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Flat-Nose, Stocky and Beautugly

James Davidson: Greek Names, 23 September 2010

A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names. Vol. V.A Coastal Asia Minor: Pontos to Ionia 
edited by T. Corsten.
Oxford, 496 pp., £125, March 2010, 978 0 19 956743 0
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... names, just as the middle classes in England at the end of the 20th century turned to Jack, Harry, Max and Ben. Whatever his real name, the fact that scholars in the Hellenistic period found it unbelievable that the great philosopher could be a ‘Plato’ – they preferred that his real name be Aristocles, ‘Famed for Excellence’, after his grandfather ...

Devoted to Terror

Thomas Laqueur: How the Camps Were Run, 24 September 2015

KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps 
by Nikolaus Wachsmann.
Little Brown, 865 pp., £25, April 2015, 978 0 316 72967 3
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... all of them documented. The level of detail we have is astonishing. My maternal grandfather, Max Weinberg, was sent to Theresienstadt in Bohemia from Frankfurt am Main on 15 May 1942, two weeks before his 73rd birthday, on Transport XII/3, Train Da 515. He was prisoner 1307. He must have been one of the few Jews left in Germany. Two and a half years ...

Brooke’s Benefit

Anthony Powell, 16 April 1981

... insisted he was only an amateur among real botanists), and a surrealist collage in the manner of Max Ernst. In various thumbnail sketches of himself taken from different angles during early London life, Brooke sardonically presents a typical young intellectual of the period, toying rather ineffectively with the arts, writing poetry intermittently, trying to ...

The Stuntman

David Runciman: Richard Branson, 20 March 2014

Branson: Behind the Mask 
by Tom Bower.
Faber, 368 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 0 571 29710 8
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... appeared in the papers perched imperiously on a chair made to look like an inverted, near-naked black woman, an image published on Martin Luther King Day. Abramovich, with his dislike of unnecessary publicity, was not amused. In the Branson household, it’s the man himself who can be relied on to do this sort of thing. The photo on the back of Bower’s ...

Don’t Ask Henry

Alan Hollinghurst: Sissiness, 9 October 2008

Belchamber 
by Howard Sturgis.
NYRB, 345 pp., £8.99, May 2008, 978 1 59017 266 7
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... sturdily built handsome man with brilliantly white wavy hair, a girlishly clear complexion, a black moustache, and tender mocking eyes’ sat quietly working on some ambitious piece of knitting or embroidery. Though men seem to have knitted more in those days, one friend at least felt it necessary to insist that there was ‘nothing effeminate about his ...

Through the Trapdoor

Jeremy Harding: Walter Benjamin’s Last Day, 19 July 2007

The Narrow Foothold 
by Carina Birman.
Hearing Eye, 29 pp., £7, August 2006, 9781905082100
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... in Port Vendres. He’d obtained a visa from the US Consulate, thanks to the good offices of Max Horkheimer, and wanted her to help him escape through Spain. Fittko’s account of what followed is now a justifiably famous element of the Walter Benjamin cult. Carina Birman’s personal story is not, but it includes the most recent of many last words about ...

Diary

Inigo Thomas: My Father, Hugh Thomas, 15 June 2017

... He had told the story to his new heart doctor earlier that day, who said it was a myth even then. Black’s Medical Dictionary was now no longer the volume much consulted over breakfast that it had once been. He owned two editions – the 28th (1968) and the 40th (2002). In the first, a stroke is defined as ‘a popular name for apoplexy ...

Walk on by

Andrew O’Hagan, 18 November 1993

... sat on a bleached-out walkway near London Bridge, staring into a gigantic billboard: ‘Pepsi Max: Max the Taste, Axe the Sugar.’ The concrete walkway sloped down from a modern block of offices labelled Colechurch House. It was the middle of the morning, cold, with hardly anyone around. I sat cross-legged with a torn ...

