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The Cult of Celebrity

Jacqueline Rose, 20 August 1998

... month for those who imagined that human society is, or could one day, be governed by reason,’ Ian Jack wrote in the ‘Unbelievable!’ issue of Granta dedicated in part to Diana’s death. For Elizabeth Wilson, in ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Diana’ in New Left Review, Diana’s mythic status put paid to any feminist component of her story (as ...

Poor Man’s Crime

Ian Gilmour, 5 December 1991

The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the 18th Century 
by Peter Linebaugh.
Allen Lane, 484 pp., £25, September 1991, 0 7139 9045 7
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... is uncritical of the multitude of criminals that appears in his book, but his particular hero is Jack Sheppard whose ‘dazzling feats were to provide an example of resourcefulness and freedom’ to the labouring poor. Sheppard was certainly more attractive than many of his peers. He was brave; he refused, unlike his brother, to betray friends and ...

Through Plate-Glass

Ian Sansom: Jonathan Coe, 10 May 2001

The Rotters’ Club 
by Jonathan Coe.
Viking, 405 pp., £14.99, April 2001, 0 670 89252 1
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... and chips, Colin ordered fillet steak and chips, Bill ordered fillet steak, chips and peas and Jack, who went to the South of France for his holidays, ordered fillet steak with chips, peas and mushrooms on the side, a touch of sophistication that was not lost on the others.’ Like Dickens, Coe is a writer who is often praised for the breadth and depth of ...

Rebusworld

John Lanchester: The Rise and Rise of Ian Rankin, 27 April 2000

Set in Darkness 
by Ian Rankin.
Orion, 415 pp., £16.99, February 2000, 0 7528 2129 6
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... arrangement of letters etc, which suggest the syllables of which it is made up’. In 1987, Ian Rankin’s novel Knots & Crosses introduced us to a tough Edinburgh Detective Sergeant called John Rebus. A series of local girls had been kidnapped and strangled. Rebus – 41-year-old drinker, ex-soldier, failed husband, absentee father, Christian, annual ...

Badoompa-doompa-doompa-doom

Graham Coster, 10 January 1991

Stone Alone 
by Bill Wyman and Ray Coleman.
Viking, 594 pp., £15.99, October 1990, 0 670 82894 7
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Blown away: The Rolling Stones and the Death of the Sixties 
by A.E. Hotchner.
Simon and Schuster, 377 pp., £15.95, October 1990, 0 671 69316 6
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Are you experienced? The Inside Story of the Jimi Hendrix Experience 
by Noel Redding and Carol Appleby.
Fourth Estate, 256 pp., £14.99, September 1990, 1 872180 36 1
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I was a teenage Sex Pistol 
by Glen Matlock and Pete Silverton.
Omnibus, 192 pp., £12.95, September 1990, 0 7119 2491 0
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Bare 
by George Michael and Tony Parsons.
Joseph, 242 pp., £12.99, September 1990, 0 7181 3435 4
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... important. ‘No group is any better than its drummer,’ the Rolling Stones’ late piano player Ian Stewart tells A.E. Hotchner. ‘Drummers are the heart of a group,’ confirms Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience: ‘a good one is worth his weight in gold.’ And here is the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock on drummer Paul Cook: ‘that steady rhythm ...

All the Cultural Bases

Ian Sansom, 20 March 1997

Moon Country: Further Reports from Iceland 
by Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell.
Faber, 160 pp., £7.99, November 1996, 0 571 17539 2
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... ho hay ... Bottle of Bell’s ... Judgment Day ... Hence those smells ... Yo ho heg ... Bottle of Jack ... All gonna peg ... Came for the craic ... Yo ho hoem ... Bottle of Gordon’s ... Better read a funeral poem ... Not sodding Auden’s’), and a wonderfully improbable plot. It’s as if Terry Pratchett had written The Age of Anxiety. It’s not really ...

Vigah

Elizabeth Drew: JFK, 20 November 2003

John F. Kennedy: An Unfinished Life 1917-63 
by Robert Dallek.
Allen Lane, 838 pp., £25, September 2003, 0 7139 9737 0
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... refusing to let health concerns stop him,’ Dallek writes, ‘became a pattern that would allow Jack to pursue a political career . . . Between May 1955 and October 1957, while he was launching his Vice-Presidential and Presidential bids, he was secretly hospitalised nine times.’ Here is Dallek’s depiction of Kennedy’s health at an early point in his ...

