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The Reviewer’s Song

Andrew O’Hagan: Mailer’s Last Punch, 7 November 2013

Norman Mailer: A Double Life 
by J. Michael Lennon.
Simon and Schuster, 947 pp., £30, November 2013, 978 1 84737 672 5
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... about Edie Sedgwick, the ultimate 1960s poor little rich girl. The film opens with Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce) in a confessional box – always a good start – telling his priest how sad he is that someone else, not him, got to be punched at a party by Norman Mailer. ‘Why can’t I be punched by Norman Mailer?’ says the artist. Lennon is Mailer’s ...

I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place

David Runciman: In the White House, 11 October 2018

Fear: Trump in the White House 
by Bob Woodward.
Simon & Schuster, 448 pp., £20, September 2018, 978 1 4711 8129 0
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... up in the European Union” going to back the president?’ Bannon wanted to know. ‘Give me one guy. One country. One company. Who’s going to back sanctions?’ Now Trump perked up. ‘“That’s what I’m talking about,” Trump said. “He just made my point. You talk about all these guys as allies. There’s not an ally up there. Answer Steve’s ...

The Greatest

R.W. Johnson, 4 August 1994

Charles de Gaulle, Futurist of the Nation 
by Régis Debray, translated by John Howe.
Verso, 111 pp., £29.95, April 1994, 0 86091 622 7
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De Gaulle and 20th-Century France 
edited by Hugh Gough and John Horne.
Edward Arnold, 158 pp., £12.99, March 1994, 0 340 58826 8
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François Mitterrand: A Study in Political Leadership 
by Alistair Cole.
Routledge, 216 pp., £19.99, March 1994, 0 415 07159 3
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... withdrawn, and had seven bishops sacked. When the new Papal Nuncio, Monsignor Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII), went to plead the cause of Catholic schools, he took with him a map of France with all the under-funded Catholic schools marked in red. De Gaulle sent him packing: ‘This map is the map of France. It is therefore up to the French, and not a foreign ...

Dialect does it

Blake Morrison, 5 December 1985

No Mate for the Magpie 
by Frances Molloy.
Virago, 170 pp., £7.95, April 1985, 0 86068 594 2
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The Mysteries 
by Tony Harrison.
Faber, 229 pp., £9.95, August 1985, 9780571137893
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Ukulele Music 
by Peter Reading.
Secker, 103 pp., £3.95, June 1985, 0 436 40986 0
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Hard Lines 2 
edited by Ian Dury, Pete Townshend, Alan Bleasdale and Fanny Dubes.
Faber, 95 pp., £2.50, June 1985, 0 571 13542 0
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No Holds Barred: The Raving Beauties choose new poems by women 
edited by Anna Carteret, Fanny Viner and Sue Jones-Davies.
Women’s Press, 130 pp., £2.95, June 1985, 0 7043 3963 3
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Katerina Brac 
by Christopher Reid.
Faber, 47 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 571 13614 1
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Skevington’s Daughter 
by Oliver Reynolds.
Faber, 88 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 571 13697 4
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Rhondda Tenpenn’orth 
by Oliver Reynolds.
10 pence
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Trio 4 
by Andrew Elliott, Leon McAuley and Ciaran O’Driscoll.
Blackstaff, 69 pp., £3.95, May 1985, 0 85640 333 4
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Mama Dot 
by Fred D’Aguiar.
Chatto, 48 pp., £3.95, August 1985, 0 7011 2957 3
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The Dread Affair: Collected Poems 
by Benjamin Zephaniah.
Arena, 112 pp., £2.95, August 1985, 9780099392507
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Long Road to Nowhere 
by Amryl Johnson.
Virago, 64 pp., £2.95, July 1985, 0 86068 687 6
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Mangoes and Bullets 
by John Agard.
Pluto, 64 pp., £3.50, August 1985, 0 7453 0028 6
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Ragtime in Unfamiliar Bars 
by Ron Butlin.
Secker, 51 pp., £3.95, June 1985, 0 436 07810 4
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True Confessions and New Clichés 
by Liz Lochhead.
Polygon, 135 pp., £3.95, July 1985, 0 904919 90 0
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Works in the Inglis Tongue 
by Peter Davidson.
Three Tygers Press, 17 pp., £2.50, June 1985
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Wild Places: Poems in Three Leids 
by William Neill.
Luath, 200 pp., £5, September 1985, 0 946487 11 1
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... in ways that augur a good deal. Nonetheless, his poems, like those of Zephaniah, Amryl Johnson and John Agard, need to be read aloud to have their full impact. A white British reviewer should be cautious about praising West Indian poets for their music and rhythm, but the point is only MacDiarmid’s over again: these poets rely heavily on sound to break down ...

