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A Traveller in Residence

Mary Hawthorne, 13 November 1997

... four children, on 6 January 1916, three months before the Easter Rebellion, in which her father, Robert Brennan, served as a commandant in the Irish Volunteers. Following the surrender ordered by Pearse, he was sentenced first to death and then to penal servitude for life but was released soon after and went on to organise the Department of External Affairs ...

Little Old Grandfather

Thomas Meaney: Djilas and Stalin, 19 May 2016

Conversations with Stalin 
by Milovan Djilas, translated by Michael Petrovich.
Penguin, 160 pp., £9.99, January 2014, 978 0 14 139309 4
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... of the British Empire, which he sees through communist eyes. In Cairo, the American head of UNRRA, Herbert Lehman, seems a capitalist out of a comic book, with a Russian gangster for an interpreter. In Baghdad, Djilas and his team marvel at the false consciousness of British soldiers, who are willing to shed blood and conquer a desert in the name of ...

Do you like him?

Ian Jack: Ken Livingstone, 10 May 2012

You Can’t Say That: Memoirs 
by Ken Livingstone.
Faber, 710 pp., £9.99, April 2012, 978 0 571 28041 4
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... Ada Kennard, a dancer in a three-women act that toured the music halls. His father was a Bob: Robert Moffat Livingstone, at different times a seafarer, a window cleaner and a stagehand. According to their son, the couple hadn’t wanted children. Then one night in September 1944, Bob ran out of condoms. The memoirist writes of his conception, ‘With ...

Megaton Man

Steven Shapin: The Original Dr Strangelove, 25 April 2002

Memoirs: A 20th-Century Journey in Science and Politics 
by Edward Teller and Judith Shoolery.
Perseus, 628 pp., £24.99, January 2002, 1 903985 12 9
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... case, a technical prerequisite. You need an A-bomb to ignite an H-bomb, and the lab’s Director Robert Oppenheimer reasonably enough felt that the race to forestall the Nazis required no distractions from the main lines of development. Destructive friction between fusion and fission was reduced by giving Teller what was essentially a roaming brief, and it ...

Save the feet for later

Edmund Gordon: Leonora Carrington, 2 November 2017

The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington 
by Joanna Moorhead.
Virago, 304 pp., £20, April 2017, 978 0 349 00877 6
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‘The Debutante’ and Other Stories 
by Leonora Carrington.
Silver Press, 153 pp., £9.99, April 2017, 978 0 9957162 0 9
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Down Below 
by Leonora Carrington.
NYRB, 69 pp., £8.99, May 2017, 978 1 68137 060 6
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Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde 
edited by Jonathan Eburne and Catriona McAra.
Manchester, 275 pp., £75, January 2017, 978 1 78499 436 5
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... following year, and after reading about it in the paper, Carrington’s mother sent her a copy of Herbert Read’s Surrealism. The picture on the cover was Max Ernst’s Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, which shows three female figures: one lying on the ground, fainted or dead; the second fleeing towards the left of the frame; the third slumped ...

Cheerfully Chopping up the World

Michael Wood: Film theory, 2 July 1998

The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium 
by Gilberto Perez.
Johns Hopkins, 466 pp., £25, April 1998, 0 8018 5673 6
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On the History of Film Style 
by David Bordwell.
Harvard, 322 pp., £39.95, February 1998, 0 674 63428 4
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Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine 
by D.N. Rodowick.
Duke, 260 pp., £46.95, October 1997, 0 8223 1962 4
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The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema 
by Jean Mitry, translated by Christopher King.
Athlone, 405 pp., £45, February 1998, 0 485 30084 2
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Signs and Meaning in the Cinema 
by Peter Wollen.
BFI, 188 pp., £40, May 1998, 0 85170 646 0
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... left. Ray Liotta, looking young and spruce but tired, is at the wheel, his face well lit. Robert de Niro, in the passenger seat, is asleep. Joe Pesci, in the back seat, is nodding off. A thumping noise is heard, and Liotta says, ‘Jimmy.’ De Niro wakes up. Liotta continues: ‘Did I hear somethin’?’ Cut to a side view of the rear of the ...

