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Diary

Rupert Wilkinson: Harvard '61, 20 November 1986

... author (George Gilder), a leading radical economist (Tom Weisskopf) and the creator of Jaws (Peter Benchley). About a quarter of us had come to Harvard from one of ten famous boarding schools of the northeast, but about a half had attended public high schools across the country. With its massive endowments supporting extensive scholarships, Harvard had ...

Like ink and milk

John Bayley, 10 September 1992

‘Sons and Lovers’: The Unexpurgated Text 
by D.H. Lawrence, edited by Helen Baron and Carl Baron.
Cambridge, 675 pp., £70, September 1992, 0 521 24276 2
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D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885-1912 
by John Worthen.
Cambridge, 464 pp., £14.95, September 1992, 0 521 43221 9
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‘Sons and Lovers’ 
by Michael Black.
Cambridge, 126 pp., £19.95, September 1992, 0 521 36074 9
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... to take the elopement for granted as a bold bid for life and freedom culminating in the idyll on Lake Garda. As Worthen shows in detail, it was anything but that. For all Frieda’s ‘splendour’ and emancipated sexual code, it was not principles that counted here but power, just as it would be when the nations went to war two years later. Lawrence as ...

Not to Be Read without Shuddering

Adam Smyth: The Atheist’s Bible, 20 February 2014

The Atheist’s Bible: The Most Dangerous Book That Never Existed 
by Georges Minois, translated by Lys Ann Weiss.
Chicago, 249 pp., £21, October 2012, 978 0 226 53029 1
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... What kind of existence do they have? In Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (1998), Anne Lake Prescott calls his fictive titles ‘nonbooks’ or ‘promises of books’: ‘oscillating between being and nonbeing’, she writes, they are ‘the librarian’s equivalent of negative wonder’. Imaginary books come close to being real, but then swerve ...

The Lady in the Back Seat

Thomas Jones: Robert Harris’s Alternative Realities, 15 November 2007

The Ghost 
by Robert Harris.
Hutchinson, 310 pp., £18.99, October 2007, 978 0 09 179626 6
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... corpse of Josef Bühler, the one-time state secretary of the General Government, washes up in a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. Xavier March, a Sturmbannführer in the Kriminalpolizei – in his early forties, divorced, a bit of an outsider, superficially cynical but inclined to do the right thing when it comes to the crunch (you know the type) – is ...

Zest

David Reynolds: The Real Mrs Miniver, 25 April 2002

The Real Mrs Miniver 
by Ysenda Maxtone Graham.
Murray, 314 pp., £17.99, November 2001, 0 7195 5541 8
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Mrs Miniver 
by Jan Struther.
Virago, 153 pp., £7.99, November 2001, 1 85381 090 8
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... 1936 they had to abandon Chelsea for something more modest. At this low moment Joyce was asked by Peter Fleming, then a leader-writer on the Times, to help enliven the Court Page, whose only light relief from the comings and goings at the Palace was a series of articles about flora and fauna – ‘Woody Plants for Limey Soil’ or ‘Family Cares of the ...

I am a severed head

Colin Burrow: Iris Murdoch’s Incompatibilities, 11 August 2016

‘The Sea, the Sea’; ‘A Severed Head’ 
by Iris Murdoch.
Everyman, 680 pp., £14.99, March 2016, 978 1 84159 370 8
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... And being fair to Murdoch is quite hard at the moment. She has received a sympathetic biography by Peter Conradi, which may be too kind to her, and a sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she ...

Nuts about the Occult

Richard J. Evans: ‘Hitler’s Monsters’, 2 August 2018

Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich 
by Eric Kurlander.
Yale, 422 pp., £12.99, May 2018, 978 0 300 23454 1
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... this stuff – surely she knew, for instance, that stories of Nazi gold at the bottom of a Swiss lake or in blocked-off Polish railway tunnels had all been disproved? Of course she didn’t believe them, she replied, but the station had a lot of young viewers and they liked this sort of thing. REN-TV is far from the first media outlet to discover that ...

