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Move like a party

Mendez: George Michael’s Destiny, 5 January 2023

George Michael: A Life 
by James Gavin.
Abrams, 502 pp., £25, June 2023, 978 1 4197 4794 6
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George Michael: Freedom Uncut 
directed by David Austin and George Michael.
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... signing with Epic, a division of CBS that was basking in the record-breaking success of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The band was rewarded with a bigger budget and full creative control: ‘I was supremely confident I was writing pop classics,’ Michael later said. Ridgeley didn’t do much more than look good while pretending to play guitar, but he ...

At the Royal Academy

Peter de Bolla: Abstract Expressionism, 15 December 2016

... by 24 painters, not all of them American but all of whom worked in the United States between 1930 (Jackson Pollock’s haunted self-portrait) and 1979 (Joan Mitchell’s joyful Salut Tom, which pulsates with fluid light). One might suppose that the very term ‘abstract expressionism’ – it was coined in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates writing in the ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: 1920s v. 1980s, 17 March 1988

... as the First Reform Bill or the Charge of the Light Brigade. I have started by reading in parallel Peter Jenkins’s Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution and the two concluding volumes of Halévy’s magisterial History of the English People in the 19th Century, which between them take the story from 1895 to 1914. The contrast is not so much between an era of greatness ...

Just about Anything You Want

Ben Jackson: Guerrilla Open Access, 6 October 2016

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz 
by Aaron Swartz.
Verso, 368 pp., £15.99, February 2016, 978 1 78478 496 6
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... well down his list of priorities. ‘I don’t care about copyright law,’ he told his friend Peter Eckersley in 2010. ‘Healthcare, financial reform – those are the issues that I work on, not something obscure like copyright law.’ He had a change of heart about freedom of information more generally: he’d started to notice that the government and ...

Games-Playing

Patrick Parrinder, 7 August 1986

The Golden Gate 
by Vikram Seth.
Faber, 307 pp., £9.95, June 1986, 0 571 13967 1
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The Haunted House 
by Rebecca Brown.
Picador, 139 pp., £8.95, June 1986, 0 330 29175 0
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Whole of a Morning Sky 
by Grace Nichols.
Virago, 156 pp., £9.95, July 1986, 0 86068 774 0
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The Piano Tuner 
by Peter Meinke.
Georgia, 156 pp., $13.95, June 1986, 0 8203 0844 7
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Tap City 
by Ron Abell.
Secker, 273 pp., £10.95, July 1986, 0 436 00025 3
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... comics. A heroine looking back at her city in ruins.’ According to one of the stories in Peter Meinke’s collection The Piano Tuner, drinks in a certain Paris café come in three sizes: demi, sérieux and formidable. Grace Nichols’s novel is definitely sérieux. Meinke’s own comparatively stylised studies in catastrophe must be accounted as ...

Seriously ugly

Gabriele Annan, 11 January 1990

Weep no more 
by Barbara Skelton.
Hamish Hamilton, 166 pp., £14.95, November 1989, 0 241 12200 7
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... French writer Bernard Frank. There is no photograph of her third husband, the millionaire Derek Jackson, but he did not seriously engross her. She bit him twice, really hard the second time, so he shuffled off into his sixth marriage, leaving her with a farmhouse near St Tropez and financial security for herself, her mother and her aunt. New readers might ...

Kissing Cure

Peter Gay, 31 August 1989

The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi 
edited by Judith Dupont, translated by Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson.
Harvard, 227 pp., £23.95, February 1989, 0 674 13526 1
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... It was Freud’s dubious privilege to attract endangered personalities. Possibly the most gifted, almost definitely the most interesting of these was Sandor Ferenczi; and the publication of a clinical journal he kept during most of 1932, the year before his death, allows the public interested in such matters to assess, far better than before, the range of his professional gifts and the depth of his psychological vulnerability ...

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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... yer:/Hallelujah, Hallelujah!/We will gather up the fragments that remain.’ In Housman Country, Peter Parker does it by writing the life and times not of the man but of his most famous book: the growing pains of A Shropshire Lad, the vicissitudes of its reception, its cultural ‘aftermaths’. The word comes from agriculture, as Parker points out (new ...

