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R.W. Johnson, 4 June 1987

Traitors: The Labyrinths of Treason 
by Chapman Pincher.
Sidgwick, 346 pp., £13.95, May 1987, 0 283 99379 0
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The Secrets of the Service: British Intelligence and Communist Subversion 1939-51 
by Anthony Glees.
Cape, 447 pp., £18, May 1987, 0 224 02252 0
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Freedom of Information – Freedom of the Individual? 
by Clive Ponting, John Ranelagh, Michael Zander and Simon Lee, edited by Julia Neuberger.
Macmillan, 110 pp., £4.95, May 1987, 0 333 44771 9
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... of ‘anti-Bolshevik old buffers’. These recruits were so markedly superior that they rapidly rose to positions of power and influence. Given the nature of the Thirties intelligentsia, it was pretty well inevitable that these recruits should have included at least a few who were to turn out to be Soviet moles. The second change followed from the fact ...

The Ticking Fear

John Kerrigan: Louis MacNeice, 7 February 2008

Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems 
edited by Peter McDonald.
Faber, 836 pp., £30, January 2007, 978 0 571 21574 4
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Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems 
edited by Michael Longley.
Faber, 160 pp., £12.99, April 2007, 978 0 571 23381 6
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I Crossed the Minch 
by Louis MacNeice.
Polygon, 253 pp., £9.99, September 2007, 978 1 84697 014 6
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The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography 
by Louis MacNeice, edited by E.R. Dodds.
Faber, 288 pp., £9.99, September 2007, 978 0 571 23942 9
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... pips. The roses are as convincingly vulgar, the pips as pointedly impure, as the gaudy flowers and rose-patterned paper and eating in the street that MacNeice praised in his 1937 radio talk ‘In Defence of Vulgarity’. Impurities like these were worth getting into poetry as a kick against St Paul. MacNeice says in Modern Poetry that ‘words like ...

Paralysed by the Absence of Danger

Jeremy Harding: Spain, 1937, 24 September 2009

Letters from Barcelona: An American Woman in Revolution and Civil War 
edited by Gerd-Rainer Horn.
Palgrave, 209 pp., £50, February 2009, 978 0 230 52739 3
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War Is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War 
by James Neugass.
New Press, 314 pp., £16.99, November 2008, 978 1 59558 427 4
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We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War 
by Paul Preston.
Constable, 525 pp., £9.99, June 2009, 978 1 84529 946 0
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... and that Lois herself had been a high-school supporter of the Socialist Party of America under Norman Thomas and perhaps, at university, an admirer of the young militants whose star rose in the party during the early 1930s. Lois sends a funny letter to her family in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that ...

Who had the most fun?

David Bromwich: The Marx Brothers, 10 May 2001

Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx 
by Stefan Kanfer.
Penguin, 480 pp., £7.99, April 2001, 0 14 029426 0
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The Essential Groucho 
by Groucho Marx, edited by Stefan Kanfer.
Penguin, 254 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 0 14 029425 2
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... about them even more than it does about Chaplin. They were nervous and resourceful fighters who rose from the bottom and never forgot it, and they deployed the slapstick aggressions of everyday life as a coarse stimulant and a way of gaining private ends. At the request of Kaufman and Irving Berlin, the producer of The Cocoanuts, Sam Harris, agreed one day ...

Bastard Foreigners

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare v. the English, 2 July 2020

Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness 
by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton.
Cambridge, 245 pp., £75, October 2019, 978 1 108 49373 4
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... he holds a small scroll (a love poem?) while the other, resting between his thighs, toys with a rose. This is a Shakespeare fit to have his poems set as lieder. He is also celebrated as a central figure in German Kunst on the proscenium arch of the Latvian national opera house in Riga, once the city’s German-speaking theatre, where four portrait profiles ...

All I Can Stand

Thomas Powers: Joseph Mitchell, 18 June 2015

Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of the ‘New Yorker’ 
by Thomas Kunkel.
Random House, 384 pp., £22.50, April 2015, 978 0 375 50890 5
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... life in his mind. In the 1980s Mitchell explained how he went about things to a professor called Norman Sims. What Mitchell waited for was ‘the revealing remark’, the thing a subject told him that came up from his unconscious and surprised both of them. Mr Hunter’s revealing remark touched on an incident during his early life when for several years he ...

