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Haughty Dirigistes

Sudhir Hazareesingh: France, 23 May 2019

France’s Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic 
by Herrick Chapman.
Harvard, 405 pp., £37.95, January 2018, 978 0 674 97641 2
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... neoliberal economic philosophy. At the height of the Poujadist insurgency in the mid-1950s, Edgar Faure, the finance minister, detected ‘a wind of insurrection against the state’ blowing from the provinces. In this respect, too, the French remain true to their ...

Bow. Wow

James Wolcott: Gore Vidal, 3 February 2000

Gore Vidal 
by Fred Kaplan.
Bloomsbury, 850 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 7475 4671 1
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... extinction (‘when time stops and the fiery beast falls upon itself to begin again as dust-filled wind’ – from the novel Two Sisters), given that he has a stoical outlook which views man as a bundle of atoms destined to disperse into the void, given that he sees writing as a noble exercise in futility in the age of idiot mass distraction (he’s bid ...

Mysteries of the City

Mark Ford: Baudelaire and Modernity, 21 February 2013

Baudelaire: The Complete Verse 
edited and translated by Francis Scarfe.
Anvil, 470 pp., £10.95, January 2012, 978 0 85646 427 0
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Baudelaire: Paris Blues/Le Spleen de Paris 
edited and translated by Francis Scarfe.
Anvil, 332 pp., £10.95, January 2012, 978 0 85646 429 4
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Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity 
by Françoise Meltzer.
Chicago, 264 pp., £29, May 2011, 978 0 226 51988 3
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... in the future to apply a magical elixir to his poetic negatives, his own literary doppelganger was Edgar Allan Poe, whom he discovered in 1847, two years before Poe’s death. In 1848 he published his first version of a Poe tale, and over the next decade and a half translated a significant percentage of Poe’s work. What Benjamin did for ...

The Only Alphabet

August Kleinzahler: Ashbery’s Early Life, 21 September 2017

The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life 
by Karin Roffman.
Farrar, Straus, 316 pp., £25.50, June 2017, 978 0 374 29384 0
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... bought him a copy of the New Yorker and a Fritzi Ritz comic book. ‘Oh! Boy what fun to have the wind outside,’ John wrote later that evening in his diary. ‘Momma and I went down to the lounge and I read my New Yorker. I feel quite distingué with it under my arm. We came back and I undressed and am now in bed. The train sways quite a lot and I keep ...

Defanged

Eric Foner: Deifying King, 5 October 2023

King: The Life of Martin Luther King 
by Jonathan Eig.
Simon & Schuster, 669 pp., £25, May, 978 1 4711 8100 9
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... and planted informers in his circle. Convinced the civil rights movement was a communist plot, J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men gathered recordings of his trysts with women and mailed them to his house, accompanied by an unsigned letter suggesting that he take his own life. Eig’s previous subjects include Muhammad Ali, Al Capone and the baseball stars Jackie ...

Diary

Jeremy Harding: My ’68, 19 July 2018

... influential coterie of boys, a year or two older than me, who were already restless. When they got wind of events in Paris they were obscurely stirred. Lindsay Anderson’s if … . – in production that spring and released at the end of the year – caught their mood well: the thought that they might cause mayhem was never far away, but it was only a ...

Enemies For Ever

James Wolcott: ‘Making It’, 18 May 2017

Making It 
by Norman Podhoretz.
NYRB, 368 pp., £13.98, May 2017, 978 1 68137 080 4
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... Podhoretz the bold young successor to Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Stanley Edgar Hyman and Mary McCarthy in the Quality Lit Crit Biz. He is needled as a symptomatic New York intellectual specimen by Benjamin DeMott in the New York Review and cuffed around roughly by Hudson Review’s Marvin Mudrick, who complains that, apart from the ...

I’ll be back

Marjorie Garber: Sequels, 19 August 1999

Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel 
edited by Paul Budra and Betty Schellenberg.
Toronto, 217 pp., £40, February 1999, 0 8020 0915 8
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... in Nahum Tate’s version of King Lear, which allowed Cordelia not only to survive but to marry Edgar – a much more ‘satisfying’ result. And the 19th century produced one of my favourite ‘prequels’, Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, which offered the Victorian reader a chance to make the acquaintance of the infant ...

The Coat in Question

Iain Sinclair: Margate, 20 March 2003

All the Devils Are Here 
by David Seabrook.
Granta, 192 pp., £7.99, March 2003, 9781862075597
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... commuter road, with the line of poplars as a windbreak, and Seabrook will treat you to the full Edgar Lustgarten re-enactment. He doesn’t report some earlier account of the event, he witnesses it. Anticipates every bloody stroke of the blade. Which might explain Seabrook’s advocacy of the novelist (conspiracy buff and former Kubrick associate) Anthony ...

