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I thought you were incredible

Bee Wilson: Elizabeth Taylor’s Magic, 16 November 2023

Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon 
by Kate Andersen Brower.
HarperCollins, 495 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 0 00 843582 0
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... is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men, some gay (like Rock Hudson), others heterosexual (like Farrell). Sometimes, Farrell took her to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had been ...

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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... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care … She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written ...

Madnesses

John Kerr, 23 March 1995

The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement 
by Richard Noll.
Princeton, 387 pp., £19.95, January 1995, 0 691 03724 8
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... scale. Jung the psychoanalyst was nearly as gifted as Jung the psychiatrist. And fittingly he rose to the same degree of pre-eminence in the new movement: editor of the first journal, official head of the International Psychoanalytic Association, gentile ‘son and heir’ of the man who had invented the procedure. But weaknesses began to show. Over the ...

Hopi Mean Time

Iain Sinclair: Jim Sallis, 18 March 1999

Eye of the Cricket 
by James Sallis.
No Exit, 190 pp., £6.99, April 1998, 1 874061 77 7
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... to build careers on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal ...

Darkness Audible

Nicholas Spice, 11 February 1993

Benjamin Britten 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Faber, 680 pp., £20, September 1992, 0 571 14324 5
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... is simple and touching, the Quatre chansons françaises as fecund as anything written by the young Richard Strauss. Perhaps inside every 14-year-old boy there is a mature mezzo soprano struggling to get out. Certainly there was in the young Benjamin Britten, and he knew how to give expression to her. Where did this exuberantly released energy go to? It can be ...

Time for Several Whiskies

Ian Jack: BBC Propaganda, 30 August 2018

Auntie’s War: The BBC during the Second World War 
by Edward Stourton.
Doubleday, 422 pp., £20, November 2017, 978 0 85752 332 7
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... It employed no reporters – news items were prepared from Reuter’s agency copy – until Richard Dimbleby, a reporter on Southampton’s evening newspaper, applied for a job with a bold letter suggesting that some members of the news staff might be called ‘BBC reporters or BBC correspondents’ and ‘held in readiness, just as are the evening ...

You have £2000, I have a kidney

Glen Newey: Morals and Markets, 21 June 2012

What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets 
by Michael Sandel.
Allen Lane, 244 pp., £20, April 2012, 978 1 84614 471 4
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How Much Is Enough?: The Love of Money and the Case for the Good Life 
by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky.
Allen Lane, 256 pp., £20, June 2012, 978 1 84614 448 6
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... on stiffs.com are egged on with a ‘newest stiffs’ page (current features: Ray Bradbury, Richard Dawson) and the lure of ‘cyberboner’ windfalls for those who manage to pick the next celebs to go. All this elicits from Sandel a mixture of bafflement and revulsion. In fact, as Sandel recognises, the line between insurance and gambling was blurred ...

The Groom Stripped Bare by His Suitor

Jeremy Harding: John Lennon, 4 January 2001

Lennon Remembers 
by Jann Wenner.
Verso, 151 pp., £20, October 2000, 1 85984 600 9
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... dente subversive whose name was reviled at gymkhanas and golf tournaments around the county – he rose in our esteem. I find it odd, but not surprising, that he’s once again a family man – in my family at any rate. In the last two years I’ve reinvested in the productions of Mopheads Inc at the request of two boys under the age of six for whom the death ...

Rigging the Death Rate

Paul Taylor, 11 April 2013

... not the only trust on its patch with a poor HSMR, responded in much the same way. It commissioned Richard Lilford and Mohammed Mohammed at Birmingham University to examine whether the cause of the problem could be a flaw in the way the HSMR was calculated. Lilford and Mohammed had already begun to publish a series of articles attacking DFI’s ...

Distraction v. Attraction

Barbara Everett: Ashbery, Larkin and Eliot, 27 June 2002

... a lack large enough to incite the putting-down of a book that has put down life. Bellow, quoting Richard Rorty, instances angrily the philosophical ambitions of a distractive culture, its mimicking of philosophical procedures. It seems highly unlikely that Ashbery was at issue here. But it has to be said that his work has achieved a height of estimation by ...

