One for water, one for urine

Stephen Smith, 3 December 1992

An Evil Cradling 
by Brian Keenan.
Hutchinson, 297 pp., £16.99, September 1992, 0 09 175208 6
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Hostage: The Complete Story of the Lebanese Captives 
by Con Coughlin.
Little, Brown, 461 pp., £16.99, October 1992, 0 316 90304 3
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... in the darkened cinema and as each character pulled out his weapon and began firing furiously, the young Arab men around us would groan and moan in a kind of ecstasy, crying out the names of the weapons. All around us in the cinema we could hear the words ‘Kalashnikov, Kalashnikov; Biretta, Biretta.’ These young men knew ...

Diary

Gaby Wood: On Gene Kelly, 21 March 1996

... the idol of a little boy who wants to join the Navy, and he dances around a fountain with a young girl made up to look Mexican. This dance was particularly hard to rehearse because Stanley Donen (then Kelly’s assistant, later his co-director) had to teach the child the steps. After some gruelling rehearsals, Donen was so desperate he said he ...

Where mine is at

Gordon Burn, 28 May 1992

Outerbridge Reach 
by Robert Stone.
Deutsch, 409 pp., £14.99, May 1992, 0 223 98774 3
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... the publishers in America’, Wolfe scanned ‘the billion-footed city for the approach of the young novelists who, surely, would bring [us] the big novels of the racial clashes, the hippy movement, the New Left, the Wall Street boom, the sexual revolution, the war in Vietnam. But such creatures, it seemed, no longer existed.’ But this was to ignore, or ...

St Malcolm Martyr

Michael Wood, 25 March 1993

Malcolm X 
directed by Spike Lee.
May 1993
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By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of ‘Malcolm X’ 
by Spike Lee and Ralph Wiley.
Vintage, 314 pp., £7.99, February 1993, 0 09 928531 2
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Malcolm X: The Great Photographs 
compiled by Thulani Davis and Howard Chapnick.
Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 168 pp., £14.99, March 1993, 1 55670 317 1
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... know this is a big movie, no skimpy, fake-ass wannabe shit.’ Lee’s idea of a big movie is David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia or Bridge over the River Kwai. He is also a great admirer of Oliver Stone’s JFK. Later we get a better look at Shorty and Malcolm in their immaculate zoot-suits, long coats, baggy pants tight at the ankles, broad-brimmed hats ...

China’s Millennials

Yun Sheng: Hipsters in Beijing, 10 October 2019

... and as only children, they have always been shielded by their well-off parents. I know young people who drift continually from one job to another: as soon as they get bored or unhappy, they quit – they don’t bother having a back-up plan. According to JWT Intelligence, 74 per cent of Chinese millennials say they would start their own business if ...

Middle-Aged and Dishevelled

Rebecca Solnit: Endangered Species?, 23 March 2006

In the Company of Crows and Ravens 
by John Marzluff and Tony Angell.
Yale, 384 pp., £18.95, October 2005, 0 300 10076 0
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... outsmart them.’ They are very smart and, unlike most birds, great learners and interpreters. A young naturalist who grew up birding in San Francisco – we have Great Blue Herons in Golden Gate Park and a considerable seabird population on the beaches – told me he considered ravens and crows to be tantamount to a ‘second Silent Spring’ (the first ...

Into Extra Time

Deborah Steiner: Living too long, 23 February 2006

Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton 
by Emily Wilson.
Johns Hopkins, 289 pp., £35.50, December 2004, 0 8018 7964 7
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... no way.’ Zeus’ beloved Ganymede has no problem with immortality. Eternal, and eternally young, he serves as Zeus’ wine-pourer, dispensing a substance whose liquid state suggests his continued (sexual) vitality and contrasts powerfully with the desiccated condition of the old (Tithonos, in some versions of the myth, turns into the dry but ...