Madder Men

Hal Foster: Richard Hamilton on Richard Hamilton, 24 October 2019

Richard Hamilton: Introspective 
by Phillip Spectre.
König, 408 pp., £49, September 2019, 978 3 88375 695 0
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... The Brutalist wing of the IG was represented by the team of Paolozzi, Henderson and the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, who littered a bare shed on a rough patio with symbolic relics (it looked as though it had been ‘excavated after the atomic holocaust’, the critic Reyner Banham remarked). On the proto-Pop side of the IG were Hamilton, John McHale ...

Ghosting

Hal Foster: Dead to the World, 29 July 2021

Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons 
by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Zone, 320 pp., £28, April 2021, 978 1 942130 47 5
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... as alien. The literary case Heller-Roazen privileges above all others is Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, the plebeian Faust who sold his shadow to the devil for magical gifts quickly squandered and so lost his ‘human belonging’, as Thomas Mann put it. Here the Latin adage nomen omen has an ironic twist, for Chamisso thought Schlemihl meant ...

Nom de Boom

Ian Penman: Arthur Russell's Benediction, 15 August 2024

Travels over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life 
by Richard King.
Faber, 296 pp., £30, April, 978 0 571 37966 8
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... in San Rafael. Playing guitar for an audience of bark and moss. Playing cello on the edge of a lake in Minnesota.In 1968 Russell moved from Iowa to San Francisco, city of bays, bridges and hills. At this early stage he comes across as a somewhat sulky, ascetic figure. He bought his clothes from thrift stores and had zero interest in popular music. His ...

Look beyond the lips

Bee Wilson: Hedy Lamarr, 28 July 2011

Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film 
by Ruth Barton.
Kentucky, 281 pp., £25.95, May 2011, 978 0 8131 2604 3
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... off the confines of paternalist authority by running naked through a forest and jumping into a lake for a swim. Her horse bolts, and she chases after it, still naked. Audiences went in hope of pornography but many were disappointed, judging by the catcalls and hissing at screenings from Berlin to Paris and New York. What they got was a lot of highfalutin ...

Whatever you do, buy

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s First Folio, 15 November 2001

The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book Vol. I: An Account of the First Folio Based on Its Sales and Prices, 1623-2000 
by Anthony James West.
Oxford, 215 pp., £70, April 2001, 0 19 818769 6
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... our understanding of how F1 was produced – W.W. Greg, Charlton Hinman and their living heir, Peter Blayney – ever owned a copy. The current respective valuations placed on F1 and on the labour of those who study it, indeed, make painfully obvious the independence of the Folio’s price from the scholarly industry on which West implies its value partly ...

The Animalcule

Nicholas Spice: Little Mr De Quincey, 18 May 2017

Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey 
by Frances Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 397 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 1 4088 3977 5
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... friend of ours’; for Lamb, ‘the animalcule’; Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth took to calling him Peter Quince. Even his friends tended to diminish him: ‘Poor little fellow!’ Carlyle exclaimed to his wife, Jane, who mused: ‘What would one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk.’ Scarcely surprising, then, that De Quincey was touchy, quick ...

Patron Saints

Jean McNicol, 12 May 1994

Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich 
by Alison Owings.
Rutgers, 494 pp., £24.95, October 1993, 0 8135 1992 6
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Solidarity and Treason: Resistance and Exile, 1933-1940 
by Lisa Fittko, translated by Roslyn Theobald.
Northwestern, 160 pp., £29.95, December 1993, 0 8101 1129 2
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... the Nuremberg race laws were enacted, when she saw her sitting forlornly on her own beside a lake near Berlin: ‘I thought, God she’s sitting there so alone. She can play with us and we can swim together.’ Dubnack says she didn’t really think of the dangers when Naumann moved in – ‘We were young. And we were opposed’ – successfully hiding ...

Hollow-Headed Angels

Nicholas Penny, 4 January 1996

Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930-1945 
edited by David Britt.
Hayward Gallery, 360 pp., £19.95, October 1995, 1 85332 148 6
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... with its resolutely unsensuous handling of paint and crisply distinguished bands of light on the lake, can be found in British as well as German painting. Hanging opposite the art which enjoyed both official and popular success under the Third Reich are specimens of art which was banned, most conspicuously a series of watercolours by Emil Nolde – who ...

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