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Power-Seeker

Frank Kermode, 12 October 1989

Bernard Shaw. Vol. II: The Pursuit of Power 
by Michael Holroyd.
Chatto, 422 pp., £18, September 1989, 0 7011 3350 3
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... another, and, nearer home, Gilbert Murray and the lecherous, contentious and extremely able Wells). He worked heroically to keep the Court Theatre going, to overthrow the stage censorship, to educate the public in all ethical, civic and artistic affairs. He feuded with Irving, debated with Chesterton. He bought, drove and crashed dangerous ...

For his Nose was as sharpe as a Pen, and a Table of greene fields

Michael Dobson: The Yellow Shakespeare, 10 May 2007

William Shakespeare, Complete Works: The RSC Shakespeare 
edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.
Macmillan, 2486 pp., £30, April 2007, 978 0 230 00350 7
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... Institute and was long rumoured to have been the source for the cut of its former director Stanley Wells’s beard; for some reason this picture looks slightly out of focus, as though seen through the wrong reading glasses). Macmillan’s accountants must be relying on the book selling in large quantities and over a long period in order to recoup their ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: My Olympics, 30 August 2012

... bonanza. The soft-spoken Californian rodent was attended by his sleepover pal and minder, Michael Jackson. We have heard it stated, quite accurately, that construction work on the Olympic Park has been carried out with few casualties. But cycle deaths are mounting, from the early casualties of the fresh-painted lanes at the base of the Bow ...

At Dia:Beacon

Hal Foster: Fetishistic Minimalist, 5 June 2003

... de Menil, a major patron and heir to the Schlumberger fortune (made from drill bits for oil wells). Along with a third collaborator, a young art historian called Helen Winkler, Friedrich and de Menil saw that this new work had opened a structural gap in the art world – neither private nor public, its scale was beyond the means of individual collectors ...

Molly’s Methuselah

Frank Kermode, 26 September 1991

Bernard Shaw. Vol. III: 1918-1950, The Lure of Fantasy 
by Michael Holroyd.
Chatto, 544 pp., £21, September 1991, 0 7011 3351 1
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... broadcast, and wrote letters no less prodigally than before. He stayed friends with the Webbs and Wells, adored T.E. Lawrence (so did Charlotte) and was close to Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who happened to be a neighbour at Ayot (Shaw had an editorial hand in The Worst Journey in the World). And – a real proof of vigour – he made new friendships of remoter ...

The Great Copyright Disaster

John Sutherland, 12 January 1995

Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright 
by Mark Rose.
Harvard, 176 pp., £21.95, October 1993, 0 674 05308 7
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Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation 
by Susan Stewart.
Duke, 353 pp., £15.95, November 1994, 0 8223 1545 9
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The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature 
edited by Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi.
Duke, 562 pp., £42.75, January 1994, 0 8223 1412 6
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... the brink of those works entering the public domain, the public whose domain it is was informed by Michael Black of Cambridge University Press that the standard Lawrence texts were culpably imperfect. A new authorised edition was put in hand – and a new copyright thereby created. As I recall, the Lawrence estate’s agents, Laurence Pollinger, initially ...

Buckle Up!

Tim Barker: Oil Prices, 1 June 2017

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices 
by Robert McNally.
Columbia, 300 pp., £27.95, January 2017, 978 0 231 17814 3
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... and studiously avoids political controversy. The book expands on a pair of articles (written with Michael Levi) in Foreign Affairs, which argued that recent fluctuations in the price of oil marked the end of a period of relative stability that began in the late 1970s. The first piece ran in 2011, when the yearly average price of Brent crude exceeded $100 for ...

The Excavation

Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann, 4 January 2001

... illnesses. People got belly-aches and died from eating rotten fruit, the water ran out in the wells, a couple of pine forests burned down, and the dry grass on the steppes caught alight. At night, the horizon was red, and there were acrid fumes in the air. We kept getting new visitors to the morgue. The authorities announced that the water was ...

