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Whisky and Soda Man

Thomas Jones: J.G. Ballard, 10 April 2008

Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton – An Autobiography 
by J.G. Ballard.
Fourth Estate, 278 pp., £14.99, February 2008, 978 0 00 727072 9
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... When Empire of the Sun was published in 1984, ‘sympathetic readers of my earlier novels and short stories were quick to spot echoes … the drained swimming pools, abandoned hotels and nightclubs, deserted runways and flooded rivers.’ After the war, Ballard took a boat to Southampton with his mother and younger sister. In 1947, Edna and Margaret ...

Blood for Oil?

Retort: The takeover of Iraq, 21 April 2005

... House of Saud, expected the Saudis to maintain sufficient unused capacity to compensate for any short-term market tightening or price volatility. It was Saudi Arabia that released oil to stall the OPEC price rises in 1973 and during the 1990-91 Gulf War. Within 24 hours of September 11, nine million extra barrels of Saudi oil were released to keep prices ...

Slants

Alastair Fowler, 9 November 1989

Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language 
by John Hollander.
Yale, 262 pp., £20, January 1989, 0 300 04293 0
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Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making 
by Harry Berger.
California, 519 pp., $54, November 1988, 0 520 05826 7
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... Imperatives are particularly frequent in refrains and closure devices, from which envoys are but a short digression away. Hollander’s preoccupation with the ‘reflexive troping’ of such self-referring devices is noticeable, and prompts the reflection that Melodious Guile may in some sense have turned out a poetics specifically of Post-Modernist ...

The Fame Game

Alan Brien, 6 September 1984

Hype 
by Steven Aronson.
Hutchinson, 198 pp., £5.95, May 1984, 0 09 156251 1
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Automatic Vaudeville 
by John Lahr.
Heinemann, 241 pp., £8.95, September 1984, 0 434 40188 9
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Broadway Babies: The People who made the American Musical 
by Ethan Mordden.
Oxford, 244 pp., £19, August 1984, 0 19 503345 0
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... out on the journey across the Atlantic – architecture, for one, since there is a picture of Philip Johnson, unmatched with any reference in the text – though this can hardly account for the absence of more than a passing reference to film-making and marketing, the prefabrication of the best-seller in publishing or the promoting of the politician. Some ...

Diary

Nigel Hamilton: Writing Books, and Selling Them, 23 October 1986

... return to the ‘little’ author I was in Suffolk for almost ten years while working on Monty? Philip Ziegler and others have written kindly about the final Monty volume, hoping that I will not abandon writing. I won’t: I have finished the manuscripts of two short novels since finishing the first draft of Monty last ...

Long Goodbye

Derek Mahon, 20 November 1980

Why Brownlee left 
by Paul Muldoon.
Faber, 48 pp., £3, September 1980, 0 571 11592 6
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Poems 1956-1973 
by Thomas Kinsella.
Dolmen, 192 pp., £7.50, September 1980, 0 85105 365 3
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Constantly Singing 
by James Simmons.
Blackstaff, 90 pp., £3.95, June 1980, 0 85640 217 6
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A Part of Speech 
by Joseph Brodsky.
Oxford, 151 pp., £4.95, September 1980, 0 19 211939 7
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Collected poems 1931-1974 
by Lawrence Durrell.
Faber, 350 pp., £9, September 1980, 0 571 18009 4
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... but to Los Angeles, where he is reincarnated as Raymond Chandler’s fast-talking private eye, philip Marlowe, apparently in search of his father. ‘Immram’ is not easy to follow, but then neither is Chandler, who once admitted that he, the author, could not himself make out exactly what was happening in The Big Sleep. His other masterpiece, The Long ...

Diary

Susannah Clapp: On Angela Carter, 12 March 1992

... which she was so fond into a series of prose poems. Angela once remarked that she finished reading Philip Larkin’s work feeling that ‘there must be more to life than this.’ With that remark in mind, the writer and critic Francis Wyndham observed that rich prose such as her own might make one feel that ‘there must be less to life than ...

