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Why can’t she just do as she ought?

Michael Newton: ‘Gone with the Wind’, 6 August 2009

Frankly, My Dear: ‘Gone with the Wind’ Revisited 
by Molly Haskell.
Yale, 244 pp., £16.99, March 2009, 978 0 300 11752 3
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... and ill-at-ease Selznick looks there, a Jew in Georgia; it was the first time he had ever set foot in the South. This was an American epic made by someone ostensibly outside its world. Selznick was uneasy about the story’s aptness to be read as a white parable of the essential goodness of the slave-owning South. The film tries its best to alleviate the ...

‘I’m coming, my Tetsie!’

Freya Johnston: Samuel Johnson’s Shoes, 9 May 2019

Samuel Johnson 
edited by David Womersley.
Oxford, 1344 pp., £95, May 2018, 978 0 19 960951 2
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... born in Market Square, slap bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and immediately deposited their ambitions in him. Michael, the son of a labourer, had ...

Suffering Souls

Marina Warner: Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 18 June 1998

Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society 
by Jean-Claude Schmitt, translated by Theresa Lavender Fagan.
Chicago, 290 pp., £26.50, May 1998, 0 226 73887 6
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... behind some medlar trees. But what he saw, instead, was a ghostly troop: first the lay folk, on foot, weighed down by terrible burdens; then the clergy, bishops as well as monks, all black-cowled and weeping; another black-robed, fiery army of knights then rode by, on black chargers. All these numbers of the dead were suffering horrible tortures, the women ...

Not very good at drawing

Nicholas Penny: Titian, 6 June 2013

Titian: His Life 
by Sheila Hale.
Harper, 832 pp., £30, July 2012, 978 0 00 717582 6
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... of the very early Holy Family with a Shepherd; the relationship between the left knee and the left foot of Saint Catharine in the Aldobrandini Madonna of twenty years later is no less puzzling; and thirty years after that there is the awkward collision of Christ’s arm with that of the Pharisee in the late Tribute Money painted for the king of Spain. The ...

Make it more like a murder mystery

Eleanor Birne: The life and death of Stuart Shorter, 19 May 2005

Stuart: A Life Backwards 
by Alexander Masters.
Fourth Estate, 295 pp., £12.99, April 2005, 0 00 720036 6
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... describes, and Masters records, problems with his feet: ‘Homeless people get wet, you know. Your foot just fucking ends up mouldy basically.’ Stuart went to jail once for burgling a village post office, once for threatening his own child with a knife in a burning house in an attempt to keep the police away. The book becomes an account of life inside, of ...

A Hit of Rus in Urbe

Iain Sinclair: In Lea Valley, 27 June 2002

... view’. The 175-acre site should have opened to the public in spring 2001, but the outbreak of foot and mouth inevitably led to a postponement. The Lee Valley Regional Park was established in 1967, the year I moved to Hackney. We had slightly different agendas. The Park planners wanted to transform areas of neglect and desolation, the very qualities I was ...

Diary

Michael Gilsenan: In Yemen, 1 October 1998

... street, to meet in lakes that form in any flat space. Parts of the main square are more than a foot deep in water. Cars set up washes so strong that the battered taxis stall – their drivers, sometimes in army uniform or straight from teaching or the office, can’t possibly afford to keep them in good repair. The new rich quarters to the south and ...

Bob Hawke’s Australia

Michael Davie, 6 October 1983

... community in order to keep interest rates down. About the same time he shot himself in the foot, metaphorically, by becoming entangled in a complicated case involving the KGB and a former Labor Party official, but the judicial inquiry that has followed seems likely to exonerate the Prime Minister, if not the Australian Intelligence services. A ...

A Very Bad Man

Michael Kulikowski: Julius Caesar, Génocidaire, 18 June 2020

The War for Gaul: A New Translation 
by Julius Caesar, translated by James J. O’Donnell.
Princeton, 324 pp., £22, September 2019, 978 0 691 17492 1
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... refused all precautions. He was stabbed to death in the Senate on the Ides of March, 44 BC, at the foot of Pompey’s statue. Some of the finest officers from his years in Gaul were among those wielding the daggers. Others, not least his chief lieutenant, Mark Antony, remained loyal, and prosecuted a still more vicious civil war against Caesar’s ...

Understanding Forwards

Michael Wood: William James, 20 September 2007

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism 
by Robert Richardson.
Mariner, 622 pp., £15, September 2007, 978 0 618 43325 4
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... bravado, the cosmic effrontery, the sheer panache of this ailing philosopher with one foot in the grave talking down the second law of thermodynamics? . . . The matchless incandescent spirit of the man!’ Walter Benjamin thought a philosophy that couldn’t account for fortune-telling by means of coffee grounds couldn’t be a real ...

We offered them their chance

Michael Wood: Henry James and the Great War, 2 June 2005

The Ivory Tower 
by Henry James.
NYRB, 266 pp., £8.99, July 2004, 1 59017 078 4
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... hear ‘something like the chink of money itself in the murmur of the breezy little waves at the foot of the cliff’. An extraordinary conversation takes place between the nephew and his friend about the difference between ‘life’ and ‘affairs’ – meaning business affairs. The nephew says he’s not ‘silly about life’, only ‘silly about ...

Memories of a Skinny Girl

Michael Wood: Mario Vargas Llosa, 9 May 2002

The Feast of the Goat 
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Edith Grossman.
Faber, 404 pp., £16.99, March 2002, 0 571 20771 5
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The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War 
by Jean Franco.
Harvard, 323 pp., £15.95, May 2002, 0 674 00842 1
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... Finally, Ramfis too leaves the country. In Vargas Llosa’s account, Balaguer doesn’t put a foot wrong at any stage of this process, and I was so caught up in the immaculate astuteness of his tactics that I almost forgot he was one of the Goat’s closest accomplices for years. But then this is perhaps where we need to read some of the other dictator ...

Russian Podunks

Michael Hofmann, 29 June 2023

The Story of a Life 
by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Douglas Smith.
Vintage, 779 pp., £14.99, March, 978 1 78487 309 7
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... and inside it a carmine, black-tailed cock (taking the place of the missing dog), chained by the foot, apparently to correct its insolent and aggressive manner.This is the point: the lyrical – but selfless and unselfconscious – stopping of ...

God’s Iceberg

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 4 December 1986

The ‘Titanic’: The Full Story of a Tragedy 
by Michael Davie.
Bodley Head, 244 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 9780370307640
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The IT Girls: Elinor Glyn and Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon 
by Meredith Etherington-Smith and Jeremy Pilcher.
Hamish Hamilton, 258 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 241 11950 2
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... the weather been hazier, more care might have been taken and the collision avoided. In that case, Michael Davie suggests, it’s likely that no one would ever have known how close to disaster they’d been: ‘not all near-misses by aircraft are reported now; and the Ice Patrol wonder how many near-collisions by ships were reported then.’ At the inquiries ...

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