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Diary

Clive James, 20 May 1982

... that case? Why didn’t old Roy stay home and write books Instead of pounding through this paper chase, The sweat of which does little for his looks? The bees have got the right approach to space: The moths flap uselessly like fish on hooks ... The tension’s fearful and one feels no better for Committing such a thoroughly mixed metaphor. The die is ...

Open that window, Miss Menzies

Patricia Craig, 7 August 1986

A Taste for Death 
by P.D. James.
Faber, 454 pp., £9.95, June 1986, 0 571 13799 7
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A Dark-Adapted Eye 
by Barbara Vine.
Viking, 300 pp., £9.95, March 1986, 0 670 80976 4
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Dead Men’s Morris 
by Gladys Mitchell.
Joseph, 247 pp., £9.95, April 1986, 0 7181 2553 3
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Laurels are poison 
by Gladys Mitchell.
Hogarth, 237 pp., £2.95, June 1986, 0 7012 1010 9
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Dido and Pa 
by Joan Aiken.
Cape, 251 pp., £7.95, June 1986, 0 224 02364 0
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... abound. Dead Men’s Morris (1936) – reissued in the ‘Classic Collection’ marking Michael Joseph’s 50th anniversary – is quite untypically straightforward and subdued, though it isn’t without moments of ebullience. One of these occurs when the elderly detective, needing assistance to get her nephew Carey out of a predicament in the ...

On the Secret Joke at the Centre of American Identity

Michael Rogin: Ralph Ellison, 2 March 2000

Juneteenth 
by Ralph Ellison, edited by John Callaghan.
Hamish Hamilton, 368 pp., £16.99, December 1999, 0 241 14084 6
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... on the American romance to Henry James on Nathaniel Hawthorne to Lionel Trilling and Richard Chase staking out the ground for American exceptionalism in the postwar United States, the problem for the writer of American fiction famously posed itself as a deficit: ‘no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong’ (Ellison quoting ...

Pious Girls and Swearing Fathers

Patricia Craig, 1 June 1989

English Children and their Magazines 1751-1945 
by Kirsten Drotner.
Yale, 272 pp., £16.95, January 1988, 0 300 04010 5
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Frank Richards: The Chap behind the Chums 
by Mary Cadogan.
Viking, 258 pp., £14.95, October 1988, 0 670 81946 8
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A History of Children’s Book Illustration 
by Joyce Irene Whalley and Tessa Rose Chester.
Murray/Victoria and Albert Museum, 268 pp., £35, April 1988, 0 7195 4584 6
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Manchester Polytechnic Library of Children’s Books 1840-1939: ‘From Morality to Adventure’ 
by W.H. Shercliff.
Bracken Books/Studio Editions, 203 pp., £25, September 1988, 0 901276 18 9
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Children’s Modern First Editions: Their Value to Collectors 
by Joseph Connolly.
Macdonald, 336 pp., £17.95, October 1988, 0 356 15741 5
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... After about the mid-Thirties, children’s papers turned rather more demotic in tone (‘ “Chase me round the gas works, it’s Inspector Meadows,” muttered Alf excitedly’) – while girls, by and large, continued to get the better of boys only by means of some tongue-in-cheek method such as flattery, and boys were still being initiated into the ...

Diary

Andrew O’Hagan: Have You Seen David?, 11 March 1993

... rest of us sat in the kitchen biting our nails and covering our ears as my father, upstairs, gave Michael the beating of his life for that. Another time, the whole family had to sit in front of a children’s panel. That’s what happens in Scotland if a child under 16 commits an offence: the social work department calls in the whole family in an effort to ...

Yellow as Teeth

Nikil Saval: John Wray’s ‘Lowboy’, 11 June 2009

Lowboy 
by John Wray.
Canongate, 258 pp., £12.99, March 2009, 978 1 84767 151 6
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... affectionately calls ‘Violet’). Ali and Yda are soon catapulted into an increasingly frantic chase after Will, which lightens the fervid sections emanating from his faltering consciousness. This narrative, which takes up half of the book, has its advantages: Wray makes full use of long dialogue sections to explain Will’s difficult family history, the ...

Pallas

R.W. Johnson, 7 July 1988

The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy 
by Tom Nairn.
Radius, 402 pp., £25, June 1988, 0 09 172960 2
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... but that’s because we have a monarchy which is not only a religion but a popular cult: it’s Michael Jackson as well as Runcie. The younger royals instinctively understand that they are a sort of super pop-star, and, while they may occasionally complain about it, the fact is that, as any pop star must, they court tabloid attention, are indeed largely ...

