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Bowling along

Kitty Hauser: The motorist who first saw England, 17 March 2005

In Search of H.V. Morton 
by Michael Bartholomew.
Methuen, 248 pp., £18.99, April 2004, 0 413 77138 5
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... book spawned a new genre of British travel-writing, nicely described as ‘motoring pastoral’ by David Matless in Landscape and Englishness (1998). Motoring is imbued with an almost celestial quality in this very British yoking together of nostalgia and modernity, as if the car, for those with the means to own one, had opened up a gateway to ...

Waiting for the next move

John Bayley, 23 July 1987

Dostoevsky. The Stir of Liberation: 1860-1865 
by Joseph Frank.
Robson, 395 pp., £17.95, April 1987, 0 86051 242 8
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Selected Letters of Dostoevsky 
edited by Joseph Frank and David Goldstein.
Rutgers, 543 pp., $29.95, May 1987, 0 8135 1185 2
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... that sort of picture, as do Dostoevsky’s own letters, a selection of which has been edited by David Goldstein and Frank. The editing is superb, the notes meticulous, but it must be said that Dostoevsky does not come into the category of great letter-writers. The most interesting are not the ones written to his brother from the Peter and Paul Fortress ...

A Calamitous Man

Patrick Collinson: Incombustible Luther, 29 July 1999

Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death 
by Richard Marius.
Harvard, 542 pp., £19.95, March 1999, 0 674 55090 0
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... God’s strength made perfect in human weakness: the Bible story of Gideon, or of the shepherd boy David. For it was the religious anxieties and unanswered questions of this insignificant monk, not the great powers of the world against which elaborate diplomatic, legal and military defences had been erected, which brought ruin to the Pope, to the Church as it ...

Diary

Paul Laity: Henry Woodd Nevinson, 3 February 2000

... It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg and William Roberts – and a revolutionary moment in British art. Even to express support for Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions was daring and radical. Nevinson, having seen a contemporary art show in Venice, knew he was ‘bored with ...

Dishonoured

Michael Wood, 5 May 1983

The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformation 
by Ian Donaldson.
Oxford, 203 pp., £15, October 1982, 0 19 812638 7
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The Rape of Clarissa 
by Terry Eagleton.
Blackwell, 109 pp., £10, September 1982, 0 631 13031 4
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Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters 
by Carol Houlihan Flynn.
Princeton, 342 pp., £17.70, May 1982, 0 691 06506 3
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... the lighter cavalry (Mlle de Scudéry, Voltaire, Alfieri, Nathaniel Lee, Gavin Hamilton, J.-L. David). However, Donaldson sharply registers the enormous popularity of the myth across the centuries, and the ways in which controversy has enlivened and enlarged it rather than killing it off. Readings of a myth become part of the myth, as Lévi-Strauss said of ...

On the Brink

James Lever: Philip Roth, 28 January 2010

The Humbling 
by Philip Roth.
Cape, 140 pp., £12.99, November 2009, 978 0 224 08793 3
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... in Axler’s proposed salvation-by-child, or by love or sex (‘He who forms a tie is lost’ – David Kepesh’s friend George O’Hearn, telling it straight in The Dying Animal). They won’t save him, and nor will solitude: it’s the absence of ties which has brought him to this pass. Axler has no family: no memories of dear Morty Sabbath to stay his ...

Brandenburg’s Dream

Derek Walmsley: Digital Piracy, 7 January 2016

How Music Got Free 
by Stephen Witt.
Bodley Head, 280 pp., £20, June 2015, 978 1 84792 282 3
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... cards; you can even get programmable LCD belt buckles that display whatever message you like. A sturdy buckle looks good even after a hard day’s work, so if you’re doing physical labour, it’s a handy way of catching someone’s eye. For rappers who wear their jeans low, a buckle has practical benefits too. In the 2000s, when the ‘Dirty ...

