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Slicing and Mauling

Anne Hollander: The Art of War, 6 November 2003

From Criminal to Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550-1672 
by David Kunzle.
Brill, 645 pp., £64, November 2002, 90 04 12369 5
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... cruelties soon to be visited on the occupied Netherlands by his son Philip, whom he had just made King of Spain, and to whom he now entrusted them.Kunzle sees one of Pieter Brueghel’s versions of the Massacre of the Innocents as an expression of political protest specifically against Philip’s military tyranny in the Netherlands, and even more specifically ...

It is still mañana

Matthew Bevis: Robert Frost’s Letters, 19 February 2015

The Letters of Robert Frost, Vol. 1: 1886-1920 
edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson and Robert Faggen.
Harvard, 811 pp., £33.95, March 2014, 978 0 674 05760 9
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... been swinging them,’ before shifting to ‘You’d think … You may see,’ and ending with a pearl of wisdom: ‘One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.’ The movement from ‘I’ to ‘you’ to ‘one’ feels a little too cosy or coddling, as though the one thing needful were for the experience to be converted into a form of knowledge. The ...

On a Chinese Mountain

Frank Kermode, 20 November 1986

The Royal Beasts 
by William Empson.
Chatto, 201 pp., £12.95, November 1986, 0 7011 3084 9
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Essays on Shakespeare 
by William Empson.
Cambridge, 246 pp., £25, May 1986, 0 521 25577 5
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... be treated like the native human populations, they ask to be regarded as beasts belonging to the King, feeling sure that he treats his animals better than his human subjects. So the immediate question, are they men or not? acquires some political urgency. This is where their breeding season becomes important. Haffenden quotes a long unposted letter to ...

Pseudo-Travellers

Ian Gilmour and David Gilmour, 7 February 1985

From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict 
by Joan Peters.
Joseph, 601 pp., £15, February 1985, 0 7181 2528 2
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... Before rushing to judgment she should have recalled the US treatment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. As an example of Arab ill-treatment of Jews, Peters mentions Nasser’s hanging of two Egyptian Jews as Zionist spies and suggests that the trial was a frame-up. Apparently she has managed not to hear of the ‘Lavon affair’, in which the Israeli ...

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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... themselves from the prison of race when in fact they still couldn’t see beyond its walls. After Pearl Harbour, he wrote, wartime Los Angeles seethed with a ‘tight, crazy feeling of race as thick in the street as gas fumes’, and no one was above the fray. Himes captured the atmosphere better than anyone in his LA novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go and ...

Things go kerflooey

Ruby Hamilton: David Lynch’s Gee-Wizardry, 11 September 2025

David Lynch’s American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema 
by Mike Miley.
Bloomsbury, 272 pp., £21.99, January, 979 8 7651 0289 3
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... to see its appeal. Eraserhead might have vanished if it hadn’t been for Ben Barenholtz, the king of New York’s midnight movie scene, who had also popularised Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘acid Western’ El Topo and John Waters’s ‘filth epic’ Pink Flamingos. Waters – a direct contemporary but no eagle scout – was another early ...

Literary Friction

Jenny Turner: Kathy Acker’s Ashes, 19 October 2017

After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography 
by Chris Kraus.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 1 63590 006 4
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... kept flying back to the US.In September 1997, she performed pieces from her last novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates, with music from the Mekons at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. During the final performance she collapsed. She got herself to San Francisco, where she booked a room in a Travelodge and phoned Glück, and then Viegener. A hospital ...

A Feeling for Ice

Jenny Diski, 2 January 1997

... murkier parts of Kings Cross and the old un-reconstructed Docklands appeal, then Grytviken is a pearl of desolation. A rust-bucket ghost town, left to rot in its own beautiful way.We were greeted by a ruddy-faced Englishman in a fisherman’s sweater and his hearty wife, though my attention was gripped by the surreal sight of three soldiers in camouflage ...

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