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Tea-Leafing

Duncan Campbell, 19 October 1995

The Autobiography of a Thief 
by Bruce Reynolds.
Bantam, 320 pp., £15.99, April 1995, 0 593 03779 0
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... off to Longchamp for the weekend. A thief goes home to the wife in Up-minster. So why did Bruce Reynolds, a main player in this country’s robbery of the century, choose to call his book The Autobiography of a Thief ? It was, he says, a bit of homage to Jean Genet. The Thief’s Journal was being translated into English just as ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Anna Karenina, New Puritans, Books on Cooking the Books, 22 February 2001

... one of the reasons ‘the face of the British gangster is changing.’ But Mad Frankie Fraser and Bruce Reynolds – both of whom have recently written memoirs – aren’t the only old crooks being forced to change their ways, if we are to believe Denise Deegan, whose Managing Activism: A Guide to Dealing with Activists and Pressure Groups was published ...

Brought to book

Gordon Williams, 7 May 1981

Ronnie Biggs: His Own Story 
by Michael Joseph.
Sphere, 238 pp., £7.95, March 1981, 9780718119720
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A Sense of Freedom 
by Jimmy Boyle.
Pan, 264 pp., £1.25, September 1977, 0 330 25303 4
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... Good Soldier Biggs ambles from a Brixton boyhood into petty thieving and friendship with big-timer Bruce Reynolds, who asks him to make one for the big job because he can produce a bent train-driver: ‘I knew before the meeting that there were qualms about my being included on the job, because I was such an unlucky thief; even ...

Like Oysters in Their Shells

Malcolm Gaskill: The Death Trade, 18 August 2022

All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation into the Death Trade 
by Hayley Campbell.
Raven, 268 pp., £18.99, March, 978 1 5266 0139 1
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... the filtered smoke is invisible.Another way to remember the dead is through a death mask. Nick Reynolds, an artist and musician in London, begins by doing the hair, then covers the face in moisturiser before applying blue dental alginate and plaster bandages for rigidity. After twenty minutes, he shakes out the head and lines the mould with polyurethane ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard’, 15 July 2021

... ever. Both films are written by Tom O’Connor and directed by Patrick Hughes. And both star Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson, though in the second case the verb is far too feeble. I’m not sure any other actor could play a murderous villain and get so many laughs. When I saw the first of the two movies I thought I was watching a bit of the James Bond ...

Short Cuts

Andrew O’Hagan: Hemingway the Spy, 16 February 2017

... And so to Ernest Hemingway, whose adventures recorded by the military historian Nicholas Reynolds may not admit such subtlety. Reynolds is a former curator of the CIA Museum in Washington. Reasonably, the museum is a bit cagey and I am not very familiar with it but, one way and another, the collection has received ...

Dialect does it

Blake Morrison, 5 December 1985

No Mate for the Magpie 
by Frances Molloy.
Virago, 170 pp., £7.95, April 1985, 0 86068 594 2
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The Mysteries 
by Tony Harrison.
Faber, 229 pp., £9.95, August 1985, 9780571137893
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Ukulele Music 
by Peter Reading.
Secker, 103 pp., £3.95, June 1985, 0 436 40986 0
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Hard Lines 2 
edited by Ian Dury, Pete Townshend, Alan Bleasdale and Fanny Dubes.
Faber, 95 pp., £2.50, June 1985, 0 571 13542 0
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No Holds Barred: The Raving Beauties choose new poems by women 
edited by Anna Carteret, Fanny Viner and Sue Jones-Davies.
Women’s Press, 130 pp., £2.95, June 1985, 0 7043 3963 3
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Katerina Brac 
by Christopher Reid.
Faber, 47 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 571 13614 1
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Skevington’s Daughter 
by Oliver Reynolds.
Faber, 88 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 571 13697 4
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Rhondda Tenpenn’orth 
by Oliver Reynolds.
10 pence
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Trio 4 
by Andrew Elliott, Leon McAuley and Ciaran O’Driscoll.
Blackstaff, 69 pp., £3.95, May 1985, 0 85640 333 4
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Mama Dot 
by Fred D’Aguiar.
Chatto, 48 pp., £3.95, August 1985, 0 7011 2957 3
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The Dread Affair: Collected Poems 
by Benjamin Zephaniah.
Arena, 112 pp., £2.95, August 1985, 9780099392507
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Long Road to Nowhere 
by Amryl Johnson.
Virago, 64 pp., £2.95, July 1985, 0 86068 687 6
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Mangoes and Bullets 
by John Agard.
Pluto, 64 pp., £3.50, August 1985, 0 7453 0028 6
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Ragtime in Unfamiliar Bars 
by Ron Butlin.
Secker, 51 pp., £3.95, June 1985, 0 436 07810 4
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True Confessions and New Clichés 
by Liz Lochhead.
Polygon, 135 pp., £3.95, July 1985, 0 904919 90 0
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Works in the Inglis Tongue 
by Peter Davidson.
Three Tygers Press, 17 pp., £2.50, June 1985
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Wild Places: Poems in Three Leids 
by William Neill.
Luath, 200 pp., £5, September 1985, 0 946487 11 1
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... in the eerie detachment of the language and the strange familiarity of Brac’s landscapes. Oliver Reynolds is another Faber poet with Martian smatterings; his long opening poem, ‘Victoriana’, ends lamely in a blind alley with the image of glue globules on the pages of a book: ‘braille tracks healing the torn paper’. But the poem has a good story to ...

