At the Jeu de Paume

Brian Dillon: Peter Hujar, 19 December 2019

... as art. Avedon, he reported, had said: ‘You know, Peter – sometimes I think that Susan may be the enemy.’Of course, Hujar’s problem with Sontag may have been that she failed to mention him in On Photography. He tended to begrudge other photographers their fame or success, even snubbing Beaton and Arbus out of ...

Eye-Popping

Ian Jackman: Killer SUVs, 7 October 2004

High and Mighty: SUVs, the World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way 
by Keith Bradsher.
PublicAffairs, 464 pp., $14, December 2003, 1 58648 203 3
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... have a tendency to roll over if they hit a fixed object, such as a guard rail. Market forces may cause industry to act where government has failed. Bradsher wrote last year that gas prices in the US would have to hit $2.50 a gallon and stay there for a while to have any negative impact on SUV sales. (A gallon of petrol in the UK costs $5.75, a figure ...

The Loneliness Thing

Peter Campbell, 5 February 1981

Nature and Culture 
by Barbara Novak.
Thames and Hudson, 323 pp., £16, August 1980, 0 500 01245 8
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Edward Hopper: The Complete Prints 
by Gail Levin.
Norton, 128 pp., £9.95, April 1980, 0 393 01275 1
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Edward Hopper as illustrator 
by Gail Levin.
Norton, 288 pp., £15.95, April 1980, 0 393 01243 3
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... climate, our deafening present’ to European traditions resulted in a realist tradition which may turn out to be America’s greatest contribution to 19th and 20th-century painting. Professor Novak’s book is fascinating because she sets about showing how the work of the prolific and confident landscape painters of the mid-1800s can be related to ...

At Tate Modern

Brian Dillon: ‘Leigh Bowery!’, 14 August 2025

... between ‘Useless Man’, a dirge from Bowery’s trash art noise band Minty, and a rendition of David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’. What might Bowery have identified with in the latter song? I ain’t got no money and I ain’t got no hair? Or something to do with salacious self-mythology? Sordid details following …He was born in 1961 and grew up in ...

Diary

Frank Kermode: Jerusalem, 16 September 1982

... mosques. Below, at the foot of the Western Wall of the Second Temple, the Orthodox pray; they may not set foot on the Mount itself. In this city the most palpable fake and the most obvious bit of tourist razzmatazz acquires some mythical resonance. Incidentally, it is remarkably beautiful and has a benign winter climate; these qualities no doubt enhanced ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Prestige’, 14 December 2006

The Prestige 
directed by Christopher Nolan.
October 2006
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... a mile off, and sees through Angier every time, until Angier, with the help of Nikola Tesla, alias David Bowie, discovers a trick that isn’t a trick at all but a bit of new weird science. This is no longer magic according to Borden – a stage magician for him is, in the words of the novel, ‘not a sorcerer at all, but an actor who plays the part of a ...

He Roared

Hilary Mantel: Danton, 6 August 2009

Danton: The Gentle Giant of Terror 
by David Lawday.
Cape, 294 pp., £20, July 2009, 978 0 224 07989 1
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... over his life and over his conduct as a leader of the Revolution, and what is soon evident about David Lawday’s spirited and highly readable biography is that he stands Danton in a flattering light and pays insufficient attention to movements in the shadows. ‘The Gentle Giant of Terror’, the subtitle calls him: which suggests, along with revolutionary ...

In the Grey Zone

Tom Stevenson: Proxy Warfare, 22 October 2020

Proxy Wars: Suppressing Violence through Local Agents 
by Eli Berman and David A. Lake.
Cornell, 354 pp., £23.99, March 2019, 978 1 5017 3306 2
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Proxy War: The Least Bad Option 
by Tyrone L. Groh.
Stanford, 264 pp., £56, March 2019, 978 1 5036 0818 4
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Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the 21st Century 
by Andreas Krieg and Jean-Marc Rickli.
Georgetown, 258 pp., £21.99, June 2019, 978 1 62616 678 3
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... literature: ‘effects-based operations’ were defined by the former US air force general David Deptula during the First Gulf War as a means of applying the minimum conventional force to achieve the greatest strategic effect. In US government planning, ‘proxy warfare’ is the preserve of wily enemies, Iran and Russia in particular. The US National ...

