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A Hammer in His Hands

Frank Kermode: Lowell’s Letters, 22 September 2005

The Letters of Robert Lowell 
edited by Saskia Hamilton.
Faber, 852 pp., £30, July 2005, 0 571 20204 7
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... rejecting his invitation to join the army, and much later he published his letter to Lyndon Johnson, explaining why he wouldn’t be turning up for some cultural occasion at the White House. He also played his part, recorded for admiring posterity by Norman Mailer, in the March on Washington, and was active in other anti-war demonstrations. He exerted ...

Outside in the Bar

Patrick McGuinness: Ten Years in Sheerness, 21 October 2021

The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness 
by Patrick Wright.
Repeater, 751 pp., £20, June, 978 1 913462 58 1
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... Crawford revealed he visited the pub during filming forty years ago. And German literary star Uwe Johnson also had his own stool at the pub where he used to write about the people he met.’ Photos of Crawford and Johnson accompanied a picture of the Napier’s façade, with a grey wheelie bin outside and blackboards ...

Is writing bad for you?

Frank Kermode, 21 February 1991

Writer’s Block 
by Zachary Leader.
Johns Hopkins, 325 pp., £19.50, January 1991, 0 8018 4032 5
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... in plagiarism may be responsible for a tendency to disarm suspicion by misquoting: for example, Dr Johnson on page 120, Pope on page 129, Wordsworth on page 150, Collins on page ...

On the Sofa

Yohann Koshy: ‘Small Axe’, 7 January 2021

... The poet​ Linton Kwesi Johnson calls the first two generations of Caribbean people in postwar Britain the ‘heroic’ generation and the ‘rebel’ generation. The Windrush generation, who arrived between 1948 and 1962, when the Commonwealth Immigrants Act came into force, were ‘heroes’ who, though not politically passive, were forced to cultivate resilience in the face of violence and hostility ...

Bristling Ermine

Jeremy Harding: R.W. Johnson, 4 May 2017

Look Back in Laughter: Oxford’s Postwar Golden Age 
by R.W. Johnson.
Threshold, 272 pp., £14.50, May 2015, 978 1 903152 35 5
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How Long Will South Africa Survive? The Looming Crisis 
by R.W. Johnson.
Hurst, 288 pp., £12.99, July 2016, 978 1 84904 723 4
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... R.W. Johnson​ is a long-standing contributor to the LRB. His first appearance was on the letters page in 1981, where he took ‘mild issue’ with a review of his most celebrated book, The Long March of the French Left. In 1984 he wrote a memorable piece about national intelligence agencies, and the following year, a homage to Pierre Mendès France, one of the best pieces the paper has published on postwar politics in France ...

Diary

R.W. Johnson: I was William Hague’s Tutor, 17 July 1997

... I meet with an ANC activist friend, now highly placed in the provincial administration. He is frank about the utter shambles within that administration but more or less optimistic that things will slowly improve. As you talk to him you realise what an enormous emotional distance he’s had to travel in three years. He began his tasks full of euphoric ...

An UnAmerican in New York

Lewis Nkosi: The Harlem Renaissance, 24 August 2000

Winds Can Wake Up the Dead: An Eric Walrond Reader 
edited by Louis Parascandola.
Wayne State, 350 pp., $24.95, December 1998, 0 8143 2709 5
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... of the new period into which Negroes appear to be emerging.’ Opportunity’s editor was Charles Johnson, a key figure in the New Negro movement, who thirty years later recalled the Harlem Renaissance as ‘that sudden and altogether phenomenal outburst of emotional expression, unmatched by any comparable period in American or Negro American history.’One ...

Off the edge

Frank Kermode, 7 November 1991

Musical Elaborations 
by Edward Said.
Chatto, 128 pp., £20, October 1991, 0 7011 3809 2
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... for a grant, but in either case you would do appropriately what Bach was doing appropriately. Dr Johnson wanted a patron for the Dictionary and the fact the we remember the case chiefly because he didn’t get one doesn’t mean he didn’t quite properly try to. And surely the equation between specific sections of the Mass and the reinforcement of the ...

Charging Downhill

Frank Kermode: Michael Holroyd, 28 October 1999

Basil Street Blues: A Family Story 
by Michael Holroyd.
Little, Brown, 306 pp., £17.50, September 1999, 0 316 64815 9
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... of non-fiction story-telling’, a lesson well learned, as readers of this book will agree. Dr Johnson thought that where there is room for fiction there is little room for truth, but here the truth sounds very like fiction. Hugh Kingsmill was his other model and with him and William Gerhardie he established friendships that made up for some of the ...