Goofing Off

Michael Hofmann: Hrabal’s Categories, 21 July 2022

All My Cats 
by Bohumil Hrabal, translated by Paul Wilson.
Penguin, 96 pp., £7.99, August 2020, 978 0 241 42219 9
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... the distance called down into Vladimír’s upturned face Vladimír I spy with my little eye that Jackson Pollock is no longer with us that Jackson Pollock drank his last glass of whiskey at the Cedar Bar though doubtless he managed a few casks over the course of his short life and when he finished smoking his last Pall ...

Supreme Kidnap

James Fox, 20 March 1980

Fortune’s Hostages 
by Caroline Moorehead.
Hamish Hamilton, 256 pp., £8.95, January 1980, 0 241 10320 7
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... government refused to deal, Herr Scheel accused them of ‘abetting murder’. In 1975, when Peter Lorenz was taken by the Baader Meinhof, Schmidt agreed to every demand. But in that same year, when the Baader gang took the German Ambassador in Stockholm, Schmidt would not deal. He called it the ‘ad hoc’ line. Ms Moorehead has done a highly efficient ...

It’s a Crime!

Peter Campbell, 8 December 1994

Chaim Soutine: Catalogue Raisonné, Vols I-II 
by Maurice Tuchman, Esti Dunow and Klaus Perls.
Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 780 pp., £49.99, December 1993, 3 8228 1629 9
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... as if setting it to music, in a way which can as properly be described as action painting as Jackson Pollock’s swinging drips. The common notion is that post-photographic painting, relieved of the responsibility of representing appearances, escaped into new modes of picture-making. This ignores continuities. The kind of distortions Soutine made have a ...

Showman v. Shaman

David Edgar: Peter Brook, 12 November 1998

Threads of Time 
by Peter Brook.
Methuen, 241 pp., £17.99, May 1998, 0 413 69620 0
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... exile. But the most noted instance of the prophet rejecting his own country is the director Peter Brook who, having forged a glittering career in the British theatre, from a consummate King Lear to a definitive Midsummer Night’s Dream, decided to up sticks and set up an international company of actors abroad. ...

No Crying in This House

Jackson Lears: The Kennedy Myth, 7 November 2013

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy 
by David Nasaw.
Allen Lane, 896 pp., £12.35, September 2013, 978 0 14 312407 8
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Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch 
by Barbara Perry.
Norton, 404 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 393 06895 5
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... in 1944; he was killed a month after Joe Jr. Several years later she began an affair with Peter Fitzwilliam, an older married man ‘widely known as something of a bounder’, according to Nasaw. He was also a risk-taker: in May 1948 he insisted on his pilot flying from Cannes to Paris in spite of a thunderstorm that had grounded all commercial ...

We came, we saw, he died

Jackson Lears: Clinton’s Creed, 5 February 2015

Hard Choices 
by Hillary Clinton.
Simon and Schuster, 635 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 1 4711 3150 9
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HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton 
by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
Hutchinson, 440 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 0 09 195448 2
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... as an ironic shorthand for the futility and mendacity of US policy. Eventually the filmmaker Peter Davis used the phrase as the title for his 1974 documentary which exposed the American invaders’ casual brutality and indifference towards Asian lives. Clinton was involved, however tangentially, in the antiwar counterculture. Yet, like everyone else in ...
Selected Poems 1964-1983 
by Douglas Dunn.
Faber, 262 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 571 14619 8
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Terry Street 
by Douglas Dunn.
Faber, 62 pp., £3.95, November 1986, 0 571 09713 8
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Selected Poems 1968-1983 
by Paul Muldoon.
Faber, 109 pp., £8.95, November 1986, 0 571 14603 1
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Essential Reading 
by Peter Reading and Alan Jenkins.
Secker, 230 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 436 40988 7
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Stet 
by Peter Reading.
Secker, 40 pp., £5.95, October 1986, 0 436 40989 5
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... of the Press’ and the self-interrogating sections from Ukulele Music warn the reviewer of Peter Reading that he risks becoming entangled in his subject like a gladiator in a net. Even his editors at Secker (not to mention the printer) must feel unnerved – which is excellent. This is poetry at its most unpredictable: we wouldn’t be surprised to ...

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