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On Not Being Sylvia Plath

Colm Tóibín: Thom Gunn on the Move, 13 September 2018

Selected Poems 
by Thom Gunn.
Faber, 336 pp., £16.99, July 2017, 978 0 571 32769 0
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... and moved into a set of images and cadences that I could not fully understand: It is as though The black breathing that billows her sleep, her name, Drugged under judgment, waned and – bearing daggers And balances – down the lampless darkness they came, Moving like women: Justice, Truth, such figures.‘Figures’ rhymes, of course, with ‘daggers’, but ...

King of Razz

Alfred Appel Jr: Homage to Fats Waller, 9 May 2002

... if Waller intends to demonstrate that the shallow ‘lookist’ he’s playing, whose grammar is black vernacular – ‘I hates you ‘cause your feet’s too big’ – also has the King’s English at his disposal. Had he lived, he could have had a major acting career – the black Zero Mostel, a lambent ...

A Nation of Collaborators

Adewale Maja-Pearce, 19 June 1997

... worst; and he is now rather stronger than before. This became very clear last October, when Warren Christopher, the former US Secretary of State, categorically ruled out any possibility of oil sanctions. ‘There is no appetite for that,’ he said on the first leg of his five-nation African tour, even as he professed himself ‘troubled by the conduct of the ...
Dance till the stars come down 
by Frances Spalding.
Hodder, 271 pp., £25, May 1991, 0 340 48555 8
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Keith Vaughan 
by Malcolm Yorke.
Constable, 288 pp., £25, October 1990, 0 09 469780 9
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... in the context of his avowed admiration of Cézanne, to be a betrayal not an advance. In 1952 Christopher Isherwood gave E. M. Forster two bottles of claret and a painting by Vaughan. His work made an ideal gay to gay present; the male nude, or nude in landscape were his main, almost his only subjects, and the steady sale of his smaller works seems to ...

A Life of Henry Reed

Jon Stallworthy, 12 September 1991

... that we attend PT wearing all our ‘kit’, except blankets. (I will never call a child of mine Christopher.) The same letter gives, incidentally, a clear view of the left-wing political position that Reed, for all his aristocratic fantasies, was never to abandon: ‘I hope,’ he wrote, ‘a good deal from Russia, of course, but rather joylessly: the ...

Magic Zones

Marina Warner, 8 December 1994

Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilisation 
by Richard Sennett.
Faber, 413 pp., £25, October 1994, 9780571173907
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... Smith in the current issue of Baetyl. (This new journal coincidentally takes its name from the black stone into which the goddess Cybele metamorphosed in order to escape Zeus on one of his rampages – more flesh and stone in opposition.) Sennett follows the approach of Marcel Detienne in his brilliant The Gardens of Adonis and interprets these rituals as ...

Fit for a Saint

Nicholas Penny, 6 April 1995

The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice 
by Peter Humfrey.
Yale, 382 pp., £19.95, May 1995, 0 300 05358 4
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Italian Altarpieces 1250-1550: Function and Design 
edited by Eve Borsook and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi.
Oxford, 296 pp., £45, September 1994, 0 19 817223 0
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... we find one of Bellini’s greatest paintings, his late altarpiece of Saint Jerome between Saints Christopher and Louis of Toulouse, which is reproduced on the jacket of The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice. The book opens with a consideration of which elements in this painting were conditioned by its setting. The church interior is illustrated in ...

Diary

Madeleine Schwartz: Teaching in the Banlieue, 17 November 2022

... that the bread was better in France?My students wore colourful tracksuits and Air Force Ones, or black shiny jeans, white sneakers and big sweatshirts. A lone goth called Agathe (whose name, like the others here, has been changed) told me she had difficulty with ‘empathy’ and always interpreted things literally. One 15-year-old asked me whether people ...