Fundamentally Goyish

James Wood: Zadie Smith, 3 October 2002

The Autograph Man 
by Zadie Smith.
Hamish Hamilton, 420 pp., £16.99, September 2002, 0 241 13998 8
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... North London suburb and in New York, bears the impress of American writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, clever, nervy exhibitionists, IQs-with-i-Books, guys who, as Smith has put it, ‘know things’, writers with a gift for speedy cultural analysis, whose prose is choppy with interruption. The Autograph Man may indeed be the nearest that a ...

Secrets are like sex

Neal Ascherson, 2 April 2020

The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain 
by Richard Norton-Taylor.
I.B. Tauris, 352 pp., £20, March 2019, 978 1 78831 218 9
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... is just for you; must go no further’ will not get far. Norton-Taylor insists (though less sturdy colleagues hesitate to agree) that they need us more than we need them: ‘Too many journalists reporting on the activities of the agencies remain on the defensive, too ready to believe they have to rely on the goodwill of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, and the ...

Like Colonel Sanders

Christopher Tayler: The Stan Lee Era, 2 December 2021

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee 
by Abraham Riesman.
Bantam, 320 pp., £20, February, 978 0 593 13571 6
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Stan Lee: A Life in Comics 
by Liel Leibovitz.
Yale, 192 pp., £16.99, June 2020, 978 0 300 23034 5
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... introvert, were less happy. They didn’t particularly enjoy being called ‘Jolly Jack’ and ‘Sturdy Steve’ in the ‘Bullpen Bulletins’ that Lee put out for the fans each month. They also noticed that Lee got paid as a credited writer on top of his editorial salary, though all three of them took it as simply the way of the world that they were ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2014, 8 January 2015

... James.7 August, Oxford. To Oxford and the Holywell Music Room where Bodley’s librarian emeritus David Vaisey and I have a conversation about our time at Oxford in the 1950s. David and I were first aware of each other at the scholarship examination in Exeter College hall in January 1954. The hall was bitter cold but both ...

Bad News

Iain Sinclair, 6 December 1990

Weather 
by John Farrand.
Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 239 pp., $40, June 1990, 1 55670 134 9
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Weather Watch 
by Dick File.
Fourth Estate, 299 pp., £14.99, November 1990, 1 872180 12 4
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Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment 
edited by J.T. Houghton, G.J. Jenkins and J.J. Ephraums.
Cambridge, 365 pp., £40, September 1990, 9780521403603
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Crop Circles: The Latest Evidence 
by Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews.
Bloomsbury, 80 pp., £5.99, October 1990, 0 7475 0843 7
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The Stumbling Block, Its Index 
by B. Catling.
Book Works, £22, October 1990, 9781870699051
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... accusation of academic complacency. ‘Lightning, Phoenix, Arizona’ has the abrupt menace of a David Lynch dream sequence, the cardiac arrest when a previously straightforward narrative crosses the line and touches a vertiginous post-mortem truth. We need to be reminded of the ugly, petrol-breathed, epidermic floss sulking past our own windows. These ...

The Raging Peloton

Iain Sinclair: Boris Bikes, 20 January 2011

... thanks to propaganda campaigns spearheaded by Bullingdon Club toffs like Boris Johnson and David Cameron, underwent significant revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the horse path alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, and forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a market wreck bought for ...

Ich dien

Michael Neill: Shakespeare and the Servants, 22 October 2009

Shakespeare, Love and Service 
by David Schalkwyk.
Cambridge, 317 pp., £50, June 2008, 978 0 521 88639 0
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... a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and painfully complicated) by the emotional ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: The Peruvian Corporation of London, 10 October 2019

... lazy, they need to understand what is required by visitors.’ With his short, sturdy build and his long silver hair, his taupe gilet with knives and pills and relics in every pocket, he reminded me of Carlos Castaneda’s Yaqui Indian mentor. And of the illustrations of this stern and teasing magician on the cover of some of the paperbacks ...

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