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At the Movies

Michael Wood: Kurosawa, 22 February 2007

Yojimbo 
directed by Akira Kurosawa.
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... piece of appetising rubbish? No, a severed human hand. It’s a plastic-looking object, though, straight from the props department. Kurosawa wants just a flicker of film horror, not Gothic realism. But then where is the rest of this hand’s body, and what violence is lurking in this place? The town has been taken over by two gangs, one led by the local ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Irishman’, 5 December 2019

... slightly to the right towards an alcove, decides it doesn’t need to go there, and continues straight ahead. It turns left into a larger room and moves more confidently towards an old man in a wheelchair, seen from the back. The camera circles round him and pauses in the air close to his face – too close for any plausible human view. Martin Scorsese ...

Tacky Dress

Dale Peck, 22 February 1996

Like People in History: A Gay American Epic 
by Felice Picano.
Viking, 512 pp., $23.95, July 1995, 0 670 86047 6
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How Long Has This Been Going On? 
by Ethan Mordden.
Villard, 590 pp., $25, April 1995, 0 679 41529 7
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The Facts of Life 
by Patrick Gale.
Flamingo, 511 pp., £15.99, June 1995, 0 602 24522 2
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Flesh and Blood 
by Michael Cunningham.
Hamish Hamilton, 480 pp., £14.99, June 1995, 9780241135150
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... called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often programmatic, was still ...

It’s me you gotta make happy

Andrea Brady: John Wieners, 29 July 2021

Yours Presently: The Selected Letters of John Wieners 
edited by Michael Seth Stewart.
New Mexico, 333 pp., £60, December 2020, 978 0 8263 6204 9
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... he channelled Baudelaire and aimed to ‘be the new Rimbaud, and not die at 37 but set the record straight’. He died in 2002, leaving the record anything but straight.Wieners is admired by other writers for his nonconformity, his tenderness and outrageous inventions. Hagiographical prefaces to his books by Allen Ginsberg ...

Top-Drawer in Geneva

Michael Wood, 30 November 1995

Belle du Seigneur 
by Albert Cohen, translated by David Coward.
Viking, 974 pp., £20, November 1995, 9780670821877
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... says she’ll tell her husband, and he says please do. This is where the plotting gets ludicrous, straight out of French farce, but also irrelevant, because the slow-motion bicycle ride is so funny. Ariane is married to the vain, stupid, lazy Adrien Deume, who works at the League of Nations under Solal. Solal promotes Deume out of lordly contempt and in order ...

Capital W, Capital W

Michael Wood: Women writers, 19 August 1999

Women Writers at Work 
edited by George Plimpton.
Harvill, 381 pp., £9.99, February 1999, 1 86046 586 2
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Just as I Thought 
by Grace Paley.
Virago, 332 pp., £8.99, August 1999, 1 86049 696 2
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... so, not many people will now agree with this view. Not all that many, perhaps, will understand it straight off. How could it be fatal? How could you not write or speak as a woman if you were one? Except by pretending to speak or write as a man. But Woolf didn’t want women to write like men. ‘It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived ...

Philip Roth’s House of Fiction

Michael Mason, 6 December 1979

The Ghost Writer 
by Philip Roth.
Cape, 180 pp., £4.95
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... at being a witness of ‘scenes’. The Richard Benjamin of Goodbye Columbus could walk straight into the part. There are no other notable actions. The rest of the novel’s interest lies in the ramifying material. There is the Henry James story, which Nathan reads during the night. He is also very preoccupied about a recent rupture with his ...

Ramadhin and Valentine

J.R. Pole, 13 October 1988

A History of West Indies Cricket 
by Michael Manley.
Deutsch, 575 pp., £17.95, May 1988, 0 233 98259 0
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Sobers: Twenty Years at the Top 
by Garfield Sobers and Brian Scovell.
Macmillan, 204 pp., £11.95, June 1988, 0 333 37267 0
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... on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the social, economic and regional problems of the Caribbean if he had been engaged in trying to resolve them in their present manifestations. There is no way of ...

Do women like sex?

Michael Mason, 8 November 1990

Making sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud 
by Thomas Laqueur.
Harvard, 352 pp., $27.50, October 1990, 0 674 54349 1
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... this is a complicated matter, there seems to be an almost capricious refusal to get it at least as straight as possible. But the primacy which is thus hazily attributed to the ideological and political certainly makes Professor Laqueur’s book duller than it should be. The one-sex/two-sex argument is, so to speak, the counterpart to the parental demand ...

Montale’s Eastbourne

Michael Hofmann, 23 May 1991

The Coastguard’s House 
by Eugenio Montale, translated by Jeremy Reed.
Bloodaxe, 223 pp., £7.95, December 1990, 1 85224 100 4
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... reader would be hard put to say what happened, and yet it’s not because Montale has failed to be straight with him or talked about other things that don’t matter. There is narrative, but of a uniquely interior kind, discontinuous scraps, observations that give rise to reflections. The poem exists on its own, it sticks to its own side of the net, it ...

I want to be queen

Michael Wood: Rimbaud’s High Jinks, 19 January 2023

The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings 
by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Mark Polizzotti.
NYRB, 306 pp., £16.99, July 2022, 978 1 68137 650 9
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... twenty. But then what is the relation of a historical person to a work that scarcely ever seems straight – that seeks, in White’s words, to ‘strain meaning to the very limits’? Can history live by metaphors alone? One answer is yes – we may want to hang on to biographical interpretations at any price.But there are tracks that respect historical ...

Nasty Angels

Michael Wood: Javier Marías, 4 May 2023

Tomás Nevinson 
by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Hamish Hamilton, 640 pp., £22, March, 978 0 241 56861 3
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... stank from the start because he knew the way it was supposed to end, even if he couldn’t think straight about it. His job would be over when – to use one of the metaphors for murder that are so rife in this book – he had taken the woman out of the picture.Marías had been here before. These two late novels look back to his trilogy Your Face Tomorrow ...

About the Monicas

Tessa Hadley: Anne Tyler, 18 March 2004

The Amateur Marriage 
by Anne Tyler.
Chatto, 306 pp., £16.99, January 2004, 0 7011 7734 9
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... a sweet, pretty girl who works as a receptionist in her father’s realty office; she goes into Michael Anton’s grocery store in the East Baltimore Polish district because she’s cut her head jumping off a moving streetcar in her haste to follow the parade of boys hurrying to enlist after Pearl Harbor. Under pressure from Pauline and from a euphoric ...

I want to be her clothes

Kevin Kopelson: Kate Moss, 20 December 2012

Kate: The Kate Moss Book 
by Kate Moss, edited by Fabien Baron, Jess Hallett and Jefferson Hack.
Rizzoli, 368 pp., £50, November 2012, 978 0 8478 3790 8
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... grungy or very beautiful clothes that Moss wears. It isn’t that the viewer, male or female, straight or gay, necessarily wishes that these outfits should be removed in conscious fantasy, striptease fashion, by Moss herself, or maybe by the viewer himself or herself; rather it’s that in unconscious fantasy he or she wishes to become the outfit. As ...

The Shinka

Michael Rose, 21 June 1984

... to work out what to say. Thank you for coming. You’re looking well. (Exceedingly so for people straight out of terminal wards.) Ask them where they’re living. ‘We’re having a fine old time,’ my father says, ‘moving around, staying in hotels.’ I do not have to tell them yet I’ve sold the house. ‘This is a nice party,’ my mother ...

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