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Diary

Keith Thomas: Two Years a Squaddie, 5 February 2015

... ex-national servicemen to be shocked when they reread their diaries and letters. He tells us that Paul Foot (Hugh Foot’s son) found it painful to read the diary he kept at the time of Suez; and he suggests that most conscripts who expressed political opinions merely adopted those of their parents. That was certainly true of me. I went to Jamaica with the ...

Don’t teach me

Gillian Darley: Ernö Goldfinger, 1 April 2004

Ernö Goldfinger: The Life of an Architect 
by Nigel Warburton.
Routledge, 197 pp., £30, November 2003, 0 415 25853 7
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... the Trianon Treaty. Initially interested in engineering (the family business was forestry and saw-mills), he began to consider architecture after coming across Hermann Muthesius’s Das Englische Haus (1904-05): English domestic architecture as observed by the German cultural attaché in London from 1896 onwards. In Muthesius’s pages, Arts and Crafts ...

Why should you be the only ones that sin?

Colm Tóibín, 5 September 1996

Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature 
by Anthony Heilbut.
Macmillan, 636 pp., £20, June 1996, 9780394556338
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Thomas Mann: A Biography 
by Ronald Hayman.
Bloomsbury, 672 pp., £20, March 1996, 0 7475 2531 5
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Thomas Mann: A Life 
by Donald Prater.
Oxford, 554 pp., £20, September 1995, 0 19 815861 0
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... had a crush. When he was 25 he had what he called ‘that central experience of my heart’ with Paul Ehrenberg, a student painter and violinist at the Munich Art Academy who more than forty years later became Rudi Schwerdtfeger in Doctor Faustus. Even the boy in Death in Venice was based on a real boy. Katia Mann remembered being on holiday in Venice with ...

Britain takes the biscuit

Gordon Brown and Geoff Mulgan, 25 October 1990

The Competitive Advantage of Nations 
by Michael Porter.
Macmillan, 855 pp., £25, May 1990, 0 333 51804 7
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... of Italy’s transport infrastructure encouraged the creation of more self-sufficient steel mini-mills. Britain’s relative decline has been the subject of hundreds if not thousands of books. Perhaps it should be no surprise that the analysis here is often both familiar and at first glance deeply depressing. The examples cited of British success range from ...

Swiftly Encircling Gloom

Tim Radford, 8 May 1997

Promising The Earth 
by Robert Lamb.
Routledge, 204 pp., £35, September 1996, 0 415 14443 4
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... with toxic exhausts, some of which have been released in the course of carrying timber to pulp mills, paper to printers and journals to readers. Awareness of nature is dependent on complicity in its destruction. Until you understand what is happening, you are not in a position to protest; but by that time you have already consumed rather a lot of the ...

Illustrating America

Peter Campbell, 21 March 1985

Willem de Kooning: Drawings, Paintings, Sculpture 
by Paul Cummings, Jorn Merkert and Claire Stoullig.
Norton, 308 pp., £35, August 1984, 0 393 01840 7
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Abstract Expressionist Painting in America 
by William Seitz.
Harvard, 490 pp., £59.95, February 1984, 0 674 00215 6
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About Rothko 
by Dore Ashton.
Oxford, 225 pp., £15, August 1984, 0 19 503348 5
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The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York 
by Peter Conrad.
Oxford, 329 pp., £15, June 1984, 0 19 503408 2
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... interest to grow – lost some of its power to throw up new combinations and inventions. But the mills were rolling, and the large abstract canvases which became the badge of New York painting went on being produced in moulds which had to a large extent already been formed. De Kooning, says Tom Armstrong, director of the Whitney Museum of American ...

Sorrows of a Polygamist

Mark Ford: Ted Hughes in His Cage, 17 March 2016

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life 
by Jonathan Bate.
William Collins, 662 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 00 811822 8
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... contain nearly a hundred thousand pages of manuscript material. The vast Collected Poems edited by Paul Keegan and published in 2003 presents a poet who insistently ‘o’erflows the measure’, to borrow a phrase from Antony and Cleopatra, veering, rather like Shakespeare’s Antony, between the sublime and the bathetic, the uncannily sure-footed and the ...

