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Golden Boy

Denis Donoghue, 22 December 1983

W.H.Auden: The Critical Heritage 
edited by John Haffenden.
Routledge, 535 pp., £19.95, September 1983, 0 7100 9350 0
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Auden: A Carnival of Intellect 
by Edward Callan.
Oxford, 299 pp., £12.50, August 1983, 0 19 503168 7
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Drawn from the Life: A Memoir 
by Robert Medley.
Faber, 251 pp., £12.50, November 1983, 0 571 13043 7
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... duly welcomed by a line of critics from Edmund Wilson to John Updike. There were exceptions. Joseph Warren Beach thought Auden’s textual shenanigans were treachery, Randall Jarrell thought Auden’s wit and elegance quite enjoyable up to a point – or rather, up to the point of their becoming needlepoint – but after that a pretty dispiriting ...

Proud to Suffer

G.S. Smith: The Intellectuals Who Left the USSR, 19 October 2006

The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia 
by Lesley Chamberlain.
Atlantic, 414 pp., £25, March 2006, 1 84354 040 1
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... whose genius has gone?’ Lev Loseff asks in his poem ‘June 1972’; Loseff’s close friend Joseph Brodsky had left Leningrad that month. The question brings to mind the title of Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel, which soon came to codify a central preoccupation of the Russian intelligentsia. But in this instance it also raises the notion that the poet’s ...

Grunge Futurism

Julian Loose, 4 November 1993

Virtual Light 
by William Gibson.
Viking, 336 pp., £14.99, September 1993, 0 670 84081 5
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Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction 
by Scott Bukatman.
Duke, 416 pp., £15.95, August 1993, 0 8223 1340 5
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... dystopias have always had on our imagination. Yet his objections carry weight, as the admirably frank Gibson (who has admitted that at the time of writing Neuromancer he neither understood computers nor had been to Japan) would probably be the first to acknowledge. For the crucial point about Gibson, despite plausible attempts to situate him alongside ...

Schadenfreude

R.W. Johnson, 2 December 1993

The Downing Street Years 
by Margaret Thatcher.
HarperCollins, 914 pp., £25, October 1993, 0 00 255049 0
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... been no difficulty in showing that, in these memoirs as in her career, Thatcher has been neither frank nor humble. Mrs Thatcher appears to suffer from a quite advanced form of egomania, or megalomania, or both; and it is genuinely difficult for her not to see everyone else as either her opponent or an instrument of her will. The former are immediately ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: You had better look out, 10 December 1998

... remedied: see below). One otherwise favourable review which I hadn’t previously seen, by Frank McLynn in the Literary Review, contains a weird aside in which I am taken to task because I, a ‘contemporary Croesus’, presume to encourage young persons contemplating a career as ‘underpaid, sneered at and generally put upon’ as academic sociology ...

Baudelairean

Mary Hawthorne: The Luck of Walker Evans, 5 February 2004

Walker Evans 
by James Mellow.
Perseus, 654 pp., £15.99, February 2002, 1 903985 13 7
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... poor, drought-stricken Hale County. Evans struck up a conversation with a tenant farmer named Frank Tingle. Tingle in turn introduced Evans and Agee to his brother-in-law Bud Woods, and to Bud Woods’s son-in-law Floyd Burroughs. Evans and Agee had found their subjects. The men all drove back to Tingle’s house, and Evans quietly set to ...

Goodbye to the Comintern

Martin Kettle, 21 February 1991

About Turn. The Communist Party and the Outbreak of the Second World War: The Verbatim Record of the Central Committee Meetings 1939 
edited by Francis King and George Matthews.
Lawrence and Wishart, 318 pp., £34.95, November 1990, 9780853157267
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... to.’ Many of the members of the Central Committee reached a similar goal by less disarmingly frank intellectual gymnastics. Even so, a number were roundly criticised by Dutt for indulging in ‘acceptance with reservations, that if it was general would leave the Party in a state of complete confusion and helplessness of ...

God’s Endurance

Peter Clarke, 30 November 1995

Gladstone 
by Roy Jenkins.
Macmillan, 698 pp., £20, October 1995, 0 333 60216 1
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... song, which might once have shocked his earnest Nonconformist followers, is at last treated with a frank and uncensorious common sense. Of the three, song is least uncontentious – though Gladstone’s delight in theatregoing brought him reproof more than once, notably when he waltzed off to a new play at the Criterion Theatre only days after the news reached ...

