Scenes from the Movies

Peter Campbell, 5 August 1982

Lulu in Hollywood 
by Louise Brooks.
Hamish Hamilton, 109 pp., £8.95, July 1982, 9780241107614
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... teachers of their film classes’. She complains that ‘the Fields they idolised was the man they read about and superimposed on the Fields they saw (or didn’t see) on the screen.’ Yet her own narrative the autobiographical bits in these essays has many scenes which reinforce notions of Hollywood gleaned from the screen. She deplores a history of film in ...

At the British Library

Peter Campbell: Great Nations of Europe Coming Through, 27 June 2002

Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia 1600-1834 
by Anthony Farrington.
British Library, 128 pp., £17.95, May 2002, 0 7123 4756 9
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... in this Mughal miniature between Warren Hastings and his servant c.1782 – it is hard not to read a hint of a joke in the oddly large proportion of Hastings’s head to his body – reminds me of what a guide, at the end of a cultural tour of China, said to a friend who pressed her about what she really thought of the Westerners she had been ...

About to be at Tate Britain, or Meanwhile in Cork Street

Peter Campbell: Gwen and Augustus John, 7 October 2004

... took part in the search for and design of the clothes – tight bodices and long skirts – which read in the drawings neither as fancy dress nor quite as of their own time (the John household must, to the eye at least, have been more Pre-Raphaelite than modern). In Gwen’s portraits of Dorelia, the active poses her brother chose, in which hands are raised ...

At the Barbican

Peter Campbell: Alvar Aalto, 22 March 2007

... and the built-in cupboards. He worked out how light would fall on the pages of a book being read in bed. The sunloungers which line the terrace overlooking the forest in an early photograph are no longer filled with consumptives – Paimio is now a general hospital – but one still reads its history in its configuration. I wish someone would film The ...

At the National Gallery of Scotland

Peter Campbell: Joan Eardley, 13 December 2007

... comparisons: Ivon Hitchens painted landscapes in which flowing patterns of colour can still be read as trees and water; de Kooning in America made pictures in which the bones of an unseen landscape seem to direct the reading of a field of abstract marks. But such mapping of similarity and influence shows little more than that Eardley’s way of drawing and ...

Character Building

Peter Campbell, 9 June 1994

Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernity 
by Jerome McGann.
Princeton, 196 pp., £25, July 1993, 0 691 06985 9
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Letters from the People 
by Lee Friedlander.
Cape, 96 pp., £75, August 1993, 9780224032957
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Margins and Marginality 
by Evelyn Tribble.
Virginia, 194 pp., $35, December 1993, 0 8139 1472 8
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... Pound and Yeats. The Kelmscott Chaucer and Modernist poetry, the argument goes, are both hard to read because they are intentionally opaque. The second claim is that the links are not coincidental, and that the achievement of the latter was, in important ways, made possible by the former. Heraldic words, words as patterns, have a long history. Inscriptions ...

The Biographer’s Story

Jonathan Coe, 8 September 1994

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers 
by Roger Lewis.
Century, 817 pp., £20, April 1994, 0 7126 3801 6
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... What exactly do we know about Peter Sellers? There have been at least half a dozen biographies before this one, and through them the outline of his career has become pretty familiar. We know that he was born in 1925, the only son of a Jewish mother, that his parents worked in a touring theatre company, and that during the war he joined the RAF and performed in Ralph Reader’s Gang Shows ...

The Exotic West

Peter Burke, 6 February 1986

The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci 
by Jonathan Spence.
Faber, 350 pp., £15, April 1985, 0 571 13239 1
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Chine et Christianisme: Action et Réaction 
by Jacques Gernet.
Gallimard, 342 pp., frs 154, May 1982, 2 07 026366 5
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... The Ink Garden. The engravings – four exotic Western flowers in a Chinese garden – portray St Peter in the Waves; the road to Emmaus; the men of Sodom; and the Virgin and Child. The memory images comprise two warriors fighting; a Muslim woman from the west of China; a farmer, sickle in hand; and a maidservant who, like the Virgin, carries a child. The ...

Why Do the Tories Always Have the Luck?

Peter Clarke, 23 February 1995

Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900 
edited by Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball.
Oxford, 842 pp., £20, October 1994, 0 19 820238 5
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... designed to exert checks and balances, the same aim has been pursued by different methods. Peter Catterall offers a nicely-judged account of the influence of religion, suggesting that the breakdown in the Conservatives’ traditionally cosy relationship with the Church of England has been exaggerated. Indeed, in his revisionist conclusion, he ...

