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‘Someone you had to be a bit careful with’

David Sylvester: Gallery Rogues, 30 March 2000

Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser 
by Harriet Vyner.
Faber, 317 pp., £20, October 1999, 0 571 19627 6
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... that I’d spoken in good faith. When the case came to court, I found Roland Penrose and Bryan Robertson there as potential expert witnesses. The only one of us to be called was Robertson. He proceeded to give a speech which was stunning in its authority and lucidity, a quiet, patient, courteous, relentless demolition of philistinism. It turned the ...

After-Time

Christopher Hitchens, 19 October 1995

Palimpsest: A Memoir 
by Gore Vidal.
Deutsch, 432 pp., £17.99, October 1995, 0 233 98891 2
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... second novel, won him attention and execration in about equal measure. The dedicatee was one ‘J.T.’ Just a few feet away from that marble slab in Rock Creek, one can discover a small grey stone with the inscription ‘James Trimble III. 1925-1945. Iwo Jima’. And here the quest is over. Vidal intends to be buried as near as he can be to his first and ...

It’s the moral thing to do

James Meek: ‘Breaking Bad’, 3 January 2013

Breaking Bad: Complete Seasons 1-4 
produced by Vince Gilligan.
Sony Pictures, £32.75, October 2012
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... orders is better than fucking,’ was an often-heard mafia saying. Walter is played by Bryan Cranston, previously best known for comedy roles – the father in Malcolm in the Middle and the dentist Tim Whatley in Seinfeld. Walter White is, for Cranston, a great mid-life unfolding of talent meeting opportunity: the challenge of a part within a ...

Tousy-Mousy

Anne Barton: Mary Shelley, 8 February 2001

Mary Shelley 
by Miranda Seymour.
Murray, 665 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 7195 5711 9
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Mary Shelley in Her Times 
edited by Betty Bennett and Stuart Curran.
Johns Hopkins, 311 pp., £33, September 2000, 0 8018 6334 1
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Mary Shelley's Fictions 
edited by Michael Eberle-Sinatra.
Palgrave, 250 pp., £40, August 2000, 0 333 77106 0
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... being loved.’ The various men on whom in the course of time she seems to have placed her hopes (Bryan Proctor, Aubrey Beauclerk, John Howard Payne, Washington Irving, Prosper Mérimée) tended to want too much from her, remain elusive or abruptly marry someone else. Most depressing of all was her late romantic fixation on the Italian adventurer Ferdinando ...

Like Colonel Sanders

Christopher Tayler: The Stan Lee Era, 2 December 2021

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee 
by Abraham Riesman.
Bantam, 320 pp., £20, February, 978 0 593 13571 6
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Stan Lee: A Life in Comics 
by Liel Leibovitz.
Yale, 192 pp., £16.99, June 2020, 978 0 300 23034 5
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... to sustain an increasingly expensive lifestyle. Joan was a great shopper, as was their daughter, JC, who now needed a Manhattan apartment to pursue a career as a socialite and would-be actor. ‘I’ll see to it that you and Joanie will never have to want for anything as long as you live,’ Goodman told Lee while selling his empire to Cadence ...

Don’t like it? You don’t have to play

Wyatt Mason: David Foster Wallace, 18 November 2004

Oblivion: Stories 
by David Foster Wallace.
Abacus, 329 pp., £12, July 2004, 0 349 11810 8
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... to persuade the woman via a threat of force was a mistake. Citing a rhetorical prescription from Bryan Garner, who compiled the Oxford Dictionary of Modern American Usage, Wallace brought his 17,000 words on the usage wars to a close on a note that melded hortatory optimism with experiential pragmatism. Imagine the phrase needlepointed into a pillow, or ...

Wham Bang, Teatime

Ian Penman: Bowie, 5 January 2017

The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference 
by Paul Morley.
Simon & Schuster, 484 pp., £20, July 2016, 978 1 4711 4808 8
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On Bowie 
by Rob Sheffield.
Headline, 197 pp., £14.99, June 2016, 978 1 4722 4104 7
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On Bowie 
by Simon Critchley.
Serpent’s Tail, 207 pp., £6.99, April 2016, 978 1 78125 745 6
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Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy 
by Simon Reynolds.
Faber, 704 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 0 571 30171 3
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... that amid all the Genet references, Mingus namedrops and mime moves, the likes of Bolan, Bowie and Bryan Ferry were very much in love with, and shaped by, mainstream British showbiz and Saturday night TV. Recall: Lulu singing ‘The Man Who Sold the World’. Recall: Bryan Ferry duetting with Cilla (‘and special guests ...