Why Goldwyn Wore Jodhpurs

David Thomson, 22 June 2000

The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper 
by Dominick Dunne.
Crown, 218 pp., £17.99, October 1999, 0 609 60388 4
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Gary Cooper Off Camera: A Daughter Remembers 
by Maria Cooper Janis.
Abrams, 176 pp., £22, November 1999, 0 8109 4130 9
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... Lazar at the Beverly Hills restaurant, the Bistro, in which the Dunnes were investors. In public, Frank Sinatra had verbally attacked Lenny Dunne. Yet Dominick was his real object – Lenny was being browbeaten for bringing in an outsider. A couple of weeks later, the Dunnes were at the Daisy – another hot place in town. Sinatra, his two daughters and Mia ...

Consider Jack and Oskar

Michael Rossi: Twin Studies, 7 February 2013

Born Together – Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study 
by Nancy Segal.
Harvard, 410 pp., £39.95, June 2012, 978 0 674 05546 9
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... Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research. Her book answers critics of Mistra who argue, as Joseph Jay did in the American Journal of Psychology in 2001, that ‘the studies of separated twins contain serious flaws, and the authors’ conclusions are questionable,’ and attempts to demonstrate the power of genetics to shed new light on human ...

Little Philadelphias

Ange Mlinko: Imagism, 25 March 2010

The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists 
by Helen Carr.
Cape, 982 pp., £30, May 2009, 978 0 224 04030 3
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... in ‘an extravagant, eye-catching green robe, bought for him, in Tunis she thought, by his Aunt Frank on his first transatlantic trip’. Elective affinity was everything. As Williams said of Pound: ‘It took just one look and I knew it was it.’ Their relationship had a note of comedy in it: ‘He was impressed with his own poetry,’ Williams ...

Up the Garden Path

R.W. Johnson: Michael Foot, 26 April 2007

Michael Foot: A Life 
by Kenneth O. Morgan.
Harper, 568 pp., £25, March 2007, 978 0 00 717826 1
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... face an economic typhoon of unparalleled ferocity, the worst the world has seen since the 1930s. Joseph Conrad once wrote a book called Typhoon, and at the end he told people how to deal with it. He said: ‘Always facing it, Captain MacWhirr, that’s the way to get through.’ Always facing it, that’s the way we have got to solve this problem . . . I ...

Love Me or I Shoot You

Christienna Fryar: Three Imperial Wars, 1 August 2024

Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire 
by Erik Linstrum.
Oxford, 313 pp., £26.99, April 2023, 978 0 19 757203 0
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... successfully publicised imperial atrocities and attracted multiracial crowds to its rallies, Joseph Murumbi (Kenyan, though not Kikuyu) broke with the movement over its uncritical response to Suez.Some conscientious objectors specifically refused to fight in colonial wars, though their chances of success at tribunals were greater if they argued that ...

In the Egosphere

Adam Mars-Jones: The Plot against Roth, 23 January 2014

Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books 
by Claudia Roth Pierpont.
Cape, 353 pp., £25, January 2014, 978 0 224 09903 5
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... breakthrough and millstone it belongs with Catch-22 (1961) and Slaughterhouse Five (1969). Joseph Heller didn’t publish another novel until 1974, while Vonnegut kept to his established rhythm, producing one every two or three years. Roth stepped up the pace, with Our Gang appearing in 1971, followed in successive years by The Breast, The Great ...

Beware Biographers

Jackson Lears: Kennan and Containment, 24 May 2012

George Kennan: An American Life 
by John Lewis Gaddis.
Penguin, 784 pp., £30, December 2011, 978 1 59420 312 1
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Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War 
by Frank Costigliola.
Princeton, 533 pp., £24.95, January 2012, 978 0 691 12129 1
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... in Moscow for four years with the ambassador, William Bullitt. In 1937, Bullitt was replaced by Joseph Davies, and Kennan was sent to head the Russian desk at the State Department’s division for Eastern European affairs in Washington, where he had ample opportunity to observe his own country and brood about its prospects. American society in the late ...

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