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Here for the crunch

R.W. Johnson, 28 April 1994

... African circuit so long off-limits to them; endless self-appointed ‘monitoring’ teams from black American universities; old South African exiles like the actor Anthony Sher, the ex-clergyman Cosmas Desmond – now the only white man on the PAC list – and Ronald Segal, once editor of the Penguin Africa Library, now bitterly inveighing against the ...

You have to take it

Joanne O’Leary: Elizabeth Hardwick’s Style, 17 November 2022

A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick 
by Cathy Curtis.
Norton, 400 pp., £25, January, 978 1 324 00552 0
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The Uncollected Essays 
by Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Alex Andriesse.
NYRB, 304 pp., £15.99, May, 978 1 68137 623 3
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... with jockeys on the front porch. It’s amusing to learn that her charming, conniving father, Eugene, a plumber who enjoyed baseball and jazz, once cheated his mother-in-law out of enough money to buy himself a boat, and that her mother, Mary, a stout woman with a ‘boneless, soft prettiness’ and the ‘scarcest of eyebrows’, was a devout ...

Lincoln, Illinois

William Fiennes, 6 March 1997

All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories 
by William Maxwell.
Harvill, 415 pp., £10.99, January 1997, 1 86046 308 8
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So Long, See You Tomorrow 
by William Maxwell.
Harvill, 135 pp., £8.99, January 1997, 9781860463075
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... as his wife tries on her old evening dresses: ‘She tried them on, one after another – the black taffeta with the bouffant skirt, the pale sea-green silk with matching silk fringe – all her favourite dresses that she had been too fond of to take to a thrift shop, and that had been languishing on the top shelf of her closet’ Objects in the house ...

Seventy Years in a Colourful Trade

Andrew O’Hagan: The Soho Alphabet, 16 July 2020

Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia 
by Darren Coffield.
Unbound, 364 pp., £25, April 2020, 978 1 78352 816 5
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... in Lassie, Karolyn Grimes, who played Jimmy Stewart’s daughter in It’s a Wonderful Life, and Eugene Mazzola, who was in The Ten Commandments. I assured Miss Moore I could do just as well as any of those creeps in any picture she could get me into. She told me I should gain experience in the West End and then call her. Thus my fascination with London. I ...

Pint for Pint

Thomas Laqueur: The Price of Blood, 14 October 1999

Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce 
by Douglas Starr.
Little, Brown, 429 pp., £20, February 1999, 0 316 91146 1
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... United States Public Health Service appropriated to represent syphilis to the largely illiterate black men who were about to become the unwitting subjects of medical observation in the notorious Tuskegee experiment; Paul Goodman’s Of One Blood (the phrase is from Acts 17.26), about the abolitionist response to St Paul’s pronouncement that the whole human ...

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
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... the attention of OSS. He managed its accounts in Algiers, making enough money for himself on the black market to buy a well-provisioned wine cellar and a luxury sedan. When American forces disembarked in the South of France in August 1944 and advanced up the Rhone Valley, OSS sent him to Alsace to interrogate and suborn German prisoners of war. Of the thirty ...

Divinely Ordained

Jackson Lears: God loves America, 19 May 2011

A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided 
by Amanda Foreman.
Penguin, 988 pp., £12.99, June 2011, 978 0 14 104058 5
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... to complicate this heroic narrative. Guided at times by Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner and David Brion Davis conceived slavery as a mode of organising labour, as well as a system of racial domination. This led to the recognition that advocates of ‘free labour’ had economic as well as humanitarian reasons for opposing ...

Driving through a Postcard

Christian Lorentzen: In New Hampshire, 3 March 2016

... without ever raising the topic of race myself. Roberto’s case rested on his years dating a black woman and then living with a Muslim woman before at last marrying an Italian. He was a big fan of The Apprentice, and said he was voting for its former host because we need a president with ‘rough edges’. ‘We need a guy with big ones right here,’ he ...

Calf and Other Loves

Wendy Doniger, 4 August 1994

Dearest Pet: On Bestiality 
by Midas Dekkers, translated by Paul Vincent.
Verso, 208 pp., £18.95, June 1994, 0 86091 462 3
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... liked sitting in a tree reading Playboy in the mornings. And Lucy used Playgirl when masturbating. Eugene Linden regards this as “the most impressive proof of the complex intelligence of chimpanzees. So be it.’ It seems to me to argue equally well for the low intelligence of humans. ‘Like every product of the imagination, pornography is also art, albeit ...

Post-Photographic

Peter Campbell, 19 June 1997

Early Impressionism and the French State 
by Jane Mayo Roos.
Cambridge, 300 pp., £45, October 1996, 0 521 55244 3
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Adolph Menzel 
edited by Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher.
Yale, 480 pp., £45, September 1996, 0 300 06954 5
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... at the Academy. There is also a photograph showing Menzel’s state funeral: the hearse drawn by black-plumed horses, the crowd on the steps of the Altes Museum and the soldiers in uniforms from the time of Frederick the Great. The Emperor Wilhelm II decreed all this for the painter he called the ‘Apelles of old Fritz’. The painter of modern life, which ...

Which Face?

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Emigrés on the Make, 6 February 2020

Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia 
by Benjamin Tromly.
Oxford, 329 pp., £75, September 2019, 978 0 19 884040 4
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The Dissidents: A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 1960-90 
by Peter Reddaway.
Brookings, 337 pp., £25.50, February, 978 0 8157 3773 5
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... oppressed by a bad government that was not of their choosing. They believed, in the words of Eugene Lyons, an Amcomlib member, that ‘behind the Soviet façade there existed “another Russia”, which awaited an opportune moment to assert itself, weapons in hand if necessary, in the name of national freedom’ – and that ‘supporting it should be a ...

In Some Sense True

Tim Parks: Coetzee, 21 January 2016

The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy 
by J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz.
Harvill Secker, 198 pp., £16.99, May 2015, 978 1 84655 888 7
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J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time 
by David Attwell.
Oxford, 272 pp., £19.99, September 2015, 978 0 19 874633 1
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... egos, abound and contrast. There is a character called Coetzee in each section, and a narrator, Eugene Dawn, in the first section who shares many of the author’s traits, notably a meticulous tidiness with his papers and the feeling that he’s only really happy among books; both qualities seem allied to the novel’s strategy of metafictional ...

Genius in Its Pure State

Mark Ford, 22 May 1997

... a Spartan slave – clutching at a sword plunged into his heart. The statue is fashioned out of black corset whalebones, and is fixed to a trolley – also of corset whalebones – whose wheels rest on two rails made of a coarse, red, gelatinous substance that turns out to be calves’ lights (the gastronomic delicacy made from the lungs of young ...

Like a row of books by Faber

Peter Porter, 22 January 1987

Other Passports: Poems 1958-1985 
by Clive James.
Cape, 221 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 224 02422 1
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... wings – Snowflakes knock spots off Philibert de L’Orme Woodcut adoring kings with narrow eye Black-bottomed whitewear out of nowhere fast You see the azure through the muscatel The white opacities we hear as thunder The fact that each is an iambic pentameter disturbs their individual impact by turning them, in this listing, into a sort of joke stanza ...

How many speed bumps?

Gavin Francis: Pain, 21 August 2014

The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers 
by Joanna Bourke.
Oxford, 396 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 0 19 968942 2
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... small doses might prevent them from returning to the religion of their baptism. In the same volume Eugene Tesson, a Jesuit, sanctioned physicians to administer pain relief only to the dying who had ‘made an act of submission to the Divine’ and those ‘in danger of falling into despair and blaspheming the goodness of God’. Such opinions are a reminder ...

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