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Chiantishire

Michael Hofmann: Shirley Hazzard, 6 May 2021

Collected Stories 
by Shirley Hazzard.
Virago, 356 pp., £16.99, November 2020, 978 0 349 01295 7
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... Road’. She published two collections: Cliffs of Fall (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). The latter – a series of linked stories about the UN (‘the Organisation’) – is written with a mordant, Waughish verve. These two volumes, and ten uncollected or unpublished pieces, make up the Collected Stories.Hazzard set her work ...

Gossip

Frank Kermode, 5 June 1997

The Untouchable 
by John Banville.
Picador, 405 pp., £15.99, May 1997, 0 330 33931 1
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... and stops, turning and turning, like a leaf on a stream. A thick drop of sunlight seethed in a glass paperweight on a low table.’ Light seething in glasses is a recurring figure, perhaps random, perhaps a leitmotif about the significance of which one can only speculate: it could have to do with seduction, or with the sensitive eye of the art expert, or ...

At the Garden Museum

Rosemary Hill: Constance Spry, 9 September 2021

... designs from the Fulham Pottery in a variety of wide, shallow shapes, glazed inside but left matt on the exterior so they could be coloured to harmonise with a particular scheme. Belgrave Road was not a great success. Victoria was too far off the beaten track of the smart set, so she moved to South Audley Street, Mayfair, in 1934. Already, according to ...

Innocence

John Bayley, 19 May 1988

... with arm movements, in his faded blue denim jacket. He was a serious young man, in glasses with matt black metal rims. I sometimes thought that if his arms could produce masterpieces on their own he wouldn’t have to be teaching us. Elevation led to the epiphany. I remember that. You quietly worked up to this big moment when nothing happened. The ...

Alma’s Alter

Gabriele Annan, 11 June 1992

Oscar Kokoschka: Letters 
translated by Mary Whittall.
Thames and Hudson, 320 pp., £24.95, March 1992, 0 500 01528 7
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... yellow, shoots out of the painting, and the immense, radiant mass of colour (radiant as stained glass, Rouault never manages to do anything like it, Van Gogh is matt and whitish-grey by comparison!) begins to tremble like a living organism in action. This is ‘action painting’ in the true sense of the word, and there ...

Diary

Clancy Martin: My Life as a Drunk, 9 July 2009

... dosage), shows no signs of alcohol addiction and claims even to be able to drink an occasional glass of wine without experiencing any subsequent craving. There are two basic theories of addiction: the ‘possession’ theory and the ‘tragic’ theory. Like most alcoholics, I prefer, but am suspicious of, the possession theory. This story goes that the ...

The Amazing …

Jonathan Lethem: My Spidey, 6 June 2002

Spider-Man 
directed by Sam Raimi.
May 2002
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... mixed teenage grandiosity with even the mildest persecution complex, let alone real persecution. Matt Groening once proposed a magazine called ‘Sullen Teen’. Long before the trench-coat mafia, The Amazing Spider-Man was that magazine. Spider-Man was also the first superhero who, as a civilian, probably read comic books. The truth, though, is that ...

Ropes, Shirts or Dirty Socks

Adam Smyth: Paper, 15 June 2017

Paper: Paging through History 
by Mark Kurlansky.
Norton, 416 pp., £12.99, June 2017, 978 0 393 35370 9
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... paper is coated with a mixture of clay and calcium carbonate. Its name is StellaPress HB: it is matt with a light coating which helps ink brightness and readability, and also gives (try it now) that smoothness to the page. But of course you may not be reading this on paper. Kurlansky’s sense of history as benign cultural development carries him ...

That Wild Mercury Sound

Charles Nicholl: Dylan’s Decade, 1 December 2016

The Bootleg Series, Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965-66 
by Bob Dylan.
Columbia, £60, November 2015
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... it seems he first thought of it as ‘Dillon’, possibly after the hard-bitten Dodge City lawman Matt Dillon, hero of the TV Western Gunsmoke. He was twenty years old, skinny and scruffy in jeans and a ‘Huck Finn cap’. In an early article in the New York Times, his future biographer Robert Shelton described him as ‘resembling a cross between a choirboy ...

Vertiginous

Nicholas Penny, 12 December 1996

Grands Décors français 1650-1800 
by Bruno Pons.
Faton, 439 pp., £130, June 1995, 2 87844 023 4
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The Rococo Interior 
by Katie Scott.
Yale, 342 pp., £39.95, November 1995, 0 300 04582 4
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Chardin 
by Marianne Roland Michel, translated by Eithne McCarthy.
Thames and Hudson, 293 pp., £60, March 1996, 0 500 09259 1
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... explaining how the wood was prepared and carved. She then considers how the invention of plate glass made mirrors available in large sheets (and discusses their cost in relation to that of painting and tapestry – their rivals as wall covering); notes how dyes of a richer tonal range were introduced by a painter into the silk and wool used by the tapestry ...

Vuvuzelas Unite

Andy Beckett: The Trade Union Bill, 22 October 2015

Trade Union Bill (HC Bill 58) 
Stationery Office, 32 pp., July 2015Show More
Trade Union Membership 2014: Statistical Bulletin 
Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 56 pp., June 2015Show More
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... always trying to add things to our contract: clean the ceilings, which are very tall, or clean the glass ceiling lamps from the inside … There can’t be any dirt, the building has to be spotless. We work at night, and in the winter it’s very very cold. In the summer, it’s extremely hot. You get sick from the changes in temperature.’ If illness ...

A Rumbling of Things Unknown

Jacqueline Rose: Marilyn Monroe, 26 April 2012

... no mouth. She was luminous – on that much everyone seems to agree. Hers is not the flawless matt beauty of Dietrich or Garbo. She is, as one might say, more curvy – I am of course referring to her face, on which, unlike Dietrich, Garbo or indeed Elizabeth Taylor (whom she saw as a rival), there isn’t a single straight line. There is no flattening ...

Speak for yourself, matey

Adam Mars-Jones: The Uses of Camp, 22 November 2012

How to Be Gay 
by David Halperin.
Harvard, 549 pp., £25.95, August 2012, 978 0 674 06679 3
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... for saving Cavaradossi’s life became a query about how much had been paid for the rotgut in the glass. Or Galupe-Borszkh, this time singing Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana, might belatedly realise she’s appearing in a production so cheap that her costume has been made from the same bolt of material as the gingham tablecloth in Lucia’s wine shop. I felt ...

In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

Rebecca Solnit: Losing San Francisco, 8 February 2024

... suburban, looking to avoid strangers and surprises.Over the past twenty years, ranks of glass towers have risen up just south of the city’s old downtown. The second tallest building west of the Mississippi River is San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower, whose resemblance, thanks to its curved sides and blunt edges, to a dildo or penis is often ...

The Shock of the Pretty

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

... Don Draper, Sterling Cooper’s top ideas man. The creator and chief writer of Mad Men is a man, Matt Weiner. But Weiner aside, the 15 women writers who have worked on the series rack up almost twice as many episode credits as the 14 men. Weiner may have worked on The Sopranos, and AMC had another award magnet with Breaking Bad, but nobody gets whacked in ...

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