Kindred Spirits

Chloe Hooper: To be Tasmanian, 18 August 2005

In Tasmania 
by Nicholas Shakespeare.
Harvill, 320 pp., £20, November 2004, 1 84343 157 2
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... On one level this is a traditional family romance. Exhausted after finishing his biography of Bruce Chatwin, Shakespeare moved to Tasmania – a place Chatwin never visited – to make a fresh start: ‘I was at that period sick of a life already lived. I hoped never to read another old letter again.’ No such luck: Shakespeare gets the metaphorical ...

Diary

Stephen Smith: Peace in Our Lunchtime, 6 October 1994

... when I included him in a remark about Loyalist ‘operators’. In The Edge of the Union, Steve Bruce, the self-styled ‘Prods are me’ spokesman of academe, observes that ‘paramilitaries use the term “operators” to distinguish those members who have been or are prepared to be personally involved in illegal violence from the “backroom ...

Dear Miss Boothby

Margaret Anne Doody, 5 November 1992

The Letters of Samuel Johnson: Vol. I: 1731-1772, Vol. II: 1773-1776, Vol. III: 1777-1781 
edited by Bruce Redford.
Oxford, 431 pp., £25, February 1992, 0 19 811287 4
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... him, but sometimes nothing more when we need more. In June 1781, for instance, Johnson writes to Reynolds: ‘It was not before yesterday that I received your splendid benefaction.’ There is a long note quoting Boswell’s description in the Life of Johnson of how he came upon this letter, but there is no account of what the ‘benefaction’ was or might ...

Move like a party

Mendez: George Michael’s Destiny, 5 January 2023

George Michael: A Life 
by James Gavin.
Abrams, 502 pp., £25, June, 978 1 4197 4794 6
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George Michael: Freedom Uncut 
directed by David Austin and George Michael.
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... and got to No. 8. Wham! were suddenly a headline act of ‘new pop’, which, according to Simon Reynolds, evolved the DIY codes of punk to ‘take on the mainstream and beat it at its own game’ and ‘involved a renaissance of glam’s interest in artifice and androgyny’. Other acts included in the category – the Human League, Eurythmics and Depeche ...

Self-Hugging

Andrew O’Hagan: A Paean to Boswell, 5 October 2000

Boswell's Presumptuous Task 
by Adam Sisman.
Hamish Hamilton, 352 pp., £17.99, November 2000, 0 241 13637 7
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James Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’: Research Edition: Vol. II 
edited by Bruce Redford and Elizabeth Goldring.
Edinburgh, 303 pp., £50, February 2000, 0 7486 0606 8
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Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author 
by Lawrence Lipking.
Harvard, 372 pp., £11.50, March 2000, 0 674 00198 2
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Dr Johnson's London 
by Liza Picard.
Weidenfeld, 362 pp., £20, July 2000, 0 297 84218 8
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... of 1740-70, that this was also a place where Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke and Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Malone, William Pitt and David Garrick could meet in the upstairs room of a pub to exchange genial perceptions on the course of the moral universe. I am pleased for Boswell, and grateful, too, that his mind was at once on the street and in the ...

Kitty still pines for his dearest Dub

Andrew O’Hagan: Gossip, 6 February 2014

Becoming a Londoner: A Diary 
by David Plante.
Bloomsbury, 534 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 1 4088 3975 1
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The Animals: Love Letters between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy 
edited by Katherine Bucknell.
Chatto, 481 pp., £25, September 2013, 978 0 7011 8678 4
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... who said that there was nothing more beautiful than the naked chest of a dead young man. Bruce Chatwin needs to give the impression that he knows everything, needs to be able to tell you, when you stop with him at an antique shop window off Bond Street, what factory the tea pot came from, and its date. In warning me that I may be basing my life too ...

Merry Companies

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: The Golden Age of Dutch painting, 20 January 2005

Dutch 17th-century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution 
by Wayne Franits.
Yale, 328 pp., £45, June 2004, 0 300 10237 2
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... powers of generalising and abstracting, the Dutch were typically seen as content to engage in what Reynolds termed the ‘mere mechanical labour of copying’. Though the neoclassical hierarchy had ostensibly broken down at the beginning of the 19th century, the fierce debate that erupted when Svetlana Alpers attempted to challenge the iconological consensus ...

Great Portland Street Blues

Karl Miller, 25 January 1990

Boswell: The Great Biographer. Journals: 1789-1795 
by James Boswell, edited by Marlies Danziger and Frank Brady.
Heinemann, 432 pp., £25, November 1989, 0 434 89729 9
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... inadvertent. By now, most of his cronies are gone, or estranged. Of those that remain, Joshua Reynolds, the Shakespearian scholar Malone and the politician John Courtenay are affectionate and supportive. These were the years, as we occasionally have to remind ourselves, when his Life of Johnson was completed, put to press, published, relished and ...

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