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No Beast More Refined

James Davidson: How Good Was Nureyev?, 29 November 2007

Rudolf Nureyev: The Life 
by Julie Kavanagh.
Fig Tree, 787 pp., £25, September 2007, 978 1 905490 15 8
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... man’. Clara Saint, however, spoke to the French border police, one of whom happened to be a White Russian. Plain-clothed officers took up position close to where Nureyev was sitting with his minders. All he had to do was go up to them and ask for freedom, which he duly did. There was a brief tug-of-war, with Nureyev in the middle, until the French ...

When that great day comes

R.W. Johnson, 22 July 1993

... no matter what its political stripe, will be able to run South Africa without sharing power with white civil servants, policemen, generals and businessmen. The rhetoric about the welding of disparate groups into a new nation is, at best, harmless window-dressing; taken seriously, it would be extremely dangerous, for it would mean the enforcement of a ...

Bumming and Booing

John Mullan: William Wordsworth, 5 April 2001

Wordsworth: A Life 
by Juliet Barker.
Viking, 971 pp., £25, October 2000, 9780670872138
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The Hidden Wordsworth 
by Kenneth Johnston.
Pimlico, 690 pp., £15, September 2000, 0 7126 6752 0
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Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s 
by David Bromwich.
Chicago, 186 pp., £9.50, April 2000, 0 226 07556 7
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... repudiating them. Academic critics are often enamoured of Wordsworth’s youthful allegiances. Kenneth Johnston’s The Hidden Wordsworth is almost mystically committed to the idea of his youth. Its prologue declares that, with all the reverence (and matching irreverence) the poet has inspired, there is one image, or story, that we have not seen fully ...

No Light on in the House

August Kleinzahler: Richard Brautigan Revisited, 14 December 2000

An Unfortunate Woman 
by Richard Brautigan.
Rebel Inc, 110 pp., £12, July 2000, 1 84195 023 8
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Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-70 
by Richard Brautigan.
Rebel Inc, 146 pp., £6.99, June 2000, 1 84195 027 0
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You Can't Catch Death 
by Ianthe Brautigan.
Rebel Inc, 209 pp., £14.99, July 2000, 1 84195 025 4
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... well have been allowed a gentler landing. But he was not any of those things: he was a Westerner, white trash, didn’t go to college, and worst of all, was a California phenom, a national success, the literary darling of the young. The long knives were well due in making an appearance. Brautigan came from the Pacific Northwest, born in Tacoma, Washington in ...

Traven identified

George Woodcock, 3 July 1980

The Man who was B. Traven 
by Will Wyatt.
Cape, 326 pp., £8.50, June 1980, 0 224 01720 9
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The Government 
by B. Traven.
Allison and Busby, 231 pp., £6.50, May 1980, 0 85031 356 2
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The Cotton-Pickers 
by B. Traven.
Allison and Busby, 200 pp., £5.50, October 1979, 0 85031 284 1
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The White Rose 
by B. Traven.
Allison and Busby, 209 pp., £6.50, May 1980, 0 85031 369 4
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... as Traven’s knowledge of the IWW (the International Workers of the World, or Wobblies). The poet Kenneth Rexroth, himself of German descent and an ex-Wobbly, suggested that Traven was in fact a German-American, brought up in a community where the mother tongue was spoken, and that at some period in his life before going to Mexico he had been a wandering ...

Ruin it your own way

Susan Pedersen, 4 June 2020

Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution 
by Selina Todd.
Chatto, 304 pp., £18.99, August 2019, 978 1 78474 082 5
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A Taste of Honey 
by Shelagh Delaney.
Methuen, 112 pp., £14.44, November 2019, 978 1 350 13495 9
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... was an immediate if controversial hit. Some avant-garde and progressive voices championed it – Kenneth Tynan, Marxism Today – but there was plenty of criticism too. T.C. Worsley, theatre critic for the New Statesman, thought Delaney’s success merely reflected the fashion for working-class voices; Salford’s city fathers complained that she was ...

‘Damn right,’ I said

Eliot Weinberger: Bush Meets Foucault, 6 January 2011

Decision Points 
by George W. Bush.
Virgin, 497 pp., £25, November 2010, 978 0 7535 3966 8
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... of the current po-mo poster boys, Tao Lin, with his anaesthetised declarative sentences, and Kenneth Goldsmith with his ‘uncreative writing’, such as a transcription of a year’s worth of daily radio weather reports. Foucault notes: ‘Today’s writing has freed itself from the theme of expression.’ Even the title of the book unchains the ...

