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Writing Absurdity

Adam Shatz: Chester Himes, 26 April 2018

Chester B. Himes: A Biography 
by Lawrence P. Jackson.
Norton, 606 pp., £25, July 2017, 978 0 393 06389 9
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... Guard was called in to suppress rioting. Among the survivors was Chester Himes, a twenty-year-old black man serving a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery. Himes had already seen his share of troubles but, as Lawrence Jackson writes in his impressive biography, they ‘did not inspire him’ the way that ‘stumbling through the gore of two cell block ...

Diary

Deborah Friedell: The Heart and the Fist, 24 May 2018

... the one at which Sheena taught. He signed a bill that made it almost impossible for anyone to sue successfully for racial discrimination. The NAACP warned black people to ‘exercise extreme caution’ before entering Missouri, the first time they’d ever issued a travel warning for a specific state. Eric was now often ...

Diary

Tom Carver: Philby in Beirut, 11 October 2012

... to the sea. On the Corniche, Lebanese girls in luminous Lycra shorts rollerbladed past clusters of black monoliths in full hijab pushing buggies. I thought I recognised one of the buildings on the seafront from old black and white photos as the former French restaurant Lucullus, a favourite haunt of Philby’s, famous for ...

The Talk of Carshalton

Rosemary Hill: Pauline Boty’s Presence, 4 July 2024

Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister 
by Marc Kristal.
Frances Lincoln, 256 pp., £25, October 2023, 978 0 7112 8754 9
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Pauline Boty: A Portrait 
by Bridget Boty, Ali Smith, Lynda Nead and Sue Tate.
Gazelli Art House, 110 pp., £40, January, 978 1 8380609 2 3
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... on a scholarship to study painting. Soon afterwards, spotted at a New Year’s Eve party wearing black stockings, she was the talk of Carshalton. ‘Well, no one wore black stockings,’ Penrose remembers, ‘so it was “Ahhh”.’Wimbledon, however, was not exciting. The painting department was stuck in a prewar ...

Taking the blame

Paul Foot, 6 January 1994

Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut to Lockerbie – Inside the DIA 
by Donald Goddard and Lester Coleman.
Bloomsbury, 325 pp., £16.99, September 1993, 9780747515623
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The Media and Disasters: Pan-Am 103 
by Joan Deppa, Maria Russell, Dona Hayes and Elizabeth Lynne Flocke.
Fulton, 346 pp., £14.99, October 1993, 9781853462252
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... the source of the story. Denounced by the Daily Mirror’s front page as a ‘liar’, he did not sue or complain. A few months later he was quietly sacked. Thatcher, of course, could not blame her loyal minister for his indiscretion, which coincided so unluckily with her instructions from the White House. Channon had been right, however, about the confidence ...

Purple Days

Mark Ford, 12 May 1994

The Pugilist at Rest 
by Thom Jones.
Faber, 230 pp., £14.99, March 1994, 0 571 17134 6
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The Sorrow of War 
by Bao Ninh, translated by Frank Palmos.
Secker, 217 pp., £8.99, January 1994, 0 436 31042 2
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A Good Scent from Strange Mountain 
by Robert Olen Butler.
Minerva, 249 pp., £5.99, November 1993, 0 7493 9767 5
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Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation 
by David Wyatt.
Cambridge, 230 pp., £35, February 1994, 9780521441513
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... Carried – because it locates the war in such a full range of social and historical contexts. The black humour which permeates American versions of Vietnam can also function as a means of undermining the reality of the events described: the surreal looniness of it all has been rendered so often and vividly – in books such as Gustav Hasford’s The ...

Doors close, backs turn

Lorna Finlayson: Why complain?, 12 May 2022

Complaint! 
by Sara Ahmed.
Duke, 359 pp., £23.99, September 2021, 978 1 4780 1771 4
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... in education) being misused to attack queer academics, for instance. Complaints against Black students are more likely to lead to expulsion than those against white students. As ever, it is members of stigmatised groups and those in less powerful positions who are most likely to suffer.These observations​ raise a more general worry. Are complaints ...

