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Captain Swing

Eric Hobsbawm, 24 November 1994

The Duke Ellington Reader 
edited by Mark Tucker.
Oxford, 536 pp., £19.95, February 1994, 0 19 505410 5
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Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America 
by David Stowe.
Harvard, 299 pp., £19.95, October 1994, 0 674 85825 5
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... musical entertainment. Its greatest figure, who has been properly honoured in the 536 pages of Mark Tucker’s Duke Ellington Reader, a ‘source-book of writings on Ellington’, lived and died as a travelling band-leader. It was not that he had to – in his later years he subsidised his band out of his royalties – but that he could not conceive ...

Superplot

Frank Kermode, 1 March 1984

The Paper Men 
by William Golding.
Faber, 191 pp., £7.95, February 1984, 0 571 13206 5
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William Golding: A Critical Study 
by Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Ian Gregor.
Faber, 291 pp., £3.50, February 1984, 0 571 13259 6
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... resist and only partly discerns. Grubbing in the novelist’s dustbin at dawn, Professor Rick L. Tucker of Astrakhan University, Nebraska, retrieves a scrap of compromising correspondence, a piece of a letter from a long-discarded mistress. It is the beginning of the end of Wilfred Barclay’s marriage, but also the beginning of a union with ...

The Style It Takes

Mark Ford: John Cale, 16 September 1999

What’s Welsh for Zen? The Autobiography of John Cale 
by Victor Bockris.
Bloomsbury, 272 pp., £20, January 1999, 0 7475 3668 6
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... a gutter, attracted by its title, The Velvet Underground. So named, and with the androgynous Moe Tucker on drums, the group embarked on a two-week stint at the Café Bizarre on MacDougal Street, where they scared off the customers and baited the management. Just before they were closed down, however, Andy Warhol wafted in. The following day Warhol proposed ...

Jungle Joys

Alfred Appel Jr: Wa-Wa-Wa with the Duke, 5 September 2002

... quotations or dismiss them as self-indulgent distractions or pointless jokes, which misses the mark.The postwar bebop jazzmen employed musical quotations even more often than Ellington. Charlie Parker frequently concludes fast-paced, hard-swinging numbers by stopping on a dime and gaily quoting – out of tempo, with leisurely elegance – from Percy ...

The Right Kind of Pain

Mark Greif: The Velvet Underground, 22 March 2007

The Velvet Underground 
by Richard Witts.
Equinox, 171 pp., £10.99, September 2006, 9781904768272
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... New York composer LaMonte Young, was the band’s violist and played bass guitar. Maureen ‘Mo’ Tucker, a self-taught teenage percussionist, played standing up, without cymbals or pedals, and was one of only a very few female drummers in rock. Sterling Morrison, the band’s fine second guitarist, has always been underappreciated, partly because he ...
Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot 
by Michael Rogin.
California, 320 pp., $24.95, May 1996, 0 520 20407 7
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... mammy-singing disciples included not only Eddie Cantor, George Burns, George Jessel and Sophie Tucker, but the future movie mogul Harry Cohn, the young Walter Winchell and his own older brother. Signed by the Shubert Brothers in 1911, Jolson was the first product of the bastard forms of vaudeville and minstrel show to be legitimised on Broadway’s Great ...

Days of Reckoning

Orlando Figes, 7 July 1988

Stalin: Man and Ruler 
by Robert McNeal.
Macmillan, 389 pp., £16.95, June 1988, 0 333 37351 0
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... in the Bolshevik underground in Baku. Martov, the Menshevik leader, was probably closer to the mark in 1918 when he accused Stalin of having carried out bank robberies (‘expropriations’) to finance party activities, although on this, as on quite a few other unresolved points in Stalin’s biography, McNeal appears to have no opinion. On several ...