‘Someone you had to be a bit careful with’

David Sylvester: Gallery Rogues, 30 March 2000

Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser 
by Harriet Vyner.
Faber, 317 pp., £20, October 1999, 0 571 19627 6
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... that I could need £100. I’d go down there and he still wouldn’t pay me, and yet he’d have a white Rolls Royce with a chauffeur sitting outside waiting to take him wherever he wanted to go. But who says he paid the chauffeur? Not settling debts is hardly unheard of in Old Etonians. But Robert was a first-generation Etonian, and might conceivably have ...

And after we’ve struck Cuba?

Thomas Powers, 13 November 1997

The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis 
edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow.
Harvard, 728 pp., £23.50, October 1997, 0 674 17926 9
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‘One Hell of a Gamble’: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis 
by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali.
Murray, 420 pp., £25, September 1997, 0 7195 5518 3
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... missiles carrying nuclear warheads. But in the course of a week of intense discussions in the White House, Kennedy and his advisers gradually turned away from proposals for an out-of-the-blue bombing raid on the missile sites and settled instead for a blockade of the island (soothingly called a ‘quarantine’) by the American Navy with an unspecified ...

Lucian Freud

Nicholas Penny, 31 March 1988

... including those, such as snakes, which are generally feared. Girl with a kitten and Girl with a white dog are among his best-known early works and two of his most successful recent paintings, entitled, significantly. Double Portrait and Triple Portrait, in fact show only one girl, with a single whippet in the former and a brace of whippets in the latter. As ...

Scientific Antlers

Steven Shapin: Fraud in the Lab, 4 March 1999

The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science and Character 
by Daniel Kevles.
Norton, 509 pp., £21, October 1998, 0 393 04103 4
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... Their relations are not sexual but wholly collegial. The out-of-control independent counsel is not Kenneth Starr but a posse partly made up of the self-appointed scientific fraud-busters Walter Stewart and Ned Feder and their patron, the Democratic Congressman John Dingell. For the excellent Linda Tripp with her concealed tape-recorder read Imanishi-Kari’s ...

I want my wings

Andrew O’Hagan: The Last Tycoons, 3 March 2016

West of Eden: An American Place 
by Jean Stein.
Cape, 334 pp., £20, February 2016, 978 0 224 10246 9
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... and there’s a touch of Sheila Graham in the Garden of Allah, with Fitzgerald drunk on the floor. Kenneth Anger is deep in conversation with Nathanael West at the counter of Schwab’s drugstore, Joan Didion’s desert air is wafting in under the door, and Ben Hecht is taking notes. Stein has an ear for Americana at its most bewildering, most politically ...

Journey to Arezzo

Nicholas Penny: The Apotheosis of Piero, 17 April 2003

Piero della Francesca 
by Roberto Longhi, translated by David Tabbat.
Sheep Meadow, 364 pp., £32.50, September 2002, 1 878818 77 5
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... the eloquent intervals, the airy combination of dusty pink, chestnut brown, pale blue and white: all mark this painting as the earliest and perhaps the most interesting example of Piero’s influence on a great modern artist. In Young Spartans, which belongs to the same years and is now in the National Gallery, the group of elders in the distance ...

Forty Thousand Kilocupids

Marina Warner: The Femfatalatron, 31 July 2014

The Erotic Doll: A Modern Fetish 
by Marquard Smith.
Yale, 376 pp., £35, January 2014, 978 0 300 15202 9
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... the two children laughed at each other in a brotherly way, and their teeth were equally white.’ A live animal is so much more fascinating than the splendid doll, for reasons that underlie the erotics Marquard Smith explores in his peculiar and highly equivocal study. Yet a doll promises everything the rat in a cage can give and more: she/he/it can ...

I myself detest all Modern Art

Anne Diebel: Scofield Thayer, 9 April 2015

The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer 
by James Dempsey.
Florida, 240 pp., £32.50, February 2014, 978 0 8130 4926 7
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... countenance’ (though not before offering him one last chance to burn a finger in her ‘white flame’). When Thayer learned of their marriage, he was ‘nettled’, even though he was already engaged to the beautiful 18-year-old Elaine Orr, whom John Dos Passos described as a ‘poet’s dream’ and about whom Cummings would write hundreds of ...

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