Little England

Patrick Wright: The view through a bus window, 7 September 2006

Great British Bus Journeys: Travels through Unfamous Places 
by David McKie.
Atlantic, 359 pp., £16.99, March 2006, 1 84354 132 7
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... his inn, he finds himself to be the only guest and tries to stave off depression with the help of Herbert Tompkins’s Marsh-Country Rambles (1904). From this source, he learns that Maldon’s first Congregational Chapel had been built in the late 17th century by a ‘pugnacious evangelist and hot-gospeller’ called Joseph Billio, said to have been the ...

Societies

Perry Anderson, 6 July 1989

A Treatise on Social Theory. Vol. II: Substantive Social Theory 
by W.G. Runciman.
Cambridge, 493 pp., £35, February 1989, 0 521 24959 7
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... fictions. Few practitioners of the social sciences have the confidence to invoke the ideals of Herbert Spencer and Henry James simultaneously. In his second volume, Runciman proceeds to his own substantive social theory. He remarks at the outset that he will here be concerned only with the explanatory segment of his overall prescriptions. But this involves ...

Touch of Evil

Christopher Hitchens, 22 October 1992

Kissinger: A Biography 
by Walter Isaacson.
Faber, 893 pp., £25, September 1992, 0 571 16858 2
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... I thought it was a strange view for someone who had been a refugee from Nazi Germany,’ Herbert Engelhardt, who lived downstairs, said. ‘I got the impression that Kissinger suffered less anti-semitism in his youth than I did as a kid in New Jersey.’ Mr Engelhardt is one of those simple souls who tends to blame American-Jewish paradox on ...

Quick with a Stiletto

Malcolm Gaskill: Europe’s Underground War, 7 July 2022

Resistance: The Underground War in Europe, 1939-45 
by Halik Kochanski.
Allen Lane, 932 pp., £35, March, 978 0 241 00428 9
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... Nazi-occupied city had partisans succeeded in such an audacious attack. Rome’s Gestapo chief, Herbert Kappler, was ordered to execute civilians at the rate of ten for every German killed (elsewhere it had been even worse: fifty for every German). Kappler – played by Richard Burton in George P. Cosmatos’s film Massacre in Rome (1973) – had to come up ...

Elizabeth Bishop’s Aviary

Mark Ford: Elizabeth Bishop’s Aviary, 29 November 2007

... make an uncertain comment when the surrounding water shines. The birds evoked in her elegy for Robert Lowell, ‘North Haven’, have no trouble performing their elegiac function: The Goldfinches are back, or others like them, and the White-throated Sparrow’s five-note song, pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes. More distracting is the ...

In the Shady Wood

Michael Neill: Staging the Forest, 22 March 2018

The Shakespearean Forest 
by Anne Barton.
Cambridge, 185 pp., £75, August 2017, 978 0 521 57344 3
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... a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (c.1590), Antony Munday’s two-part Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598) and Jonson’s unfinished Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In George Peele’s Edward I, the Welsh bandit Prince Lluellen and his followers give their cause a veneer of mischievous ...

Some Sad Turtle

Alison Light: Spinsters and Clerics, 29 July 2021

The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym: A Biography 
by Paula Byrne.
William Collins, 686 pp., £25, April 2021, 978 0 00 832220 5
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... of blessings’ – the title of the novel she appears in. (The quotation is borrowed from George Herbert, one of Pym’s favourite poets.) Gently mocking self-love, Pym’s novels find redemption in commonplace pleasures – though without sanctimony. ‘The trivial round, the common task,’ Belinda repeats from Keble’s hymn ‘New Every Morning Is the ...

The wind comes up out of nowhere

Charles Nicholl: The Disappearance of Arthur Cravan, 9 March 2006

... and scandal, Maintenant was entirely written and published by Cravan: the other contributors (Robert Miradique, W. Cooper, E. Lajeunesse, Marie Lowitska etc) are all pseudonyms. Even the advertisements bear his skewed imprint: the restaurant Chez Jourdain entices customers with the words, ‘Where can you see Van Dongen’ – the Flemish painter Kees van ...

Loose Talk

Steven Shapin: Atomic Secrets, 4 November 2021

Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States 
by Alex Wellerstein.
Chicago, 549 pp., £28, April, 978 0 226 02038 9
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... control. ‘Elite rule is an inevitable by-product of secrecy,’ the American political scientist Robert Dahl noted in 1953. ‘Those who effectively influence policy can scarcely exceed the number of those who possess the information to act.’ Yet democratically elected governments have always marked out things their own citizens are not allowed to ...

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