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What she wasn’t

Joanna Biggs: ‘The Vanishing Half’, 13 August 2020

The Vanishing Half 
by Brit Bennett.
Dialogue, 343 pp., £14.99, June, 978 0 349 70146 2
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... George Floyd was choked to death on a Minneapolis sidewalk; the novel itself begins weeks after Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, and concerns twin girls who saw their own father lynched. ‘I wanted to write a book that was not just about Black pain,’ Bennett continued, ‘but also about Black love.’ Her novel, which has been at the ...

Do put down that revolver

Rosemary Hill, 14 July 2016

The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House between the Wars 
by Adrian Tinniswood.
Cape, 406 pp., £25, June 2016, 978 0 224 09945 5
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... with four girls under her supervision. Hierarchies below stairs were as rigid as above. ‘The kitchen,’ she explains, ‘never made toast.’ McLelland’s move from Belvoir to Styles, the home of Agatha Christie, was, she thought, ‘a come down’. Indeed the mass exodus from service between the wars was owed only in part to new opportunities: it was ...

Crushing the Port Glasses

Colin Burrow: Zadie Smith gets the knives out, 14 December 2023

The Fraud 
by Zadie Smith.
Hamish Hamilton, 464 pp., £20, September, 978 0 241 33699 1
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... in it. Then bent down, took the second pail, and walked off towards the pantry, past all the kitchen drawers so full of sharp and threatening things.Such spiky delights. The passage follows a description of a group of servant children – ‘he’ is a young Black servant – taking the piss out of their masters and mistresses. It’s a kind of purposive ...

Batter My Heart

Catherine Nicholson: Who was John Donne?, 19 January 2023

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne 
by Katherine Rundell.
Faber, 352 pp., £16.99, April 2022, 978 0 571 34591 5
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... not be triedAt the last day? Will it then boot theeTo say a Philip, or a Gregory,A Harry, or a Martin taught thee this?(‘Philip’ is Philip II of Spain, ‘Gregory’ the pope, ‘Harry’ the Tudor king whose marital woes precipitated England’s break from Rome, and ‘Martin’ is ...
... There might even be an inset, a small cameo of her in a neat shirtwaister, looking through the kitchen window, out onto a neat garden, thinking of something far away while she does the washing up. I mention these two puffs of fantasy to emphasise that I’m not attempting anything like a biography of Doris or Peter Lessing, still less my own ...

Momentary Substances

Nicholas Penny, 21 November 1985

Patterns of Intention 
by Michael Baxandall.
Yale, 148 pp., £12.50, September 1985, 0 300 03465 2
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The Enigma of Piero 
by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by Martin Ryle and Kate Soper.
Verso, 164 pp., £12.95, November 1985, 0 86091 116 0
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... we have this duty but I am puzzled by what exactly needs explanation. Chardin was a painter of the kitchen table with its coppers and onions and of the dessert table with its fruit and porcelain, and also of tranquil domestic scenes – children saying grace, contented servants preparing food, a lady taking tea. His still-lives (the term suits all his ...

An Ordinary Woman

Alan Bennett, 16 July 2020

... An ordinary kitchen. Gwen, a middle-aged wo­man, talks to the camera.He​  pulled up his trousers.‘You are nice to me,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have shown it to anybody else.’I said, ‘Well, I hope you haven’t been doing.’‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Not much chance of that. No demand at the moment.’He’d come home from school looking a bit down and retreats upstairs to his room and doesn’t even bother to raid the fridge, by which I take it something’s amiss ...

Down and Out in London and Amis

Zachary Leader, 22 June 1989

Ripley Bogle 
by Robert McLiam Wilson.
Deutsch, 273 pp., £11.95, May 1989, 0 233 98392 9
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The Burnt House 
by Adam Lively.
Simon and Schuster, 264 pp., £12.95, May 1989, 0 671 69999 7
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Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde 
by Emma Tennant.
Faber, 121 pp., £10.99, June 1989, 0 571 15242 2
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The Magic Drum 
by Emma Tennant.
Viking, 142 pp., £11.95, May 1989, 0 670 82556 5
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... prone to the overstatement of youth but this is the real thing. The voice here is like that of Martin Amis, whose mark is all over this novel, not just in the muscular, shouldering prose style – the style of John Self – but in Ripley’s rich tangle of adolescent preoccupations, his Charles Highway-like obsession with bodily products (‘matutinal ...

