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Malgudi Revisited

Robert Taubman, 21 May 1981

... of different Rajus in the past – the tourist guide in Malgudi who is a bit of a con man, the young lover, the fantastically rich manager of a dancing girl (Narayan’s documentation is as usual convincing), the casual defrauder sentenced to jail. Raju is almost suicidally casual about changing his roles, yet they’re wholly sincere as long as they ...

One Enchanted Evening

J. Robert Lennon: Chris Adrian, 17 November 2011

The Great Night 
by Chris Adrian.
Granta, 292 pp., £16.99, June 2011, 978 1 84708 186 5
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... and perhaps only, staging of the musical. Adrian is not alone, even (or especially) among his young American cohort, in his rejection of the idea that fiction must employ received structures, themes and styles. Freedom comes at a cost, however, and Adrian’s generation is susceptible to generalised whimsy – the result, perhaps, of being under the spell ...

Diary

Robert Morley: Give me a Basher to travel, 20 March 1986

... I told the taxi driver: ‘I always fall down in snow.’ We parked on concrete and instantly a young man hurried from the massive doorway. ‘Good,’ I told myself, ‘I am expected.’ But he was only alarmed at our proximity. ‘Not here,’ he chided, ‘you mustn’t park here.’ Attendance wasn’t brisk, but then Sir William Burrell insisted the ...

London Review of Crooks

Robert Marshall-Andrews, 15 July 1982

Rough Justice: The Extraordinary Truth about Charles Richardson and his Gang 
by Robert Parker.
Fontana, 352 pp., £1.95, October 1981, 0 00 636354 7
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Web of Corruption: The Story of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith 
by Raymond Fitzwalter and David Taylor.
Granada, 282 pp., £12.50, October 1981, 0 246 10915 7
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Inside Boss: South Africa’s Secret Police 
by Gordon Winter.
Penguin, 640 pp., £7.95, October 1981, 9780140057515
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Crime in Wartime: A Social History of Crime in World War II 
by Edward Smithies.
Allen and Unwin, 219 pp., £12.50, January 1982, 0 04 364020 6
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... procedings and a long quotation from Nicholas Monsarrat’s novel The Cruel Sea, in which a young naval officer berates the idleness of dockyard workers. The use of Mr Monsarrat’s novel might be thought entertaining in a university debate, but it is a poor factual basis on which to pass judgment upon an entire section of the working class in the ...

Miles from Palestine

Robert Fisk, 23 June 1988

The Yellow Wind 
by David Grossman, translated by Haim Watzman.
Cape, 202 pp., £10.95, June 1988, 9780224025669
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... who live outside ‘Palestine’ – a homeland which many tens of thousands of them are too young ever to have known – but the Jewish settlers who have actually moved into the West Bank. Here the rhetoric operates in an obverse, obtuse way. When Yoel Ben-Nun tells Grossman, in the West Bank, ‘the Jordan River is not the border of Greater Israel but ...

My Dagger into Yow

Ian Donaldson: Sidney’s Letters, 25 April 2013

The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney 
edited by Roger Kuin.
Oxford, 1381 pp., £250, July 2012, 978 0 19 955822 3
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... Letters, Robert Lovelace remarks in Clarissa, are a way of ‘writing from the heart’. A brilliant letter-writer though a terrible etymologist, Lovelace finds warrant for this belief in the word correspondence: letters (so he thinks) touch the core, the coeur, of their senders’ being, revealing their innermost thoughts and sensations, showing their essential character ...

Hitler’s Belgian Partner

Robert Paxton, 27 January 1994

Collaboration in Belgium: Léon Degrelle and the Rexist Movement 
by Martin Conway.
Yale, 364 pp., £30, October 1993, 0 300 05500 5
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... the summer and autumn of 1942 and in the winter of 1943-4, suffering frightful casualties. These young men’s deaths bought Degrelle increased support in Berlin, and eventually a virtual alliance with the SS. They also enabled this one-time journalist to discover a taste for military action: Degrelle actually fought (unlike the paper collaborators of France ...

Mao Badges and Rocket Parts

Robert Macfarlane, 23 August 2001

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress 
by Dai Sijie, translated by Ina Rilke.
Chatto, 208 pp., £10, June 2001, 0 7011 6982 6
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The Drink and Dream Teahouse 
by Justin Hill.
Weidenfeld, 344 pp., £12.99, March 2001, 0 297 64697 4
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... Xun in editions that provided the correct ideological spin. For the ‘educated youth’ – the young city-dwellers who were sent in their millions to the countryside for ‘re-education’ through labour during the Cultural Revolution – these restrictions induced a powerful hunger for literature beyond the prescribed Communist diet. Inevitably, Mao’s ...

