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Time to think again

Michael Neve, 3 March 1988

Benjamin Disraeli: Letters 1838-1841 
edited by M.G Wiebe, J.B. Conacher, John Matthews and M.S. Millar.
Toronto, 458 pp., £40, March 1987, 0 8020 5736 5
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Salisbury: The Man and his Policies 
edited by Lord Blake and Hugh Cecil.
Macmillan, 298 pp., £29.50, May 1987, 0 333 36876 2
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... but it was a start, appeared in March 1838, with the death of Maidstone’s other MP, Wyndham Lewis. Disraeli was not inexperienced in love – or what he would call ‘love’ – and seems to have made plain his need for maternal attentions. He needed someone to help him out of his financial mess, as well as someone who understood the nature of his ...

The Best Stuff

Ian Jack: David Astor, 2 June 2016

David Astor: A Life in Print 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 400 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 0 224 09090 2
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... décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy Lewis observes, it was a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its rival, the Sunday Times, which looked untidy and grey by comparison. Throughout the 1950s it was the dominant ...

Burlington Bertie

Julian Symons, 14 June 1990

The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read 
by James King.
Weidenfeld, 364 pp., £25, May 1990, 0 297 81042 1
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... whose views about art differed deeply from his own. He was overwhelmed on first meeting Wyndham Lewis, called him ‘a great and scandalously ignored painter’, and as late as 1932 said Lewis was ‘by far the most active force among us’. But he nursed feelings of resentment that his admiration was not ...

Diary

Michael Dobson: The Russell-Cotes, 23 February 2012

... had collected, such as James Archer’s Henry Irving as Charles I (1873) and John Collier’s Lewis Waller as Monsieur Beaucaire (1903), were really very fine. I had also begun to feel defensive about genre painting, which seemed to be eminently respectable when executed by 17th-century Dutchmen but was otherwise bafflingly taboo. Was it really so ...

The Paranoid Elite

Michael Wood: DeLillo, 22 April 2010

Point Omega 
by Don DeLillo.
Picador, 117 pp., £14.99, March 2010, 978 0 330 51238 1
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... us on the edge of emptiness. Finley’s only previous film is composed of edited footage of Jerry Lewis doing his telethons, ‘a disease artist’, as Finley calls him. The film was all Jerry, pure performance, Jerry talking, singing, weeping, Jerry with his ruffled shirt open at the collar, bow tie undone, a raccoon flung over his shoulders, Jerry inviting ...

They didn’t mean me

Imaobong Umoren: African European History, 10 February 2022

African Europeans: An Untold History 
by Olivette Otele.
Hurst, 291 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 78738 191 9
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... words​ , reminiscent of W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’, come from Theodor Wonja Michael’s autobiography, Deutsch sein und Schwarz dazu: Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen (2013), translated into English as Black German: An Afro-German Life in the 20th Century. Born in Berlin in 1925, Michael was the ...
Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of ‘Horizon’ 
by Michael Shelden.
Hamish Hamilton, 254 pp., £15.95, February 1989, 0 241 12647 9
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Coastwise Lights 
by Alan Ross.
Collins Harvill, 254 pp., £12.95, June 1988, 0 00 271767 0
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William Plomer 
by Peter Alexander.
Oxford, 397 pp., £25, March 1989, 0 19 212243 6
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... During or just after the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame or both, some not: but then, not now, was their moment. Was Connolly himself any good as a writer? The question means little because the point of Connolly turned out to be Connolly not producing ...

The Forty Years’ Peace

Keith Kyle, 21 October 1993

The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations and Provocations 
by John Lewis Gaddis.
Oxford, 301 pp., £19.50, July 1992, 0 19 505201 3
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Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953-71 
by Douglas Brinkley.
Yale, 429 pp., £22, February 1993, 0 300 04773 8
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The Quest for Stability: Problems of West European Security 1918-1957 
edited by Rolf Ahmann, A.M. Birke and Michael Howard.
Oxford, 546 pp., £50, June 1993, 0 19 920503 5
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... in the face of intense criticism, adhered to policies that brought us safely through. Yet John Lewis Gaddis’s book prompts the thought that perhaps the time of the historian is not yet. To be fair, Gaddis makes much of the risks of writing contemporary history, but adds that if historians are not willing to run them ‘political scientists and ...