Spot and Sink

Richard J. Evans: The End of WW1, 15 December 2011

With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 
by David Stevenson.
Allen Lane, 688 pp., £30, May 2011, 978 0 7139 9840 5
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... surrender and the overthrow of the kaiser. ‘Again,’ he later wrote, ‘everything went black before my eyes.’ And so it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations; in vain the hunger and thirst of months which were often endless; in vain the hours in which, with mortal fear clutching at our hearts, we nevertheless did our ...

Diary

Michael Henry: Trials of a Translator, 19 August 2010

... drawn by Léon during his 30-year search. They were handed down to JMG in his father’s black case ‘in an old cardboard file tied up in string with the particularly vindictive inscription in my aunt’s writing: Worthless Papers’. We board a light plane to Rodrigues, 560 kilometres from Mauritius. There, I find that Anse aux Anglais (known ...

Dying and Not Dying

Cathy Gere: Henrietta Lacks, 10 June 2010

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks 
by Rebecca Skloot.
Macmillan, 368 pp., £18.99, June 2010, 978 0 230 74869 9
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... you know that?” “Those cells in my lab have to be hers,” he said. “They’re from a black woman named Henrietta Lacks who died of cervical cancer at Hopkins in the 1950s.”’ Only a few months earlier, Bobbette had read about the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Male Negro, and had learned that for 40 years the US Public Health ...

Showboating

John Upton: George Carman, 9 May 2002

No Ordinary Man: A Life of George Carman 
by Dominic Carman.
Hodder, 331 pp., £18.99, January 2002, 0 340 82098 5
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... press by the mere mention of Carman’s name had led the Telegraph to forget that the dead can’t sue for libel, because as anyone who has frequented the pubs and wine bars around the Temple would confirm, George Carman did not lead a quiet life. In the 1980s and 1990s it was usual to find him on several nights of the week in Daly’s, a wine bar near the ...

Stone Cold

Nicholas Wade, 29 August 1991

Too hot to handle 
by Frank Close.
W.H. Allen, 376 pp., £14.99, January 1991, 1 85227 206 6
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... Fleischmann were not just recalibrating their detectors or smoothing out data: they were reporting black as white, and committing a very serious breach of scientific ethics. The pair committed other assaults on conventional scientific procedure. Their blunders are almost enough to evoke sympathy, were it not for the fact that to this day they have not recanted ...

Writing it down

Peter Parsons, 31 August 1989

Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens 
by Rosalind Thomas.
Cambridge, 321 pp., £27.50, March 1989, 0 521 35025 5
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... books, as well as beds, were soon being exported as far as the remote and isolated colonies of the Black Sea. And yet the book itself remains, well into the Middle Ages, an oddly approximate item: a string of letters, without word-divisions, with minimal punctuation, it leaves the reader to pick out the words and organise them into sentences. Many readers ...

Diary

Elisa Segrave: The bride wore fur, 30 November 1995

... Hackney neighbour, who kept banging on his door and holding up new-born puppies, threatening to sue him and his mongrel Sid for paternity unless he found them homes. Already ‘stressed out’, it was doubtful that he would be able to get out of bed in time for the morning ceremony. He did.) Of course in not having a white wedding, I was simply following ...

The Light Waters of Amnion

Dan Jacobson: Bruno Schulz, 1 July 1999

The Collected Works of Bruno Schulz 
edited by Jerzy Ficowski.
Picador, 582 pp., £50, December 1998, 0 330 34783 7
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... man-about-town is swallowed by a crocodile and then, from within the beast’s belly, threatens to sue its owner for damages. (I suspect that that crocodile had a hand or claw in the title Schulz gave to his first book.) Nothing would be easier than to make an anthology of striking descriptions and flights of fancy from this volume to illustrate both the ...

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