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Diary

Inigo Thomas: Berry Bros, 20 December 2018

... are stored in an old safe and inside them are the figures for Beau Brummell, the younger Pitt, Charles James Fox and hundreds of others. It seems to me, after a cursory inspection, that the average weight of the Englishmen listed in these two books increased by about twenty pounds over a hundred-year period. In July 1807, Byron, wearing only his ...

Her Body or the Sea

Ian Patterson: Ann Quin, 21 June 2018

The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments 
by Ann Quin.
And Other Stories, 192 pp., £10, January 2018, 978 1 911508 14 4
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... of Europeans, especially the Surrealists and Paul Celan, and to the work of Americans such as Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, Jack Spicer or Frank O’Hara and the New York poets. When I look back on it now, it’s clear that Quin’s writing sits more easily alongside this internationalist milieu. She was always critical of English narrowness and its ‘safe ...

Consider Jack and Oskar

Michael Rossi: Twin Studies, 7 February 2013

Born Together – Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study 
by Nancy Segal.
Harvard, 410 pp., £39.95, June 2012, 978 0 674 05546 9
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... material) transmitted such traits had yet to be determined. The prominent American biologist Charles Davenport, for instance, speculated in 1915 that ‘factors’, which he labelled C and E for ‘cheerfulness’ and ‘excitability’, combined in human reproductive material to yield general personalities which he described as ...

Damsons and Custard

Paul Laity: Documentary cinema’s unsung poet, 3 March 2005

Humphrey Jennings 
by Kevin Jackson.
Picador, 448 pp., £30, October 2004, 0 330 35438 8
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... power. Jennings’s conception of Mass-Observation, like that of his friend and fellow founder Charles Madge, was broadly Surrealist. The project began at the end of 1936 with a letter Madge wrote to the New Statesman arguing that the abdication crisis and the burning down of the Crystal Palace had produced a ‘symbolic situation’, a ‘coincidence in ...

The Man in the Clearing

Iain Sinclair: Meeting Gary Snyder, 24 May 2012

... home.’ He is Gary Snyder, poet, bioregionalist, teacher. Having bought out his early partners, Allen Ginsberg and Dick Baker, he is the sole proprietor of this estate, a hundred acres of manzanita thickets, with open stretches of ponderosa pine, black oak, cedar, madrone, Douglas fir, bunchgrass – and one of the most seductive houses in ...

Horror like Thunder

Germaine Greer: Lucy Hutchinson, 21 June 2001

Order and Disorder 
by Lucy Hutchinson, edited by David Norbrook.
Blackwell, 272 pp., £55, January 2001, 0 631 22061 5
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... country gentry, incensed by the long prorogation of Parliament in 1675, and by then convinced that Charles II would never accept Parliament as a partner in government, had for some years busied themselves with restating and updating the Old Cause, most daringly in the anonymous pamphlet entitled The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England ...

Diary

Will Self: Cocaine, 5 November 2015

... glimpses of them in the houses of wealthier, older friends. They had names such as Hamish or Charles, wore cavalry twill trousers, blazers and Viyella shirts. Having some artisan in Lima sculpt a block of cocaine into a likeness of an Inca god then lacquer it against detection by Customs and Excise was a wizard wheeze for these dashing chaps, who, while ...

Pound & Co.

August Kleinzahler: Davenport and Kenner, 26 September 2019

Questioning Minds: Vols I-II: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner 
edited by Edward Burns.
Counterpoint, 1817 pp., $95, October 2018, 978 1 61902 181 5
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... disavowals (‘My worst mistake was that stupid, suburban prejudice of antisemitism,’ he said to Allen Ginsberg, although it’s a better description of T.S. Eliot’s brand of antisemitism than his own). Kenner was bewitched by the ‘emphatic, aphoristic quality’ of Pound’s speech, which was ‘of a piece with the working of one of the most active ...

His Own Peak

Ian Sansom: John Fowles’s diary, 6 May 2004

John Fowles: The Journals, Vol. I 
edited by Charles Drazin.
Cape, 668 pp., £30, October 2003, 9780224069113
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John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds 
by Eileen Warburton.
Cape, 510 pp., £25, April 2004, 0 224 05951 3
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... ascent that I date some real first belief in myself as a writer.’ As the editor of the Journals, Charles Drazin, notes, ‘while other writers have been content to climb Parnassus in their imaginations, it is somehow typical of John that he should have trekked across the Argive Plain and climbed the mountain for real.’ Even Drazin may not take Fowles quite ...

