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It wasn’t the Oval

Blake Morrison: Michael Frayn, 7 October 2010

My Father’s Fortune: A Life 
by Michael Frayn.
Faber, 255 pp., £16.99, September 2010, 978 0 571 27058 3
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... who wrote wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in The Real Thing in which a playwright, explaining dramatic technique, says: ‘What we’re trying to do is to ...

Keeping Score

Ian Jackman: Joe DiMaggio, 10 May 2001

Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life 
by Richard Ben Cramer.
Simon and Schuster, 560 pp., £20, April 2001, 0 684 85391 4
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... Joe said. ‘But he never won a thing.’ The Streak, the marriage to Monroe, the reference in the Simon and Garfunkel song (‘Where have you gone . . .’) and the old geezer waving to the crowd at Yankee Stadium are as much of DiMaggio as most people know – or knew before this book was published. ‘The Hero’s Life’ of Cramer’s subtitle is not to ...

Cricket’s Superpowers

David Runciman: Beyond the Ashes, 22 September 2005

... jerky bowling action (they suspect him of achieving his extraordinary bounce by chucking the ball rather than bowling it). Muralitharan didn’t disappoint either his supporters or his critics, but the Australians had the last laugh. Ponting’s team won 3-0, despite the fact that they conceded a first innings lead in each game, and despite ...

Diary

Ben Anderson: In Afghanistan, 3 January 2008

... a British soldier was killed when he drove over an IED. 26 June. I met a company commander, Simon Butt from the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters, today. He described the area we’ll be entering when a big operation starts in a few days. It’s called the Green Zone, because it’s a solitary strip of fertile land about a mile wide that follows the ...

Stabbing the Olive

Tom McCarthy: Toussaint, 11 February 2010

Running Away 
by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated by Matthew Smith.
Dalkey, 156 pp., $12.95, November 2009, 978 1 56478 567 1
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La Vérité sur Marie 
by Jean-Philippe Toussaint.
Minuit, 204 pp., €14.50, September 2009, 978 2 7073 2088 9
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... itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon et compagnie redrew the map of what fiction might offer and aspire to, what its ground rules should be – so much so that some have found their legacy stifling. Michel Houellebecq’s response has been one of adolescent rejection, or, to use the type of ...

Miracle on Fleet Street

Martin Hickman: Operation Elveden, 7 January 2016

... lot of you and replace you with them.’ On another occasion she had scrunched a news list into a ball and hurled it at him, screaming and slamming the door on the morning editorial conference. In 2004 alone, the Sun paid sources at least £362,000 in cash; Graham Dudman, then managing editor, kept £25,000 in his safe. Asked how much went to public ...

It’s already happened

James Meek: The NHS Goes Private, 22 September 2011

... successors as health secretary, was paid £60,000. The revolving door has become a blur. Simon Stevens, Blair’s special adviser on health, is now an executive vice president at UnitedHealth, one of America’s largest private health companies. Mark Britnell, a career NHS manager who rose to become one of the most powerful civil servants in the ...

Top Brands Today

Nicholas Penny: The Art World, 14 December 2017

The Auctioneer: A Memoir of Great Art, Legendary Collectors and Record-Breaking Auctions 
by Simon de Pury and William Stadiem.
Allen and Unwin, 312 pp., £9.99, April 2017, 978 1 76011 350 6
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Rogues’ Gallery: A History of Art and Its Dealers 
by Philip Hook.
Profile, 282 pp., £20, January 2017, 978 1 78125 570 4
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Donald Judd: Writings 
edited by Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray.
David Zwirner, 1054 pp., £28, November 2016, 978 1 941701 35 5
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... Simon​ de Pury, assisted by ‘a regular contributor to Vanity Fair’, has written a book about his ascent to the top of the art world: the auctions he conducted, the deals he struck, the parties he attended. It resembles a board game, with smaller parts assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king ...

Who had the most fun?

David Bromwich: The Marx Brothers, 10 May 2001

Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx 
by Stefan Kanfer.
Penguin, 480 pp., £7.99, April 2001, 0 14 029426 0
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The Essential Groucho 
by Groucho Marx, edited by Stefan Kanfer.
Penguin, 254 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 0 14 029425 2
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... from the ‘grouch bag’ carried by travelling showmen. His parents were Jewish immigrants: Simon Marrix, of a family of tailors from Alsace-Lorraine, and Minna Schoenberg, the daughter of a Dutch magician who emigrated when his work in Germany ran out in the 1870s. All of the Marxes appear to have been clever with words – ...

Trains in Space

James Meek: The Great Train Robbery, 5 May 2016

The Railways: Nation, Network and People 
by Simon Bradley.
Profile, 645 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 1 84668 209 4
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... many times over, in the town where I grew up. Those engines were new in the 1970s. Unlike Simon Bradley I lack the trainspotter’s enthusiasm for locomotives, and I’ve had some horrible journeys on that train. But the theatrical grandeur of its arrival always alters my sense of my surroundings, as if a door had opened, offering a glimpse of an ...

Who is Laura?

Susannah Clapp, 3 December 1981

Olivia 
by Olivia.
Hogarth, 109 pp., £4.50, April 1981, 0 7012 0177 0
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... students, who, more maidenly than the average batch of 16-year-olds, appear at a Fancy Dress Ball provocatively equipped with plunging necklines or decked out in top hat and whiskers. It is present in the language of Olivia’s ‘indefinite desire’, which has her aching, awakening and dissolving; it is present in Mlle Julie’s promise that, St ...

Ediepus

Michael Neve, 18 November 1982

Edie: An American Biography 
by Jean Stein and George Plimpton.
Cape, 455 pp., £9.95, October 1982, 0 224 02068 4
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Baby Driver: A Story About Myself 
by Jan Kerouac.
Deutsch, 208 pp., £7.95, August 1982, 0 233 97487 3
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... you’d fuck. People used him that way. His office was a social focal point.’ If you didn’t ball Doctor Roberts, it was probably because you had to go off and appear on television. Doctors seem to have been good dealers in those days. Edie staggers through this world, to go on to, say, the back room at the club Max’s Kansas City (‘how many pills can ...

Crack Open the Shells

Hal Foster: The Situationist Moment, 12 March 2009

Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957-60) 
by Guy Debord, translated by Stuart Kendall and John McHale.
Semiotext(e), 397 pp., £12.95, February 2009, 978 1 58435 055 2
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... or another he deems such critics and artists as Michel Tapié, Georges Mathieu, Yves Klein and Simon Hantaï, not to mention all the Angry Young Men, ‘apolitical and fascistic’, and even the once-recruited Spur artists are soon dismissed as ‘ridiculous’. Sentiments like this one – ‘we already have amongst us too many young artistic elderly who ...

Mrs Stitch in Time

Clive James, 4 February 1982

Lady Diana Cooper 
by Philip Ziegler.
Hamish Hamilton, 336 pp., £9.95, September 1981, 0 241 10659 1
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... about his own interior drama. His name came up the second time I met Lady Diana, at a fancy-dress ball. Once more I was lucky enough to draw her as a dinner partner. I was pretending to be an Australian in a black tie while she was in her standard outfit as a nun. On her right she had the Arab who was financing the party. He was dressed as a sheik but that ...

Fetch the Chopping Knife

Charles Nicholl: Murder on Bankside, 4 November 2021

... This play is also lost, but it was seen at the Rose in early 1600 by the astrologer-physician Simon Forman. His brief account of it, found among his manuscripts at the Bodleian, reveals a farrago of greed and gore: pure pulp melodrama. It begins with John Cox shooting ‘an arrowe thorow his unkells head to have his land’. After Cox’s death the next ...

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