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Killing Stripes

Christopher Turner: Suits, 1 June 2017

Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress 
by Anne Hollander.
Bloomsbury, reissue, 158 pp., £19.99, August 2016, 978 1 4742 5065 8
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The Suit: Form, Function and Style 
by Christopher Breward.
Reaktion, 240 pp., £18, May 2016, 978 1 78023 523 3
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... volume, a blacklist of nearly three thousand names. ‘A man’s first duty is to his tailor,’ Oscar Wilde (another patron) quipped, but obviously not when it came to paying. Winston Churchill was a regular customer, even having his suits cleaned and pressed at Poole’s, until an overzealous clerk sent a letter to Number 10 demanding that he settle ...

Supermax

John Bayley, 8 December 1988

The Letters of Max Beerbohm 1892-1956 
edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Murray, 244 pp., £16.95, August 1988, 0 7195 4537 4
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The Faber Book of Letters 
edited by Felix Pryor.
Faber, 319 pp., £12.95, October 1988, 0 571 15269 4
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... wish to identify themselves with their subjects. I have something in common with Joyce, and with Wilde, is the modest assumption of Richard Ellmann. Max was a bit like me, implies Cecil. That brings them, and us, all the closer to the subject. It can also lead to misunderstanding. Oddly enough, as Cecil’s admirable biography shows, both he and Max ...

Updike’s Innocence

Craig Raine, 25 January 1990

Just Looking: Essays on Art 
by John Updike.
Deutsch, 210 pp., £19.95, November 1989, 0 233 98501 8
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... illustrated, sometimes with pictures that aren’t actually discussed (by Hopkins, Poe and Oscar Wilde), apparently effortless, occasional, these pieces are freighted with the chronic preoccupations evident since the beginning of this intelligent writer’s long career. They are not the innocent reports they seem to be. Witness Updike’s comment ...

Mendacious Flowers

Martin Jay: Clinton Baiting, 29 July 1999

All too Human: A Political Education 
by George Stephanopoulos.
Hutchinson, 456 pp., £17.99, March 1999, 0 09 180063 3
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No One Left to Lie to: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton 
by Christopher Hitchens.
Verso, 122 pp., £12, May 1999, 1 85984 736 6
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... of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.’ It is safe to assume that the Oscar Wilde of ‘The Decay of Lying’ would feel far more at home in the America of William Jefferson Clinton than in that of its most esteemed founding father. For whatever else may be accused of falling into decay these days, public mendacity has surely ...

Tall and Tanned and Young and Lovely

James Davidson: The naked body in Ancient Greece, 18 June 1998

Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece 
by Andrew Stewart.
Cambridge, 272 pp., £45, April 1997, 0 521 45064 0
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... a flood. Caught cavorting naked with Bosie on a lawn in Goring and challenged by a passing vicar, Oscar Wilde stuck out his hip and announced: ‘What you see is pure Greek.’ One obvious channel between art and life was provided by the popular statues humaines, the professional models – ‘La Milo’, ‘The Seldoms’ – who stripped down in public ...

‘If I Could Only Draw Like That’

P.N. Furbank, 24 November 1994

The Gentle Art of Making Enemies 
by James McNeill Whistler.
Heinemann, 338 pp., £20, October 1994, 0 434 20166 9
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James McNeill Whistler: Beyond the Myth 
by Ronald Anderson and Anne Koval.
Murray, 544 pp., £25, October 1994, 0 7195 5027 0
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... his draughtsmanship. William Rothenstein recalls Whistler talking to him contemptuously of Oscar Wilde’s house in Tite Street and doing him a little drawing of it, to illustrate the monotony of such a terrace house. ‘I noticed then,’ says Rothenstein, ‘how childishly Whistler drew when drawing out of his head.’ One might think there was ...
... ludicrously morbid suicide-pact. Her adaptation was full of paradoxical epigrams in the manner of Oscar Wilde, with five acts, a Duke and a Duchess among the leading parts and a scene set in a conservatory during a ball. This reflects her happiest period, for which she is most often remembered – as an unconventional but respectable literary hostess ...

Nabokov’s Dreams

John Lanchester, 10 May 2018

... There’s​ a joke, attributed to Oscar Wilde, that the most frightening sentence in the English language is: ‘I had a very interesting dream last night.’ If Wilde did say that, it’s a safe bet that he wouldn’t have liked Insomniac Dreams, because this short book is focused entirely on the dream-life of Vladimir Nabokov ...

Short Cuts

Duncan Campbell: Courthouse Hotel, 20 May 2021

... its closure, Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, which over its 271-year history provided a stage for Oscar Wilde, Emmeline Pankhurst, Dr Crippen, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, the Kray twins and General Pinochet, is about to reopen as a hotel called NoMad London. There will be luxury suites costing up to £2500 a night, a cocktail lounge called Common Decency ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Servant’, 9 May 2013

The Servant 
directed by Joseph Losey.
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... back, and they set up a ménage à deux that is a sort of apotheosis cum parody of gay marriage as Oscar Wilde might have pictured it. They squawk, squeal, prance, hit each other, make peace, get along divinely. By this time it’s clear that the servant is the master in all kinds of senses, and not just for a day, and Bogarde is not content until he has ...

Running out of Soil

Terry Eagleton: Bram Stoker and Irish Protestant Gothic, 2 December 2004

From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker 
by Paul Murray.
Cape, 356 pp., £18.99, July 2004, 0 224 04462 1
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... for many more Irish writers than himself. Yet to be free of a convention is not to ignore it. Wilde was hardly ignorant of how to flatter a duchess or please a West End audience, but it was never easy to decide whether this was deference or parody, or whether imitation might not be the sincerest form of mockery. Like many colonial writers, ...

Extraordinary People

Anthony Powell, 4 June 1981

The Lyttelton – Hart-Davis Letters 
edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Murray, 185 pp., £12.50, March 1981, 0 7195 3770 3
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... in editing such works as the collected letters of George Moore, Max Beerbohm – above all, Oscar Wilde – and later, now for many years past, in correcting the proofs of my own books with precision and severity. The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962) constitutes an achievement altogether unusual in its field of ...

The Only True Throne

John Pemble: ‘Muckraker’, 19 July 2012

Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of W.T. Stead 
by W. Sydney Robinson.
Robson, 281 pp., £20, May 2012, 978 1 84954 294 4
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... publisher Henry Vizetelly, jailed for issuing Zola’s works in translation. Taking stock in 1891, Oscar Wilde complained that the Fourth Estate ‘has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by journalism … The tyranny ...

Opportunities

David Gilmour, 1 June 1989

Prepared for the worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports 
by Christopher Hitchens.
Chatto, 357 pp., £15.95, April 1989, 0 7011 3459 3
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... between the last two categories. The Heroes section would include pieces on Tom Paine and Oscar Wilde, a passionate vindication of Noam Chomsky (‘among the few Americans of his generation to lay claim to the title of original thinker’) and a long, thoughtful portrait of Professor Shahak, the great Israeli human rights activist. There is a ...

Geek Romance

Philip Connors: Junot Díaz, 20 March 2008

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 
by Junot Díaz.
Faber, 340 pp., £12.99, February 2008, 978 0 571 17955 8
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... Yunior tells is as powerful in its silences as it is in its surface. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz’s long-awaited second book, the surface is much more jagged, more inflected with a hip-hop beat, fonder of Spanish idioms. What’s curious about this is that the narrator is again Yunior, although it’s some time before we learn that ...

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