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Neil Corcoran confronts the new recklessness

Neil Corcoran, 28 September 1989

Manila Envelope 
by James Fenton.
28 Kayumanggi St, West Triangle Homes, Quezon City, Phillipines, 48 pp., £12, May 1989, 971 8647 01 5
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New Selected Poems 
by Richard Murphy.
Faber, 190 pp., £10.99, May 1989, 0 571 15482 4
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The Mirror Wall 
by Richard Murphy.
Bloodaxe, 61 pp., £10.95, May 1989, 9781852240929
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Selected Poems 
by Eavan Boland.
Carcanet, 96 pp., £5.95, May 1989, 0 85635 741 3
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The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness 
by Selima Hill.
Chatto, 47 pp., £5.95, May 1989, 0 7011 3455 0
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... the manifesto itself is printed on manila paper. This visual and verbal punning puts me in mind of Frank O’Connor’s account of a picture he saw in Joyce’s Paris flat: the city of Cork in a cork frame. An instance, no doubt, of Joyce’s compulsive punning, the picture can also be viewed as the manifestation of an ambiguous attitude. The visual pun ...

Good Things

Michael Hofmann, 20 April 1995

Heart’s Journey in Winter 
by James Buchan.
Harvill, 201 pp., £14.99, April 1995, 9780002730099
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... the founders of their prosperous republic but the peevish Marxists of the Frankfurt School such as Frank Lightner or the revolutionaries of remote and picturesque ex-colonies, the Soviets found a field ripe for subversion and recruitment.’ (Who needs story, with exposition like this?) Between the big players, people like ...

There’s Daddy

Michael Wood, 13 February 1992

Flying in to Love 
by D.M. Thomas.
Bloomsbury, 262 pp., £14.99, February 1992, 0 7475 1129 2
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JFK 
directed by Oliver Stone.
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... electric current had shot through her,’ ‘His eyelids gave a slow, saurian blink’). Love Field is the name of the airport in Dallas, and you might well think that the best thing to do with this unbearable but entirely accidental irony would be to forget it. Not for Thomas. Love is his theme, the word he has underlined in his notes (‘Politics is a ...

Ruling Imbecilities

Andrew Roberts, 7 November 1991

The Enemy’s Country: Words, Contexture and Other Circumstances of Language 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 153 pp., £19.95, August 1991, 0 19 811216 5
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... he is still concerned with the writer’s obligation to recognise and resist a ‘gravitational field’, but this field is identified with the negotium or business of practical life, not with original sin. Admirers of Hill’s poetry will find much in these essays of relevance to his own poetic technique, in particular ...

Learning to Say ‘Cat’

Edmund Gordon: ‘Lean Fall Stand’, 17 June 2021

Lean Fall Stand 
by Jon McGregor.
Fourth Estate, 288 pp., £14.99, April, 978 0 00 820490 7
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... pages, the last consists of a single word. We’re shown the exact moment when, sheltering in the field station from a storm, Doc’s grip on language begins to fail:His head felt wrong. There was no pain but a weakness. The feeling came and went. There were lights flashing on the radio but there was no sound. He poured a drink and emptied his glass. He rawed ...

The Only Alphabet

August Kleinzahler: Ashbery’s Early Life, 21 September 2017

The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life 
by Karin Roffman.
Farrar, Straus, 316 pp., £25.50, June 2017, 978 0 374 29384 0
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... man, a professor of physics at the University of Rochester, who had written his PhD on the new field of X-ray technology. He was also fluent in Greek and Latin and a good businessman. After his grandfather’s death Ashbery told an interviewer that Henry Lawrence was the only person he had ever unconditionally loved. Because there was no kindergarten in ...

