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That was the year that was

Tariq Ali, 24 May 2018

... thing was just to read, non-stop, books that were never available in Pakistan: D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Isaac Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy, Trotsky himself, other Bolshevik leaders, many others. So for me Oxford was very liberating and on many fronts. When I came to Britain, it was obvious that the United States had taken over the function of ...

Nayled to the wow

Tom Shippey, 7 January 1993

The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer 
by Derek Pearsall.
Blackwell, 365 pp., £19.95, September 1992, 1 55786 205 2
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A Wyf ther was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens-Fonck 
edited by Juliette Dor.
University of Liège, 300 pp., June 1992, 2 87233 004 6
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Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of 14th-Century Texts 
by Paul Strohm.
Princeton, 205 pp., £27.50, November 1992, 0 691 06880 1
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... as ‘the genial observer of the social scene’ – sympathetic to the working classes like the Miller and the Reeve, mildly satirical of established religious figures like the Monk, Friar and Prioress, respectful of solid moral worth in the Parson and Plowman, but capable of extending a hand to mavericks like the Wife of Bath. As for the ...

In Need of a New Myth

Eric Foner: American Myth-Making, 4 July 2024

A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America 
by Richard Slotkin.
Harvard, 512 pp., £29.95, March, 978 0 674 29238 3
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... trilogy, for example, the titles of influential works on this theme such as Virgin Land by Henry Nash Smith and Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness. Slotkin makes clear that the conquest of the West resulted from violence, not persuasion.In the Cold War years, many scholars aligned with the emerging ...

Bournemouth

Andrew O’Hagan: The Bournemouth Set, 21 May 2020

... Stevenson found the core of his talent. It all started with a spirited exchange in print with Henry James. In September 1884, when Stevenson was new to that oasis of convalescents, he picked up a copy of Longman’s Magazine, which carried James’s essay ‘The Art of Fiction’. He knew James only at a distance, and admired him. Stevenson, who had ...

Olivier Rex

Ronald Bryden, 1 September 1988

Olivier 
by Anthony Holden.
Weidenfeld, 504 pp., £16, May 1988, 0 297 79089 7
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... goatee modelled on George Arliss’s Disraeli and had to be persuaded by his director, Jonathan Miller, to evolve in the succeeding weeks a characterisation based on his own face. No one seems to have told Holden that dress rehearsals normally complete, not commence, the rehearsal process. He will surprise many who worked with Tyrone Guthrie by describing ...

Ojai-geeky-too-LA

Lucie Elven: LA Non-Confidential, 17 June 2021

I Used to Be Charming 
by Eve Babitz.
NYRB, 448 pp., £14.99, January 2020, 978 1 68137 379 9
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... the stabs and screeches in Psycho), could pursue some musicological research. Babitz wrote a Daisy Miller-inspired novel, which Heller sent to his publisher: it was turned down. Deciding to be a groupie instead, she raced through the LA art and music scenes. ‘In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz,’ Earl McGrath, later the president of Rolling ...

The Subtleties of Frank Kermode

Michael Wood, 17 December 2009

... more generally on the ‘new transgressive criticism’ produced by Geoffrey Hartmann, J. Hillis Miller, Edward Said and others, not to mention any of their French influences and inspirations. These were relatively early days in the Theory Wars, and Kermode was splitting his vote in a way that was both subtle and rare. He liked transgressions but rather ...

Closet Virtuoso

Seamus Perry: Magic Mann, 24 February 2022

The Magician 
by Colm Tóibín.
Viking, 438 pp., £18.99, September 2021, 978 0 241 00461 6
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... Magician is a sort of companion volume to The Master (2004), Tóibín’s celebrated novel about Henry James, and a book similarly preoccupied by the thought that what might normally be construed as psychological damage can turn out to be just what a novelist needs. This is partly a matter of a similarly subterranean homosexual life that never realises ...

