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Mr Down-by-the-Levee

Thomas Jones: Updike’s Terrorist, 7 September 2006

Terrorist 
by John Updike.
Hamish Hamilton, 310 pp., £17.99, August 2006, 0 241 14351 9
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... to her was her parents’ refusing to show up at her civil wedding to a Jew’). They have a son, Mark, who lives with his wife and three children in Albuquerque. Waking before dawn, Jack lies in bed beside his overweight, snoring wife, his mind steeped in despair: ‘Fear and loathing squirm inside him like the components of a bad restaurant meal – twice ...

Too Glorious for Words

Bernard Porter: Lawrence in Arabia, 3 April 2014

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East 
by Scott Anderson.
Atlantic, 592 pp., £25, March 2014, 978 1 78239 199 9
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... flower, and became a Zionist, setting up a Jewish spy network in Palestine to help the Allies; and Mark Sykes, co-author of the notorious Sykes-Picot agreement, secretly parcelling out Syria, Palestine and Iraq behind Lawrence’s back in 1916. For Sykes Anderson has nothing but contempt: ‘Few people in history have so heedlessly caused so much ...

Damp-Lipped Hilary

Jenny Diski: Larkin’s juvenilia, 23 May 2002

Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions 
by Philip Larkin, edited by James Booth.
Faber, 498 pp., £20, May 2002, 0 571 20347 7
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... in The North Ship.’ Just as ‘Larkin, the mature poet, was later to transfigure the clichés of urban folklore and advertising in poems such as “Essential Beauty” or “Sunny Prestatyn”’ so he turns ‘well-worn schoolgirl clichés into moving elegies (“Now the ponies all are dead”)’ and ‘the intimate domestic triviality of the schoolgirl ...

At Tate Modern

Hal Foster: Robert Rauschenberg, 1 December 2016

... everyday things. As the curator Walter Hopps commented, they also underscore ‘the fact of a new urban surface’. Nevertheless, the two series do share an essential operation in negation. After two White Paintings were exhibited in September 1953, Cage offered this litany: ‘No subject/No image/No taste/No object/No beauty/No message/No talent/No technique ...

Djojo on the Corner

Benedict Anderson, 24 August 1995

After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist 
by Clifford Geertz.
Harvard, 198 pp., £17.95, April 1995, 0 674 00871 5
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... were divided vertically between a ‘modernist’ (Geertz would later call it ‘scripturalist’) urban, and a traditionalist rural segment, so the abangan were split horizontally between a rapidly growing Communist Party based on the rural and urban poor, and a heavily Javanese upper and middle-class-led Nationalist ...

Do I like it?

Terry Castle: Outsider Art, 28 July 2011

... vernacular art, popular art – would likewise seem to have some relevance. And judging by its urban San Francisco incarnation, the one I know best, outsider art has recently developed some fascinating semantic and subcultural connections with what is known locally as ‘alternative’, ‘urban primitive’ or ...
The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe 
edited by George Holmes.
Oxford, 398 pp., £17.50, March 1988, 0 19 820073 0
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A History of 12th-century Western Philosophy 
edited by Peter Dronke.
Cambridge, 495 pp., £37.50, April 1988, 0 521 25896 0
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The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c.350-c.1450 
edited by J.H. Burns.
Cambridge, 808 pp., £60, May 1988, 0 521 24324 6
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Medieval Popular Culture: Problem of Belief and Perception 
by Aron Gurevich, translated by Janos Bak and Paul Hollingsworth.
Cambridge, 275 pp., £27.50, May 1988, 0 521 30369 9
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A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World 
edited by George Duby, translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Harvard, 650 pp., £24.95, April 1988, 0 674 39976 5
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... thought of no longer knowing who he is. So he puts a straw cross on his shoulder, as it were to mark his identity. Unfortunately a neighbour grabs it and says, ‘Now I am you; begone, you are dead!’ at which the furrier goes mad. The joke may be on status-conscious furriers, or it may be an early reaction to ...

An American Romance

Edward Mendelson, 18 February 1982

Old Glory: An American Voyage 
by Jonathan Raban.
Collins, 527 pp., £9.95, October 1981, 9780002165211
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No particular place to go 
by Hugo Williams.
Cape, 200 pp., £6.50, October 1981, 0 224 01810 8
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... giving the character, the physiognomy of the place, though all the details may be inexact.’ The mark of a sophisticated realist is that he denies his sophistication at the same point where his work most elaborately displays it. What I tell you is real, he insists, artfully: what all those other fellows do is write books. Raban makes a great show of ...