Received Accents

Peter Robinson, 20 February 1986

Collected Poems 
by Charles Tomlinson.
Oxford, 351 pp., £15, September 1985, 0 19 211974 5
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Selected and New Poems: 1939-84 
by J.C. Hall.
Secker, 87 pp., £3.95, September 1985, 0 436 19052 4
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Burning the knife: New and Selected Poems 
by Robin Magowan.
Scarecrow Press, 114 pp., £13.50, September 1985, 0 8108 1777 2
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Englishmen: A Poem 
by Christopher Hope.
Heinemann, 41 pp., £4.95, September 1985, 0 434 34661 6
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Selected Poems: 1954-1982 
by John Fuller.
Secker, 175 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 436 16754 9
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Writing Home 
by Hugo Williams.
Oxford, 70 pp., £3.95, September 1985, 0 19 211970 2
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... production and ugliness – the poem was written in the early Sixties, when the dark satanic mills were still largely in business. His 1974 collection, The Way In, attempts to resolve that conflict, for, unlike John Maydew, Tomlinson moved away from the slag and into the green. The first person singular confidently speaks throughout ‘At Stoke’ and ...

Diary

Tom Paulin: Ulster’s Long Sunday, 24 August 1995

... The next morning we set out for the Ulster Folk Museum where there are thatched cottages, scutch mills, mill terraces, churches, flax growing in the grounds of an old manor house at Cultra on the shores of Belfast Lough. I have to deliver an elegy for Ulster Scots in Ballyverdagh National School, one of the institutions that helped to stamp out the ...

We came, we saw, he died

Jackson Lears: Clinton’s Creed, 5 February 2015

Hard Choices 
by Hillary Clinton.
Simon and Schuster, 635 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 1 4711 3150 9
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HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton 
by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
Hutchinson, 440 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 0 09 195448 2
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... Armed Services Committee, is ‘tall and warm – and as tough as a Trident missile’; Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s top State Department aide, is a ‘ball-buster’ and a ‘pit bull’. But Clinton’s hawkishness is a matter of moral and intellectual conviction. In Hard Choices, she tries to construct a coherent rationale for an interventionist foreign ...

Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill

Jonathan Raban: Sarah Palin’s Cunning, 9 October 2008

... tank. But the moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano, Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real thing. Americans, starved of völkisch authenticity in their national politicians, thrilled to her presence on the stage. Forty million people ...

Beware Biographers

Jackson Lears: Kennan and Containment, 24 May 2012

George Kennan: An American Life 
by John Lewis Gaddis.
Penguin, 784 pp., £30, December 2011, 978 1 59420 312 1
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Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War 
by Frank Costigliola.
Princeton, 533 pp., £24.95, January 2012, 978 0 691 12129 1
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... to use military force, up to and including nuclear weapons. Not for nothing did C. Wright Mills coin the term ‘crackpot realists’ to describe the masterminds of the nuclear arms race. And the elasticity of the phrase ‘national interest’ compounds the difficulty: could it be used to justify Nixon and Kissinger’s carpet-bombing of North ...

Serious Mayhem

Simon Reynolds: The McLaren Strand, 10 March 2022

The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren: The Biography 
by Paul Gorman.
Constable, 855 pp., £14.99, November 2021, 978 1 4721 2111 0
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... the Sex Pistols as Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious, eclipsing the group’s musical muscle: drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Glen Matlock. (It was Matlock who wrote nearly all the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial ...

If It Weren’t for Charlotte

Alice Spawls: The Brontës, 16 November 2017

... attribution to Charlotte’s Belgian teacher, Constantin Héger, is laughable: it’s signed ‘Paul Hegér’ (Paul Emmanuel, a character with strong affinities to Héger, is the love-interest in Villette). The date given is 1850; Charlotte left Brussels in 1844. The accent is in the wrong place: Hegér not Héger. It ...

Dirty Little Secret

Fredric Jameson: The Programme Era, 22 November 2012

The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing 
by Mark McGurl.
Harvard, 466 pp., £14.95, November 2012, 978 0 674 06209 2
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... so often loosely identified as individualism. McGurl offers a few sociological references (Wright Mills, Pine and Gilmore, Thomas Frank), and even a few socio-economic ones (Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens). The point is, however, not necessarily to endorse these (many are standard culture critiques), but rather to indicate the direction in which literary theory ...

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