Susannah Clapp was an editor at the LRB from its founding in 1979 until 1992. She has been the Observer’s theatre critic since 1997 and has written books on Bruce Chatwin and Angela Carter.
It is a fascinating and fawning exhibition. At the King’s Gallery (until 18 October) some three hundred items of clothing belonging to Queen Elizabeth II are displayed – headless, limbless, fleshless – like the remains of extinct animals. Norman Hartnell supplies silky flamboyance and encrustations: lace re-embroidered with sequins and crystals. Hardy Amies, fresh from a...
Little magazines: big guns. It is hard to overestimate the high hopes and strong feelings swirling around papers which are small in funds and circulation but large in aspiration. For a time the London Review of Books might have been considered a little magazine: uncertain of its future but clear it wanted to put a spoke in the Falklands War. The Little Review, thought to have originated...
Not exactly an addiction but a compulsion. When I started to write full-time about the theatre, I was fixated on television soaps. Not all of them. I didn’t have an afternoon habit. Just EastEnders, which I had watched from the beginning (and failed to persuade the then editor would be a subject for this paper), Coronation Street and Brookside. I would come home from King Lear or the
Think of a loincloth as an act of diplomacy. The beautiful, fact-crammed catalogue accompanying the British Museum’s Hawaii exhibition (until 25 May) explains that the malo loloa, a long loincloth made of barkcloth, was a metaphor for Hawaii forming alliances. When, just over two hundred years ago, the young King Liholiho (known as Kamehameha II) and Queen Kamāmalu sailed from...
‘Woman and Vegetation’ (1945)
André Breton gave one of the best descriptions: ‘the rocket I’ll call Baya’. He also gave some of the worst: ‘a being as frail as she is talented’, ‘the child that is Baya’. Excitement vibrates around the subject of Alice Kaplan’s biography Seeing Baya (Chicago, £21). The artistic gift...
Angela Carter didn’t enjoy much of what she called ‘the pleasantest but most evanescent kind of fame’.
Susannah Clapp’s memoir of Bruce Chatwin has little in the way of hard-going and nothing of the comprehensive record that bloats a literary biography. It makes no claims about the relation...
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