Tongues Wagged

Donald Rayfield, 20 February 1997

When The News seeped out that Anton Chekhov, the most sought after of Russia’s eligible bachelors, had, in Moscow on 25 May 1901, married a Lutheran actress, Olga Knipper, at least a dozen...

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Not Saluting, but Waving

Michael Wood, 20 February 1997

Nothing became her life like the remaking of it, but there were so many remakes. The latest stars Madonna, but the earliest starred Eva María Duarte herself. Or was that María Eva...

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Claire Bloom has now written two books about her life. Lest this give rise to any suspicion of autobiographical surfeit, she notes in the Preface to the latest volume, that her earlier book,

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Wear and Tear

Anne Hollander, 6 February 1997

Alice Rawsthorn begins her book about Yves St Laurent with a dramatic prologue evoking a period late in the designer’s career, specifically the end of January and the beginning of February...

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Grandiose Moments

Frank Kermode, 6 February 1997

Ford Madox Ford, an appealingly talented and gossipy subject, has naturally attracted biographers. In 1971 Arthur Mizener’s The Saddest Story seemed adequately exhaustive, but now Max...

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Corncob Caesar

Murray Sayle, 6 February 1997

Know your enemy, and know yourself, and you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific,...

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A House Full of No One

Colm Tóibín, 6 February 1997

The words ‘HIV Positive’ and ‘Aids’ do not appear in the poems in Mark Doty’s My Alexandria (1995); instead, they hover in the spaces between the other words, and...

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Wounding Nonsenses

E.S. Turner, 6 February 1997

The letters exchanged by Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh over twenty years were written, we are told, ‘to amuse, distract or tease’, a welcome function no doubt in times of bogged-down...

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Stick to the Latin

R.W. Johnson, 23 January 1997

It’s a dependable party game: who was the MP who sat from 1950 to 1987, emerged as a strong and early opponent of hanging and supported homosexual law reform; was fiercely anti-Nato,...

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Holborn at Heart

Jonathan Parry, 23 January 1997

Fifty or sixty years ago, there were many people for whom Gladstone still mattered. This can hardly be said today. He has become more and more marginal to our preoccupations, partly because those...

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Narco Polo

Iain Sinclair, 23 January 1997

‘Did you write it yourself?’ That is the first question any visiting journo asks Howard Marks about his autobiography, Mr Nice. Marks suppresses a yawn. The morning is not really his...

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Faraway Train

Hilary Mantel, 23 January 1997

The title of this writer’s autobiography is taken from Easy-to-Make Old-Fashioned Toys. ‘Flip-books, or Flickerbooks ... a series of sequential pictures or photographs put on separate...

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Smashing the Teapots: Where’s Woolf?

Jacqueline Rose, 23 January 1997

Virginia Woolf once said that biographies fail because the subject of the biography always goes missing (lost under the welter of the life). In this case, it is madness that goes missing because Woolf...

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Diary: What I did in 1996

Alan Bennett, 2 January 1997

3 January. To ‘Dynasties’, the exhibition of Tudor portraits at the Tate. There are some superb pictures but, with the sitters shortly to die or be executed, many of them seem ominous...

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The Passing Show

Ian Hacking, 2 January 1997

Bryan Magee is a brilliant philosophical entrepreneur, host of two BBC television series in which he interviewed live philosophers and dead ones (the latter mediated by other live ones). The late...

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Tiff and Dither

Michael Wood, 2 January 1997

It may be that only the truly self-absorbed can make art out of self-effacement. This at least is one of the suggestions of the first volume of Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries, a whingeing,...

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Sycophant-in-Chief

Clarence Brown, 12 December 1996

In 1966, the year I made the acquaintance of Ilya Ehrenburg, these words appeared in the Daily Mirror: ‘His name is always mud – somewhere or other. He is Ilya Ehrenburg, the renowned...

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The Ingenuity of Rural Life

R.W. Johnson, 12 December 1996

Kas Maine sharecropped on the marginal farmland of Willem Nieman, a staunch Afrikaner, chairman of the local National Party branch and hater of the English and the Jews. When Kas’s first...

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