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Like a boll weevil to a cotton bud

A. Craig Copetas, 18 November 1993

New York Days 
by Willie Morris.
Little, Brown, 400 pp., £19.45, September 1993, 0 316 58421 5
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... is seeing the bloodiest street fighting since the clam-linguini war that followed revelations that Woody Allen had slept with his wife’s adopted daughter. Eastside, Westside, all around the town’s British-controlled perimeter Louis Lapham and his humiliated forces meet like a collegium of Soviet generals to plan a counter-attack in the pages of the ...

Get it out of your system

Jenny Diski, 8 May 1997

The Anatomy of Disgust 
by William Ian Miller.
Harvard, 313 pp., £16.50, April 1997, 0 674 03154 7
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... preserve of the Church, it only aped what humans do best of all, and have the most fun with. Sex, Woody Allen said in happier times, is only dirty if you do it right. Conversely, disgust gets you off the hook of love if you nurture it as Swift did, both tormenting and releasing himself with the thought: ‘Nor wonder how I lost my ...

Paley’s Planet

Robert Walshe, 17 April 1986

Three of a Kind 
by Rachel Ingalls.
Faber, 141 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 571 13606 0
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Home Truths 
by Mavis Gallant.
Cape, 330 pp., £9.95, November 1985, 0 224 02344 6
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Later the Same Day 
by Grace Paley.
Virago, 211 pp., £8.95, November 1985, 0 86068 701 5
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... most part, write prose: she writes speech. She is the daughter of Groucho Marx and the mother of Woody Allen. You can pick it up from the far side of the Atlantic: ‘She says I called Mrs Z. a grizzly bear a few times. It’s my wife, no? ... ’ ‘She died in front of the television set. She didn’t miss a trick ... ’ ‘She’s a nice-looking ...

Who ate the salted peanuts?

Jerry Fodor, 21 September 2006

The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe 
by Michael Frayn.
Faber, 505 pp., £20, September 2006, 0 571 23217 5
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... something worth reporting, we’d be long gone before the stars got the news. There are those of a Woody Allen temperament who find this revised worldview not bearable. Angst and dread overcome them; they languish in existential loneliness. Or at least they tell me that they do. I guess I sympathise, though it’s not a mood I find it easy to get into. If ...

What happened to Flora?

Michael Wood: Nabokov’s Cards, 7 January 2010

The Original of Laura: (Dying is Fun) A Novel in Fragments 
by Vladimir Nabokov.
Penguin, 278 pp., £25, November 2009, 978 0 14 119115 7
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... abandoned, and we can enjoy Flora’s company because we’re not married to her and because, as Woody Allen would say, she’s only fictional. Into this mix Nabokov clearly planned to insert a novel written by the narrator of the opening pages – that is, a person who knows (and sleeps with) Flora and turns her into a thinly disguised character called ...

I just worked it out from the novel

Michael Wood, 24 April 1997

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me 
by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Harvill, 313 pp., £8.99, October 1996, 1 86046 199 9
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The Club Dumas 
by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, translated by Sonia Soto.
Harcourt Brace, 368 pp., $23, February 1997, 0 15 100182 0
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... getting his hands dirty.’ Corso is Sam Spade among the bibliophiles, a character out of Woody Allen as well as out of Eco. He is a pastiche of a pastiche, but he still fails to understand, until the end, that some coincidences are just coincidences, that both chance and conspiracy are features of the world we imagine we know. ‘I thought you ...

Swinging it

Mark Ford, 7 July 1988

S.J. Perelman: A Life 
by Dorothy Herrmann.
Simon and Schuster, 337 pp., £14.95, November 1987, 0 671 65460 8
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Don’t tread on me: The Selected Letters of S.J. Perelman 
edited by Prudence Crowther.
Viking, 372 pp., £14.95, October 1987, 0 670 81759 7
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... has overtaken the comic writer,’ he complained. In fact our greatest living comic, Woody Allen, derives directly from Perelman’s intellectual schlemiel routine. Perelman ended up feeling rather out of touch with the times. After the death of Laura he precipitately sold the farm in Pennsylvania and tried to settle down in London. All his ...