Heil Heidegger

J.P. Stern, 20 April 1989

Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie 
by Hugo Ott.
Campus Verlag, 355 pp., DM 48, December 1988, 3 593 34035 6
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... Dreyfus does in his recent discussion of ‘Husserl, Heidegger and Modern Existentialism’ in Bryan Magee’s The Great Philosophers. He begins by outlining Heidegger’s claim that the relation of thinking subject to thought object does not adequately describe our most common relation to things. What Dreyfus calls our ‘everyday masterful, practical ...

Velvet Gentleman

Nick Richardson: Erik Satie, 4 June 2015

A Mammal’s Notebook: The Writings of Erik Satie 
edited by Ornella Volta, translated by Antony Melville.
Atlas, 224 pp., £17.50, June 2014, 978 1 900565 66 0
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... Like so many young ruined Parisians before him he’d fallen in with a dodgy Spanish poet – J.P. Contamine de Latour, real name José Maria Vicente Ferrer Francisco de Paola Patricio Manuel Contamine, from Tarragona. Years later, Latour managed to piece together the following recollection: ‘We didn’t eat every day, but we never missed an aperitif. I ...

Britain’s Thermonuclear Bluff

Norman Dombey and Eric Grove, 22 October 1992

... more sympathetic and arranged for Keith Roberts, who knew the details of the Ward proposal, and Bryan Taylor, who had just joined the Aldermaston staff, to continue work on two-stage radiation implosion devices. They were assisted in the design work by the recruitment of several members of the Harwell fast reactor team; and by 1957 they had designed a ...

Wild and Tattered Kingdom

Owen Hatherley: Fassbinder and His Friends, 29 June 2023

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors 
by Ian Penman.
Fitzcarraldo, 185 pp., £12.99, April, 978 1 80427 042 4
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... such as Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun, his was a name to conjure with. Photocopies of an essay on Bryan Ferry in a cultural studies anthology might be passed from hand to hand, but there was no body of work one could point to. Vital Signs gave only hints; it includes a piece on Fassbinder from 1987 that isn’t worth a paragraph of Fassbinder Thousands of ...

Attila the Hus

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 4 November 1982

Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley 1896-1933 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Secker, 274 pp., £8.95, October 1982, 0 436 28849 4
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... Trent and Mosley was given the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster with responsibility (under J.H. Thomas) for unemployment. A year later he resigned his ministerial post, and in January 1931, he and Cimmie resigned from the Labour Party. The first resignation was a triumph: the second ruined his career. At the time of the election there were over a ...

So Ordinary, So Glamorous

Thomas Jones: Eternal Bowie, 5 April 2012

Starman: David Bowie, the Definitive Biography 
by Paul Trynka.
Sphere, 440 pp., £9.99, March 2012, 978 0 7515 4293 6
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The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s 
by Peter Doggett.
Bodley Head, 424 pp., £20, September 2011, 978 1 84792 144 4
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... but largely vacuous cover versions. Even the idea for a covers album was ripped off from Bryan Ferry. Leaving Ziggy behind meant leaving the Spiders behind too: as the lyrics to ‘Ziggy Stardust’ put it, ‘when the kids had killed the man I had to break up the band.’ Bowie later played down the importance of his partnership with Ronson. In The ...

Light Entertainment

Andrew O’Hagan: Our Paedophile Culture, 8 November 2012

... told me that he was always surrounded by them in Broadcasting House. The actor and director Bryan Forbes, who would go on to direct Whistle Down the Wind and The Stepford Wives, remembered the help he got from Gamlin. Forbes wrote to him at the BBC – at the time Forbes’s name was John Theobald Clarke – and Gamlin wrote back, telling Forbes that ...

The Lives of Ronald Pinn

Andrew O’Hagan, 8 January 2015

... to Camberwell New Cemetery about six years ago, looking for the grave of a young man called Melvin Bryan, a petty criminal who died after being stabbed at a drug-house in Edmonton. Walking down the pathways and over the crisp, frozen leaves, I’d noticed how many of the people buried there had died young – you can often pick them out by the soft toys ...

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