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Gotcha, Pat!

Terry Castle: Highsmith in My Head, 4 March 2021

Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith 
by Richard Bradford.
Bloomsbury, 258 pp., £20, January 2021, 978 1 4482 1790 8
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... fright-bag. Heartbreakingly attractive in her youth (see the exquisite nude portraits made by her gay photographer friend Rolf Tietgens in the early 1940s), she looked like a sullen gargoyle by the time she died: rubbery, bloodshot, wrinkled to the point of cave-in, a calamitous experiment in DIY self-pickling. Compared with Highsmith in her seventies, her ...

Our National Hodgepodge

Colin Kidd and Malcolm Petrie, 29 June 2017

... Ulster from Sodomy campaign of the late 1970s still has an influence in a party that opposes both gay marriage and abortion. It also has several prominent members who are ‘young earth creationists’, insistent that the truth of the world’s creation in 4004 bc should be made clear to visitors at the Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland’s most popular ...

Writing Absurdity

Adam Shatz: Chester Himes, 26 April 2018

Chester B. Himes: A Biography 
by Lawrence P. Jackson.
Norton, 606 pp., £25, July 2017, 978 0 393 06389 9
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... Invisible Man but believed in the promise of a racially inclusive American democracy. Baldwin, the gay stepson of a preacher, dreamed that romantic love between a white man and a black man might give birth to ‘another country’. Himes was black American literature’s one authentic nihilist. In his novels, solutions to what was then called the ‘Negro ...

A Use for the Stones

Jacqueline Rose: On Being Nadine Gordimer, 20 April 2006

Get a Life 
by Nadine Gordimer.
Bloomsbury, 187 pp., £16.99, November 2005, 0 7475 8175 4
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... to cure. There were, of course, whites who went much further than Gordimer did. Compared with Ruth First and Bettie du Toit, she always felt that she had not been brave enough. ‘She was so fearless,’ Gordimer wrote of Ruth First, ‘that she made one feel ashamed.’ ‘In comparison,’ she wrote in her preface to ...

Adieu, madame

Terry Castle: Sarah Bernhardt, 4 November 2010

Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt 
by Robert Gottlieb.
Yale, 233 pp., £18.99, October 2010, 978 0 300 14127 6
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... Otis Skinner – American stage actress and author of the sublime Our Hearts Were Young and Gay – wrote a boffo if now somewhat dated biography for English readers in 1967 entitled Madame Sarah. (In the requisite Mucha-decorated dustjacket, it became a supermarket bestseller in the US in that long-ago Summer of Love.) And the prolific biographer and ...

Making sentences

Philip Horne, 21 November 1991

The Jameses: A Family Narrative 
by R.W.B. Lewis.
Deutsch, 696 pp., £20, October 1991, 0 233 98748 7
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Meaning in Henry James 
by Millicent Bell.
Harvard, 384 pp., £35.95, October 1991, 9780674557628
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... in the field. With his going, there was only Leon Edel (who in due course encouraged his colleague Gay Wilson Allen to write William James: A Biography, which appeared in 1967). Edel was at first going to produce an edition of Henry James’s letters, but decided to delay for over twenty-five years while he put out his four biographical volumes, edited The ...

Ruin it your own way

Susan Pedersen, 4 June 2020

Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution 
by Selina Todd.
Chatto, 304 pp., £18.99, August 2019, 978 1 78474 082 5
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A Taste of Honey 
by Shelagh Delaney.
Methuen, 112 pp., £14.44, November 2019, 978 1 350 13495 9
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... naval rating’ who keeps Jo company over Christmas and leaves her pregnant. And Geof, the gay art student who becomes Jo’s flatmate and nursemaid – until Helen barges back in and sends him packing. The play ends as it begins, with Helen and Jo in a bedsit – entangled, stuck, sparring, unforgettable.This is a long way from the marriage ...

A Piece of Pizza and a Beer

Deborah Friedell: Who was Jane Roe?, 23 June 2022

The Family Roe: An American Story 
by Joshua Prager.
Norton, 655 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 0 393 24771 8
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... became interested in writing about McCorvey twelve years ago, while learning about the attempts of gay rights activists to bring the issue of marriage equality before the Supreme Court. Since the justices won’t consider hypothetical cases, the activists needed to find real people to file suit, ‘stakeholders’ willing to swear that the outcome would ...

Diary

August Kleinzahler: Remembering Thom Gunn, 4 November 2004

... a reading series (a recent phenomenon popularised by Dylan Thomas) and archive. Auden stayed with Ruth Witt-Diamant, the Poetry Center’s founding director, and, in return for his considerable largesse, asked only that he be delivered to gay bars where he might meet young Jewish American males with blond hair. Thom Gunn ...

Eat butterflies with me?

Patricia Lockwood, 5 November 2020

Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor 
by Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy.
Penguin, 576 pp., £12.99, November, 978 0 14 139838 9
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... has begun to gather speed. He is expelled from his nursery, a staggering inheritance from that gay leathern uncle is won and lost in what seems only a day, his father is assassinated while attempting to shield the real target. But the elision of these years has less to do with memory and more to do with the fact that to be young and unformed is ...

Call a kid a zebra

Daniel Smith: On the Spectrum, 19 May 2016

In a Different Key: The Story of Autism 
by John Donvan and Caren Zucker.
Allen Lane, 670 pp., £25, January 2016, 978 1 84614 566 7
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NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter about People Who Think Differently 
by Steve Silberman.
Allen and Unwin, 534 pp., £9.99, February 2016, 978 1 76011 364 3
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... was that Susan was autistic.) Appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show shortly after Rain Man opened, Ruth Sullivan, the doyenne of American parent advocates, said that the movie had ‘advanced the field of autism by 25 years’. The new public fascination with autism, coupled with the rise in diagnoses, gave activist groups a long-awaited chance to secure ...

The Ultimate Socket

David Trotter: On Sylvia Townsend Warner, 23 June 2022

Lolly Willowes 
by Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Penguin, 161 pp., £9.99, October 2020, 978 0 241 45488 6
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Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life 
by Frances Bingham.
Handheld Press, 344 pp., £15.99, May 2021, 978 1 912766 40 6
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... Molly like the only way to escape from the surviving members of her decrepit family. Her mother, Ruth, was needy, smothering and idiotically pious, while her elder sister, Joan, a borderline psychopath, had contrived to make her childhood a misery and showed no sign of letting up any time soon. Both did all they could to humiliate Molly. ‘She is ...
... blow up the Houses of Parliament.) Sentenced to life imprisonment, he would eventually become what Ruth Dudley Edwards described as ‘the spider at the centre of the conspiratorial web’ that would lead to the 1916 Rebellion in Dublin more than thirty years later. He was, in her words, ‘able, vengeful, focused, selfless and implacable’.Clarke’s time in ...

Prejudice Rules

LRB Contributors: After Roe v. Wade, 21 July 2022

... would prohibit the right to abort a foetus are the same ones that want to pathologise trans and gay people. Trans-exclusionary feminists have a choice to make: whether to continue providing sustenance to highly organised and murderous right-wing forces, or come into coalition, however uncomfortable, with those of us looking to stop them.Writing in Women: A ...

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