Are we having fun yet?

John Lanchester: The Biggest Scandal of All, 4 July 2013

... that here we would all do well to bear in mind something an experienced Wall Street investor told Michael Lewis: ‘When I hear “Chinese wall” I think “you’re a fucking liar.”’ If I sound cynical and unsurprised about the manipulation of Libor, that’s because I long since stopped believing assurances of ethical conduct on the part of the ...

Top Grumpy’s Top Hate

Robert Irwin: Richard Aldington’s Gripes, 18 February 1999

Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: A Cautionary Tale 
by Fred Crawford.
Southern Illinois, 265 pp., £31.95, July 1998, 0 8093 2166 1
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Lawrence the Uncrowned King of Arabia 
by Michael Asher.
Viking, 419 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 670 87029 3
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... public. Aldington was a determined outsider, like Henry Williamson and like his friends, Wyndham Lewis and Roy Campbell. They were all writers who were never quite fashionable in their own lifetimes and not likely to be in the future. All of them held cantankerous, right-wing opinions. There were aspects of Fascism which Aldington admired and he was ...

Sergeant Jones’s Sleeping-Bag

Michael Ignatieff, 17 July 1997

Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture 
by Elaine Showalter.
Picador, 244 pp., £16.99, June 1997, 0 330 34670 9
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... to backwoods institutions, consider Harvard Medical School, which allowed Professor Judith Lewis Herman to purvey extravagantly exaggerated theories of ‘recovered memory’ syndrome. The same institution harbours Professor John Mack, who believes that beings from outer space are abducting men and women and conducting fertility experiments on them. As ...

Out of the Lock-Up

Michael Wood: Wallace Stevens, 2 April 1998

Collected Poetry and Prose 
by Wallace Stevens, edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson.
Library of America, 1032 pp., $35, October 1997, 1 883011 45 0
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... and Frost made jokes, but they didn’t have this trust in the other side of reason. It’s as if Lewis Carroll rather than, say, Dante were the measure of the world we have lost – the mood seems later because it is less nostalgic. The modern interest in the imagination, Stevens said, ‘is to be regarded not as a phase of humanism but as a vital ...

Diary

Robert Walshe: Bumping into Beckett, 7 November 1985

... as quickly as I managed to get a foot inside the door, I was sent a copy of Byzantium endures – Michael Moorcock. That one, icons iconing, balalaikas balalaikaing, kept me up nights marking pages, memorising passages, and dreaming dreams of a vividness and thrust that I hadn’t experienced since I was in the Army. My well-intentioned friends in Poland ...

Don’t blub

Michael Hofmann, 7 October 1993

Stand before Your God: Growing up to Be a Writer 
by Paul Watkins.
Faber, 203 pp., £14.99, August 1993, 0 571 16944 9
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... It cracked me up at 14 to hear my first psalm; the rotten apple sermons and poisonous C.S. Lewis readings in chapel; the half-hourly staggered bedtimes; the sardine bathtubs and lavatories-named-for the-seven-birthplaces-of Homer. My best memories are all to do with solitude and truancy (we had no studies, lived fifteen or twenty to a room; time by ...

Sweet Porn

Michael Irwin, 1 October 1981

George’s Marvellous Medicine 
by Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake.
Cape, 96 pp., £3.95, April 1981, 0 224 01901 5
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... often alliterative exclamations – ‘Jumping jackrabbits!’ – talking insects, magic potions. Lewis Carroll is a powerful but ill-digested influence. George’s Marvellous Medicine exhibits most of the author’s characteristic strengths and weaknesses. George has a frightful Grandma, a wicked old woman with ‘pale brown teeth and a small puckered up ...

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