Jihad

James Wood, 5 August 1993

The New Poetry 
edited by Michael Hulse, David Kennedy and David Morley.
Bloodaxe, 352 pp., £25, May 1993, 1 85224 244 2
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Who Whispered Near Me 
by Killarney Clary.
Bloodaxe, 64 pp., £5.95, February 1993, 1 85224 149 7
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Sunset Grill 
by Anne Rouse.
Bloodaxe, 64 pp., £5.95, March 1993, 1 85224 219 1
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Half Moon Bay 
by Paul Mills.
Carcanet, 95 pp., £6.95, February 1993, 9781857540000
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Shoah 
by Harry Smart.
Faber, 74 pp., £5.99, April 1993, 0 571 16793 4
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The Autonomous Region 
by Kathleen Jamie.
Bloodaxe, 79 pp., £7.95, March 1993, 9781852241735
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Collected Poems 
by F.T. Prince.
Carcanet, 319 pp., £25, March 1993, 1 85754 030 1
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Stirring Stuff 
by Selwyn Pritchard.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 145 pp., £8.99, April 1993, 9781856193085
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News from the Brighton Front 
by Nicki Jackowska.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 86 pp., £7.99, April 1993, 1 85619 306 3
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Translations from the Natural World 
by Les Murray.
Carcanet, 67 pp., £6.95, March 1993, 1 85754 005 0
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... 55 poets, you feel, blush for it. Mostly they contradict it. The style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets ...

Diary

Peter Craven: On the Demidenko Affair, 16 November 1995

... Franklin Award. It was a decision that bewildered those few members of the literary world who had read the book, and which had the far more important effect of commanding the attention of a nation that takes its big books seriously. The upshot was that a significant group of literate, but not professionally literary, people found themselves reading this ...

Diary

Peter Parsons: Rooting around Oxyrhyncus, 4 June 2015

... Homer and Hesiod and tragedy – and chooses The Art of Cookery. Two millennia on, we can still read Homer and Hesiod and a selection of tragedies, because these authors remained set books in schools, and as set books they were copied and recopied through the Middle Ages. But the cookbooks disappeared for ever, along with a mass of lighter literature: the ...

Façades

Peter Burke, 19 November 1981

The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History 
by Richard Goldthwaite.
Johns Hopkins, 459 pp., £16.50, April 1981, 0 8018 2342 0
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Public Life in Renaissance Florence 
by Richard Trexler.
Academic Press, 591 pp., £29.80, March 1981, 0 12 699550 8
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Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice 
by Edward Muir.
Princeton, 356 pp., £10.80, August 1981, 0 691 05325 1
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Venice: The Greatness and the Fall 
by John Julius Norwich.
Allen Lane, 400 pp., £12, September 1981, 0 7139 1409 2
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Ruskin and Venice 
edited by Jeanne Clegg.
Junction, 233 pp., £10.50, September 1981, 0 86245 019 5
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The Stones of Venice 
by John Ruskin and Jan Morris.
Faber, 239 pp., £12.50, September 1981, 0 571 11815 1
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... messages, in particular. He makes it clear that the Florentine man in the piazza was competent to read ritual, to assess how far a cap was raised in salute, how far the Florentine government went to meet a particular visitor, how far away from the tribune in front of the Palazzo della Signoria the visitor dismounted – and would draw political conclusions ...

Carnival Time

Peter Craven, 18 February 1988

The Remake 
by Clive James.
Cape, 223 pp., £10.95, October 1987, 0 224 02515 5
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In the Land of Oz 
by Howard Jacobson.
Hamish Hamilton, 380 pp., £12.95, September 1987, 0 241 12110 8
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... sits in piles In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs. Of course there are sage heads (Peter Porter’s, for instance) who will defend James’s serious verse-making as poised and Larkinesque. He is also (when he confines himself to what he knows) a fine literary critic. As a critic, James not only has his charm, he burns very ...

Maggiefication

Peter Clarke, 6 July 1995

The Path to Power 
by Margaret Thatcher.
HarperCollins, 656 pp., £24, June 1995, 0 00 255050 4
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... still learning. This, her second book, shorter and sharper than her first, is generally a better read. Compared with The Downing Street Years, it has the more difficult task of interesting us in the years of obscurity and preparation. It thus risks bathos in moving, so to speak, from the world of Churchill to that of Holtby. But Thatcher nicely conveys the ...