Symbolism, Expressionism, Decadence

Frank Kermode, 24 January 1980

Romantic Roots in Modern Art 
by August Wiedmann.
Gresham, 328 pp., £8.50, July 1980, 0 905418 51 4
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Symbolism 
by Robert Goldwater.
Allen Lane, 286 pp., £12.95, November 1980, 9780713910476
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Decadence and the 1890s 
edited by Ian Fletcher.
Arnold, 216 pp., £9.95, July 1980, 0 7131 6208 2
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... fix the last fine shade, the quintessence of things, to fix it fleetingly’ is Lionel Johnson’s idea of a Symbolist programme, but you might need to be a Decadent to bring it off. The little magazines were often associated with proponents, necessarily somewhat furtive, of what they called ‘Uranian’ love, lacking the word ...

At Tate Modern (and elsewhere)

Peter Campbell: How architects think, 21 July 2005

... These, like the material at Tate Modern, are early moves, unresolved and sometimes tentative. Frank Gehry’s 1982 ‘Study for a Tract House’, shown here (it was made for an exhibition not a client), is on the face of it no more than a doodle in brown ink and coloured crayon. But its sprightliness sums up the spirit which, in finished buildings, so ...
From Bauhaus to Our House 
by Tom Wolfe.
Cape, 143 pp., £6.95, March 1982, 0 224 02030 7
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... his own, for Nelson, along with Peter Blake, the late marvellous dragoness Sybil Moholy and Philip Johnson, is one of the prime sources of scandalous stories about modern architecture in North America (my own stock is deeply indebted to him). Gossip, in the almost hermetically-sealed subculture of New York architecture, in particular, has always been ...

Not for Horrid Profs

Colin Burrow: Kermode’s Shakespeare, 1 June 2000

Shakespeare's Language 
by Frank Kermode.
Allen Lane, 324 pp., £20, April 2000, 0 7139 9378 2
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... only for the moment in which one is reading the play or seeing a production. Shakespeare is, as Frank Kermode termed him in a lecture given to celebrate the poet’s 400th birthday in 1964, ‘patient’: he endures because his writing has ‘power to absorb our questions’ and has shown an extraordinary ability to adapt itself to the concerns of each ...

Between centuries

Frank Kermode, 11 January 1990

In the Nineties 
by John Stokes.
Harvester, 199 pp., £17.50, September 1989, 0 7450 0604 3
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Olivia Shakespear and W.B. Yeats 
by John Harwood.
Macmillan, 218 pp., £35, January 1990, 0 333 42518 9
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Letters to the New Island 
by W.B. Yeats, edited by George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer.
Macmillan, 200 pp., £45, November 1989, 0 333 43878 7
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The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson: The ‘Little Review’ Correspondence 
edited by Thomas Scott, Melvin Friedman and Jackson Bryer.
Faber, 368 pp., £30, July 1989, 0 571 14099 8
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Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic Friendship, 1910-1912 
edited by Omar Pound and Robert Spoo.
Duke, 181 pp., £20.75, January 1989, 0 8223 0862 2
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Postcards from the End of the World: An Investigation into the Mind of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna 
by Larry Wolff.
Collins, 275 pp., £15, January 1990, 0 00 215171 5
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Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age 
by Modris Eksteins.
Bantam, 396 pp., £14.95, September 1989, 0 593 01862 1
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Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1916-1925 
by Kenneth Silver.
Thames and Hudson, 506 pp., £32, October 1989, 0 500 23567 8
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... here, but it is for her association with Yeats that she is now remembered. A cousin of Lionel Johnson, she was married to the much older, and apparently very dull, Hope Shakespear. Yeats met Olivia at a Yellow Book dinner in 1894. He was 29, she a couple of years older. The nervous hesitations preceding their affair, which terminated the poet’s ...

If you don’t swing, don’t ring

Christopher Turner: Playboy Mansions, 21 April 2016

Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics 
by Beatriz Preciado.
Zone, 303 pp., £20.95, October 2014, 978 1 935408 48 2
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Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny 
by Holly Madison.
Dey Street, 334 pp., £16.99, July 2015, 978 0 06 237210 9
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... laudatory articles on contemporary architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller. The architects were themselves portrayed as playboys, the architectural and sexual revolutions intimately enmeshed. In Pornotopia, Beatriz Preciado writes that in 1950s issues ...

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