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Mistaken or Doomed

Thomas Jones: Barry Unsworth, 12 March 2009

Land of Marvels 
by Barry Unsworth.
Hutchinson, 287 pp., £18.99, January 2009, 978 0 09 192617 5
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... fast running out of money. His wife, Edith, who is with him in the Middle East, fell instantly in love with the fervour of his ambition on the evening they met, but has since become disillusioned with him. She believes that a woman’s role – because it is the role she desires – is to provide feminine support to a strong man, and her husband is falling ...

At the Centre Pompidou

Jeremy Harding: Beat Generation, 8 September 2016

... in the 1980s. They hold their own with more famous photos, taken on and around the Beat scene by Harold Chapman, Fred McDarrah and John Cohen. The photographer Robert Frank is in another league; a dozen prints from The Americans, first published in Paris in 1958 with texts by Beauvoir, Steinbeck, Faulkner and others, hang alongside the Kerouac ms. Frank’s ...

Short Cuts

Inigo Thomas: At the Ladbroke Arms, 22 February 2018

... for granted.Taking political liberties himself, Powell chose to betray his own party and plot with Harold Wilson to defeat Edward Heath. I visited Pentonville Prison in December, on a tour to mark the jail’s 175th anniversary. No phones, no laptops – instant isolation and unease. Pentonville was considered a model new prison when it was built in the 1840s ...

Looking back in anger

Hilary Mantel, 21 November 1991

Almost a Gentleman. An Autobiography: Vol. II 1955-66 
by John Osborne.
Faber, 273 pp., £14.99, November 1991, 0 571 16261 4
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... In the days of heady fame – of Broadway and the Royal Court, of pursuit by the press, of ‘love-nests’ and ‘hideaways’ and CND celebrity rallies – the letters still wing their way. ‘Sid is upstairs in Bed. He had all his bottom teeth out on Wednesday.’ How did our hero escape Nellie Beatrice, Sid and the rest? He had a footling journalist ...

Raven’s Odyssey

D.A.N. Jones, 19 July 1984

Swallow 
by D.M. Thomas.
Gollancz, 312 pp., £8.95, June 1984, 0 575 03446 7
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First Among Equals 
by Jeffrey Archer.
Hodder, 446 pp., £8.95, July 1984, 0 340 35266 3
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Morning Star 
by Simon Raven.
Blond and Briggs, 264 pp., £8.95, June 1984, 9780856341380
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... Here is a Russian at the improvisers’ prize-giving: ‘I get phases like tonight when I’d love to fuck almost every woman I see. Look at that magnificent, fat, blowsy frau dancing with the Pole. God, I’d love to get it up her and stifle myself between her breasts!’ Here is another Russian, visiting ...

Jew d’Esprit

Dan Jacobson, 6 May 1982

Disraeli’s Grand Tour: Benjamin Disraeli and the Holy Land 1830-31 
by Robert Blake.
Weidenfeld, 141 pp., £8.95, January 1982, 0 297 77910 9
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... quasi-idylls are from the story of his own life, with its debts and shady business deals, dubious love-affairs, caricatural dandyisms, scroungings for patronage, early and obscure breakdowns, humiliations endured and revenges taken; its unbounded audacity and calculated displays of aggression; its ever-vigilant opportunism and its ...

Duels in the Dark

Colin Kidd: Lewis Namier’s Obsessions, 5 December 2019

Conservative Revolutionary: The Lives of Lewis Namier 
by D.W. Hayton.
Manchester, 472 pp., £25, August 2019, 978 0 7190 8603 8
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... pedigree of Namier’s ideas, however. When at Balliol between 1908 and 1911 he fell in love with the stolid, pragmatic instincts of the British governing class and the empire over which it ruled, despite the antisemitism which prevailed in both. In 1910 he changed his surname from Bernstein to Namier, and in 1913 became a British subject. But ...

Blacking

John Bayley, 4 December 1986

Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939 
by Martin Stannard.
Dent, 537 pp., £14.95, October 1986, 0 460 04632 2
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... may explain both the weakness of his books and their remarkable and continuing popularity. Readers love an amateur with no intellectual pretensions – one of themselves, in fact – who is also an expert craftsman: and Waugh’s novels are as solidly made as the best furniture. Among his most genuinely enthusiastic recollections was the ‘brilliant and ...