Ripping the pig

Robert Bernard Martin, 5 August 1982

The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson: Vol. 1 1821-1850 
edited by Cecil Lang and Edgar Shannon.
Oxford, 366 pp., £17.50, February 1982, 0 19 812569 0
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Tennyson: ‘In Memoriam’ 
edited by Susan Shatto and Marion Shaw.
Oxford, 397 pp., £25, March 1982, 0 19 812747 2
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... the instructions of the poet’s widow and son in repainting the portrait of Tennyson as a young man which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Emily Tennyson had never liked the picture, perhaps in part because she also disliked Edward FitzGerald, who had originally commissioned it from Samuel Laurence. Earlier she had asked Watts to repaint ...

Gloriously Fucked

J. Robert Lennon: Paul Auster’s ‘4321’, 2 February 2017

4321 
by Paul Auster.
Faber, 866 pp., £20, January 2017, 978 0 571 32462 0
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... be transplanted into another without disrupting the narrative. (Mercifully, Ferguson no. 2 dies young, the victim of a falling tree branch; we’re forced to flip past his blank chapter headings for the rest of the novel.) The timelines all cover the same twenty years (roughly, the 1950s and 1960s) and many of the same locales in New York and New ...

The Great Mary

Dinah Birch, 13 September 1990

Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-Eminent Edwardian 
by John Sutherland.
Oxford, 432 pp., £16.99, August 1990, 0 19 818587 1
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... the showy opulence of her houses, servants and shooting parties brought her few friends among the young, and contributed as much to her drooping reputation as the steady stream of trite romances she published after the turn of the century. And women have not been ready to forgive her relentless championship of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League, the ...

What Life Says to Us

Stephanie Burt: Robert Creeley, 21 February 2008

The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-75 
California, 681 pp., £12.55, October 2006, 0 520 24158 4Show More
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1975-2005 
California, 662 pp., £29.95, October 2006, 0 520 24159 2Show More
On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay 
by Robert Creeley.
California, 89 pp., £12.95, April 2006, 0 520 24791 4
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Selected Poems: 1945-2005 
by Robert Creeley, edited by Benjamin Friedlander.
California, 339 pp., $21.95, January 2008, 978 0 520 25196 0
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... For a spell during the 1960s, Robert Creeley’s ‘I Know a Man’ may have been the most often quoted, even the most widely known, short poem by a living American. Here is the poem: As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, – John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going ...

Scary Dad

J. Robert Lennon, 10 May 2018

My Absolute Darling 
by Gabriel Tallent.
Fourth Estate, 432 pp., £12.99, August 2017, 978 0 00 818521 3
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Elmet 
by Fiona Mozley.
John Murray, 311 pp., £8.99, March 2018, 978 1 4736 7649 7
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... two very different first novels, one by an American man whose protagonist is a nonconforming young woman; the other by a British woman whose protagonist is a nonconforming young man. The two examine childhood, parenthood and self-determination, at a time when true autonomy is rare. The British novel reads like a ...

The Nominated Boy

Robert Macfarlane: The Panchen Lama, 29 November 2001

The Search for the Panchen Lama 
by Isabel Hilton.
Penguin, 336 pp., £7.99, August 2001, 0 14 024670 3
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... specific location can be divined from the clues, the search party will travel there to inspect the young males of the area for signs of godhead. Often, the searchers will carry props with them and carry out recognition tests: the boys may be shown a collection of artefacts, some of which belonged to the previous bodhisattva, and asked to pick from ...

Father and Son

Tony Gould, 23 June 1988

When the fighting is over: A Personal Story of the Battle for Tumbledown Mountain and its Aftermath 
by John Lawrence and Robert Lawrence.
Bloomsbury, 196 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 0 7475 0174 2
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Tumbledown 
by Charles Wood.
Penguin, 80 pp., £3.95, April 1988, 0 14 011198 0
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... that Tumbledown was the name of one of the few serious battles in the Falklands campaign and that Robert Lawrence was the platoon commander in the 2nd Battalion, the Scots Guards, who had 40 per cent of his brain removed by a sniper’s bullet after he had earned himself a Military Cross by his bravery. Even before the film was shown on BBC television on 31 ...

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