Don’t be a Kerensky!

David Runciman: Kissinger looks for his prince, 3 December 2020

The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World 
by Barry Gewen.
Norton, 452 pp., £22.99, April 2020, 978 1 324 00405 9
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Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography 
by Thomas Schwartz.
Hill and Wang, 548 pp., £27.99, September 2020, 978 0 8090 9537 7
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... fronting both magazines at the same time. In June 1974, two months before Watergate drove his boss Richard Nixon from office, Newsweek portrayed Kissinger as ‘Super K’ in full hero outfit, muscles rippling, cape swirling. He knew it was too good to last: those whom the gods wish to destroy they first dress up as Superman. Gewen describes the absurdity of ...

Jack and Leo

John Sutherland, 27 July 1989

The Letters of Jack London 
edited by Earle Labor, Robert Leitz and Milo Shepard.
Stanford, 1657 pp., $139.50, October 1988, 0 8047 1227 1
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Tolstoy 
by A.N. Wilson.
Hamish Hamilton, 572 pp., £16.95, May 1988, 0 241 12190 6
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... Charmian London’s first response to an independent biographical account of her husband – Rose Wilder Lane’s articles in Sunset Magazine a year after Jack’s death – was to squelch the project. The widow’s publicly-given reason for suppression was that, as Jack’s ‘mate woman’, she was herself bringing out the authoritative life. When the ...

Human Wishes

Irvin Ehrenpreis, 20 December 1984

Samuel Johnson 
by Walter Jackson Bate.
Hogarth, 646 pp., £6.95, July 1984, 0 7012 0562 8
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A Preliminary Handlist of Copies of Books Associated with Dr Samuel Johnson 
by J.D. Fleeman.
Oxford Bibliographical Society, 101 pp., £5, March 1984, 0 901420 41 7
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Samuel Johnson 1709-84: A Bicentenary Exhibition 
edited by K.K. Yung.
Arts Council/Herbert Press, 144 pp., £9.95, July 1984, 9780906969458
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Samuel Johnson 
by Donald Greene.
Oxford, 872 pp., £15, June 1984, 9780192541796
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... lessons of Clarke, who had been found guilty of heresy, and to the reasoning of dissenters like Richard Baxter and Isaac Watts. For anyone who wishes to praise Johnson’s moral stature, the evasion is troublesome. Clergymen constantly taught that the morality practised by the ancients lacked the virtues inspired by Christianity. In one of his best ...

Are women nicer than men?

Michael Wood, 21 February 1985

The Dark Hole Days 
by Una Woods.
Blackstaff, 127 pp., £3.50, December 1984, 0 85640 316 4
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Superior Women 
by Alice Adams.
Heinemann, 374 pp., £8.95, January 1985, 0 434 00631 9
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The Collected Stories 
by Frank Tuohy.
Macmillan, 410 pp., £12.95, December 1984, 0 333 38534 9
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The Apple in the Dark 
by Clarice Lispector, translated by Gregory Rabassa.
Virago, 361 pp., £10.95, January 1985, 0 86068 605 1
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Family Ties 
by Clarice Lispector and Giovanni Pontiero.
Carcanet, 140 pp., £8.95, January 1985, 0 85636 569 6
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... of Communism the emergence of Senator McCarthy; the Civil Rights movement; Vietnam; the return of Richard Nixon; Watergate – it is all there, introduced with a swift and studied casualness. ‘Meanwhile, the war in Europe ends, the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, then Nagasaki ... ’ Meanwhile? I suppose there is a blurry sort of truthfulness in this ...

God’s Little Sister

Gabriele Annan, 1 July 1982

Early Memoirs 
by Bronislava Nijinska, translated by Irina Nijinska and Jean Rawlinson.
Faber, 546 pp., £15, January 1982, 0 571 11892 5
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... It is perhaps significant that when her daughter showed the manuscript of these memoirs to Richard Buckle, who was preparing the Penguin edition of his life of Nijinsky, he did not think it necessary to change his own evaluation. But he was fascinated by Nijinska’s memories of her brother’s hitherto unrecorded early childhood. One sees why: they ...

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