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Bow. Wow

James Wolcott: Gore Vidal, 3 February 2000

Gore Vidal 
by Fred Kaplan.
Bloomsbury, 850 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 7475 4671 1
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... Karloff’s monster in Bride of Frankenstein. He’s not alone. ‘I prefer my subjects dead,’ Fred Kaplan confesses in the prelude to his ambitious biography of Gore Vidal. Kaplan, a professor of English in New York whose taxidermies include Henry James, Dickens and Carlyle (they hardly get deader than ...

Fuming

Richard Altick, 19 July 1984

Thomas Carlyle: A Biography 
by Fred Kaplan.
Cambridge, 614 pp., £25, January 1984, 0 521 25854 5
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Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages 
by Phyllis Rose.
Chatto, 318 pp., £11.95, March 1984, 0 7011 2825 9
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A Carlyle Reader 
edited by G.B. Tennyson.
Cambridge, 544 pp., £25, May 1984, 0 521 26238 0
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... French Revolution, his private letters, and elsewhere, he dashes off one vignette after another. Fred Kaplan quotes one of the less well-known of these cameo portraits, depicting the French historian Thiers: ‘a noticeable subject ... with the light eupeptic practical Gascon spirit very strong in him, has a most musical, plaintively-singing, and yet ...

Unhappy Childhoods

John Sutherland, 2 February 1989

Trollope and Character 
by Stephen Wall.
Faber, 397 pp., £17.50, September 1988, 0 571 14595 7
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The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope 
by R.H. Super.
Michigan, 528 pp., $35, December 1988, 0 472 10102 1
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Dickens: A Biography 
by Fred Kaplan.
Hodder, 607 pp., £17.95, November 1988, 0 340 48558 2
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Charlotte Brontë 
by Rebecca Fraser.
Methuen, 543 pp., £14.95, October 1988, 9780413570109
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... absent-mindedness) what produced a narrative as symptomatically distorted as An Autobiography. Fred Kaplan begins his Dickens: A Biography with the event that makes writing a biography of Dickens so frustrating. On a fine September day in 1860 the author had a gigantic bonfire at Gad’s Hill in which ‘the accumulated letters and papers of twenty ...

A Terrible Bad Cold

John Sutherland, 27 September 1990

Dickens 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 1195 pp., £19.95, September 1990, 1 85619 000 5
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... of overall shape – something that even famous lives lack in the day-to-day business of living. Fred Kaplan’s 1988 life of Dickens began with the vivid scene of his incinerating ‘every letter he owned not on a business matter’ in a bonfire at his Gad’s Hill garden. What Kaplan ruefully implied by opening with ...

Bros

Tony Tanner, 22 April 1993

The Correspondence of William James. Vol. I: William and Henry 1861-1884 
edited by Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth Berkeley.
Virginia, 477 pp., £39.95, January 1993, 0 8139 1338 1
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Henry James: The Imagination of Genius 
by Fred Kaplan.
Hodder, 620 pp., £25, November 1992, 9780340555538
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... whole Henry James story – read it again, if you have already read Leon Edel’s biography – in Fred Kaplan’s new biography, and it is worth the effort. Inevitably Kaplan covers much of the same ground as Edel (not to mention F.W. Dupee or R.W.B. Lewis), but, taking advantage of the copious Jamesian research of the ...

A Tiny Sun

Tom Stevenson: Getting the Bomb, 24 February 2022

The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War 
by Fred Kaplan.
Simon and Schuster, 384 pp., £15, April 2021, 978 1 9821 0729 1
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The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age 
by Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press.
Cornell, 180 pp., £23.99, June 2020, 978 1 5017 4929 2
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... some delegation, so that in extremis subordinates or military commanders can order nuclear strikes.Fred Kaplan’s 1983 book The Wizards of Armageddon was an invaluable account of early American nuclear strategy. In the immediate postwar period, US military theorists were impressed by the power of what Kaplan called the ...

Nelly gets her due

John Sutherland, 8 November 1990

The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 317 pp., £16.99, October 1990, 0 670 82787 8
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The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant 
edited by Elisabeth Jay.
Oxford, 184 pp., £16.95, October 1990, 0 19 818615 0
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... financial support but resisted him sexually until 1862-3, and that her surrender was reluctant. Fred Kaplan has suggested that the relationship was sexual even before the Dickenses separated, and that there was no reluctance. Whichever side one takes, there are enigmas. Why did Dickens leave Ellen anything at all in his will? A thousand pounds was not ...

I can’t, I can’t

Anne Diebel: Edel v. the Rest, 21 November 2013

Monopolising the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship 
by Michael Anesko.
Stanford, 280 pp., £30.50, March 2012, 978 0 8047 6932 7
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... will probably move closer to pornography.’) More recent books by Sheldon Novick (1996, 2007) and Fred Kaplan (1992) have served as correctives to Edel’s genteel evasion. A valiant attempt to commemorate James as he wanted to be remembered – for his work – was made by Theodora Bosanquet, his bright, loyal secretary from 1907 until his death. As the ...

No Accident

Zachary Leader: Gore Vidal’s Golden Age, 21 June 2001

The Golden Age: A Novel 
by Gore Vidal.
Little, Brown, 467 pp., £17.99, October 2000, 0 316 85409 3
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... Hollywood (1989), Washington, DC (1967) and now The Golden Age. According to Vidal’s biographer, Fred Kaplan, it was while at work on Lincoln, in the early 1980s, that Vidal conceived of the series in its totality (though there were earlier links, 1876 being a sequel to Burr, and both introducing characters who are ancestors of those in ...

Roaming the Greenwood

Colm Tóibín: A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods, 21 January 1999

A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition 
by Gregory Woods.
Yale, 448 pp., £24.95, February 1998, 0 300 07201 5
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... began happening to [Henry] James in the mid-1890s, and more frequently in the next decade,’ Fred Kaplan wrote in his biography of James. He began to fall in love with young men. ‘James’s sexual self-consciousness,’ Kaplan continued, ‘seemed either impossibly innocent or embarrassingly explicit.’ ‘I ...

The Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt: The Israel Lobby, 23 March 2006

... value, but the truth is that they are intended in large part to promote Israel’s image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes it clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter the ‘Arabic [sic] point of view’ that he thinks is prevalent in NYU’s Middle East programmes. No discussion of the Lobby would be complete ...

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