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Neutered Valentines

David Bromwich: James Agee, 7 September 2006

‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, ‘A Death in the Family’, Shorter Fiction 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 818 pp., $35, October 2005, 1 931082 81 2
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Film Writing and Selected Journalism 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 748 pp., $40, October 2005, 1 931082 82 0
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Brooklyn Is 
by James Agee.
Fordham, 64 pp., $16.95, October 2005, 0 8232 2492 9
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... of interest to literate businessmen. Sent on assignment to Alabama in 1936, with the photographer Walker Evans, to do an article on tenant farmers, he returned with unorganised pages and sections of finished prose, prose-in-the-rough, poetry, extended captions and descriptions, none of them reducible to an article in Fortune. Agee’s manuscript kept soaking ...
... phase of Confederate commemorations – is more direct: ‘Erected to the memory of the heroes … Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris, who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy, April 13, 1873.’ When EJI arrived in Montgomery there were more than fifty memorials of one sort or another to the glories of the ...

The big drops start

John Bayley, 7 December 1989

Coleridge: Early Visions 
by Richard Holmes.
Hodder, 409 pp., £16.95, October 1989, 0 340 28335 1
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Wordsworth: Romantic Poetry and Revolution Politics 
by John Williams.
Manchester, 203 pp., £29.95, November 1989, 0 7190 3168 0
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Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays 
by Bradford Keyes Mudge.
Yale, 287 pp., £18.95, September 1989, 0 300 04443 7
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... in the sun, – its shadows running down in the water like a column.’ Coleridge became a fell-walker on a scale more heroic even than Wordsworth and Wordsworth’s sailor brother John. As Stephen Gill acutely points out in his recent Wordsworth biography, an excellent companion piece to Holmes on Coleridge, ‘Coleridge ...

Particularly Anodyne

Richard Norton-Taylor: One bomb in London, 15 July 2021

The Intelligence War against the IRA 
by Thomas Leahy.
Cambridge, 356 pp., £18.99, March 2020, 978 1 108 72040 3
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... was slow to appreciate the real threats to national security from Northern Ireland, as both Stephen Lander (the head of the agency from 1996 to 2002) and his successor, Eliza Manningham-Buller, admitted when I interviewed them many years later. Though a senior MI5 officer took on the role of director and co-ordinator of intelligence in 1972, the RUC ...

Other Ways to Leave the Room

Michael Wood: Antonio Machado, 25 November 1999

The Eyes: A Version of Antonio Machado 
by Don Paterson.
Faber, 60 pp., £7.99, October 1999, 0 571 20055 9
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... Goodbye. And with this tone and image and allusion – the lightly parodied bravery, the lonely walker, the angels on a pin – we suddenly seem quite close to Machado after all. Machado’s scenery is traditional and rural, rivers, olive trees, autumn, sunlight, long melancholy evenings, and his diction is composed and sedate. But there are also roads ...

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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... city is set against the closed world of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Conrad shows O’Henry and Stephen Crane plucking characters from the crowd; Jacob Riis using photography to document the inhumanities of slum tenements, Stieglitz using it to make skyscrapers monumental; Oldenburg embracing the city by making toys out of monuments, and monuments out of ...

Diary

Will Self: On the Common, 25 February 2010

... a Young Man, he asked Katherine Mullin, a senior lecturer at Leeds University, the extent to which Stephen Dedalus’s character was based on Joyce himself. ‘That,’ Mullin reasonably replied, ‘is an extremely complex question.’ ‘Well,’ Bragg snapped back, ‘I want an extremely simple answer to it so that we can move on.’ Truly, he is the ...

This Guilty Land

Eric Foner: Every Possible Lincoln, 17 December 2020

Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times 
by David S. Reynolds.
Penguin, 1066 pp., £33.69, September, 978 1 59420 604 7
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The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the Struggle for American Freedom 
by H.W. Brands.
Doubleday, 445 pp., £24, October, 978 0 385 54400 9
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... Political cartoonists sometimes depicted Lincoln in the guise of Charles Blondin, a tightrope walker famous for crossing Niagara Falls on a high wire, navigating a dangerous course without leaning too far to the left or right. Reynolds describes Lincoln as a ‘political Blondin’, who chose an ideologically balanced ‘Blondin-like’ Cabinet and sought ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Fresh Revelations, 20 October 1994

... careful of for the future. It’s the same state of affairs I noticed once when having supper with Stephen Spender, namely that he was telling me lots of stories I knew already. But of course I only knew them because he had already published them in book form. There’s very little in the back of the shop is the message; now that it’s all out on the shelves ...

Clunk, Clack, Swish

Jon Day: Watching the Snooker, 8 February 2024

Unbreakable 
by Ronnie O’Sullivan.
Seven Dials, 262 pp., £22, May 2023, 978 1 3996 1001 8
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... won seven world titles, an achievement equalled only by the game’s dominant player in the 1990s, Stephen Hendry. He has made more century breaks – at the time of writing, 1240 – and more 147s (the maximum score you can get in a single frame) in tournament play than anyone else. O’Sullivan was given the nickname ‘Rocket’ early on, because of his ...

On the imagining of conspiracy

Christopher Hitchens, 7 November 1991

Harlot’s Ghost 
by Norman Mailer.
Joseph, 1122 pp., £15.99, October 1991, 0 7181 2934 2
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A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs 
by Theodore Draper.
Hill and Wang, 690 pp., $27.95, June 1991, 0 8090 9613 7
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... was surely there to be read, but they would not allow it to be heard. The Commission had announced Stephen Foster when they were actually playing Wagner. Surely, critics who had followed the true score should have pointed that out?A good question, but perhaps one that only literature can answer. ‘Critics’ – the press, the academics, the think-tankers ...

A Hit of Rus in Urbe

Iain Sinclair: In Lea Valley, 27 June 2002

... is even better. Lea as ley, it always had that feel. A route out. A river track that walked the walker, a wet road. The Lea fed our Hackney dreaming: a water margin. On any morning when the city was squeezing too hard, you could get your hit of rus in urbe. Hackney Marshes giving way to the woodyards of Lea Bridge Road, to Springfield Park; reservoir ...

How do you spell Shakespeare?

Frank Kermode, 21 May 1987

William Shakespeare. The Complete Works: Original-Spelling Edition 
edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor.
Oxford, 1456 pp., £75, February 1987, 9780198129196
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William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 
edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor.
Oxford, 1432 pp., £25, October 1986, 0 19 812926 2
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... long ago by R.B. McKerrow, but he produced only the Prolegomena (1939) before he died, and Alice Walker, who took over the project, did not issue a single play. With this discouraging history behind him, Professor Wells seems not to have been thinking of old spelling when he mounted the present assault on the Shakespearian summit. ‘The newly proposed ...

Even When It’s a Big Fat Lie

Alex Abramovich: ‘Country Music’, 8 October 2020

Country Music 
directed by Ken Burns.
PBS, eight episodes
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... films provide. (‘More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than from any other source,’ Stephen Ambrose is supposed to have said, and for better or worse, I believe him.) But you notice, after a while, that the errors all face in a certain direction, and serve to make the same points, while all the things that are supposed to stay under the carpet ...

At the White House’s Whim

Tom Bingham: The Power of Pardon, 26 March 2009

... Among the applicants, it is reported, were Conrad Black; Michael Milken, of junk bond fame; John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban’; a former Republican congressman jailed for accepting bribes; and a former Democratic governor of Louisiana, convicted on racketeering charges. They were doomed to disappointment. But just before Christmas 2008, the ...

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