Everlasting Fudge

Theo Tait: The Difficult Fiction of Cynthia Ozick, 19 May 2005

The Bear Boy 
by Cynthia Ozick.
Weidenfeld, 310 pp., £12.99, March 2005, 0 297 84808 9
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... most of her fictions, which tend to be elaborate and circuitous meditations on deeply felt themes: love, ambition, anti-semitism, or the difficulty of maintaining a Jewish identity in a gentile society. ‘It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.’ This, from Henry James, is one of Ozick’s favourite quotations. In her case, it is ...

Motoring

Frank Kermode: James Lees-Milne, 30 November 2000

Deep Romantic Chasm: Diaries 1979-81 
by James Lees-Milne, edited by Michael Bloch.
Murray, 276 pp., £22.50, October 2000, 0 7195 5608 2
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A Mingled Measure: Diaries 1953-72 
by James Lees-Milne.
Murray, 325 pp., £12.99, October 2000, 0 7195 5609 0
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Ancient as the Hills: Diaries 1973-74 
by James Lees-Milne.
Murray, 228 pp., £12.99, October 2000, 0 7195 6200 7
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... curiosity. The generic description for such people is ‘bedint’, a term borrowed from Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West; meaning, I suppose, someone who serves, whose manners are appropriate to a subordinate station. They might be ‘Liverpool Geordies’ (it’s hard to tell one bedint from another) or educated at a redbrick university, in ...

Ask Anyone in Canada

Neal Ascherson: Max Beaverbrook’s Mediations, 24 October 2019

Max Beaverbrook: Not Quite a Gentleman 
by Charles Williams.
Biteback, 566 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 1 84954 746 8
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... of press omnipotence has survived into the digital age. Politicians apparently wish it to be true. Harold Wilson was obsessed with the idea that the Daily Mirror could undo him; Neil Kinnock in his defeat accepted that it was ‘The Sun Wot Won It’; and more recent governments convinced themselves that the Daily Mail under Paul Dacre’s editorship was the ...

Plato’s Friend

Ian Hacking, 17 December 1992

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals 
by Iris Murdoch.
Chatto, 520 pp., £20, October 1992, 0 7011 3998 6
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... have two aims, truth and virtue. In Plato these are somehow one, in the powerful sense that the love of truth and the love of virtue are identical. The contrast between states of illusion (selfish habits or egoistic fantasy) and honest clarified truthful serious thinking suggests a moral picture of the mind in a ...

Batsy

Thomas Karshan: John Updike, 31 March 2005

Villages 
by John Updike.
Hamish Hamilton, 321 pp., £17.99, February 2005, 9780241143087
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... his misogyny, his conservatism, his theological bad faith, the gratuitousness of his language. To Harold Bloom, Updike is ‘a minor writer with a major style’. Gore Vidal thinks that Updike ‘describes to no purpose’. James Wood complains that Updike fills his characters’ thoughts with showy phrases that don’t suit them or their situations; and that ...

Late Worm

Rosemary Hill: James Lees-Milne, 10 September 2009

James Lees-Milne: The Life 
by Michael Bloch.
Murray, 400 pp., £25, September 2009, 978 0 7195 6034 7
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... Mitford, with whom he had been at school, and Tom’s sister Diana, with whom he was for years in love. He remained bisexual for most of his life. A further episode of doubtful veracity in Another Self, according to Bloch, is Lees-Milne’s account of falling into conversation with a young man he met at the opera. In the memoir they share an idyllic evening ...

Literary Friction

Jenny Turner: Kathy Acker’s Ashes, 19 October 2017

After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography 
by Chris Kraus.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 1 63590 006 4
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... so she follows anyone. A dog. She doesn’t know a goddam thing she’s too scared to know what love is she has no idea what money is she runs away from anyone so anything she’s writing is just un-knowledge.Conveniently, the clip stops just there, before the next bit, which is:Plus she doesn’t have the guts to entertain an audience. She should put lots ...

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