Rub gently out with stale bread

Adam Smyth: The Print Craze, 2 November 2017

The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking 1550-1820 
by Antony Griffiths.
British Museum, 560 pp., £60, August 2016, 978 0 7141 2695 1
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... utilitarian applications of surveying, heraldry or craft. With (the introduction tells us) ‘a black lead pencil and paper’, the reader should ‘slightly sketch’ the image placed before them (vaulting horse, waterfall, clenched fist). ‘By rubbing gently out with stale Bread’ and then through a process of retouching and hatching and shading with ...

No Beast More Refined

James Davidson: How Good Was Nureyev?, 29 November 2007

Rudolf Nureyev: The Life 
by Julie Kavanagh.
Fig Tree, 787 pp., £25, September 2007, 978 1 905490 15 8
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... and the last: ‘Suddenly, from nowhere, she heard a clatter of hooves on the road. “A black horse without saddle or bridle cantered along the road … The horse was part Arab and beautiful, but in this context, suddenly unpredictable and dangerous.”’ In between there are hints of symbolic subplots, paths not taken, connections waiting to be ...

Scribblers and Assassins

Charles Nicholl: The Crimes of Thomas Drury, 31 October 2002

... On 18 May 1593 a warrant was issued to ‘apprehend’ Christopher Marlowe, and on 20 May he was brought before the Privy Council for questioning. He was not detained, but was ordered to report to the Council daily until ‘licensed to the contrary’. This state of precarious liberty lasted only until 30 May, when he was fatally stabbed by a man named Ingram Frizer, though whether his sudden death was a matter of coincidence or conspiracy remains unresolved ...

Cod on Ice

Andy Beckett: The BBC, 10 July 2003

Panorama: Fifty Years of Pride And Paranoia 
by Richard Lindley.
Politico’s, 404 pp., £18.99, September 2002, 1 902301 80 3
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The Harder Path: The Autobiography 
by John Birt.
Time Warner, 532 pp., £20, October 2002, 0 316 86019 0
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... Weekend World was creating its own network of clever, ambitious men. Peter Jay, Peter Mandelson, Christopher Hitchens, Brian Walden and their slightly geeky colleagues turned out to be a more influential and politically adept group than Panorama’s fist-fighting war reporters. And none was more geeky and influential than Weekend World’s creator and ...

Entryism

Jacqueline Rose: ‘Specimen Days’, 22 September 2005

Specimen Days 
by Michael Cunningham.
Fourth Estate, 308 pp., £14.99, August 2005, 0 00 715605 7
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... At the centre of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, in the second of its three tales, Cat, a black woman police investigator in New York, has the job of receiving and recording the calls of people threatening to blow themselves and others to pieces. Only because these deranged stories have become too familiar does she miss the one who really means it, a young boy, who, without forewarning or apparent motive, goes up to a stranger in Central Park, embraces him and explodes ...

Ismism

Evan Kindley: Modernist Magazines, 23 January 2014

The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I: Britain and Ireland 1880-1955 
edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker.
Oxford, 976 pp., £35, May 2013, 978 0 19 965429 1
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The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II: North America 1894-1960 
edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker.
Oxford, 1088 pp., £140, July 2012, 978 0 19 965429 1
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The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume III: Europe 1880-1940 
edited by Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker and Christian Weikop.
Oxford, 1471690 pp., £145, March 2013, 978 0 19 965958 6
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... succès d’estime the Smart Set with ‘louse magazines’ such as Parisienne, Saucy Stories and Black Mask. Die neue linie, featuring work by Bauhaus designers such as László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Irmgard Sörensen-Popitz, was a revamp of the mass market German women’s magazine Frauen-Mode and a probable influence on Vanity Fair’s designer ...

Prophet of the Past

Oliver Cussen: Blame it on Malthus, 26 September 2024

The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History 
by Deborah Valenze.
Yale, 254 pp., £45, July 2023, 978 0 300 24613 1
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... of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries. In the 15th century, after the Black Death, the region’s population was at a historic low. Land was left fallow, and villagers complained about the encroachment of wild animals and forests on crops and pasture. Nature was taking its revenge for the great land colonisation movement of the ...

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