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What does a chicken know of bombs?

David Thomson: A Key to Brando, 5 December 2019

The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando 
by William J. Mann.
HarperCollins, 718 pp., £22, November 2019, 978 0 06 242764 9
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... Terry Malloy, and accepted it with good grace. Then came 18 years of turmoil, a bad marriage (to Anna Kashfi, Christian’s mother), a mounting dread of his own work, and a need to sabotage projects. He scorned Hollywood, but started living there. He disdained phony projects, but took the money, all the while declaring that the entertainment medium was ...

Ways to Be Pretentious

Ian Penman, 5 May 2016

M Train 
by Patti Smith.
Bloomsbury, 253 pp., £18.99, October 2015, 978 1 4088 6768 6
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Collected Lyrics 1970-2015 
by Patti Smith.
Bloomsbury, 303 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 1 4088 6300 8
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... warmed to her. (How couldn’t I? Talking to cats, watching Inspector Morse repeats, reading Anna Kavan? She’s stolen my life!) If M Train had stayed there, as an unlikely TV addict’s pillow book, I would have been wholly won over. In her 1979 song ‘Dancing Barefoot’, Smith sang of ‘grave visitations’. If we take M Train at its word, Smith ...

Now for the Hills

Stephanie Burt: Les Murray, 16 March 2000

Collected Poems 
by Les Murray.
Carcanet, 476 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 1 85754 369 6
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Fredy Neptune 
by Les Murray.
Carcanet, 256 pp., £19.95, May 1999, 1 85754 433 1
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Conscious and Verbal 
by Les Murray.
Carcanet, 89 pp., £6.95, October 1999, 1 85754 453 6
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... the ‘feebleminded’: These were no leaders but they were first into the dark on Dog Fox Field: Anna who rocked her head, and Paul who grew big and yet giggled small, Irma who looked Chinese, and Hans who knew his world as a fox knows a field. Insisting that the dignity of persons is not based on intellect or achievement, Murray can be astonishingly good at ...

Public Enemy

R.W. Johnson, 26 November 1987

Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover 
by Richard Gid Powers.
Hutchinson, 624 pp., £16.95, August 1987, 0 02 925060 9
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... they frequently acted like comic-strip actors themselves. When Baby Face Nelson killed FBI agent Sam Cowley, FBI Special Agent Melvin Purvis rushed to Cowley’s deathbed where, he told reporters, he had taken ‘an oath in Cowley’s blood’ to avenge him, helpfully providing the press with the headline quote they wanted: IF IT’S THE LAST THING I ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... making for the stairs. ‘I was holding the door for Eddie Daffarn to come downstairs, and for Sam, the son of my neighbour.’ No one had woken Sheila, the elderly lady who lived on that floor, and Sam had to leave without his father, who suffered from dementia and was refusing to move. ‘Where is your dad?’ Hamid ...

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