Seven Miles per Hour

Robert Macfarlane: The men who invented flight, 5 February 2004

First to Fly: The Unlikely Triumph of Wilbur and Orville Wright 
by James Tobin.
Murray, 431 pp., £9.99, November 2003, 0 7195 5738 0
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The Wright Brothers: The Aviation Pioneers who Changed the World 
by Ian Mackersey.
Little, Brown, 554 pp., £20, October 2003, 0 316 86144 8
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Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight 
by Paul Hoffman.
Fourth Estate, 369 pp., £18.99, June 2003, 1 84115 368 0
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Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity to the First World War 
by Richard Hallion.
Oxford, 531 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 19 516035 5
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... As Tobin tells it, the brothers were a pair of modest Midwestern visionaries, whose story – the kitchen-sink improvisation, the dogged determination, the legendary triumph – illustrates the American Dream. Their efforts and achievements seem to belong to a lost era of entrepreneurial innocence. The Wright Brothers were heavily researched even before the ...

Obama v. Clinton: A Retrospective

Eliot Weinberger: A Tale of Two Candidates, 3 July 2008

... sign, but had no idea what it meant.) I’d grown up during the civil rights movement, had heard Martin Luther King speak. And here was an African-American who had risen higher than any non-white person in any Western country, and moreover had done so in a nation that has never, with the exception of the Irish John Kennedy, elected a president from even its ...

Diary

Pooja Bhatia: Leaving Haiti, 4 April 2024

... new book, Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism and the Battle to Control Haiti (St Martin’s Press, £24.99), analyses America’s sordid manipulation of that election, which brought the corrupt – but pro-US – Martelly to power, as well as the 2016 election of Moïse, Martelly’s chosen successor. At the time of Moïse’s assassination ...

The dogs in the street know that

Nick Laird: A Week in Mid-Ulster, 5 May 2005

... Growing up in Cookstown in County Tyrone, I would occasionally wonder what it would be like to be Martin McGuinness’s son. He was infamous for being Sinn Féin’s number two, and for being the officer commanding of the Derry brigade of the IRA, a position he assumed, as he recently admitted, in February 1972. He was born the same year as my mother, and my parents used to live in Londonderry ...

Impossibilities

Walter Nash, 25 April 1991

Saraband 
by Patrice Chaplin.
Methuen, 216 pp., £13.99, February 1991, 0 413 63290 3
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Pious Secrets 
by Irene Dische.
Bloomsbury, 147 pp., £14.99, February 1991, 0 7475 0835 6
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City of the Mind 
by Penelope Lively.
Deutsch, 220 pp., £12.99, March 1991, 0 233 98661 8
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... meringue,’ ‘Kay felt her face crumbling like a badly-made piecrust.’ We get the point. The kitchen rules, OK, even in the dirty bits, as when poor Joel is driven to desperate measures: ‘Maddened with frustration, he unzipped his trousers and shoved his erect penis into a carton of cream.’ (Well, to be sure, there’s a divinity that shapes our ...

Diary

Colin McGinn: A Philosopher in LA, 4 September 1986

... apartment had the standard LA wall-to-wall shaggy carpet and saloon-style doors into the ‘kitchen area’. Strolling the murky corridors of the apartment building, I could hear the sounds of daytime game-shows emanating from behind the closed doors of my reclusive neighbours; and occasionally I would glimpse a night-attired spectral figure gliding to ...

Uncle Vester’s Nephew

Graham Coster, 27 February 1992

Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession 
by Greil Marcus.
Viking, 256 pp., £17.99, February 1992, 0 670 83846 2
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Rythm Oil: A Journey through the Music of the American South 
by Stanley Booth.
Cape, 254 pp., £16.99, October 1991, 0 224 02779 4
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... so bombed out one day on barbiturates that while his girlfriend was preparing their lunch in the kitchen he passed out into the starter. Elvis is not a broad church: if you’re not fundamentalist then you’re indifferent. Uncle Vester, thus, is either another messenger at the shrine or another unfortunate chorus-sweller in the vaudeville farce we ...

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