Performing Seals

Christopher Hitchens: The PR Crowd, 10 August 2000

Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals 
by David Laskin.
Simon and Schuster, 319 pp., $26, January 2000, 0 684 81565 6
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... only their Hardwick) have vented about Robert Lowell. To interview all the exes of Philip Rahv would be an undertaking from which the most committed Boswellian might recoil. (Though it’s fascinating to speculate what might have happened if Rahv and Mary McCarthy had made a go of it; a marriage between the most politically savvy and the most ...

Diary

Eric Hobsbawm: My Days as a Jazz Critic, 27 May 2010

... music into 20th-century society. It was the chance to understand the musicians and their world: in short, ‘the jazz scene’. I lived on the edge of the West End, and teaching at Birkbeck left most of the day free, so it was possible to combine my profession with the nocturnal and late-rising habits of the scene. My main base was the Downbeat Club on Old ...

Taunted with the Duke of Kent, she married the Aga Khan

Rosemary Hill: Coming Out, 19 October 2006

Last Curtsey: The End of the Debutantes 
by Fiona MacCarthy.
Faber, 305 pp., £20, October 2006, 0 571 22859 3
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... inclusiveness: ‘We had to put a stop to it. Every tart in London was getting in.’ For Prince Philip, the main enthusiast for abolition, it was presumably the agonising boredom. The passage of time has done little to improve the image of the deb. In so far as she still has a presence in the national imagination she is a figure of essential silliness, a ...

On Anthony Hecht

William Logan, 21 March 2024

... in Germany. As he knew some French and German, Hecht was asked to interview the survivors. He told Philip Hoy, who has edited his Collected Poems (Knopf, £42), that ‘the place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after, I would wake shrieking.’ He also saw his own men machine-gun a group of German women and ...

A Lethal Fall

Barbara Everett: Larkin and Chandler, 11 May 2006

... Philip Larkin gave the name High Windows to what proved to be his last collection of verse (published in 1974, 11 years before he died). The phrase had been used as the title of one of the poems included, and also occurs at the poem’s end: the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless ...

Boomster and the Quack

Stefan Collini: How to Get on in the Literary World, 2 November 2006

Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 
by Philip Waller.
Oxford, 1181 pp., £85, April 2006, 0 19 820677 1
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... two maids, a cook, a gardener, a houseman-cum-assistant gardener and eventually a chauffeur. As Philip Waller remarks in his extraordinary compendium of turn-of-the-century literary life in Britain, ‘Corelli’s sense of grandeur was the inverse of her sense of the absurd.’ He doesn’t stint his illustration of the point: A daily ritual was her ...

Purple Days

Mark Ford, 12 May 1994

The Pugilist at Rest 
by Thom Jones.
Faber, 230 pp., £14.99, March 1994, 0 571 17134 6
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The Sorrow of War 
by Bao Ninh, translated by Frank Palmos.
Secker, 217 pp., £8.99, January 1994, 0 436 31042 2
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A Good Scent from Strange Mountain 
by Robert Olen Butler.
Minerva, 249 pp., £5.99, November 1993, 0 7493 9767 5
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Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation 
by David Wyatt.
Cambridge, 230 pp., £35, February 1994, 9780521441513
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... on a clothes dump a mangled jacket recording 12 months served in-country; the list ends one month short ‘like a clock stopped by a bullet’.) Time and commitment were personal matters – ‘Time Is on My Side’ was another popular helmet slogan – unrelated to any sense of historical purpose or meaning. Hollywood and Baggit’s psychedelic killing ...

Suffocating Suspense

Richard Davenport-Hines, 16 March 2000

Cult Criminals: The Newgate Novels 1830-47 
by Juliet John.
Routledge, 2750 pp., £399, December 1998, 0 415 14383 7
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... as a Whig from 1831 until 1841, and as a Disraelian Conservative from 1852 until 1866. During a short period as Colonial Secretary in the late 1850s he supervised the creation of Queensland and British Columbia. On the accession of Queen Victoria, he was nominated by the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, to a baronetcy as the representative man of letters at ...

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