept his job, because she didn’t dare sack him. In some respects her role in the miners’ strike ...

Squealing to Survive

John Lahr: Clancy was here, 19 July 2018

Black Sunset: Hollywood Sex, Lies, Glamour, Betrayal and Raging Egos 
by Clancy Sigal.
Icon, 352 pp., £12.99, May 2018, 978 1 78578 439 2
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The London Lover: My Weekend that Lasted Thirty Years 
by Clancy Sigal.
Bloomsbury, 274 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 4088 8580 2
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... as an agent in the mid-1950s, representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with ...

Who is Stewart Home?

Iain Sinclair, 23 June 1994

... was his bag (in high art they call it ‘selective quotation’ or ‘homage’). Having sampled Peter Cave’s biker novelettes, and the works of Mick Norman, Alex R. Stuart and Thom Ryder, he nominated the 18-volume Richard Allen Bildungsroman as his template. Delivered from the bourgeois neurosis invention (the demand for fresh ‘product’), his charged ...

Our Dear Channel Islands

Linda Holt, 25 May 1995

The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands under German Rule 1940-1945 
by Madeleine Bunting.
HarperCollins, 354 pp., £20, January 1995, 0 00 255242 6
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The Channel Islands: Occupation and Liberation 1940-1945 
by Asa Briggs.
Batsford, 96 pp., £7.99, April 1995, 0 7134 7822 5
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... of dirt on it – and being taken far more seriously than they deserved. A writer calling himself Peter Tombs came in the mid-Seventies, promising many of the same sensational revelations as Bunting, only to disappear again when evidence for his allegations failed to materialise. Picking on Bunting is perhaps unfair, for all her British reviewers to date ...

Falling in love with Lucian

Colm Tóibín: Lucian Freud’s Outer Being, 10 October 2019

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth, 1922-68 
by William Feaver.
Bloomsbury, 680 pp., £35, September 2019, 978 1 4088 5093 0
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... later, Freud cut the Spender poems out of the book, ‘deeming them superfluous’.) Peter Watson, who funded Horizon, also began to enjoy Freud’s company. ‘He helped me very much, looked at my pictures and bought things and gave me money and books,’ Freud said. ‘He had pictures that I liked and learned from, very good things … He had a ...

Against Whales

Paul Keegan, 20 July 1995

The Moon by Whale Light 
by Diane Ackerman.
Phoenix, 260 pp., £6.99, May 1994, 1 85799 087 0
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The Last Panda 
by George Schaller.
Chicago, 292 pp., $13.95, May 1993, 0 226 73629 6
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The Great Ape Project 
edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer.
Fourth Estate, 312 pp., £9.99, June 1993, 1 85702 126 6
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... the giant panda of Sichuan Province in China. Schaller’s principles and practices inspired Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. He is a big-game biologist, a student of spectacular individuals in nature rather than a toiler at the overlooked and the unindividuated: ‘An animal must provide an emotional experience if I am to involve myself in its ...

Open in a Scream

Colm Tóibín, 4 March 2021

Francis Bacon: Revelations 
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.
William Collins, 869 pp., £30, January, 978 0 00 729841 9
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... introduced Bacon to collectors and galleries and other painters, even persuading Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, to visit Bacon’s studio. (‘Interesting, yes,’ Clark said. ‘What extraordinary times we live in.’) In 1945, Ben Nicholson pulled out of a planned six-artist show and Sutherland ...

Scoop after Scoop

Ian Jack: Chapman Pincher’s Scoops, 5 June 2014

Dangerous to Know: A Life 
by Chapman Pincher.
Biteback, 386 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 1 84954 651 5
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... Amery; industrialists in the arms business such as Arnold Weinstock of General Electric and the Clark brothers, who ran Plessey together with ‘two splendid shooting estates’; the old airplane maker Sir Thomas Sopwith, who owned a lovely stretch of the Test but also a grouse moor, which introduced Pincher to grouse and in turn to Viscount Slim and Sir ...

The Return of History

Raphael Samuel, 14 June 1990

... research, and is indeed hardly less apparent in the work of the supposedly High Tory Jonathan Clark or the proto-Thatcherite Alan Macfarlane as in the Marxist historians whom they attack. There are now a dozen or more learned journals devoted to it – Past and Present, Social History, History Workshop Journal, Llafur, Gender and History to name but a ...

In the Shady Wood

Michael Neill: Staging the Forest, 22 March 2018

The Shakespearean Forest 
by Anne Barton.
Cambridge, 185 pp., £75, August 2017, 978 0 521 57344 3
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... Forest’ that form the basis for this, her much anticipated last book, in Cambridge in 2003. The Clark Lectures were themselves the product of an extended reflection on the significance of Shakespeare’s imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays. As Peter Holland’s eloquent ...

Heroes of Our Time

Karl Miller, 19 May 1988

The Monument 
by T. Behrens.
Cape, 258 pp., £11.95, May 1988, 0 224 02510 4
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The Passion of John Aspinall 
by Brian Masters.
Cape, 360 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 0 224 02353 5
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... a poor thing if I thank them here alphabetically. They include Mr Gerald Albertini, The Rt Hon. Peter Archer MP, Miss Amanda Aspinall, Dr Robert Aspinall, The Duke of Atholl, Miss Julie Battersea, Mr Tom Begg, Dr Kurt Benirschke, Mr Robin Birley, Mr Anthony Blond, Mr Robert Boutwood, Mr Claus von Bülow, Mr Timothy Cassel, The Hon. Mr Alan ...

Things Ill-Done and Undone

Helen Thaventhiran: T.S. Eliot’s Alibis, 8 September 2022

Eliot after ‘The Waste Land’ 
by Robert Crawford.
Cape, 609 pp., £25, June, 978 0 224 09389 7
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... preparing to mark the centenary of The Waste Land’s publication. When Christopher Ricks reviewed Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot in the LRB (1 November 1984; the same year Michael Hastings’s play about Eliot’s first marriage was staged), he remarked: ‘Plainly it is the Tom and Viv bits which we are all likely to home in on.’ In 2022, with the ...

The Sponge of Apelles

Alexander Nehamas, 3 October 1985

The Skeptical Tradition 
by Myles Burnyeat.
California, 434 pp., £36.75, June 1984, 0 520 03747 2
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The Modes of Scepticism: Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations 
by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes.
Cambridge, 204 pp., £20, May 1985, 0 521 25682 8
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Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties 
by P.F. Strawson.
Methuen, 98 pp., £10.95, March 1985, 0 416 39070 6
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Hume’s Skepticism in the ‘Treatise of Human Nature’ 
by Robert Fogelin.
Routledge, 195 pp., £12.95, April 1985, 0 7102 0368 3
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The Refutation of Scepticism 
by A.C. Grayling.
Duckworth, 150 pp., £18, May 1985, 0 7156 1922 5
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The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism 
by Barry Stroud.
Oxford, 277 pp., £15, July 1985, 0 19 824730 3
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... Scepticism are obvious from the opening pages of Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties, Sir Peter Strawson’s urbane, elegant, and, alas, short new book: ‘The Sceptic is, strictly, not one who denies the validity of certain types of belief, but one who questions, if only initially and for methodological reasons, the adequacy of our grounds for ...