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You can’t prove I meant X

Clare Bucknell, 16 April 2020

Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660-1820 
by Thomas Keymer.
Oxford, 352 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 0 19 874449 8
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... read Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1682), with its delicate possible parallel between the dunce writer Richard Flecknoe and Charles II, but not Nero the Second. Charles can’t be twinned with Flecknoe as straightforwardly as George I with Nero but, as Keymer shows, it’s the non-straightforwardness of the parallel – the way it’s built up from detail to ...

Olivier Rex

Ronald Bryden, 1 September 1988

Olivier 
by Anthony Holden.
Weidenfeld, 504 pp., £16, May 1988, 0 297 79089 7
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... of the decade. What he means is that he and his fellow-toilers in the biographical olive grove have been racing to make sense of the great heap of myth, obfuscation, blarney and coded revelation dumped on them in Olivier’s Confessions of an Actor. Far from settling questions about himself, it raised them like flies. Perhaps it meant to. Had Olivier ...

What Happened to Obama?

August Kleinzahler: The Rise and Fall of Barack Obama, 18 October 2007

Dreams from My Father 
by Barack Obama.
Canongate, 442 pp., £12.99, September 2007, 978 1 84767 091 5
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The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream 
by Barack Obama.
Canongate, 375 pp., £14.99, May 2007, 978 1 84767 035 9
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Obama: From Promise to Power 
by David Mendell.
Amistad, 406 pp., $25.95, August 2007, 978 0 06 085820 9
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... no one would be terribly worried, not even the folks at the Trilateral Commission or the Bohemian Grove Club or the Hoover Institution. Barack Obama is sensible, cautious and tractable. Talented, sensible, cautious, tractable African-Americans can do well among the political elites in this country: ask Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice. But in any case Hillary ...

Let’s go to Croydon

Jonathan Meades, 13 April 2023

Iconicon: A Journey around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain 
by John Grindrod.
Faber, 478 pp., £10.99, March, 978 0 571 34814 5
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... His vast apartment, at the very top of the wind-bruised, screeching tower, includes an olive grove 160 metres above ground. The Royal Geographical Society’s PR boasts that ‘on clear days it’s visible from ten counties, while apartments inside offer views over the Pennines, Peak District and Snowdonia.’ They also offer views of miles of ...

Undesirable

Tom Paulin, 9 May 1996

T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form 
by Anthony Julius.
Cambridge, 308 pp., £30, September 1995, 0 521 47063 3
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... of essays derived from Frazer, George Watson quotes the following passage: In this sacred grove mere grew a certain tree round which ... a grim figure might be seen to prowl ... He was a priest and a murderer: and the man for whom he was looking was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the ...

Sympathy for the Devil

Michael Wood, 16 October 1997

The Master and Margarita 
by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor.
Picador, 367 pp., £20, August 1997, 0 330 35133 8
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The Master and Margarita 
by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Penguin, 412 pp., £7.99, May 1997, 0 14 118014 5
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... trust in the triumph of poetry, imagination, the free word, over terror and oppression’, as Richard Pevear says in his Introduction to the Penguin text? Both critics go on to say that Bulgakov knew that manuscripts do burn, since he had burned some of his own. But surely the splendour and bravura of the line rely not on the actual combustibility (or ...

Yes, we have no greater authority

Dan Hawthorn: The constraints facing the new administration for London, 13 April 2000

... transport network, through investment in the building and improvements programme. The Ladbroke Grove train crash may have led the Government to drop Railtrack as a definite partner in the project, but it has done nothing to dampen their longterm enthusiasm for the scheme.The majority of PPP’s opponents, including Livingstone and the Liberal Democrat ...

The Power of Sunshine

Alexander Cockburn, 10 January 1991

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles 
by Mike Davis.
Verso, 462 pp., £18.95, November 1990, 0 86091 303 1
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... is to weave through place and time with a guide as robust and detailed in his knowledge as, say, Richard Cobb is about France, albeit with diametrically opposite political analysis and enthusiasms. As a pamphleteer and radical, Davis is still very much on active service, though, as he remarked not so long ago, the programme of a radical in Los Angeles today ...

Imparadised

Colin Burrow: Cultivation and desire in Renaissance gardens, 19 February 2004

Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens 
by Rebecca Bushnell.
Cornell, 198 pp., £18.95, August 2003, 0 8014 4143 9
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... in which ‘Birds thir quire apply; aires, vernal aires,/Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune/The trembling leaves,’ are intimately connected to the artful manipulations of the senses by late 17th-century gardeners. Although gardening between 1500 and 1700 might have aimed to create the appearance of paradisal simplicity, it was ...

All Nerves

Ysenda Maxtone Graham: 10 Rillington Place, 7 November 2024

The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place 
by Kate Summerscale.
Bloomsbury, 296 pp., £22, October, 978 1 5266 6048 0
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... street was demolished in 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no front steps or front gardens. Number 10 was the last house on the left, jammed up against the wall of a ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: The Plutocrat Tour, 7 July 2022

... pockets.When a couple of art sympathisers drifted in, they were sent off to a filling station on Grove Road to find coins. Back in the Sunday spread of Victoria Park, the original people’s park, where multicultural street fare – Afghan Street Food, Mother Flipper Burgers, Japanese Street Food, Philly Cheesesteaks, Souvlaki and Chips – is on ...

Textual Intercourse

Claude Rawson, 6 February 1986

The Name of Action: Critical Essays 
by John Fraser.
Cambridge, 260 pp., £25, December 1984, 0 521 25876 6
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... The answer is that it is an inept rendering of the sexual term jouissance in the translation by Richard Miller in which Anglophone readers regularly misread Barthes’s Plaisir du Texte, though it’s true that no single English word gives the full sense of ‘active pleasure’, with specific associations of orgasm, of Barthes’s usage. Barthes isn’t ...

Mr Trendy Sicko

James Wolcott, 23 May 2019

White 
by Brett Easton Ellis.
Picador, 261 pp., £16.99, May 2019, 978 1 5290 1239 2
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... Reformed, but Ellis’s next screenplay credit was on a teen movie called The Curse of Downers Grove, which has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 15 per cent – not good. Talking is easier than writing, no matter how fluently the hackwork flows, and in 2013, Ellis began hosting a podcast. In 2019, nearly everyone with a smidge of name recognition and a working ...

The Faster the Better

Paul Driver: Anatomising Mendelssohn, 3 February 2005

Mendelssohn: A Life in Music 
by Larry Todd.
Oxford, 683 pp., £25, October 2003, 0 19 511043 9
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... might be better applied to Carl Orff, who accepted a Nazi commission (turned down by Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner and Werner Egk) to replace the much-loved incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His alternative to what he called Mendelssohn’s ‘moonlight with sugar water’ was due to be premiered in a Frankfurt opera house when ...

Cheering us up

Ian Jack, 15 September 1988

In for a Penny: The Unauthorised Biography of Jeffrey Archer 
by Jonathan Mantle.
Hamish Hamilton, 264 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 241 12478 6
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... hasn’t bothered to examine, shows that his father, William Robert Archer, lived at 48 Highbury Grove, then a North London boarding-house owed by one Mrs Rhoda Bowness. His occupation is given as ‘journalist’. The mother, Lola Howard Archer, lived separately over the Thames at a now-vanished address in Southwark – 18 Nelson Square – which was bombed ...

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