Stories of Black and White

Michael Wood, 4 October 1984

In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women 
by Alice Walker.
Women’s Press, 138 pp., £7.50, September 1984, 0 7043 2852 6
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Nights at the Circus 
by Angela Carter.
Chatto, 295 pp., £8.95, September 1984, 0 7011 3932 3
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Democracy 
by Joan Didion.
Chatto, 234 pp., £8.95, September 1984, 0 7011 2890 9
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... are bandits, shamans, revolutionaries all adrift in a Siberia borrowed, in about equal doses, from Woody Allen and Dostoevsky. The Tsar, a bandit says, weeping – ‘the Little Father of All the Russians ... is the friend of simple truth and doesn’t know the half of what his officials get up to on the side.’ Fevvers thinks: ‘Nobility of spirit hand ...

His Own Peak

Ian Sansom: John Fowles’s diary, 6 May 2004

John Fowles: The Journals, Vol. I 
edited by Charles Drazin.
Cape, 668 pp., £30, October 2003, 9780224069113
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John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds 
by Eileen Warburton.
Cape, 510 pp., £25, April 2004, 0 224 05951 3
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... of the heart. I noticed, too, that I am out of napkins. Will it never stop?’ That’s Woody Allen: he is joking. You can imagine what it’s like when Fowles is diagnosed with amoebic dysentery: ‘Not altogether an ill wind; so many depths would have been unplumbed.’ It is never a good idea to live next door to a writer, because they tend ...

It’s Mister Softee

Namara Smith: In Love with Roth, 19 July 2018

Asymmetry 
by Lisa Halliday.
Granta, 275 pp., £14.99, March 2018, 978 1 78378 360 1
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... of Duck Soup; she dances around him singing the nonsense song from Modern Times. They could be Woody Allen and Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, or, from an earlier era, the Little Tramp and the Kid, alone together against a hostile world. Ezra most obviously correlates with Roth when we discover he is also a decorated veteran of the sexual ...

A Human Being

Jenny Diski: The Real Karl, 25 November 1999

Karl Marx 
by Francis Wheen.
Fourth Estate, 441 pp., £20, October 1999, 1 85702 637 3
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Adventures in Marxism 
by Marshall Berman.
Verso, 160 pp., £17, September 1999, 9781859847343
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... knowingly, while knowing nothing much, and thinking even less. Ironic chic has been with us since Woody Allen set us all smiling smugly in the cinemas, but lately it has got out of hand. TV’s Eurotrash gives permission to wallow in silicon-enhanced breasts and cultural impoverishment with an ironically raised Gallic eyebrow. Chat-show host and DJ Chris ...

His Galactic Centrifuge

Edmund Gordon: Ballard’s Enthusiasms, 23 May 2024

Selected Non-Fiction: 1962-2007 
by J.G. Ballard, edited by Mark Blacklock.
MIT, 386 pp., £30, October 2023, 978 0 262 04832 3
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... the Guardian and his Christmas Books in the Sunday Times, reviewing biographies of Walt Disney or Woody Allen for the Daily Telegraph, or knocking off a piece about the French Riviera for the Mail on Sunday. He didn’t exactly sell out in these performances – one of the most striking qualities of his Selected Non-Fiction is the consistency of his ...

Weirdo Possible Genius Child

Daniel Soar: Max Porter, 23 May 2019

Lanny 
by Max Porter.
Faber, 213 pp., £12.99, March 2019, 978 0 571 34028 6
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... of my attention may have been heightened by the fact that sitting in the row behind me were Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn; I couldn’t help watching them watch, in my head at least, and therefore – as it felt – watching more, and more closely, myself. At the interval, naturally, I was as curious as any stargazer to see where ...

Nothing goes without saying

Stanley Cavell, 6 January 1994

The Marx Brothers: ‘A Day at the Races’, ‘Monkey Business’ and ‘Duck Soup’ 
introduced by Karl French.
Faber, 261 pp., £8.99, November 1993, 0 571 16647 4
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... were really lecherous they would no longer be funny. (Adam Gopnik was making such a point about Woody Allen a couple of months ago in the New Yorker.) Being parodies of lechery, they enact claims on the part of each human creature (‘All God’s chillun’ is how they name them in A Day at the Races) to be loved, for no reason. Harpo would not know ...
Cary Grant: A Class Apart 
by Graham McCann.
Fourth Estate, 346 pp., £16.99, September 1996, 1 85702 366 8
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... making it hard even for her to feel settled within any single identity.’ In his book on Woody Allen (1990) he expands: ‘Many observers have been content to settle on the fairly contemptuous belief that movie stars “play themselves” – as if playing oneself were easy, given the complex, contradictory material at hand and the problem of ...

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