Your Inner Salmon

Nick Richardson: Mohsin Hamid, 20 June 2013

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia 
by Mohsin Hamid.
Hamish Hamilton, 228 pp., £14.99, March 2013, 978 0 241 14466 4
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... new film version of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, directed by Mira Nair, with a screenplay by a young American TV writer, is foggier. Changez (Riz Ahmed) is portrayed as a violent man from the outset; ‘you’ is a more developed and more sympathetic character. Changez is shown to be more ruthless than his colleagues when it comes to firing ...

Clutching at Railings

Jonathan Coe: Late Flann O’Brien, 24 October 2013

Plays and Teleplays 
by Flann O’Brien, edited by Daniel Keith Jernigan.
Dalkey, 434 pp., £9.50, September 2013, 978 1 56478 890 0
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The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien 
edited by Neil Murphy and Keith Hopper.
Dalkey, 158 pp., £9.50, August 2013, 978 1 56478 889 4
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... allegedly because the nuns would not at first admit the firefighters in case they saw any of the young girls in a state of undress.) The third factor, it becomes increasingly clear, was the commercial failure of his play Faustus Kelly, now made available to us again in this edition of O’Brien’s Plays and Teleplays. Daniel Keith Jernigan, the book’s ...

Indoor Raincoat

Lavinia Greenlaw: Joy Division, 23 April 2015

So This Is Permanence: Joy Division Lyrics and Notebooks 
by Ian Curtis, edited by Deborah Curtis and Jon Savage.
Faber, 304 pp., £27, October 2014, 978 0 571 30955 9
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... and history, wore nail polish and borrowed his sister’s fun-fur jacket. He took Deborah to hear David Bowie and Lou Reed, and read her Oscar Wilde, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. He showed her a ring binder containing sections labelled ‘Lyrics’ and ‘Novel’. ‘I felt privileged that he had trusted me enough to let me see the extent of his ...

A Man’s Man’s World

Steven Shapin: Kitchens, 30 November 2000

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly 
by Anthony Bourdain.
Bloomsbury, 307 pp., £16.99, August 2000, 0 7475 5072 7
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... Islands at the fag-end of rationing. Circulating freely between kitchen and dining-room was the young Canadian American sociologist Erving Goffman, who had come all the way from Chicago to observe what passed across the boundary between stage performance and backstage preparation. That kitchen stood proxy for all the social world’s backstages. If the ...

Diary

Catherine Hall: Return to Jamaica, 13 July 2023

... 1962. For all migrants, Britain was ‘the mother country’. Stuart came as a Rhodes scholar, a young anti-colonial, to Oxford. Like most of the Windrush generation he stayed, learning new political identities – first West Indian, then Black – over troubled decades. I learned what it meant to live in a mixed couple, something that carried one set of ...

Like a Thunderbolt

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Solzhenitsyn’s Mission, 11 September 2008

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 
by Liudmila Saraskina.
Molodaia gvardiia, 935 pp., €30, April 2008, 978 5 235 03102 9
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... might know its heroes. It’s ironic that Liudmila Saraskina’s deeply admiring biography of the David who challenged the Soviet Goliath should now appear under its imprint. As Saraskina tells the story, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian patriot and Orthodox Christian, was a man with a mission from the first. Unswerving, uncompromising, beset by perils and ...

The Pills in the Fridge

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Christodora’, 30 March 2017

Christodora 
by Tim Murphy.
Picador, 432 pp., £16.99, February 2017, 978 1 5098 1857 0
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... specialising in industrial sculpture (the next Richard Serra, even), started to make it his home. Young Jared took pleasure in the neighbourhood, dirty and dangerous as it was, with homeless people and intravenous drug users camping out in Tompkins Square Park, and was surprised when a contingent of protesters trying to storm the Christodora during the riots ...

When the pistol goes off

Peter Clarke, 17 August 1989

Arnold Toynbee: A Life 
by William McNeill.
Oxford, 346 pp., £16.95, July 1989, 0 19 505863 1
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... Arnold Toynbee was a double-edged privilege, as the behaviour of the family testifies; when the young author published his first book under this style, he was reprimanded for appropriating his uncle’s name and told in future to ‘sign yourself A.J. or Arnold J’. Born with his uncle’s reputation to live up to, the ...