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My father says

Brian Dillon: Hugo Hamilton, 23 March 2006

The Sailor in the Wardrobe 
by Hugo Hamilton.
Fourth Estate, 263 pp., £16.99, February 2006, 0 00 719217 7Show More
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“... myself, for the first time, somehow insufficiently Irish. The two autobiographical volumes that Hugo Hamilton has now devoted to his early years in a coastal Dublin suburb in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s amount to a study of the ways in which a national history insinuates itself into the mind of a child.* Perhaps the sense of not being Irish enough ...”

No boozing, no donkeys

George O’Brien: Hugo Hamilton, 10 July 2003

The Speckled People 
by Hugo Hamilton.
Fourth Estate, 298 pp., £15.99, February 2003, 0 00 714805 4Show More
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“... Hugo Hamilton was born in 1953 to an Irish father and a German mother. When he was growing up, as he writes in this remarkable memoir, he spent a lot of time trying to prove that he wasn’t a Nazi. But he never could. The sight of somebody in lederhosen and an Aran sweater was irresistible to the local bullies ...”

Audrey’s Eye

Anthony Quinn, 21 February 1991

Leaving Brooklyn 
by Lynne Sharon Schwartz.
Minerva, 146 pp., £4.99, December 1990, 0 7493 9072 7Show More
Surrogate City 
by Hugo Hamilton.
Faber, 197 pp., £12.99, November 1990, 0 571 14432 2Show More
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“... about what you know can be a drastic process of discovery. It is difficult not to sympathise with Hugo Hamilton, a Dublin-born writer whose debut novel Surrogate City was hijacked by reality before it even appeared. Set in pre-1989 Berlin, what clearly started out as a contemporary urban romance already has the forlorn air of a period piece, locked in an ...”

Imbalance

Michael Hofmann: The Charm of Hugo Williams, 22 May 2003

Collected Poems 
by Hugo Williams.
Faber, 288 pp., £20, September 2002, 0 571 21233 6Show More
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“... It is a curious thing that of the three judges offering superlatives on the jacket of Hugo Williams’s Collected Poems – Edna Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Porter – none is English. And yet Williams, born in Windsor during World War Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a lifelong London resident, seems as English as they come ...”

We’ll win or lose it here

Robert F. Worth: Lessons from Tahrir Square, 21 September 2017

The City Always Wins 
by Omar Robert Hamilton.
Faber, 312 pp., £14.99, August 2017, 978 0 571 33517 6Show More
Chronicle of a Last Summer: A Novel of Egypt 
by Yasmine El Rashidi.
Tim Duggan, 181 pp., £11.70, June 2017, 978 0 7704 3729 9Show More
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“... putting themselves in competition with historians, who are usually accorded more patience. Victor Hugo would be forgotten today if all he had written was Ninety-Three, his fictional version of the Terror and the Vendée rebellion (though the book made a deep impression on the young Stalin, for reasons that now seem too easy to imagine). Egypt’s 2011 revolt ...”

Fame

Ian Hamilton, 2 July 1981

Charles Charming’s Challenges on the Pathway to the Throne 
by Clive James.
Cape, 103 pp., £4.95, June 1981, 0 224 01954 6Show More
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“... The strength of Peregrine Prykke was in the detail of its little world (who is Terry Towelling, Hugo Harsfried, Klaus Mauler?). Most readers couldn’t know about the true-to-life-ness of his characters, and could therefore respond to them as if they were James’s own ribald inventions. The tiniest of cameos had to be strong enough to raise non-knowing ...”

No Fun

David Blackbourn: Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 15 October 1998

Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900-49 
edited by Hans Wysling, translated by Don Reneau.
California, 444 pp., £40, March 1998, 0 520 07278 2Show More
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“... Twenty years ago Nigel Hamilton wrote a double biography of the literary Brothers Mann, giving equal billing to the celebrated Thomas and the neglected Heinrich. It was certainly time to look again at Heinrich, whose importance as a public and literary figure had been taken for granted by an earlier generation of writers ...”

How much?

