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Our Shapeshifting Companion

David Cantor: Cancer, 7 March 2013

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer 
by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
Fourth Estate, 571 pp., £9.99, September 2011, 978 0 00 725092 9
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... interventions had been crude. In the late 19th century, the Johns Hopkins surgeon William Stewart Halsted pioneered radical forms of mastectomy, shunning what he called ‘mistaken kindness’ in favour of removing not only the breast but much, much more. The key to successful treatment, he believed, was to remove the tumour while it was still ...

Short is sweet

Christopher Ricks, 3 February 1983

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs 
edited by J.A. Simpson.
Oxford, 256 pp., £7.95, October 1982, 0 19 866131 2
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A World of Proverbs 
by Patricia Houghton.
Blandford, 152 pp., £5.95, September 1981, 0 7137 1114 0
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... is up against variant forms from 1766 and 1776; that an injustice may have been done to Sir Robert Walpole (‘All those men have their price’); that ‘It is the first step which counts’ gets its power from the miracle that followed St Denis’s execution – ‘Afterwards he picked up his head and walked for six miles’; that nobody ever quite ...

Just like Mother

Theo Tait: Richard Yates, 6 February 2003

Collected Stories 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 474 pp., £17.99, January 2002, 0 413 77125 3
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Revolutionary Road 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 346 pp., £6.99, February 2001, 0 413 75710 2
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The Easter Parade 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 226 pp., £10, January 2003, 0 413 77202 0
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... in Hollywood, but none of his scripts was ever produced. He worked as a speech-writer for Robert Kennedy, a career cut short by JFK’s assassination. Recently, there has been a considerable resurgence of interest in his writing, previously limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, ...

Newspaperising the World

Sadakat Kadri: The Leveson Inquiry, 5 July 2012

Dial M for Murdoch 
by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman.
Allen Lane, 360 pp., £20, April 2012, 978 1 84614 603 9
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... he proclaimed, ‘is the most humble day of my life.’ As the American satirist Jon Stewart observed, Murdoch wasn’t so humbled that he was willing to wait his turn to speak. But his very presence in Portcullis House represented an extraordinary turnaround. After dominating British journalism for four decades, he and his putative heir were ...

I’m not an actress

Michael Newton: Ava Gardner, 7 September 2006

Ava Gardner 
by Lee Server.
Bloomsbury, 551 pp., £20, April 2006, 0 7475 6547 3
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... as though what’s going on out there were more interesting to her than the rigmarole in the car. Robert Siodmak, the director, told her what to do in minute detail, forcing her to play down her performance. Whoever deserves the credit, the result is a little piece of perfection, a rare instance of downbeat, off-guard grace. Gardner was never so good ...

On the Window Ledge of the Union

Colin Kidd: Loyalism v. Unionism, 7 February 2013

Belfast 400: People, Place and History 
edited by S.J. Connolly.
Liverpool, 392 pp., £14.95, November 2012, 978 1 84631 634 0
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Ulster since 1600: Politics, Economy and Society 
edited by Liam Kennedy and Philip Ollerenshaw.
Oxford, 355 pp., £35, November 2012, 978 0 19 958311 9
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The Plantation of Ulster: Ideology and Practice 
edited by Eamonn O Ciardha and Micheál O Siochrú.
Manchester, 269 pp., £70, October 2012, 978 0 7190 8608 3
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The End of Ulster Loyalism? 
by Peter Shirlow.
Manchester, 230 pp., £16.99, May 2012, 978 0 7190 8476 8
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... other community. Ulster is, and remains, a collage of confessional territories. As the late A.T.Q. Stewart remarked in his history of Ulster, The Narrow Ground (1977), every resident of the province carries around in his or her head a complex and detailed geography: they know which villages or streets are Protestant or Catholic, or mixed. These internalised ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Allelujah!, 3 January 2019

... off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly from ...

Ways to Be Pretentious

Ian Penman, 5 May 2016

M Train 
by Patti Smith.
Bloomsbury, 253 pp., £18.99, October 2015, 978 1 4088 6768 6
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Collected Lyrics 1970-2015 
by Patti Smith.
Bloomsbury, 303 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 1 4088 6300 8
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... her holy presence, not to listen to the once volatile, trance-inducing music. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in 1974 Smith (née Smith), who turns seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is ...