Feast of St Thomas

Frank Kermode, 29 September 1988

Eliot’s New Life 
by Lyndall Gordon.
Oxford, 356 pp., £15, September 1988, 0 19 811727 2
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The Letters of T.S. Eliot 
edited by Valerie Eliot.
Faber, 618 pp., £25, September 1988, 0 571 13621 4
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The Poetics of Impersonality 
by Maud Ellmann.
Harvester, 207 pp., £32.50, January 1988, 0 7108 0463 6
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T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism 
by Richard Shusterman.
Duckworth, 236 pp., £19.95, February 1988, 0 7156 2187 4
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‘The Men of 1914’: T.S. Eliot and Early Modernism 
by Erik Svarny.
Open University, 268 pp., £30, September 1988, 0 335 09019 2
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Eliot, Joyce and Company 
by Stanley Sultan.
Oxford, 326 pp., £25, March 1988, 0 19 504880 6
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The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot 
by Robert Crawford.
Oxford, 251 pp., £25, December 1987, 9780198128694
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T.S. Eliot: The Poems 
by Martin Scofield.
Cambridge, 264 pp., £25, March 1988, 0 521 30147 5
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... been asked to write for the Times Literary Supplement – ‘the highest honour possible in the field of critical literature’. Yet despite such signal distinctions he continued to be poor: Vivien had to darn his worn-out underclothes, and although the family was generous with handouts, he never had enough money to stop worrying about it. At one rather ...

Free speech for Rupert Murdoch

Stephen Sedley, 19 December 1991

... Thatcher years has given impetus to the movement for a Bill of Rights and that the programmatic field need not be left to the political centre. Frank Vibert’s essay in the IEA volume offers a very different reason from Charter 88’s or the IPPR’s or Liberty’s for enacting a Bill of Rights: that the US Supreme ...

Mushroom Cameo

Rosemary Hill: Noël Coward’s Third Act, 29 June 2023

Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 634 pp., £30, March 2023, 978 1 4746 1280 7
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... Surrey and then to Battersea, at which point Violet read an article in the Daily Mirror about Lila Field and her new London Theatre for Children. She took Noël to audition and Field, German in origin but now with a ‘devastatingly refined’ English accent and ‘foaming with lace’, accepted him. It was one foot on a ...

America comes to the USSR

J. Hoberman: The 1950s’ Soviet Dream, 6 January 2011

Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the 1950s’ Soviet Dream 
by Francis Spufford.
Faber, 434 pp., £16.99, August 2010, 978 0 571 22523 1
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... happily confident as he ponders his past and present achievements, not least in the economic field. Thanks to the greater efficiency of central planning, prosperity has spread even more rapidly than Kantorovich expected. Soviet growth in the 1950s, Khrushchev reflects on the basis of official Soviet figures, exceeds that of West Germany, a rate equalled ...

Sterling and Strings

Peter Davies: Harold Wilson and Vietnam, 20 November 2008

... in the form of men on the ground. Two platoons were suggested or even less or a military field hospital. Bundy said that the result of such a contribution would be worth “several hundred million dollars”.’ While this offer seems to have been withdrawn, for fear of alienating Wilson, US memoranda make clear that it represents the thinking of the ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1996, 2 January 1997

... leave it for a while to see if it catches a gull’s eye, then put it in the bin. 24 May. Run into Frank Dickens the cartoonist walking down the stalled escalator at Camden Town Tube. Says that in Bristow, his strip in the Standard, he’s about to introduce the concept of Desk Rage, with frenzied attacks on other people in the office. About the same age as ...

Other Selves

John Bayley, 29 October 1987

How I Grew 
by Mary McCarthy.
Weidenfeld, 278 pp., £14.95, September 1987, 0 297 79170 2
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Myself and Michael Innes 
by J.I.M. Stewart.
Gollancz, 206 pp., £12.95, September 1987, 0 575 04104 8
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... if he had spelt it all out in the true first person, recounting his triumphs and disasters in the field of sex and family life. The moral seems to be that writers use themselves better in their novels and stories than in an autobiography, in which they simply put it all down, with various degrees of relaxation and garrulity. A memoir by Proust, instead of a ...

Writing about Shakespeare

Frank Kermode, 9 December 1999

... at the beginning of the piece, describing in disapproving tones the lavish festivities at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, when Henry made his state visit to Francis I of France: … men might say Till this time pomp was single, but now married To one above itself. Each following day Became the next day’s master, till the last Made former wonders ...

Jungle Book

John Pym, 21 November 1985

Money into Light 
by John Boorman.
Faber, 241 pp., £4.95, September 1985, 0 571 13731 8
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... feature film (give or take $17m) on treacherous locations in the 1980s, it is unrivalled: frank, amusing and amused, vivid and, above all, even-tempered. A passionate man whose project was beset by vicissitudes, Boorman nevertheless admits to only one spectacular and cathartic loss of temper. Everyone in the film business, Boorman recognises, has his ...

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