A Preference for Torquemada

Michael Wood: G.K. Chesterton, 9 April 2009

Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874-1908 
by William Oddie.
Oxford, 401 pp., £25, November 2008, 978 0 19 955165 1
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The Man Who Was Thursday 
by G.K. Chesterton.
Atlantic, 187 pp., £7.99, December 2008, 978 1 84354 905 5
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... with Kipling’s narrowness and a host of other national failures. His highest praise for H.G. Wells is that ‘he has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one.’ It’s not Chesterton’s fault that his idea should have become so popular with people who didn’t have to go to ...

Diary

Michael Dibdin: Ulster Questions, 21 April 1988

... churches disdain such tactics; they would no more think of second-guessing the Deity than Stanley Wells would of paraphrasing Shakespeare. The result is that pure blasts of 17th-century English peal out amid the High Street mix, creating acute problems of harmonisation. John Julius Norwich pointed out that St Paul can sound like Nancy Mitford (‘How shall ...

Babylon with Bananas

Michael Newton: Tarzan's best friend, 29 January 2009

Me Cheeta: The Autobiography 
by Cheeta.
Fourth Estate, 320 pp., £16.99, October 2008, 978 0 00 727863 3
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... books on animal behaviour and sleazy anecdotes of the Hollywood Golden Age. That these two wells of inspiration should be so strikingly similar is the premise of the book. ‘Life ain’t perfect, as the one and only Wallace Beery supposedly told Gloria Swanson after raping her on their wedding night.’ In such asides we are told more than we ever ...

How did the slime mould cross the maze?

Adrian Woolfson: The Future of Emergence, 21 March 2002

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software 
by Steven Johnson.
Allen Lane, 288 pp., £14.99, October 2001, 0 7139 9400 2
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The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture 
by Mark Taylor.
Chicago, 340 pp., £20.50, January 2002, 0 226 79117 3
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... the guilds of Florence, Johnson addresses his key question – one that was anticipated by H.G. Wells in his World Brain (1938). Is it possible that the World Wide Web, a complex artificial system, might one day exhibit emergent behaviour or develop autonomous ‘higher-level consciousness’? Wells speculated that a ...

Ovid goes to Stratford

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare Myths, 5 December 2013

Thirty Great Myths about Shakespeare 
by Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith.
Wiley-Blackwell, 216 pp., £14.99, December 2012, 978 0 470 65851 2
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... 30, for instance, one would be better off turning to James Shapiro’s Contested Will, or Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson’s collection, Shakespeare beyond Doubt.)* Nevertheless it means that their book is always alert, memorable and to the point. Come to think of it, Thirty Great Myths about Shakespeare is made up of sections exactly the length of this ...

At the V&A

Jeremy Harding: 50 Years of ‘Private Eye’, 15 December 2011

... mostly familiar, come from dozens of the Eye’s contributors, including the superb Ed McLaghlan, Michael Heath (Great Bores of Today etc), Ken Pyne, whose National Association of Builders Convention (1986) is proudly displayed (as are the many builders’ cracks in the drawing), Barry Fantoni, Nick Newman, Martin Honeysett, Willie Rushton … the list is ...

The Great Exhibition

John Sutherland, 6 September 1984

Empire of the Sun 
by J.G. Ballard.
Gollancz, 287 pp., £8.95, September 1984, 0 575 03483 1
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Enterprise Red Star 
by Alexander Bogdanov, translated by Charles Rongle, edited by Loren Graham and Richard Stites.
Indiana, 266 pp., $22.50, June 1984, 0 253 17350 7
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Hotel du Lac 
by Anita Brookner.
Cape, 184 pp., £7.95, September 1984, 0 224 02238 5
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Conversations in Another Room 
by Gabriel Josipovici.
Methuen, 121 pp., £7.95, August 1984, 0 413 55930 0
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An Affair on the Appian Way 
by Michael Levey.
Hamish Hamilton, 219 pp., £8.95, August 1984, 0 241 11315 6
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... He died, in 1928, experimenting on himself with blood donations from an infected patient. Like Wells’s vampiric Martians, Bogdanov’s aliens in Red Star are interested in blood – but only as something to be shared among themselves, in semi-religious ‘comradely exchanges of life’. A scientific amateur and Socialist philosopher, Bogdanov developed a ...

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