Secretly Sublime

Iain Sinclair: The Great Ian Penman, 19 March 1998

Vital Signs 
by Ian Penman.
Serpent’s Tail, 374 pp., £10.99, February 1998, 1 85242 523 7
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... Penman’s eclectic retrievals from time lost, that he had become a ‘signature’. A logo. A mark. A neon sign that culture buffs will chase without worrying too much what he is writing about. One of those elephantine Hunter S. Thompson, self-cannibalising careers that define the point where it all went wrong, where the floating signifier began to get ...

‘Auntie Mabel doesn’t give a toss about Serbia’

Jo Glanville: The World Service, 25 August 2011

... which the BBC secured the licence fee – frozen at the current level – for the next six years. Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director general, told me in June that the Foreign Office’s continuing control is ‘a fine constitutional point’ which can be addressed in the next charter renewal – no more threatening, he believes, than the potential the ...

Playing Catch Up

Wolfgang Streeck: The German Exception, 4 May 2017

German Economic and Business History in the 19th and 20th Centuries 
by Werner Plumpe.
Palgrave, 367 pp., £86, August 2016, 978 1 137 51859 0
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The Seven Secrets of Germany: Economic Resilience in an Era of Global Turbulence 
by David Audretsch and Erik Lehmann.
Oxford, 229 pp., £22.99, February 2016, 978 0 19 025869 6
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Germany’s Role in the Euro Crisis: Berlin’s Quest for a More Perfect Monetary Union 
by Franz-Josef Meiers.
Springer, 146 pp., £90, November 2016, 978 3 319 37052 1
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... for ever the fabric of what had been until then a largely traditional society divided between urban and rural, Catholic and Protestant, left and right. Centuries-old parochial ways of life and socio-cultural milieux were broken up, often in the face of adamant resistance. But, ultimately, the skills and hard work the newcomers contributed to their new ...

Big toes are gross

Hal Foster: Surrealism's Influence, 6 June 2024

Why Surrealism Matters 
by Mark Polizzotti.
Yale, 232 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 300 25709 0
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... Bataille was often, as Breton remarked, an ‘excrement philosopher’.In Why Surrealism Matters, Mark Polizzotti, a biographer of Breton and translator of many Surrealist texts, makes a good case for the varied influence of the movement, especially regarding sexual politics and anticolonial struggles. He also points to its many complicities. While communists ...

Designing criminal policy

David Garland, 10 October 1991

Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830-1914 
by Martin Wiener.
Cambridge, 391 pp., £30, February 1991, 9780521350457
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... was at once radical, provocative, and somewhat overstated Martin Wiener’s book might be taken to mark the third wave in the development (and deepening) of our historical understanding of criminal justice. In the last few years several authors have voiced misgivings about the tendency of the power perspective to ignore the role of culture, values and ...

Days of Reckoning

Orlando Figes, 7 July 1988

Stalin: Man and Ruler 
by Robert McNeal.
Macmillan, 389 pp., £16.95, June 1988, 0 333 37351 0
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... in the Bolshevik underground in Baku. Martov, the Menshevik leader, was probably closer to the mark in 1918 when he accused Stalin of having carried out bank robberies (‘expropriations’) to finance party activities, although on this, as on quite a few other unresolved points in Stalin’s biography, McNeal appears to have no opinion. On several ...

Gangsters in Hats

Richard Mayne, 17 May 1984

Essays on Detective Fiction 
edited by Bernard Benstock.
Macmillan, 218 pp., £20, February 1984, 0 333 32195 2
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Dashiell Hammett: A Life at the Edge 
by William Nolan.
Arthur Barker, 276 pp., £9.95, September 1983, 0 213 16886 3
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The Life of Dashiell Hammett 
by Diane Johnson.
Chatto, 344 pp., £12.95, January 1984, 9780701127664
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Hellman in Hollywood 
by Bernard Dick.
Associated University Presses, 183 pp., £14.95, September 1983, 0 8386 3140 1
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... in the mind is the glum portrait of Personville, nick-named ‘Poisonville’, the claustrophobic urban badland, with gangsters in hats and 1920s roadsters, spraying bullets the way blurb-writers spray praise. The Dain Curse, from later the same year, looks like an implausible extravaganza. Originally published, like Red Harvest, as four separate Black Mask ...

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