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Shriek before lift-off

Malcolm Gaskill: Could nuns fly?, 9 May 2024

They Flew: A History of the Impossible 
by Carlos Eire.
Yale, 492 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 0 300 25980 3
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Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa 
by Anthony Grafton.
Allen Lane, 289 pp., £30, January, 978 1 84614 363 2
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... as well as for stigmatism and conversing with birds and animals. Among his imitators was Joseph of Cupertino, a levitating Franciscan friar, easily triggered by prayer, who shrieked loudly before lift-off. St Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, was said to radiate a blinding light as he left the ground. Reformers were not impressed. Since ...

Here comes the end of the world

Michael Hofmann, 23 July 1992

Bohin Manor 
by Tadeusz Konwicki, translated by Richard Lourie.
Faber, 240 pp., £12.99, July 1992, 0 571 14437 3
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... and adult as everything else of Konwicki’s; and A Dreambook of Our Time, once chosen by Philip Roth for his Penguin series ‘The Other Europe’, but long unobtainable. (My own copy of it has gone missing, but I remember it as a slightly flowery rooming-house novel about zero-hour Poland.) It seems barbaric to ignore any books by a foreign author, like ...

Blame it on the boogie

Andrew O’Hagan: In Pursuit of Michael Jackson, 6 July 2006

On Michael Jackson 
by Margo Jefferson.
Pantheon, 146 pp., $20, January 2006, 0 375 42326 5
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... a year and a half he would stand with his bottle and dance to the rhythm of the washing-machine. Joseph, his father, was angry and ambitious, an excellent if often sorry combination in the parent of a child who wants to be successful in showbusiness. Everything that is bad for a child might be good for a performer – including, I suspect, being locked in a ...

A Short History of the Trump Family

Sidney Blumenthal: The First Family, 16 February 2017

... to him was a tuxedoed man pumping his fists at Trump’s every line to lead the cheering throng. Joseph ‘Joey No Socks’ Cinque is a former associate of the Gambino family boss John Gotti who was convicted in 1989 for possession of stolen artworks including a couple of $20,000 Chagall prints and a Miró. (The New York district attorney’s office withdrew ...

Into the Eisenshpritz

Elif Batuman: Superheroes, 10 April 2008

Life, in Pictures: Autobiographical Stories 
by Will Eisner.
Norton, 493 pp., £18.99, November 2007, 978 0 393 06107 9
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Epileptic 
by David B..
Cape, 368 pp., £12.99, March 2006, 0 224 07920 4
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Shortcomings 
by Adrian Tomine.
Faber, 108 pp., £12.99, September 2007, 978 0 571 23329 8
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Misery Loves Comedy 
by Ivan Brunetti.
Fantagraphics, 172 pp., £15.99, April 2007, 978 1 56097 792 6
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... an ophthalmologist, based Holmes’s deductive abilities on those of a real doctor, the surgeon Joseph Bell.) Nonetheless, the hero-in-two-persons arrangement is vestigially present in many cyclically narrated comics. Probably the best-loved example is the duality of Snoopy and Charlie Brown. Snoopy, the romantic ‘hero’, is variously an attorney, a pulp ...

Four Funerals and a Wedding

Andrew O’Hagan: If something happens to me…, 5 May 2005

... an excited neediness for supra-human entitlement. There was a great deal of clapping as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger offered his words of appreciation to the dead pontiff. Clapping is the way it is always done nowadays, clapping in church, clapping by roadsides, as if a surge of assent had no outlet bar through the palms. What is a saint these days but a ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2005, 5 January 2006

... to look Jewish when he takes to wearing glasses. It’s a powerful piece and in retrospect rather Roth-like. No one quite says how much of his street cred came from his marriage to Monroe, though paradoxically more with the intellectuals than with Hollywood. 21 February. Snow arrives on cue around four but alas doesn’t lay; ‘It’s laying!’ one of the ...

Get a Real Degree

Elif Batuman, 23 September 2010

The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing 
by Mark McGurl.
Harvard, 480 pp., £25.95, April 2009, 978 0 674 03319 1
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... the ‘“surprising point of view” trick’ also has a long pre-Jamesian history. To quote Joseph Addison’s ‘Adventures of a Shilling’ (1710), ‘I was born on the side of a mountain, near a little village of Peru, and made a voyage to England in an ingot, under the convoy of Sir Francis Drake’; the shilling’s later adventures include being ...

Capitalism’s Capital

Jackson Lears: The Man Who Built New York, 17 March 2016

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York 
by Robert Caro.
Bodley Head, 1246 pp., £35, July 2015, 978 1 84792 364 6
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... others owned by men of wealth and influence – but not the hundred-acre farms of men like James Roth, whose best land was bisected and paved over. The same outlook shaded into distaste for the people his projects were supposed to serve. As Frances Perkins said, ‘He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just the public. It’s a great ...

From Progress to Catastrophe

Perry Anderson: The Historical Novel, 28 July 2011

... tradition was not extinguished, but still capable of a remarkable reassertion, was shown by Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March, which appeared in 1932. This great novel, which Lukács came to admire, answers to all his criteria save one, which it pointedly reverses. Lukács believed that the true historical novel was carried by a sense of ...

Tickle and Flutter

Terry Castle: Maude Hutchins’s Revenge, 3 July 2008

... mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the course of an admittedly strange and somewhat ill-starred ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... sessions, Sontag was not monastic and solo piloting, sequestered at her desk like Philip Roth with only a photograph of Kafka for company. Moser reiterates what memoirists such as Sigrid Nunez (Sempre Susan), Phillip Lopate (Notes on Sontag), Edmund White (City Boy), Gary Indiana (Utopia’s Debris) and others recorded first-hand: that Sontag was ...

Palestinianism

Adam Shatz, 6 May 2021

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said 
by Timothy Brennan.
Bloomsbury, 437 pp., £20, March 2021, 978 1 5266 1465 0
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... and the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in Places of Mind, Said was ‘a photo negative of his Jewish counterparts’.Said spent his first years at Columbia as a kind of an Arab Marrano, or crypto ...

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