Diary

Andrew O’Hagan: Stevenson in Edinburgh, 4 January 2024

... our lives, moreover; we no longer see the devil in the bed-curtains nor lie awake to listen to the wind.’While he was at Edinburgh Academy, Stevenson is said to have fought a duel with another pupil, Bobby Romanes. ‘They had real pistols and real powder,’ according to a witness, Patrick Campbell, ‘but no real bullets – not even a charge of redcurrant ...

Sabotage

Gavin Millar, 13 September 1990

Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles 
by Frank Brady.
Hodder, 655 pp., £18.95, January 1990, 0 340 51389 6
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If this was happiness: A Biography of Rita Hayworth 
by Barbara Leaming.
Weidenfeld, 312 pp., £14.95, September 1989, 0 297 79630 5
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Norma Shearer 
by Gavin Lambert.
Hodder, 381 pp., £17.95, August 1990, 0 340 52947 4
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Ava’s Men: The Private Life of Ava Gardner 
by Jane Ellen Wayne.
Robson, 268 pp., £14.95, November 1989, 0 86051 636 9
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Goldwyn: A Biography 
by Scott Berg.
Hamish Hamilton, 579 pp., £16.95, September 1989, 0 241 12832 3
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The Genius of the System: Hollywood Film-Making in the Studio Era 
by Thomas Schatz.
Simon and Schuster, 514 pp., £16.95, September 1989, 0 671 69708 0
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... house in her bare feet and was shocked to discover she had only ever read one book: Gone with the Wind. ‘I left before he had a chance to flunk me.’ Her three husbands had 20 wives. Sinatra seems to have been the serious one. Shooting Mogambo, John Ford gave a party for the British Governor of Uganda and his wife. A man’s man, as they say, Ford thought ...

Brussels Pout

Ian Penman: Baudelaire’s Bad End, 16 March 2023

Late Fragments: ‘Flares’, ‘My Heart Laid Bare’, Prose Poems, ‘Belgium Disrobed’ 
by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Richard Sieburth.
Yale, 427 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 300 27049 5
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... stops writing aged nineteen and disappears like a magician’s assistant. He is flighty, in the wind; Baudelaire is unhappy anywhere outside Paris. Rimbaud is eternally young and puckish; Baudelaire looks seedy and prematurely middle-aged, sparse hair brushed forward, a dandy with water damage.One of the late fragments included here, Baudelaire’s prose ...

All change. This train is cancelled

Iain Sinclair: The Dome, 13 May 1999

... before your fascinated gaze. The mechanism in its complacent little box is as remorseless as Edgar Allan Poe’s tell-tale heart and as silent as Conan Doyle’s dog that didn’t bark. It’s the silence that drives you mad. A second site visit was arranged. A second site visit was cancelled. Indulging my native paranoia, I believed that they must have ...

Alphabeted

Barbara Everett: Coleridge the Modernist, 7 August 2003

Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection 
edited by Seamus Perry.
Oxford, 264 pp., £17.99, June 2002, 0 19 871201 4
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The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. XVI: Poetical Works I: Poems (Reading Text) 
edited by J.C.C. Mays.
Princeton, 1608 pp., £135, November 2001, 0 691 00483 8
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The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. XVI: Poetical Works II: Poems (Variorum Text) 
edited by J.C.C. Mays.
Princeton, 1528 pp., £135, November 2001, 0 691 00484 6
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The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. XVI: Poetical Works III: Plays 
edited by J.C.C. Mays.
Princeton, 1620 pp., £135, November 2001, 0 691 09883 2
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... perhaps barely conscious echoes and inheritances: like that piercing moment in Moby-Dick when the wind brings (or seems to bring) to the fated men far out at sea the smell of harvesting in a distant land, surely recalling Coleridge’s salty memory of a ‘hidden brook/In the leafy month of June’. In a comic Indian Army yarn by Kipling, the nightmare ...

Follow-the-Leader

Colm Tóibín: Bishop v. Lowell, 14 May 2009

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell 
edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton.
Faber, 875 pp., £40, November 2008, 978 0 571 24308 2
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... calling Snodgrass ‘one of your better imitators’ and saying: ‘You tell things – but never wind up with your own darling gestures, the way he does … I went straight through Life Studies again and there is not a trace of it, and that is really “masculine” writing – courageous and honest.’ In 1974, Lowell wrote to Bishop: ‘By the way is a ...

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