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Martinique in Burbank

David Thomson: Bogart and Bacall, 19 October 2023

Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair 
by William J. Mann.
HarperCollins, 634 pp., £35, August, 978 0 06 302639 1
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... Slim called Howard. There was a coy home movie playing out within the melodrama on screen, with Walter Brennan, Marcel Dalio and Hoagy Carmichael all there like pages to the marriage. Nothing could match that bliss, certainly not life. Bogart and Bacall were married shortly before The Big Sleep appeared, an automatic cashing in by Warners and ...

A Country Emptied

Ian Jack: The Highland Clearances, 7 March 2019

The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed 1600-1900 
by T.M. Devine.
Allen Lane, 464 pp., £25, October 2018, 978 0 241 30410 5
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... book of all time. Prebble, born in England and raised in Canada, did for the clearances what Walter Lord did for the Titanic in A Night to Remember, and in the same way. Through vivid narrative history, told like a novel, he revived public interest in a historic disaster: the story of how, to quote from its opening sentence, ‘the Highlanders were ...

Formication

Daniel Soar: Harry Mathews, 21 July 2005

My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 
by Harry Mathews.
Dalkey Archive, 203 pp., £8.99, July 2005, 1 56478 392 8
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... great names trip off the tongue: Jean-Noël Vuarnet, Sylviane Agacinski, Jim West, Mary McCarthy, Gregory Mazurovsky, Richard Foreman, Kate Manheim, Louis and Zuka Mittelberg, Bruno Marcenac, Michel Loriod, Maurice Roche), he now can see that all the high-flown references he had barely understood – to Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan – were no more than ...

Welcome Home

Sukhdev Sandhu: Memories of Michael X, 4 February 1999

Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multiracial Britain 
by Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips.
HarperCollins, 422 pp., £16.99, May 1998, 0 00 255909 9
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... black businesses were owned by West Indians. In 1952, however, when Congress passed the McCarran Walter Act restricting migration, prospective migrants to the US were obliged to reconsider. The United Kingdom, where some of their kin had already settled, was an obvious choice. Officially, 492 West Indians, the majority of them Jamaican men with an average ...

My son has been poisoned!

David Bromwich: Cold War movies, 26 January 2012

An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War 
by J. Hoberman.
New Press, 383 pp., £21.99, March 2011, 978 1 59558 005 4
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... a film dedicated to the good of mutual understanding, Davies played with avuncular benignity by Walter Huston, and the film introduced by Davies himself. The movies actually written by Communists in the late 1930s (the harvest years of the Hollywood CP, after the ‘fair seed-time’ of the Popular Front) are almost all unwatchable. Murray Kempton in Part ...

What does a snake know, or intend?

David Thomson: Where Joan Didion was from, 18 March 2004

Where I Was From 
by Joan Didion.
Flamingo, 240 pp., £14.99, March 2004, 0 00 717886 7
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... usually is. And now here comes Joan Didion, a little bit like the doomsayer on the wagon train (Walter Brennan, with teeth), but too arresting to be ignored, to tell us the prospectus, like the prospect, was a hoax. None of Joan Didion’s books has been long, exactly, not with the generous amounts of white space she provides, which serve as fresh linen and ...

Mushrooms

Michael Dobson: How to Be a Favourite, 5 October 2006

Literature and Favouritism in Early Modern England 
by Curtis Perry.
Cambridge, 328 pp., £50, February 2006, 0 521 85405 9
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... or cowed into an embittered quietism. It’s a shame that Perry’s book went to press before Gregory Doran’s revelatory RSC revival, performed at the Swan in Stratford last year, demonstrated what a shocking and resonant piece of drama Sejanus can still be. Perry acknowledges in passing that leaders of Western democracies still grant and receive ...

Yeats and Violence

Michael Wood: On ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, 14 August 2008

... the old Ascendancy in Ireland. Elsewhere Yeats borrows a phrase from the poem to talk about Lady Gregory, who is said to be ‘indifferent to praise or blame’, a quality attributed to the law that was one of the pretty toys ‘we’ had when young. But then their youth in this sense goes back a while, at least to the 18th century, as Foster suggests, and ...

Hooted from the Stage

Susan Eilenberg: Living with Keats, 25 January 2024

Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph 
by Lucasta Miller.
Vintage, 357 pp., £12.99, April 2023, 978 1 5291 1090 6
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Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse 
by Anahid Nersessian.
Verso, 136 pp., £12.99, November 2022, 978 1 80429 034 7
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... made him hard to place, and his social ambiguity became for his critics (some themselves what Gregory Dart in Metropolitan Art and Literature 1810-40: Cockney Adventures called ‘social amphibians’) a matter of derision. His parents managed a thriving London hostelry and inn, the Swan and Hoop, near Bedlam Hospital in Moorfields. In his 1963 biography ...

Who do you think you are?

Jacqueline Rose: Trans Narratives, 5 May 2016

... down the generations. ‘You keep seeing the same faces,’ Judge Robert Finn told John Gregory Dunne, who wrote about the case in 1997. ‘I’m into third-generation domestic abuse and restraining orders.’ He was talking about husbands and lovers whose fathers and grandfathers had appeared before him on the same charges in the course of his 16 ...

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