Educating Georgie

E.S. Turner, 6 December 1984

Matriarch: Queen Mary and the House of Windsor 
by Anne Edwards.
Hodder, 462 pp., £12.95, September 1984, 0 340 24465 8
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... then? Well no, not quite. Eddy died in 1892 only weeks after he became engaged to Princess May (as the future queen was then known). We are invited to wonder whether his demise was deliberately accelerated by a doctor. Was it just coincidence that the young man took a dramatic turn for the worse directly after the arrival of the Queen’s ...

The smallest details speak the loudest

John Upton: The Stephen Lawrence inquiry, 1 July 1999

The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry 
by Sir William Macpherson.
Stationery Office, 335 pp., £26, February 1999, 0 10 142622 4
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The Case of Stephen Lawrence 
by Brian Cathcart.
Viking, 418 pp., £16.99, May 1999, 0 670 88604 1
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... from among the large volume of information that the police received: Jamie Acourt, Neil Acourt, David Norris and Gary Dobson. The names came from unreliable sources – an ex-girlfriend, youths with grudges against them. All four had been suspects in connection with previous acts of racial violence. Despite a barrage of teenage estate gossip with all the ...

Through the Mill

Jane Humphries: The Industrial Revolution, 20 March 2014

Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution 
by Emma Griffin.
Yale, 303 pp., £12.99, March 2014, 978 0 300 20525 1
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... to illustrate various aspects of working-class life in Useful Toil and Destiny Obscure. By 1981, David Vincent had found 142 memoirs spanning the years from 1790 to 1850, and in Bread, Knowledge and Freedom used them to explore the response of ordinary people to economic and social change. In 1989, Vincent, Burnett and ...

At the Royal Academy

Charles Hope: Giorgione, 31 March 2016

... would better describe the process. One of the exhibits at the Royal Academy, a picture called David between Saul and Jonathan, illustrates this very well. It was first attributed to Giorgione by the most influential Italian art historian of the last century, Roberto Longhi. In 1992 a letter about the picture Longhi wrote to the owner in 1944 was published ...

Lying doggo

Christopher Reid, 14 June 1990

Becoming a poet 
by David Kalstone, edited by Robert Hemenway.
Hogarth, 299 pp., £20, May 1990, 0 7012 0900 3
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... her life are known only scantly. In the absence of any comprehensive account of Bishop’s life, David Kalstone seems to have opted for an approach to the poet that might be termed semi-biographical. There are frustrations that attend even his scrupulous and sympathetic discussion of Bishop and her friendships with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. The ...

Vote for the Beast!

Ian Gilmour: The Tory Leadership, 20 October 2005

... will filch it. Moore has even complained of Clarke flattening the flat tax. The flat tax may well be right for, say, the new economies of Eastern Europe, but in long-established economies like those of the United States and Western Europe it would be largely a device for making the rich richer, which is no doubt why it appeals to the neo-cons here ...

Absent Authors

John Lanchester, 15 October 1987

Criticism in Society 
by Imre Salusinszky.
Methuen, 244 pp., £15, May 1987, 0 416 92270 8
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Mensonge 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Deutsch, 104 pp., £5.95, September 1987, 0 233 98020 2
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... But there are immediate difficulties with the book, difficulties of a kind once ascribed by David Lodge to a figure seen at academic conferences: the figure of the Deconstructionist who, radically sceptical about the existence of selfhood, identity and the subject, nonetheless continues to go for an early-morning jog. The jogging Deconstructionist – a ...