Still Reeling from My Loss

Andrew O’Hagan: Lulu & Co, 2 January 2003

I Don't Want to Fight 
by Lulu.
Time Warner, 326 pp., £17.99, October 2002, 0 316 86169 3
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Billy 
by Pamela Stephenson.
HarperCollins, 400 pp., £6.99, July 2002, 0 00 711092 8
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Just for the Record 
by Geri Halliwell.
Ebury, 221 pp., £17.99, September 2002, 0 09 188655 4
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Learning to Fly 
by Victoria Beckham.
Penguin, 528 pp., £6.99, July 2002, 0 14 100394 4
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Right from the Start 
by Gareth Gates.
Virgin, 80 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 1 85227 914 1
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Honest 
by Ulrika Jonsson.
Sidgwick, 417 pp., £16.99, October 2002, 0 283 07367 5
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... friends. Lulu has more than your average head for vertiginous name-dropping: it’s Elton this and John Lennon that, insecurity all the way, but this doesn’t stop the portrait from becoming something of an anthem to Little Me-ism. Lulu is a Sixties being: one of the first of that generation of pop stars to be found cool on account of their class, their ...

Dysfunctional Troglodytes with Mail-Order Weaponry

Iain Sinclair: Edward Dorn, 11 April 2013

Collected Poems 
by Edward Dorn.
Carcanet, 995 pp., £25, November 2012, 978 1 84777 126 1
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... and for the cadences of English speech, both grand and passionate, and ordinary off the street’. John Clare was an inspiration. Prynne took Dorn to Northampton to investigate the asylum where the poet spent his last years. John Barrell, another member of the new Essex University cluster, was working on his groundbreaking ...

Heroes

Pat Rogers, 6 November 1986

Hume and the Heroic Portrait: Studies in 18th-Century Imagery 
by Edgar Wind, edited by Jaynie Anderson.
Oxford, 139 pp., £29.50, May 1986, 0 19 817371 7
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Augustan Studies: Essays in honour of Irvin Ehrenpreis 
edited by Douglas Lane Patey and Timothy Keegan.
University of Delaware Press, 270 pp., £24.50, May 1986, 9780874132724
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The 18th Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1700-1789 
by James Sambrook.
Longman, 290 pp., £15.95, April 1986, 0 582 49306 4
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... topics; nobody’s in here just because he was a long-time acolyte or even that pleasant guy in the next office. The book was planned as a festschrift, but on its way to the press its mission has been re-defined as a commemorative offering, following Ehrenpreis’s sad death in an accident in July 1985. The full range of scholarly interests which ...

The Greatest Error of Modern History

R.W. Johnson: Did the Kaiser get it right?, 18 February 1999

The Pity of War 
by Niall Ferguson.
Allen Lane, 512 pp., £16.99, November 1998, 0 7139 9246 8
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... sense of comradeship with one another, but because many of them liked it; they wanted to fight. To Guy Chapman war was ‘a mistress – once you have lain in her arms you can admit no other’. Teilhard de Chardin spoke of discovering within oneself ‘an underlying stream of clarity, energy and freedom that is to be found hardly anywhere in ordinary ...