The Hard Zone

Andrew O’Hagan: At the Republican National Convention, 1 August 2024

... his own bullet-points into company with their resounding dénouement, a bullet that clipped its mark. The iconography of his fist-pump and bloodied face immediately became the image he had waited for all his life, as – on the floor, with mad bravery and media savvy beyond the bounds of reason – he prepared for the photo-op. ‘Let me get my ...

Why couldn’t she be fun?

Lavinia Greenlaw: Nico gets her own back, 24 February 2022

You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico 
by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike.
Faber, 512 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 0 571 35001 8
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... honest, and I wasn’t doing anything at the time.’ They diminished her contribution. Maureen Tucker: ‘It was just something to do for fun on the first album.’ Lou Reed: ‘It was fun that she was there and it was fun that she wasn’t.’Just before this, Nico had been in London, where the manager of the Stones took her up and put out a single, a ...

Diary

Tom Nairn: Australian Blues, 18 November 2004

... elder statesman of the Labor Party, Gough Whitlam, appeared to counsel patience on his protégé Mark Latham, who recently became the Labor leader. The gaffer prognosticated that a full two sessions of zombiedom might have to elapse before the progressives get another chance. Had not he himself had to wait 23 years before the turnaround of the 1970s? Though ...

Cyberpunk’d

Niela Orr, 3 December 2020

Such a Fun Age 
by Kiley Reid.
Bloomsbury, 310 pp., £12.99, January, 978 1 5266 1214 4
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... one kind of Black image, just as the erasure of Oney Judge represented the lacunae that mark historical narratives like one of Kara Walker’s cutouts. The legacy of these representations haunts this novel.The protagonist of Such a Fun Age is Emira Tucker, a 25-year-old Black woman struggling to figure out her ...

Burrinchini’s Spectre

Peter Clarke, 19 January 1984

That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in 19th-Century Intellectual History 
by Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow.
Cambridge, 385 pp., £25, November 1983, 9780521257626
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... of the established Church,’ we are reminded, ‘Malthus was as much the successor to Abraham Tucker and William Palcy as to Adam Smith, and as much the contemporary of someone like Bishop Sumner, who did so much to make his doctrines acceptable in Anglican circles, as of his friend Ricardo.’ Macaulay, on the other hand, is to be visualised, as he so ...

‘Damn right,’ I said

Eliot Weinberger: Bush Meets Foucault, 6 January 2011

Decision Points 
by George W. Bush.
Virgin, 497 pp., £25, November 2010, 978 0 7535 3966 8
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... of ‘trusted friends’. Foucault: ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’ ‘The mark of the writer is … nothing more than the singularity of his absence.’ As a postmodern text, many passages in the book are pastiches of moments from other books, including scenes that Bush himself did not witness. These are taken from the memoirs of ...

Cooked Frog

David Edgar: Orbán’s Hungary, 7 March 2024

Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary 
by Zsuzsanna Szelényi.
Hurst, 438 pp., £25, November 2022, 978 1 78738 802 4
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... claims about the role of multinational companies, banks, the IMF and the EU). In 2014, to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Nazi invasion, his government erected a memorial to ‘all the victims’ of the occupation depicting a struggle between a sepulchral Archangel Gabriel and a rapacious German imperial eagle. In this version of ...

Hey man, we’re out of runway

Christian Lorentzen: Bad Times for Biden, 18 July 2024

The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future 
by Franklin Foer.
Penguin, 432 pp., £24, September 2023, 978 1 101 98114 6
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The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House 
by Chris Whipple.
Scribner, 409 pp., £12.99, December 2023, 978 1 9821 0644 7
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The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump 
by Alexander Ward.
Portfolio, 354 pp., £28.99, February, 978 0 593 53907 1
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... its allies for two decades.’ Austin, a former general who served with Beau Biden in Iraq, and Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, favoured maintaining a force of 2500 troops in the country. Milley made an ‘emotional’ pitch, Ward writes: ‘Withdrawing American forces would make it easy for the Taliban to regain control of the ...

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