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Hal Foster: Reyner Banham, 9 May 2002

Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future 
by Nigel Whiteley.
MIT, 494 pp., £27.50, January 2002, 0 262 23216 2
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... the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his scholarly ...

I have nothing to say and I am saying it

Philip Clark: John Cage’s Diary, 15 December 2016

The Selected Letters of John Cage 
edited by Laura Kuhn.
Wesleyan, 618 pp., £30, January 2016, 978 0 8195 7591 3
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Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) 
by John Cage, edited by Richard Kraft and Joe Biel.
Siglio, 176 pp., £26, October 2015, 978 1 938221 10 1
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... with him. The story goes that Schoenberg dismissed him, telling him he lacked an ear for harmony. Peter Yates’s book Twentieth-Century Music: Its Evolution from the End of the Harmonic Era into the Present Era of Sound (1968), reported Schoenberg as saying that Cage was ‘not a composer – but an inventor of genius’, a back-handed compliment that stuck ...

What does a chicken know of bombs?

David Thomson: A Key to Brando, 5 December 2019

The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando 
by William J. Mann.
HarperCollins, 718 pp., £22, November 2019, 978 0 06 242764 9
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... a dozen biographies of Brando, or memoirs that depend on his presence. The weightiest of these is Peter Manso’s, published in 1994, when Brando still had ten years to live. (Mann hurries through those last years out of kindness as much as weariness. The killing of Drollet, the imprisonment of Christian and Cheyenne’s subsequent suicide left Brando a ...

The Court

Richard Eyre, 23 September 1993

The Long Distance Runner 
by Tony Richardson.
Faber, 277 pp., £17.50, September 1993, 0 571 16852 3
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... turn of Joan Littlewood at Stratford East and George Devine at the Royal Court. In recent years, Peter Brook has taken up the baton in Stratford and in Paris. All of them demonstrated, implicitly or explicitly, that the theatre is an art, a forum, a faith, something to be fought for. At the Royal Court George Devine instilled a system of values that gave the ...

You could scream

Jenny Diski, 20 October 1994

Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me 
by Marlon Brando and Robert Lindsey.
Century, 468 pp., £17.99, September 1994, 0 7126 6012 7
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Greta & Cecil 
by Diana Souhami.
Cape, 272 pp., £18.99, September 1994, 0 224 03719 6
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... no ordinary, daily life going on. Beaton languished for four years after the wealthy art patron Peter Watson, who was kind enough to him but emotionally committed to Beaton’s rival, Oliver Messel. For a while Stephen Tennant looked like a possibility, but no one fell in love with Beaton, though he hankered and ached. When he turned his attentions to ...

Tony and Caroline

Ben Pimlott, 26 November 1987

Out of the Wilderness: Diaries 1963-67 
by Tony Benn.
Hutchinson, 592 pp., £14.95, October 1987, 0 09 170660 2
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... proudly describing himself as a member of the Kitchen Cabinet, along with Gerald Kaufman, Marcia Williams, Thomas Balogh and Peter Shore. Leaders, however, have difficulty in maintaining the unqualified devotion even of their closest followers. It is interesting to see that there were rumbles of discontent as early as June ...

Two Hares and a Priest

Patricia Beer: Pushkin, 13 May 1999

Pushkin 
by Elizabeth Feinstein.
Weidenfeld, 309 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 297 81826 0
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... He was a great-grandson on his mother’s side of an African slave who had become a protégé of Peter the Great. He inherited several African characteristics, such as hair, features and skin colour, and this seemed to annoy his mother, though perhaps no more than everything else about him. He himself was, or appeared to be, proud of his African ...

On the State of the Left

W.G. Runciman, 17 December 1981

The Forward March of Labour Halted? 
by Eric Hobsbawm, Ken Gill and Tony Benn.
Verso, 182 pp., £8.50, November 1981, 0 86091 041 5
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... impeccably of the Left, but by no means all are intellectuals. There is not only Professor Raymond Williams but Bernard Dix of NUPE and Jack Adams, Convenor at BL, Longbridge; not only Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today, but Peter Carter, UCATT regional organiser; not only Royden Harrison, professor of social history at ...

Another A.N. Wilson

Michael Irwin, 3 December 1981

Who was Oswald Fish? 
by A.N. Wilson.
Secker, 314 pp., £6.95, October 1981, 0 436 57606 6
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... the vulgarisation of Christianity, is a barn-door that has been riddled repeatedly by the likes of Peter Simple. The influence of Evelyn Waugh – the Waugh of Decline and Fall – is so marked as to be oppressive. The characters are facetiously named – Father Sporran, the Dundee of Caik, Professor Hairbrush (a philosopher – get it?). Since satire invites ...

Corbyn in the Media

Paul Myerscough, 22 October 2015

... resignation. A scattering of dissident voices on the payroll – Seumas Milne, Owen Jones, Zoe Williams, George Monbiot – were drowned out by a host of detractors, from within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan ...

Not Just Yet

Frank Kermode: The Literature of Old Age, 13 December 2007

The Long Life 
by Helen Small.
Oxford, 346 pp., £25, December 2007, 978 0 19 922993 2
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... To die thus at just the right moment depends, in life, not on narrative logic but on what Bernard Williams calls ‘moral luck’. It is what enables a person to die when full of days, old but not in terminal misery, correctly mourned by a numerous and prosperous family. It is not an ending one can choose, it is a matter of aesthetics. For instruction in the ...

Keeping Score

Ian Jackman: Joe DiMaggio, 10 May 2001

Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life 
by Richard Ben Cramer.
Simon and Schuster, 560 pp., £20, April 2001, 0 684 85391 4
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... won ten pennants and nine World Series. His big rival as a hitter was Boston’s scientific Ted Williams, who hit .406 in DiMaggio’s Streak season, the last person to hit .400 in a season. ‘Sure he can hit,’ Joe said. ‘But he never won a thing.’ The Streak, the marriage to Monroe, the reference in the Simon and Garfunkel song (‘Where have you ...

No nation I’ve ever heard of

Garth Greenwell: Matthew Griffin’s ‘Hide’, 19 January 2017

Hide 
by Matthew Griffin.
Bloomsbury, 272 pp., £16.99, August 2016, 978 1 4088 6708 2
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... bites my hand. As I read this scene, and others like it, I found myself thinking of William Carlos Williams’s story ‘The Use of Force’, in which a country doctor attempts to examine a young girl’s throat, checking for diphtheria. She resists; he forces her. There’s no question of the necessity of the examination: the child has a potentially fatal ...

Wielded by a Wizard

Seamus Perry: Shelley’s Kind of Glee, 3 January 2019

Selected Poems and Prose 
by Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy.
Penguin, 893 pp., £12.99, January 2017, 978 0 241 25306 9
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... plausibly recalled than the conger eel story is the fine remark made by Shelley’s friend Jane Williams when Trelawny first encountered him. No sooner had they met than Shelley disappeared, and a puzzled Trelawny asked where on earth he had gone. ‘Mrs Williams said: “Who? Shelley? Oh, he comes and goes like a ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1995, 4 January 1996

... 13 January. One of Peter Cook’s jokes, several times quoted in his obituaries, is of two men chatting. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ says one, whereupon the other says: ‘Yes, neither am I.’ And of course it’s funny and has a point, except that Peter, I suspect, felt that this disposed of the matter entirely ...

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