Sunshine

David Goldie: Morecambe and Wise, 15 April 1999

Morecambe and Wise 
by Graham McCann.
Fourth Estate, 416 pp., £16.99, October 1998, 1 85702 735 3
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... grotesque clown. This is the mode in which Morecambe and Wise began, mimicking the hard-edged wise-guy contentiousness of Abbott and Costello and writing it small on the British variety stage. Very small. Their partnership was established in 1940 when both, already seasoned entertainers, were in their mid-teens. As Morecambe would later recall, they were at ...

Half Bird, Half Fish, Half Unicorn

Paul Foot, 16 October 1997

Peter Cook: A Biography 
by Harry Thompson.
Hodder, 516 pp., £18.99, September 1997, 0 340 64968 2
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... allow the commentary to continue none the less. Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling was usually the fall-guy: INTERVIEWER: Sir Arthur, where did you strat your work? SIR ARTHUR: I think it can be said of me that I have never ever stratted my work. This is one thing I have never done. I can lay my hand on my heart, or indeed anyone else’s heart, and say: ‘I ...

Defensive, Not Aggressive

Andrew Cockburn: Khrushchev’s Cuban Gambit, 9 September 2021

The Silent Guns of Two Octobers: Kennedy and Khrushchev Play the Double Game 
by Theodore Voorhees.
Michigan, 384 pp., £27.95, September, 978 0 472 03871 8
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Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis 
by Serhii Plokhy.
Allen Lane, 464 pp., £25, April, 978 0 241 45473 2
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... Voorhees’s study is different. He highlights the all-important fact that in October 1962 John F. Kennedy was about to face congressional midterm elections. The results would determine the fate of his presidency, as well as his prospects for re-election in 1964. Kennedy’s New Frontier domestic agenda – which promised a huge house-building ...

E Bada!

Rye Dag Holmboe: What Isou Did to Language, 21 July 2022

Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou 
by Andrew Hussey.
Reaktion, 328 pp., £20, September 2021, 978 1 78914 492 5
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... squeaks. The lettristes came to include such luminaries as Maurice Lemaître, Gil J. Wolman and Guy Debord as well as students, drunks and petty criminals. Many of them really believed that Isou was a messiah, even, briefly, Debord, who thereafter made it his life’s mission to undermine him. In 1952, Debord and Wolman founded a splinter group called the ...

There are some limits Marlowes just won’t cross

Christopher Tayler: Banville’s Marlowe, 3 April 2014

The Black-Eyed Blonde 
by Benjamin Black.
Mantle, 320 pp., £16.99, February 2014, 978 1 4472 3668 9
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... a doll’s house’. On occasion he thinks of himself in the third person – ‘Very methodical guy, Marlowe. Nothing must interfere with his coffee technique’ – or has strange, charged moments of apprehension: ‘My mind drifted through waves of false memory, in which I seemed to do the same thing over and over again, go to the same places, meet the ...

How Dare He?

Jenny Turner: Geoff Dyer, 11 June 2009

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi 
by Geoff Dyer.
Canongate, 295 pp., £12.99, April 2009, 978 1 84767 270 4
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... in Oberkampf in the 1990s, and in his photography book and in his jazz book, and in the one about John Berger he did in 1986, as he was starting out. He writes, often, about romance and glamour and pleasure and excitement. Even more, he writes about listlessness and ambivalence and prevarication, the digressions and distractions that seem to stop him getting ...

They didn’t have my fire

Bee Wilson: The New Food Memoirists, 25 June 2009

The Settler’s Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food 
by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.
Portobello, 439 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 1 84627 083 3
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... regaled.’ A life history in which the stomach is wholly absent – you would never know whether John Stuart Mill ever yearned for sweets or felt his tummy rumble – doesn’t seem quite human. It is only in the past decade or so, however (M.F.K. Fisher and Alice B. Toklas notwithstanding), that food has been making the transition from supporting role to ...

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