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Diary

Tom Paulin: Summer in Donegal, 16 September 1999

... those traits which are the very antithesis of modern republicanism’. On the other hand, Dennis Kennedy has just described the Northern Irish state under Unionism as a ‘democracy’. The statelet was not a democracy, it was a holding operation which its founding fathers, Carson and Craig, thought would last only thirty years beyond 1921. It’s high ...

Across the Tellyverse

Jenny Turner: Daleks v. Cybermen, 22 June 2006

Doctor Who 
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Doctor Who: A Critical Reading of the Series 
by Kim Newman.
BFI, 138 pp., £12, December 2005, 1 84457 090 8
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... Unearthly Child’ was broadcast on a date to conjure with – 23 November 1963, the day after Kennedy was shot. The basic concept had come from Sydney Newman, the recently appointed head of drama at the BBC. He was looking for something that would hold children, teenagers and adults in the then-as-now transitional Saturday teatime slot, between Grandstand ...

Half Bird, Half Fish, Half Unicorn

Paul Foot, 16 October 1997

Peter Cook: A Biography 
by Harry Thompson.
Hodder, 516 pp., £18.99, September 1997, 0 340 64968 2
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... Was the Week That Was broadcast a sickeningly sycophantic tribute to the assassinated President Kennedy. There was no part of public life, he insisted, which was free of humbug and therefore immune to mockery. Peter’s own statements to journalists must always be treated with caution. He could rarely resist satirising himself or his interviewer, and ...

At the Hunterian

Andrew O’Hagan: Joan Eardley gets her due, 4 November 2021

... several films a day. Black police vans scuttled past like creepy-crawlies. The Sun Foundry in Kennedy Street was belting out smoke. The chains in the swing park were all twisted up. Rattray’s Cycles was open in Murray Street and the Rottenrow Maternity Hospital did tea for visitors at 10 a.m. Rag and bone men appeared with balloons for ‘any old ...

Narco Polo

Iain Sinclair, 23 January 1997

Mr Nice: An Autobiography 
by Howard Marks.
Secker, 466 pp., £16.99, September 1996, 0 436 20305 7
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Pulp Election: The Booker Prize Fix 
by Carmen St Keeldare.
Bluedove, 225 pp., £12.99, September 1996, 0 9528298 0 0
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... his manicures, orthodontics, his walnut-stain flesh, still failed to achieve the status of a Kennedy off-cut: cynics persisted in seeing him as a man who’d had so many blow jobs he looked like an inflatable. Marks could afford to grin out of the cover panel of Mr Nice. His teeth were white as glacial chippings, but they were paste. The price he paid ...

It’s me you gotta make happy

Andrea Brady: John Wieners, 29 July 2021

Yours Presently: The Selected Letters of John Wieners 
edited by Michael Seth Stewart.
New Mexico, 333 pp., £60, December 2020, 978 0 8263 6204 9
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... His poems explore forms of celebrity femininity: he writes about the heartaches of Joan Crawford, Jane Fonda and Bette Davis; imagines Barbara Hutton taken in a white silk crib to the White House followed by five hundred devotees; pictures Marlene Dietrich moving ‘majestically down the avenue to guard over/the war-torn refugees, waifs who lined the ...

Beefcake Ease

Miranda Carter: Robert Mitchum and Steve McQueen, 14 January 2002

Robert Mitchum: Solid, Dad, Crazy 
by Damien Love.
Batsford, 208 pp., £15.99, December 2001, 0 7134 8707 0
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Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don’t Care 
by Lee Server.
Faber, 590 pp., £20, October 2001, 0 571 20994 7
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McQueen: The Biography 
by Christopher Sandford.
HarperCollins, 497 pp., £16.99, October 2001, 0 00 257195 1
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... while his long-suffering wife, Dorothy (they were married for 57 years), stayed at home. When Jane Russell, a family friend, and his co-star on two films including Macao – the film which prompted Howard Hughes to write a multi-page memo on the subject of her breasts – was asked to choose her favourite Mitchum film, she said: ‘I just like ...