Nom de Boom

Ian Penman: Arthur Russell's Benediction, 15 August 2024

Travels over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life 
by Richard King.
Faber, 296 pp., £30, April, 978 0 571 37966 8
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... they possibly have in common, these wildly different figures, the nature boy and the urban genie?Charles Arthur Russell Jr was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa in May 1951, and died in New York in April 1992 from complications related to Aids. His father, Chuck, a former naval officer, was the town mayor. It’s easy to picture something down-home and folksy, but the ...

As a returning lord

John Lanchester, 7 May 1987

Einstein’s Monsters 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 127 pp., £5.95, April 1987, 0 224 02435 3
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... world.’ The experience which resonates most memorably in Amis’s five novels is described by Charles Highway, narrator of The Rachel Papers: ‘One of the troubles with being over-articulate, with having a vocabulary more developed than your emotions, is that every turn in the conversation, every switch of posture, opens up an estate of verbal avenues ...

Salons

William Thomas, 16 October 1980

Holland House 
by Leslie Mitchell.
Duckworth, 320 pp., £18, May 1980, 9780715611166
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Genius in the Drawing-Room 
edited by Peter Quennell.
Weidenfeld, 188 pp., £8.50, May 1980, 9780297777700
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... at all. For instance, the contributions of the many Scottish Whigs like Holland’s librarian John Allen, or the historian Sir James Mackintosh, who were drawn into the circle, are left unanalysed. When he writes of ‘Holland House’ thinking this or disapproving of that, he mostly seems to mean Lord and Lady Holland. The book is essentially an exploration ...

A Little Bit of Real Life

Michael Wood: Writing with Godard, 9 May 2024

The Cinema House and the World: The ‘Cahiers du Cinéma’ Years, 1962-81 
by Serge Daney, translated by Christine Pichini.
Semiotext(e), 600 pp., £28, September 2022, 978 1 63590 161 0
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Footlights: Critical Notebook 1970-82 
by Serge Daney, translated by Nicholas Elliott.
Semiotext(e), 212 pp., £16.99, December 2023, 978 1 63590 198 6
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Reading with Jean-Luc Godard 
edited by Timothy Barnard and Kevin J. Hayes.
Caboose, 423 pp., £35, November 2023, 978 1 927852 46 0
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... giving things a name.’ Antonioni is admired for his ‘establishment of distance’ and Woody Allen for the ‘rarefaction of images and particularly of angles … theorised in Annie Hall’. What Charlie Chaplin’s little barber is saying in The Great Dictator comes from somewhere that might be nowhere. Daney’s summary of the speech is: ‘Whatever I ...

Diary

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s Grotto, 5 October 2023

... landscaping, exploring the area described by Pococke beside the artfully bifurcated River Allen and the artificial lake, admiring Joseph Highmore’s portrait of the 18th-century countess, and meeting her present-day successor in a kitchen ornamented with Forbidden Planet-style toy robots in honour of Nick’s former nightclub, Robots.This was ...

Why the bastards wouldn’t stand and fight

Murray Sayle: Mao in Vietnam, 21 February 2002

China and the Vietnam Wars 1950-75 
by Qiang Zhai.
North Carolina, 304 pp., $49.95, April 2000, 0 8078 4842 5
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None so Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam 
by George Allen.
Ivan Dee, 296 pp., $27.50, October 2001, 1 56663 387 7
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No Peace, No Honour: Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam 
by Larry Berman.
Free Press, 334 pp., $27.50, November 2001, 0 684 84968 2
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... country’ as opposed to ‘The World’; ‘VC’, ‘Charlie’, or even, respectfully, ‘Sir Charles’, as stubbornly opposed to ‘friendlies’, subdivided into US, ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) and ‘Free World’ – South Koreans, Thais, Filipinos, Australians, New Zealanders and, keeping low profiles somewhere, 30 each from Chiang ...

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