Carré on spying

John Sutherland, 3 April 1986

A Perfect Spy 
by John le Carré.
Hodder, 463 pp., £9.95, March 1986, 9780340387849
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The Novels of John le Carré 
by David Monaghan.
Blackwell, 207 pp., £12.50, September 1985, 0 631 14283 5
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Taking sides: The Fiction of John le Carré 
by Tony Barley.
Open University, 175 pp., £20, March 1986, 0 335 15251 1
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John le Carré 
by Peter Lewis.
Ungar, 228 pp., £10.95, August 1985, 0 8044 2243 5
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A Servant’s Tale 
by Paula Fox.
Virago, 321 pp., £9.95, February 1986, 0 86068 702 3
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A State of Independence 
by Caryl Phillips.
Faber, 158 pp., £8.95, February 1986, 0 571 13910 8
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... of the George Smiley trilogy in 1979 and 1982 made him almost overnight a popular author on the Ian Fleming scale, and it can have done no harm that the TV version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy coincided with the Blunt scandal. Now, as a rite of academic canonisation, three critical monographs have been published which respectfully analyse his ...

Diary

Julian Girdham: Mansergh v. Arnold, 21 June 1984

... the early morning before the Report’s appearance we had the honour of a visit from the Reverend Ian Paisley, who stuck up a few ‘Ulster is British’ posters, adorned with the Union Jack, around the centre of Dublin. This was a fairly appropriate proleptic reaction to the Forum Report. All the publicity surrounding it ...

Call me unpretentious

Ian Hamilton, 20 October 1994

Major Major: Memories of an Older Brother 
by Terry Major-Ball.
Duckworth, 167 pp., £12.95, August 1994, 0 7156 2631 0
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... delivered stage-monologues in verse: And can you ever remember a Tommy, A Swaddie, a Tiffy, or Jack, Hear a word said against Mother England, And not biff the foreigner back? And then there was the business of Dad Major’s name. Here there were vivacities galore. Dad’s real name was not Major; it was Ball. Christened Tom Ball, he took ‘Major’ as ...

Even If You Have to Starve

Ian Penman: Mod v. Trad, 29 August 2013

Mod: A Very British Style 
by Richard Weight.
Bodley Head, 478 pp., £25, April 2013, 978 0 224 07391 2
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... you to buy a decent pair of trousers? Mods posed a far less obvious threat. They flew the Union Jack, after all, and most of them had jobs; they were clean, well turned-out and had nice haircuts. In 1964 there was a brief spasm of tabloid outrage over some rather tame skirmishes between Mods and Rockers, mostly conducted in bracing seaside ozone. Talk of ...

Diary

Ian Hamilton: It's a size thing, 19 September 1985

... escapades of the Sixties as well as a few House and Garden glimpses of How He Lives Now. And the Jack Abbott fiasco is covered in some detail. The same cannot be said of Conversations with Capote. Here the indiscretions verge on mania, and it seems unlikely (though you never know) that even Capote would have allowed them to see print if he had lived. One ...

The least you can do is read it

Ian Hamilton, 2 October 1997

Cyril Connolly: A Life 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 653 pp., £25, May 1997, 0 224 03710 2
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... He would much rather talk Proust over a posh dinner than sit at home and read a new novel by Jack Priestley. In many respects, and in spite of all the talk about becoming, or not becoming, a great artist, Connolly’s true vocation was to score points as a literary socialite. This being so, he had no wish to be praised for effortful near-misses. Far ...

Villain’s Talk

John Bayley, 17 April 1986

The Fisher King 
by Anthony Powell.
Heinemann, 256 pp., £9.95, April 1986, 0 434 59926 3
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... modes of entertainment: the slow-motion encounter, the rambling tales, never completed, by Mr Jack, the elderly drunk who is not too unlike Bithell in The Music of Time – above all, the marvellous funny and prolonged dinner-time conversations in the saloon of the cruise ship Alecto, in which everyone is trying to escape from someone else, and at the ...

Heliotrope

John Sutherland, 3 December 1992

Robert Louis Stevenson: Dreams of Exile 
by Ian Bell.
Mainstream, 295 pp., £14.99, November 1992, 1 85158 457 9
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... Ian Bell protests his disqualifications as a biographer rather too much: ‘I have approached Stevenson in the most unscholarly way. I am a journalist, and do not pretend to be anything else.’ But Bell, as he is at pains to point out, is a Scottish journalist and it is through the privilege of shared race and place of origin that he claims a blood-intimacy denied scholars ...

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