Ian Hamilton: Literary pay and literary prizes, 18 June 1998

Guide to Literary Prizes, 1998 
edited by Huw Molseed.
Book Trust, 38 pp., £3.99, May 1998, 0 85353 475 6Show More
The Cost of Letters: A Survey of Literary Living Standards 
edited by Andrew Holgate and Honor Wilson-Fletcher.
W Magazine, 208 pp., £2, May 1998, 0 9527405 9 1Show More
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“... project than for anything sensible.’ Today’s mood is perhaps best expressed by Hugo Williams. His answer to ‘should the state do more for writers?’ is: ‘Yes for me, no for everyone else . . . In other words no . . . today young writers are almost by definition award-winners. I certainly had my whack, for doing practically ...”

On Thatcher

Karl Miller, 25 April 2013

“... Runciman bearing the palm for aphoristic conciseness. In embarking on a review, also in 1989, of Hugo Young’s biography of her, R.W. Johnson was also concise: ‘personally, she is neither nice nor interesting. She has immense energy, remarkable tenacity and stamina, and a good brain. But she has a shallow mind, little imagination and an immense, bullying ...”

C is for Colonies

Anthony Pagden: A New History of Empire, 11 May 2006

Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750-1850 
by Maya Jasanoff.
Fourth Estate, 405 pp., £25, August 2005, 0 00 718009 8Show More
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“... of empire who collected. Some of the century’s greatest hoarders, from Horace Walpole to William Hamilton, had only a slight association with empire. But the collections of the Poliers and the Clives were filled not only with the traditional European decorative objects, from furniture to paintings, with which every well-to-do European home had to be ...”

Theroux and Through

Julian Barnes, 21 June 1984

The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain 
by Paul Theroux.
Hamish Hamilton, 303 pp., £9.95, October 1983, 0 241 11086 6Show More
Doctor Slaughter 
by Paul Theroux.
Hamish Hamilton, 137 pp., £6.95, June 1984, 0 241 11255 9Show More
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“... going to an unexciting location and reporting on his lack of excitement; Jonathan Raban and Hugo Williams purvey this mode as well. Is it that old-style travellers chose their destinations better? Did they perhaps fake their enthusiasm? Or was the world simply fresher then? Today’s travellers may claim a greater truthfulness by reporting their ...”

On Thatcher

“... moreover, no end to her presumption: to the already notorious quotes one can add another culled by Hugo Young, who finds her measuring ‘my performance against that of other countries in the real world’.R.W. Johnson, 20 April 1989If​ you want to see the cutting edge of Thatcherism, go to Basingstoke. There, as we learn in Paul Hirst’s After ...”

Troglodytes

Patrick Parrinder, 25 October 1990

Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society and the Imagination 
by Rosalind Williams.
MIT, 265 pp., £22.50, March 1990, 9780262231459Show More
The Mask of the Prophet: The Extraordinary Fictions of Jules Verne 
by Andrew Martin.
Oxford, 222 pp., £27.50, May 1990, 0 19 815798 3Show More
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“... in 1750, and is still continuing. An early collector of Pompeian antiquities was Sir William Hamilton, British Envoy to the Court of Naples in the 1770s, whose frequent observations of the crater of the volcano were communicated to the Royal Society. Bulwer-Lytton stayed in Naples long enough to write his hugely popular romance The Last Days of Pompeii ...”

Amerikanist Dreams

Owen Hatherley, 21 October 2021

Building a New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture 
by Jean-Louis Cohen.
Yale, 544 pp., £30, September 2020, 978 0 300 24815 9Show More
Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital 
by Katherine Zubovich.
Princeton, 280 pp., £34, January, 978 0 691 17890 5Show More
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“... motion studies of the Gilbreths and the ‘Psycho-technics’ of the German-American psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, Gastev’s work became a crucial part of Constructivism, whether in the theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold, the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky or the architecture of Moisei Ginzburg.Most Americans had no notion of the strange uses their ideas were ...”

At the End of a Dirt Road

Thomas Powers: The Salinger File, 24 October 2019

The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour – an Introduction 
by J.D. Salinger.
Little, Brown, 1072 pp., $100, November 2018, 978 0 316 45071 3Show More
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“... his ‘privacy’. He fended off journalists and biographers, sometimes in the courts: Ian Hamilton was commissioned by Random House to write a biographical study subtitled ‘A Writing Life’, but permission to quote from Salinger’s unpublished letters was denied by the courts and Hamilton’s book ended up being ...”

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