Mad Doings in Trade

Anatole Kaletsky, 21 June 1984

The World’s Money: International Banking from Bretton Woods to the Brink of Insolvency 
by Michael Moffitt.
Joseph, 284 pp., £9.95, February 1984, 0 7181 2414 6
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International Debt and the Stability of the World Economy 
by William Cline.
MIT, 134 pp., £5.10, September 1983, 0 262 53048 1
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Managing Global Debt 
by Richard Dale and Richard Mattione.
Brookings, 50 pp., October 1983, 0 8157 1717 2
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... US banks would in theory be enough to break every bank in America (including household names like Chase Manhattan and Citibank) if the debts were evenly spread among them and had to be formally recognised as lost. And the fact is that they are lost, at least in the sense that nobody expects them to be repaid when due – or in the foreseeable future. The ...

Christopher Hitchens states a prosecution case

Christopher Hitchens, 25 October 1990

Crossman: The Pursuit of Power 
by Anthony Howard.
Cape, 361 pp., £15.95, October 1990, 0 224 02592 9
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... so far as I have one, is as an awkward, independent ideas man who can always be relied upon to chase an idea further than is convenient. Of what is this extreme unction reminding me? The slavish gleam of loyalty in the eye, the wish to be first with assurances, the eager glint of the spectacles, the unstoppable self-regard in the guise of self-deprecation ...

Towards a Right to Privacy

Stephen Sedley: What to do with a prurient press?, 8 June 2006

... as much. Sure enough, in November 2000, the month after the Human Rights Act came into effect, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones arrived in the Court of Appeal, seeking to hold the emergency injunction granted to them and to OK! magazine to stop OK!’s rival Hello! from publishing unauthorised photographs of the Douglases’ wedding in New ...

His Own Prophet

Michael Hofmann: Read Robert Lowell!, 11 September 2003

Collected Poems 
by Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter.
Faber, 1186 pp., £40, July 2003, 0 571 16340 8
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... rewrote,’ is the epigraph for Bidart’s introduction. I can’t imagine the blizzard of a paper-chase required of Lowell and Bidart; it was something that as a student I wasn’t willing to contemplate. If all three versions of Notebook had been incorporated, it would have put maybe another five hundred pages on the book, and probably required a second ...

Red Stars

John Sutherland, 6 December 1984

Wild Berries 
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Antonia Bovis.
Macmillan, 296 pp., £8.95, September 1984, 0 333 37559 9
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The Burn 
by Vassily Aksyonov, translated by Michael Glenny.
Hutchinson, 528 pp., £10.95, October 1984, 0 09 155580 9
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Fellow Travellers 
by T.C. Worsley.
Gay Men’s Press, 249 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 907040 51 9
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The Power of the Dog 
by Thomas Savage.
Chatto, 276 pp., £9.95, October 1984, 0 7011 3939 0
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The Fourth Protocol 
by Frederick Forsyth.
Hutchinson, 448 pp., £8.95, September 1984, 0 09 158630 5
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The Set-Up 
by Vladimir Volkoff, translated by Alan Sheridan.
Bodley Head, 397 pp., £8.95, September 1984, 0 370 30583 3
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... at Brighton. That bomb outrage will have done Forsyth’s novel no harm. Whatever else, the chase scenes of The Fourth Protocol drag the reader along at an invigorating gallop. By contrast, Vladimir Volkoff’s The Set-Up is a ponderous affair. The plots of the two novels are exactly similar: both deal with fiendishly deep-laid Soviet conspiracies to ...

Going underground

Elaine Showalter, 12 May 1994

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes 
by Janet Malcolm.
Knopf, 208 pp., $23, April 1994, 0 679 43158 6
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... indeed her ‘feeling of tenderness’ for Hughes, and her ‘shame at my complicity in the chase that has made his life a torment’. On another level, the taxi driver and his silent wife and child become accusing symbols of another story.At the heart of the book, Malcolm comes face to face with Jacqueline Rose, whose critical book on Plath outraged ...

What did you expect?

Steven Shapin: The banality of moon-talk, 1 September 2005

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth 
by Andrew Smith.
Bloomsbury, 308 pp., £17.99, April 2005, 0 7475 6368 3
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... A British astronaut would have stuck in a flag and said: “I name this moon Elizabeth.”’ And Michael Collins – the Apollo 11 astronaut left behind orbiting in the command module – was the first of several Apollonians who suggested eventually sending a ‘priest, poet or philosopher’: ‘From these people you might get a much better feeling of what ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: London’s Lost Cinemas, 6 November 2014

... Polish Meals for Everyone’. And there’s the optional thrill of a fine-yourself chase in a little red car. ‘You’ve been caught on camera – Your photo for £1.’ It’s time to leave the unbroken set with its traces of blitz and blight, workhouse and limelight, and to present myself for the screening at the London College of ...

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