Buy birthday present, go to morgue

Colm Tóibín: Diane Arbus, 2 March 2017

Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer 
by Arthur Lubow.
Cape, 734 pp., £35, October 2016, 978 0 224 09770 3
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Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov 
by Alexander Nemerov.
Fraenkel Gallery, 106 pp., $30, March 2015, 978 1 881337 41 6
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... and Chicago. In 1919, Gertrude married David Nemerov, a window-dresser in the main store who rose to become president of the company. Howard was born in 1920, Diane in 1923 and their sister Renée in 1929. The work that their father put in at the department store, Lubow writes, ‘took place mostly out of the children’s view’. But ‘the attention ...

His Own Prophet

Michael Hofmann: Read Robert Lowell!, 11 September 2003

Collected Poems 
by Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter.
Faber, 1186 pp., £40, July 2003, 0 571 16340 8
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... Studies. ‘I arranged the poems chronologically, starting in Greek and Roman times and finally rose to air and the present with Life Studies. I felt that I had hit the skies, that all cohered. It was mostly waste.’ Quite so. It is striking that, from the start, Lowell is about rewriting. ‘The Exile’s Return’, the opening poem in Lord Weary’s ...

Conspire Slowly, Act Quickly

David Runciman: Thatcher Undone, 2 January 2020

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. III: Herself Alone 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 1072 pp., £35, October 2019, 978 0 241 32474 5
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... put this together. And now she was going to be gone.’ Some of Bush’s generals were blunter. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of the US forces, accosted his British counterpart, General de la Billière: ‘Hey Peter, what sort of country have you got there when they sack the prime minister halfway through a war?’It was not a coup, not even a very ...

The German Question

Perry Anderson: Goodbye to Bonn, 7 January 1999

... he spent some years driving a cab and dabbling in philosophy; then joined the Greens and quickly rose to the top as their most flexible and articulate leader. Witty, trenchant, unencumbered with doctrine, he was soon Minister for the Environment in a Red-Green coalition in Hessen, winning the admiration of the press for hard-headed ambition and political ...

The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... marched to the mouth of Limehouse Causeway, through which, in the customary light of grey and rose, many amiable creatures were gliding, levelled his nice new Kodak, and got – an excellent picture of the Causeway after the earthquake. The entire street in his plate was deserted.’ Just another London vanishing: the journalist would have to learn what ...

The Road to Reading Gaol

Colm Tóibín, 30 November 2017

... where, without conquering the proud hearts, or gaining the warm affections of the Irish, the Anglo-Norman barons, who, with mailed hearts as well as backs – neither civilising nor enriching the country – resided amongst us.’It is clear that Wilde is aware of the difficulties inherent in any effort to describe the Irish landscape with political ...

Prejudice Rules

LRB Contributors: After Roe v. Wade, 21 July 2022

... Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was finishing the tour for my new ...

Festival of Punishment

Thomas Laqueur: On Death Row, 5 October 2000

Proximity to Death 
by William McFeely.
Norton, 206 pp., £17.95, January 2000, 0 393 04819 5
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Death Row: The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment 
edited by Bonnie Bobit.
Bobit, 311 pp., $24.95, September 1999, 0 9624857 6 4
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... brilliant criminal and the subject of one of the great pieces of modern American writing, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. Gilmore forswore further appeals and faced the firing squad wearing his famously indestructible Timex watch: scarcely typical and followed by a mere trickle of other deaths. There were no executions in 1978 or 1980, one ...

Don’t abandon me

Colm Tóibín: Borges and the Maids, 11 May 2006

Borges: A Life 
by Edwin Williamson.
Penguin, 416 pp., £9.99, August 2005, 0 14 024657 6
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... and enjoyment.’ Even had Vázquez written that Borges cried for merely two days and then rose on the third, I would not believe a word of it. Nor do I believe the account in James Woodall’s life of Borges, also published in 1996: ‘What happened is a matter for speculation. It seems probable that Georgie’s virginity ended with the predictable ...

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