Secrets are best kept by those who have no sense of humour

Alan Bennett: Why I turned down ‘Big Brother’, 2 January 2003

... one imagines, by John Bayley, whose efforts on behalf of his late wife and her reputation make Max Clifford seem timid and retiring. One lesson of this deplorable business is never to sanction the shooting of any video, however lofty its purpose, because once shot it will be shown. Professor Hodges seems to have arrived at his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s ...

A Djinn speaks

Colm Tóibín: What about George Yeats?, 20 February 2003

Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats 
by Ann Saddlemyer.
Oxford, 808 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 19 811232 7
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... and you must not.’ The figure of Maud in the automatic writing was the ‘Bird with white & black head & wings’. She was ‘dangerous . . . Nothing must be said unless she speaks of it – then simply say you are destroying the souls of hundreds of young men. That method is most wicked in this country – wholesale slaughter because a few are cruel ...

Selflessness

Jonathan Rée, 8 May 1997

Proper Names 
by Emmanuel Levinas, translated by Michael Smith.
Athlone, 191 pp., £45, January 1997, 0 485 11466 6
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Levinas: An Introduction 
by Colin Davis.
Polity, 168 pp., £39.50, November 1996, 0 7456 1262 8
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Basic Philosophical Writings 
by Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi.
Indiana, 201 pp., £29.50, November 1996, 0 253 21079 8
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... recognise them as exceeding the limits of our own experience, and hence to confront a nauseating black hole within our everyday self-satisfactions. The subjectivity of others is essentially ‘impenetrable’, and ‘radically refractory’ to our understanding. ‘No consciousness can even conceive of a consciousness other than itself,’ Sartre said. We ...

Liquidator

Neal Ascherson: Hugh Trevor-Roper, 19 August 2010

Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Weidenfeld, 598 pp., £25, July 2010, 978 0 297 85214 8
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... he attacked the whole Religion and the Rise of Capitalism orthodoxy established by R.H. Tawney and Max Weber. The question for him was not why capitalism emerged in Protestant countries but why it did not emerge in Catholic Europe after the Counter-Reformation. Widening his focus, he denounced another received version: that the intellectual pedigree of the ...

I have washed my feet out of it

Hilary Mantel: Growing up in Ghana, 21 October 2004

Hustling Is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl 
by John Chernoff.
Chicago, 480 pp., £16, January 2004, 0 226 10352 8
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Exchange Is Not Robbery: More Stories of an African Bar Girl 
by John Chernoff.
Chicago, 425 pp., £16, November 2004, 0 226 10355 2
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Purple Hibiscus 
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Fourth Estate, 307 pp., £12.99, March 2004, 0 00 717611 2
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... this. Because Hawa is telling him clearly: ‘I know – every man, every kind of man, it’s not black or white, it’s any kind of man; they are just like a dog. He can go out and do whatever he likes.’ From time to time, expatriate men offer bed and board. Sometimes it turns into a lengthy relationship. For a year she is with ‘Nigel Manners’, a ...

The Monster Plot

Thomas Powers: James Angleton, Spymaster, 10 May 2018

The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton 
by Jefferson Morley.
Scribe, 336 pp., £20, December 2017, 978 1 911344 73 5
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... sent her four-page letter to the Post. Instead, a year later she sent a copy of the letter to Max Holland, a long-time student of the Warren Commission, who recently sent me a copy. Roman also wrote to Jeremy Gunn, the executive director of the JFK Assassination Records Review Board, telling him she had agreed to the interview with Morley ‘against my ...

The Magic Bloomschtick

Colin Burrow: Harold Bloom, 21 November 2019

The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon 
by Harold Bloom, edited by David Mikics.
Library of America, 426 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 1 59853 640 9
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... by the reaction to his earlier book into seeing a wider world of writing. There are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, Jay Wright) as well as on 12 women writers. Toni Morrison (‘a child of Faulkner’) is given shorter shrift than she deserves and told off for being ideological, but ...

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