“... but of the nation itself. They want their country to provide a sensational tableau for them to star in, rather than merely a congenial background to their lives. Neal Ascherson’s bus party (LRB, 21 August) sounds like the Makars on wheels. One hesitates to shut the door on such a charming bunch. All the same, I wouldn’t much fancy them parking in my ... ”
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The Person in the Phone Booth
David Trotter: Phone Booths, 28 January 2010
“... retractable tripod fizzing with static on top, but no sign of insanitary behaviour below. The star of that film, Keanu Reeves, also appears in The Matrix (1999) as Thomas Anderson, a.k.a. Neo, a company man turned hacker turned messiah. At the film’s conclusion, Neo phones in a proclamation of defiance from a booth on a busy street in the virtual world ... ”
Like a Thunderbolt
Sheila Fitzpatrick: Solzhenitsyn’s Mission, 11 September 2008
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
by Liudmila Saraskina.
Molodaia gvardiia, 935 pp., €30, April 2008,978 5 235 03102 9 Show More
by Liudmila Saraskina.
Molodaia gvardiia, 935 pp., €30, April 2008,
“... sympathies in 1917-18 are unclear). By the time Solzhenitsyn entered the University of Rostov, a star student and one of eight holders of ‘Stalin’ stipends, he had resolved his childhood ambivalence – Saraskina sees this as a conversion – and with the single-mindedness that was to be characteristic of his adult life, become a thoroughgoing Soviet ... ”
Homer Inc
Edward Luttwak, 23 February 2012
The Iliad by Homer
translated by Stephen Mitchell.
Weidenfeld, 463 pp., £25, October 2011,978 0 297 85973 4 Show More
translated by Stephen Mitchell.
Weidenfeld, 463 pp., £25, October 2011,
“... II’s regal dates fit, roughly 1295-1272 BCE, and so do the names: Alaksandu cannot be other than Alexander, which happens to be the other name of Paris, he who stole away the wife and treasure of Menelaus, but it is certainly the name of a decidedly Greek ruler. Wilusa is most definitely Troy. The book we know as Iliad is the adjective for the city of Ilios ... ”
Sisyphus at the Selectric
James Wolcott: Undoing Philip Roth, 20 May 2021
Philip Roth: The Biography
by Blake Bailey.
Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021,978 0 224 09817 5 Show More
by Blake Bailey.
Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021,
Philip Roth: A Counterlife
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021,978 0 19 984610 8 Show More
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021,
Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020,978 0 525 50524 2 Show More
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020,
“... stylings could only sedate the rumblings for so long, and then, as if fired from a cannon, came Alexander Portnoy wagging his dingdong and marauding for shiksas.The tremendous, scandalous success of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), that pyrotechnical display of flying ejaculate, stopped-up bowels, Jewish angst and mother-woe, revived and inflamed accusations ... ”
Hush-Hush Boom-Boom
Charles Glass: Spymasters, 12 August 2021
The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War – A Tragedy in Three Acts
by Scott Anderson.
Picador, 576 pp., £20, February,978 1 5290 4247 4 Show More
by Scott Anderson.
Picador, 576 pp., £20, February,
“... Alexander Cockburn blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars ... ”
When the Costume Comes Off
Adam Mars-Jones: Philip Hensher, 14 April 2011
King of the Badgers
by Philip Hensher.
Fourth Estate, 436 pp., £18.99, March 2011,978 0 00 730133 1 Show More
by Philip Hensher.
Fourth Estate, 436 pp., £18.99, March 2011,
“... of this realisation came his interest in such non-cowardly homosexuals as T.E. Lawrence (Ross) and Alexander the Great (Adventure Story). But perhaps the question to be asked is: why should a heterosexual writer adopt a gay point of view? What’s the benefit, not to the person, but to the novel? There needs to be some novelistic payoff, if we accept that the ... ”
Even Now
Neal Ascherson: The Silence of Günter Grass, 2 November 2006
Beim Häuten der Zwiebel
by Günter Grass.
Steidl, 480 pp., €24, September 2006,3 86521 330 8 Show More
by Günter Grass.
Steidl, 480 pp., €24, September 2006,
“... suffered. There is something in this. The famous 1967 study of German psychology by Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich had the title Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: the incapacity to mourn, rather than the incapacity to empathise with others. It was not that postwar Germans lacked self-pity. How could they fail to be sorry for themselves when they remembered ... ”
Poor Sasha, Poor Masha
Adam Mars-Jones: Neel Mukherjee’s Pessimism, 1 August 2024
“... attempted some such mischief in my novel Box Hill.) Discussing Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, Germaine Greer remarked that reaction to the novel would have been rather different if the narrator’s love object, the young man whose tutor he is, had been female. These days there can be a blanket ... ”
What else actually is there?
Jenny Turner: On Gillian Rose, 7 November 2024
Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory
by Gillian Rose, edited by Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson.
Verso, 176 pp., £16.99, September,978 1 80429 011 8 Show More
by Gillian Rose, edited by Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson.
Verso, 176 pp., £16.99, September,
“... University of Sussex in 1986. But she would like us, she said, to see Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander if we could, and to read ‘The Immortal Story’ by Isak Dinesen, ‘whom I have since discovered has become rather trrrendy’ (a film had just been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert ... ”
As Astonishing as Elvis
Jenny Turner: Ayn Rand, 1 December 2005
“... read The Fountainhead at high school, and both were besotted by it. Quickly, very quickly, these star-struck, good-looking youngsters became Rand’s best friends, surrogate children, protégés and heirs. In 1953, Nathan and Barbara married; in 1954, Nathan changed his name to Nathaniel Branden. Early in 1955, according to The Passion of Ayn Rand, the ... ”
Don’t be a Kerensky!
David Runciman: Kissinger looks for his prince, 3 December 2020
The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World
by Barry Gewen.
Norton, 452 pp., £22.99, April 2020,978 1 324 00405 9 Show More
by Barry Gewen.
Norton, 452 pp., £22.99, April 2020,
Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography
by Thomas Schwartz.
Hill and Wang, 548 pp., £27.99, September 2020,978 0 8090 9537 7 Show More
by Thomas Schwartz.
Hill and Wang, 548 pp., £27.99, September 2020,
“... for new political figures who burst brightly on the scene was: ‘Don’t be a Kerensky!’ Alexander Kerensky was the leader of the February Revolution in 1917 and briefly the darling of the democratic world until the Bolsheviks consigned him to the dustbin of history nine months later. He spent the last 53 years of his life eking out a living as a ... ”
The Lives of Ronald Pinn
Andrew O’Hagan, 8 January 2015
“... names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan Police Force in the 1960s. Until very recently, it was thought, in-house, to be a legitimate ... ”
Where little Fyodor played
Stephen Greenblatt, 24 January 1991
“... literature in the life of the country. ‘The USSR has lost its spiritual goal, its ideal,’ said Alexander Mikhailov, an official of the Writers’ Union and editor of Literary Workshop: Our revolution overthrew not only the Tsar but throne and God together. In place of God, the people were offered the world revolution and the victory of Communism. But ... ”
My Darlings
Colm Tóibín: Drinking with Samuel Beckett, 5 April 2007
“... on screen was reduced in the editing room simply because he would draw attention away from the star. After Lord Jim he said: ‘I’ll never do another film where I have anything to say to the star.’ When he played in a television version of Waiting for Godot in 1961, the problem was identified by Louis MacNeice in a ... ”
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