I, Lowborn Cur

Colin Burrow: Literary Names, 22 November 2012

Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature 
by Alastair Fowler.
Oxford, 283 pp., £19.99, September 2012, 978 0 19 959222 7
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... turn out to exemplify general tendencies. For some realist writers the best names are invisible. Henry James was a great fretter over names, as you might expect from someone who had the same names as his father, both of which could be interchangeably a surname or a first name. He wanted his characters’ names to have a tang of truth but not too much overt ...

Post-its, push pins, pencils

Jenny Diski: In the Stationery Cupboard, 31 July 2014

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace 
by Nikil Saval.
Doubleday, 288 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 0 385 53657 8
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... its glory period with the vertical cities designed by Sullivan, Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, Henry-Russell Hitchcock. The Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building, the Rockefeller Center, the UN Secretariat Building, Lever House and the Seagram Building were visually stunning statements of corporate power and prevailed by making the perceived virtues ...

On Every Side a Jabbering

Clare Bucknell: Thomas Hammond’s Travels, 5 April 2018

Memoirs on the Life and Travels of Thomas Hammond, 1748-75 
edited by George E. Boulukos.
Virginia, 303 pp., £47.95, June 2017, 978 0 8139 3967 4
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... The road up to the high pass at Mont Cenis was long and treacherous. The British tourist Anna Miller, who took the same route six months after Hammond in the autumn of 1770, noted that collapsing bridges and ‘being crushed to death by ponderous rocks’ were two possible hazards; in the winter there were avalanches, rolling ‘Snow balls’ of ...

I adore your moustache

James Wolcott: Styron’s Letters, 24 January 2013

Selected Letters of William Styron 
edited by Rose Styron and R. Blakeslee Gilpin.
Random House, 643 pp., £24.99, December 2012, 978 1 4000 6806 7
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... the life, said not enough money was coming in just now, wanted to get unused to the money. Arthur Miller a bit tight addressing me as usual on the subject of his latest openings. Benevolent, even comradely in a Jewish-1915 way, but would never think of saying a word, asking a word, about anyone else’s work … Caroline Kennedy (Schlossberg) was there. The ...

Short is sharp

John Sutherland, 3 February 1983

Firebird 2 
edited by T.J. Binding.
Penguin, 284 pp., £2.95, January 1983, 0 14 006337 4
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Bech is Back 
by John Updike.
Deutsch, 195 pp., £6.95, January 1983, 0 233 97512 8
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The Pangs of Love 
by Jane Gardam.
Hamish Hamilton, 156 pp., £7.50, February 1983, 0 241 10942 6
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The Man Who Sold Prayers 
by Margaret Creal.
Dent, 198 pp., £7.95, January 1983, 9780460045926
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Happy as a Dead Cat 
by Jill Miller.
Women’s Press, 120 pp., £2.50, January 1983, 9780704338982
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... Such books still tend to be what the famous author does on the side. Brevity and irony are Henry James’s bequest to the short story form; mystery and strangeness Poe’s. There is, however, another input of longer standing. This is the tract, or the short tale subordinated to frankly improving ends. In the 19th century, the tract fiction industry ...

Coma-Friendly

Stephen Walsh: Philip Glass, 7 May 2015

Words without Music: A Memoir 
by Philip Glass.
Faber, 416 pp., £22.50, April 2015, 978 0 571 32372 2
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... who weren’t writing serial music: American tonalists such as Copland, Virgil Thomson and Henry Cowell; or the radical wing represented by John Cage and Morton Feldman, which rejected both tendencies. He would encounter them when he went to New York to study at Juilliard in 1956, but again in the extra-curricular context of downtown alternative ...

Nutty Professors

Hal Foster: ‘Lingua Franca’, 8 May 2003

Quick Studies: The Best of ‘Lingua Franca’ 
edited by Alexander Star.
Farrar, Straus, 514 pp., $18, September 2002, 0 374 52863 2
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... is so much cut-and-paste soup. In the final article in this section the political scientist James Miller asks ‘Is Bad Writing Necessary?’ This is essentially a comparison of Orwell and Adorno as models of criticism, and you can guess who wins. But in fact no one does: the opposition serves neither, since the intellectual difficulty of Adorno is associated ...

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