Otherwise Dealt With

Chalmers Johnson: ‘extraordinary rendition’, 8 February 2007

Ghost Plane: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Rendition Programme 
by Stephen Grey.
Hurst, 306 pp., £16.95, November 2006, 1 85065 850 1
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... as N829MG when it was used on 8 October 2002 to fly the Canadian citizen Maher Arar from Kennedy airport to Jordan and on to Syria, where he was held in a coffin-sized cell and tortured for ten months before being told that his arrest was a mistake. After this incident was exposed, the Gulfstream’s registration was changed to N259SK. The main base ...

Diary

Marina Warner: Literary Diplomacy, 16 November 2017

... they course through that I couldn’t find an origin. Like Hamlet, Frankenstein’s creature or Jane Eyre, the persona of Augustine has a life of his own: such figures are figments that become autonomous beings, acting in further conversations between pieces of literature and imagination. ‘The tendency to weave stories where evidence is missing is the ...

All change. This train is cancelled

Iain Sinclair: The Dome, 13 May 1999

... Sir Francis Drake and Sir Francis Chichester, visits by Samuel Pepys, location work for the latest Jane Austen or for Harrison Ford (more bombs) in Patriot Games – are trumpeted, while the dark history of the Greenwich marshes, a decayed industrial wilderness, is brutally elided. The tongue of poisoned land, a couple of miles to the east of the Royal Naval ...

My son has been poisoned!

David Bromwich: Cold War movies, 26 January 2012

An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War 
by J. Hoberman.
New Press, 383 pp., £21.99, March 2011, 978 1 59558 005 4
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... a sojourn at Lake Arrowhead. Temporarily without work himself, he had come along with his wife, Jane Wyman, on location to shoot The Yearling. He took out a motorboat, communed with his conscience, and saw that something in America had gone badly wrong. Was he meant to be a leader more than an actor, and might his second career pass through leadership of ...

Lethal Pastoral

Paul Keegan: Housman’s Lethal Pastoral, 17 November 2016

Housman Country: Into the Heart of England 
by Peter Parker.
Little, Brown, 446 pp., £25, June 2016, 978 1 4087 0613 8
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... about writing or assembling poems), its slow take-off then rapid ascent; his election in 1911 as Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge; his separate apotheoses as scholar and poet. Apart from a sabbatical term in 1934, he lectured in Cambridge twice a week for 25 years, until only days before his death. He was aware that the less he said the more was said ...

The Shock of the Pretty

James Meek: Seventy Hours with Don Draper, 9 April 2015

... stop him going on to get Joan pregnant, marrying and breaking up with his young secretary, Jane, dropping acid and hosting a rolling orgy at his grand Manhattan apartment. So powerful is the masculine culture of the agency that even men who don’t work there are enthralled by its mythology of dominant men and compliant women. When Joan takes her ...

I am a knife

Jacqueline Rose: A Woman’s Agency, 22 February 2018

Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus 
by Vanessa Grigoriadis.
Houghton Mifflin, 332 pp., £20, September 2017, 978 0 544 70255 4
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Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus 
by Laura Kipnis.
HarperCollins, 245 pp., £20, April 2017, 978 0 06 265786 2
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Living a Feminist Life 
by Sara Ahmed.
Duke, 312 pp., £20.99, February 2017, 978 0 8223 6319 4
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Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body 
by Roxane Gay.
Corsair, 288 pp., £13.99, July 2017, 978 1 4721 5111 7
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Difficult Women 
by Roxane Gay.
Corsair, 272 pp., £13.99, January 2017, 978 1 4721 5277 0
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... a feminist backstory to this argument. Twenty years ago, in Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, Jane Gallop made a plea for the erotics of teaching: a case made more effectively by bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress, which had appeared three years before. All hooks’s teachers at a segregated school in Kentucky had been black women who, although they ...

Get a Real Degree

Elif Batuman, 23 September 2010

The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing 
by Mark McGurl.
Harvard, 480 pp., £25.95, April 2009, 978 0 674 03319 1
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... speech from Samuel Johnson’s History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.In the early 19th century, Jane Austen, who did not use the phrase ‘point of view’, or read an anthology called Points of View, nonetheless began writing novels whose sophisticated and innovative use of limited narration is founded on a firm grasp of the fact that ‘everything said is ...

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