Dunbar’s Disappearance

Sally Mapstone: William Dunbar, 24 May 2001

The Poems of William Dunbar 
edited by Priscilla Bawcutt.
Association for Scottish Literary Studies, £70, May 1999, 0 948877 38 3
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... female and male, from Margaret Tudor and the Virgin Mary to the celebrated diplomat Bernard Stewart. The dextrous harmonising of gender roles in the London poem isn’t typical of his later work, but it is entirely fitting for a piece written within the context of marital negotiations, especially by a young and attention-seeking poet. Dunbar is the ...

Shaving-Pot in Waiting

Rosemary Hill: Victoria’s Albert, 23 February 2012

Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death That Changed the Monarchy 
by Helen Rappaport.
Hutchinson, 336 pp., £20, November 2011, 978 0 09 193154 4
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Albert 
by Jules Stewart.
I.B. Tauris, 276 pp., £19.99, October 2011, 978 1 84885 977 7
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... popularity with her accession, it could take nothing for granted. It was less than a decade since Robert Peel had predicted that it would not last another five years, and while the violent civil disorder of the early 1830s had abated, there was still considerable ambivalence towards an institution whose incumbents in the two previous reigns had done much to ...

Into the Second Term

R.W. Johnson: New Labour, 5 April 2001

Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour 
by Andrew Rawnsley.
Hamish Hamilton, 434 pp., £17.99, September 2000, 0 241 14029 3
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Mandelson and the Making of New Labour 
by Donald Macintyre.
HarperCollins, 638 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 0 00 653062 1
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Mo Mowlam: The Biography 
by Julia Langdon.
Little, Brown, 324 pp., £16.99, September 2000, 0 316 85304 6
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Ann Widdecombe: Right from the Beginning 
by Nicholas Kochan.
Politico’s, 302 pp., September 2000, 1 902301 55 2
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The Paymaster: Geoffrey Robinson, Maxwell and New Labour 
by Tom Bower.
Simon and Schuster, 272 pp., £17.99, March 2001, 0 7432 0689 4
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The Future of Politics 
by Charles Kennedy.
HarperCollins, 235 pp., £17.99, September 2000, 0 00 710131 7
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... everyone knew that Callaghan, Jenkins, George Brown, Healey, Castle, Crosland, Shore, Benn, Stewart and Crossman were political heavyweights – while the only real heavyweight now besides Blair is Gordon Brown. Parliament’s weakness is best gauged by the way the number of MPs keeps creeping up – from 615 before the war to 659 now. America, with ...

Horrid Mutilation! Read all about it!

Richard Davenport-Hines: Jack the Ripper and the London Press by Perry Curtis, 4 April 2002

Jack the Ripper and the London Press 
by Perry Curtis.
Yale, 354 pp., £25, February 2002, 0 300 08872 8
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... real culprit than did the exertions of Scotland Yard in 1888’, but he is unduly dismissive of Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey’s The Lodger: The Arrest and Escape of Jack the Ripper (1995). This indicts a ferocious misogynist, Francis Tumblety (c.1833-1903), an American quack who peddled a patent medicine known as the Tumblety Pimple Destroyer. (He was ...

From Progress to Catastrophe

Perry Anderson: The Historical Novel, 28 July 2011

... to agricultural to commercial forms of society, Scott absorbed from Adam Ferguson and Dugald Stewart and mapped onto his re-creation of the conflicts between Highlands and Lowlands, clan and capital, in Waverley and its sequels. It was Scott’s capacity to represent the tragic collision between historically distinct times and their characteristic social ...

Everybody’s Joan

Marina Warner, 6 December 2012

... Florence Carrez, played the title role in Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, the classic film made by Robert Bresson in 1962; Delay became a writer not long after her role in Bresson’s film, and is now an académicienne. She drew attention to Péguy’s dream of fusing faith, hope and charity with the three Republican virtues in order to establish a universal ...

It isn’t the lines

Bee Wilson: Paul Newman’s Looks, 16 February 2023

Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man 
by Paul Newman, edited by David Rosenthal.
Century, 320 pp., £25, October 2022, 978 1 5291 9706 8
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The Last Movie Stars 
directed by Ethan Hawke.
HBO/CNN
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... would often delay the shooting of a scene because he wanted to discuss every element in detail (Robert Redford, who played the Sundance Kid, just wanted to hurry up and finish). ‘Then what Paul would do with the scene would have no relationship to what we’d been talking about for the last half-hour.’ He put far more agony and effort into his ...

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