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Falling in love with Lucian

Colm Tóibín: Lucian Freud’s Outer Being, 10 October 2019

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth, 1922-68 
by William Feaver.
Bloomsbury, 680 pp., £35, September 2019, 978 1 4088 5093 0
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... mother started worshipping it so I smashed it,’ he said. When his father introduced him to a potter friend, he said: ‘This wild animal is my son.’ The wild animal received helpful advice from some of his teachers, one of whom told him that the thing to do before parties is to ‘toss yourself off in the taxi to make your eyes shine.’ The same man ...

Haley’s Comet

Paul Driver, 6 February 1997

The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Weidenfeld, 431 pp., £25, September 1996, 0 297 81720 5
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... press, though it had already sent itself up in its inaugural programme, How to Listen, by Stephen Potter and Joyce Grenfell – the first of many satires, including Henry Reed’s high-camp Hilda Tablet comedies and Third Division, the comedy show that turned into the Goons. But mostly the press response was respectful. The social and political consensus that ...

Between the Raindrops

David Bromwich: The Subtlety of James Stewart, 12 December 2002

James Stewart at the NFT 
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... alone keeps the town of Bedford Falls out of the grip of the property and lending monopolies of Mr Potter, the evil tycoon played by Lionel Barrymore. One of Bailey’s projects is a co-operative low-income housing development for working-class families; Potter’s wish to eradicate that symbol of collective hope is a ...

Isn’t that . . . female?

Patricia Lockwood: My Dame Antonia, 20 June 2024

Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories 
by A.S. Byatt.
Vintage, 444 pp., £9.99, November 2023, 978 1 5291 1299 3
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... whole.I have read it all, beginning with Babel Tower (1996), back when I was the age of Frederica Potter graduating from school at Blesford Ride, sinking her uniform into the canal as her older sister, Stephanie, looks on. I have gone to the bookstore on publication day in my pyjamas and asked them to unbox the new one; it’s back there, I know it. I have ...

Fashville

Robert Tashman, 9 March 1995

Prêt-à-Porter 
directed by Robert Altman.
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... The prêt-à-porter shows are covered for FAD TV by an inexhaustibly dumb Texan named Kitty Potter, who is played, in an inspired performance, by Kim Basinger. Kitty functions as a choral presence in the film. As for the question of whether television is stupid because Americans are, or vice versa, Altman seems to decide for the former. Kitty, after her ...

China’s Millennials

Yun Sheng: Hipsters in Beijing, 10 October 2019

... as Earth Hour, or raising funds for forest restoration. Many are vegetarians, and they worship David Attenborough. On the other hand, they are addicted to overseas holidays, which leave a large carbon footprint; to online shopping (usually packed in several layers of bubblewrap) and takeaway food (packed in single-use plastic boxes); and to fast ...

A Preference for Strenuous Ghosts

Michael Kammen: Theodore Roosevelt, 6 June 2002

Theodore Rex 
by Edmund Morris.
HarperCollins, 772 pp., £25, March 2002, 0 00 217708 0
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... Americans seem to relish Presidential biographies. David McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker ...

Liberation Music

Richard Gott: In Memory of Cornelius Cardew, 12 March 2009

Cornelius Cardew: A Life Unfinished 
by John Tilbury.
Copula, 1069 pp., £45, October 2008, 978 0 9525492 3 9
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... and led a Scratch Orchestra of musicians and artists; that his father was Michael Cardew, the potter; that he wrote a polemical tract alleging that Stockhausen ‘serves imperialism’; and that, after spending a decade as a prominent Maoist, he was killed by a hit-and-run driver, in an apparent accident that conspiracy theorists have liked to construe as ...

Change at MoMA

Hal Foster, 7 November 2019

... than sixty galleries, at a cost of $450 million. Roughly half of this great sum came from the late David Rockefeller, longtime chairman of the board (his mother, Abby, was a co-founder of the museum), and the other half from just four people: the hedge fund billionaires Leon Black, Kenneth Griffin and Steven Cohen, and the media mogul ...

The Person in the Phone Booth

David Trotter: Phone Booths, 28 January 2010

... anthem ‘Wake Up’. But it isn’t all CGI, yet, at reality’s interface with illusion. Harry Potter, for example, nips into a sanctuary of rather more traditional design to place a call to the Ministry of Magic. J.K. Rowling has enough respect for folk memory to register his surprise that the phone actually works. A lot depends on genre. ‘Don’t go ...

The Whole Secret of Clive James

Karl Miller, 22 May 1980

Unreliable Memoirs 
by Clive James.
Cape, 171 pp., £5.50, May 1980, 0 224 01825 6
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... A little over a year ago, a very good play was screened on BBC Television, Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills. A troupe of adult actors climbed into shorts and re-enacted the days of Potter’s youth – fights, ordeals, boasts, burnings, with an Indian file of girls manoeuvring in relation to the Indian file of boys, each brave or squaw as solemn as Sioux ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1998, 21 January 1999

... and after, with reminiscences by various advertisements for the system, including Kenneth Clarke, David Puttnam and Barry Hines. Listening to their recollections of taking and passing the eleven-plus makes me wonder whether I ever took it at all. I had jumped one or two classes at my primary school so by July 1944 when I left to go to secondary school, I was ...

Things the King Liked to Hear

Blair Worden: Donne and Milton’s Prose, 19 June 2014

Sermons of John Donne Vol. III: Sermons Preached at the Court of Charles I 
edited by David Colclough.
Oxford, 521 pp., £125, November 2013, 978 0 19 956548 1
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Complete Works of John Milton Vol. VI: Vernacular Regicide and Republican Writings 
edited by N.H. Keeble and Nicholas McDowell.
Oxford, 811 pp., £125, December 2013, 978 0 19 921805 9
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... much of which was composed in verse form – surpassed those of classical poetry. Donne declared David ‘a better poet than Virgil’ and similarly lauded Isaiah. Donne’s sermons have been read by Eng. Lit. in the light of his poems and as guides to them. Some critics have stressed continuities of imaginative or linguistic pattern across the frontier of ...

Everyone Loves Her

Will Frears: Stieg Larsson, 16 December 2010

Stieg Larsson, My Friend 
by Kurdo Baksi.
MacLehose Press, 143 pp., £14.99, 0 85705 021 4
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... Craig has been signed up for the American remake of the first film, which will be directed by David Fincher. The quest to find Lisbeth Salander took on Scarlett O’Hara proportions; the role has been filled with attendant fanfare by Rooney Mara, who was introduced to the world in Fincher’s last movie, The Social Network. (It will be interesting to see ...

So Many Handbags, So Little Time

Andrew O’Hagan: The Bling Ring, 20 June 2013

The Bling Ring 
by Nancy Jo Sales.
HarperCollins, 288 pp., £7.99, May 2013, 978 0 00 751822 7
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... cell door and just stare at me.’ Cut to the present day and you’ll find Emma Watson from Harry Potter playing our main girl in the movie, while back in the territory west of the Ventura Freeway, Alexis has just had a baby. The baby is called Harper, not after Harper Lee, but after the only daughter of David and Victoria ...

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