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Culture Wars

W.J.T. Mitchell, 23 April 1992

... Vietnam era, the other marking the transition between the end of the Cold War and the unveiling of George Bush’s ‘new world order’. Both events were also turning points in the history of American television, reaching unprecedented numbers of viewers. According to Major-General Perry Smith in How CNN fought the war, CNN’s public relations office ...

Naderland

Jackson Lears: Ralph Nader’s novel, 8 April 2010

Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! 
by Ralph Nader.
Seven Stories, 733 pp., $27.50, September 2009, 978 1 58322 903 3
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... presidential campaign in 2000 cost Al Gore the White House and ushered in the calamitous reign of George W. Bush. The obsession with Nader is at first puzzling: blame for Bush’s ascendancy can be traced to many other sources. Gore’s campaign was timid and bungling, but in any case he won the election and was only denied office by wholesale Republican ...

Subsistence Journalism

E.S. Turner, 13 November 1997

‘Punch’: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841-51 
by Richard Altick.
Ohio State, 776 pp., £38.50, July 1997, 0 8142 0710 3
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... Louis-Philippe as a beggar on horseback, but continued to contribute and to eat his hot meal. George III notoriously found ‘much sad stuff’ in Shakespeare and Professor Altick concedes that there was some sad stuff in Punch. Teasing Baron Rothschild as a ‘curly-headed Jew-boy’ and laying stress on Disraeli’s non-Aryan features were par for the ...

Blowing Cigarette Smoke at Greenfly

E.S. Turner: The Beastliness of Saki, 24 August 2000

The Unrest-Cure and Other Beastly Tales 
by Saki.
Prion, 297 pp., £8.99, May 2000, 9781853753701
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... The young Hector was brought up in Devonshire by two supposedly harsh, repressive aunts. Like George Orwell, he served briefly in the Burma police. Invalided out, he was next seen as a near-dandy and struggling writer in London, somewhat given to practical joking. He was also given to what his sister Ethel, who burned his letters after he died, called ...

Whoosh

Jenny Turner: Eat the Document, 7 June 2007

Eat the Document 
by Dana Spiotta.
Picador, 290 pp., £12.99, April 2007, 978 0 330 44828 4
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... which Joan Didion attacked ‘the women’s movement’ in her famous breaking-eggs essay of 1972. George Clinton’s ‘cryptic nonsense’ on that album is neither difficult to hear nor to understand: ‘Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time, for y’all have knocked her up. I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe – I was not ...

At the Royal Academy

Rosemary Hill: The Treasures of the Society of Antiquaries, 18 October 2007

... closet Catholicism, republicanism, even as late as 1797 the antiquaries could be denounced by George III as a ‘Popish cabal’. Still, they stuck to the motto associated with their emblem, the bronze Lamp of Knowledge: non exstinguere, it ‘shall not be extinguished’. The Lamp, which is ‘curious’ – to use a favourite antiquarian adjective ...

Etheric Vibrations

E.S. Turner: Marie Corelli, 29 July 1999

The Mysterious Marie Corelli: Queen of Victorian Bestsellers 
by Teresa Ransom.
Sutton, 247 pp., £25, June 1999, 0 7509 1570 6
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... to the press, she threw a fine tantrum on conviction, prophesying the immediate fall of Lloyd George and revolution within a week. She was luckier than the scapegoated celebrity of World War Two, Ivor Novello, who was gaoled for a month for fiddling petrol for his Rolls-Royce. In those late months of World War One it looked as though Prince Lucio might be ...

How Dare He?

Jenny Turner: Geoff Dyer, 11 June 2009

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi 
by Geoff Dyer.
Canongate, 295 pp., £12.99, April 2009, 978 1 84767 270 4
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... Venice that had not been said before, “including this statement”.’ The work of Gilbert and George he considers ‘as weary as some harmless sin’; the same pretty much goes for contemporary art in general: ‘So what if they were just snaps of someone jerking off in a leather armchair in an apartment in Zurich? Blow ’em up big enough and they looked ...

Pornotheology

Jenny Turner: Martin Amis, 22 April 2010

The Pregnant Widow 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 470 pp., £18.99, February 2010, 978 0 224 07612 8
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... can be described’ is porn. Lily, it seems, is a ‘creature of the middleworld’, an admirer of George Eliot who has ‘no patience with any work of fiction that strayed from the sternest social realism’; Keith, to begin with, assumes ‘that social realism would hold, here in Italy. And yet Italy itself seemed partly fabulous … He was, ominously, a K ...

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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... Oscar Wilde (with his quasi-Renaissance velvet suits), as well as the female cross-dresser (from George Sand to Marlene Dietrich). We learn of ‘The Anti-Neutral Suit’ in the Futurist Manifesto, which promised ‘three-dimensional colour acrobatics’, and the TuTa of 1919, an avant-garde adaptation of the utilitarian boiler suit that supposedly heralded ...

Thus were the British defeated

Colin Munro: ‘Tipu’s Tiger’, 4 January 2018

... of the name of Monro; and he told the story so often that he got the nickname of Tiger Conran’. George Downie (Downey), who died in Bengal in 1808, may have been equally keen to share it: in Travels in India a Hundred Years Ago (1893) Thomas Twining told of meeting in about 1800 a ‘Captain O’Donald’ who claimed to be one of those present at Munro’s ...

Valet of the Dolls

Andrew O’Hagan: Sinatra, 24 July 2003

Mr S.: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra 
by George Jacobs and William Stadiem.
Sidgwick, 261 pp., £16.99, June 2003, 0 283 07370 5
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... finding instant and compelling evidence to prove he was a complete nightmare. Yet this book by George Jacobs, who was Sinatra’s valet for 15 years, might be understood to be wired in a whole new way: it is perhaps the ultimate diatribe by the disgruntled ex-staffer; a new high point (or low point) in a super-readable genre that should surely be given its ...

Nicely! Nicely!

Jenny Turner, 13 May 1993

Operation Shylock 
by Philip Roth.
Cape, 398 pp., £14.99, March 1993, 0 224 03009 4
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... carefully to be believed. There is an extraordinary tract on Jewish self-hatred as delivered by George Ziad, a wealthy Palestinian who has been driven to espouse the Diasporist cause after years spent watching his people being mowed down by Israeli batons and bullets: the unassuageable guilt of the American émigrés who inadvertently abandoned their poor ...

At the Duveen Galleries

Brian Dillon: ‘The Asset Strippers’, 18 July 2019

... by columns and arches, run through the centre of Tate Britain. They opened in 1937, shortly after George VI was crowned; along their length Nelson has hung a number of large dusty plaques bearing Commonwealth flags and the legend ‘Long May They Reign’. At their centre, instead of the regal ‘GR’, is the cursive ‘GE’ of General Electric. The ...

Short Cuts

Jeremy Harding: Erratic Weather, 11 April 2013

... yet we imagine it to be a thoroughly British habit. The painters are among the best observers, and Turner the grandest. Shortly before he died he was discovered on the floor of his sickroom in Cheyne Walk, having tried to reach the window and a view of the Thames. His doctor recalled how ‘the sun broke through the cloudy curtain which for so long had ...

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