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Mixed Blood

D.A.N. Jones, 2 December 1982

Her Victory 
by Alan Sillitoe.
Granada, 590 pp., £8.95, September 1982, 0 246 11872 5
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This Earth of Mankind 
by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, translated by Max Lane.
Penguin, 338 pp., £2.50, August 1982, 9780140063349
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... It was surprising to see the resemblances between Her Victory and This Earth of Mankind. Alan Sillitoe’s new novel is about 50-year-old Britons feeling rootless. Pramoedya Ananta Toer is concerned with young people of the Dutch East Indies in the 1890s, almost choked with different roots – religions, races, cultures, classes – all sprouting wildly ...

Diary

Ruth Dudley Edwards: Peddling Books, 21 January 1988

... is one thing to have your history* record that the firm’s founder – like Bodley Head’s John Lane – tried to avoid paying his authors. It would be quite another to have it alleged that the present management had inherited those proclivities. The distinguished journalist J.W. Lambert was certainly thorough and honest, but for the later period, together ...

God wielded the buzzer

Christian Lorentzen: The Sorrows of DFW, 11 October 2012

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace 
by D.T. Max.
Granta, 352 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 84708 494 1
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... misremembering or paraphrasing a line of Virginia Woolf’s about Henry James) grew out of D.T. Max’s post-mortem profile of Wallace for the New Yorker, and is very much the version of his life as seen from Times Square. ‘Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace’s’ is Max’s first sentence. It’s a ...

Diary

Patrick Hughes: What do artists do?, 24 July 1986

... in Edmund Leach’s review of Lévi-Strauss’s latest, The View from Afar, that ‘the essay on Max Ernst contains an analysis of that artist’s celebrated construction of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on a dissection table.’ It does not. I have been to the British Library and looked at The View from Afar. The essay in question refers, and presumes ...

Yeah, that was cool

Harry Strawson: ‘Rave’, 1 April 2021

Rave 
by Rainald Goetz, translated by Adrian Nathan West.
Fitzcarraldo, 263 pp., £12.99, July 2020, 978 1 913097 19 6
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... of woodland beside a busy road in Hackney Wick; a squat with a full-size skate bowl off Brick Lane); and what drugs they took (ecstasy and mephedrone), but not, in any concrete sense, what happened or what music was playing or who was playing it. No one had an answer when I asked: ‘What was your first rave really like?’This is the question that ...

Eye-Popping

Ian Jackman: Killer SUVs, 7 October 2004

High and Mighty: SUVs, the World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way 
by Keith Bradsher.
PublicAffairs, 464 pp., $14, December 2003, 1 58648 203 3
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... well and missed the worst of the traffic out of New York City, we will be doing 65 in the middle lane. Even so there’ll be a steady stream of vehicles passing us to left and right, many of them SUVs (sports utility vehicles), the truck-based four-wheel-drive giants that rule America’s roads. Other than the unironic Suburban, a name that has been in ...

Post-Useful Misfits

Thomas Jones: Mick Herron’s Spies, 19 October 2023

The Secret Hours 
by Mick Herron.
Baskerville, 393 pp., £22, September, 978 1 3998 0053 2
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... lanes’ of North Devon, the location of the dead badger and an allusion perhaps to the sunken lane in Dorset used as a hideout by the hero of Geoffrey Household’s 1939 thriller Rogue Male (turned into a TV movie starring Peter O’Toole). In The Secret Hours, the man who’s been hiding out in Devon for years under the alias ...

The Call of the Weird

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Last Gasp Apparitions, 4 April 2024

Andrew Lang: Writer, Folklorist, Democratic Intellect 
by John Sloan.
Oxford, 285 pp., £78, June 2023, 978 0 19 286687 5
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Troubled by Faith: Insanity and the Supernatural in the Age of the Asylum 
by Owen Davies.
Oxford, 350 pp., £25, September 2023, 978 0 19 887300 6
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... about what he had seen. He was, he admitted, bad with faces, but the lamp light in Oriel Lane had given him ‘a very good view’ and Conington was ‘not easily mistaken … I know no one in Oxford who was at all like him’ – he was renowned, even in good health, for his greenish complexion. This was enough for the SPR. Even if it were a case of ...

Lucky Boy

Kevin Kopelson, 3 April 1997

Shine 
directed by Scott Hicks.
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Shine: The Screenplay 
by Jan Sardi.
Bloomsbury, 176 pp., £7.99, January 1997, 0 7475 3173 0
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The Book of David 
by Beverley Eley.
HarperCollins, 285 pp., £8.99, March 1997, 0 207 19105 0
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Love You to Bits and Pieces: Life with David Helfgott 
by Gillian Helfgott, with Alissa Tanskaya.
Penguin, 337 pp., £6.99, January 1997, 0 14 026546 5
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... male pianists speak? King Vidor’s A Song to Remember (1945) exerted no such pressure. Nor did Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). Yet, while Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) presented a woman incapable of speech, François Girard’s Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould (1994) presented a man who was abnormally articulate – one who ...

Simply too exhausted

Christopher Hitchens, 25 July 1991

Edwina Mountbatten: A Life of Her Own 
by Janet Morgan.
HarperCollins, 509 pp., £20, July 1991, 0 00 217597 5
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... as is the immediately-following intelligence that Edwina, after a shift or two helping ‘Max’ Beaverbrook strike-break at the Daily Express, ‘looked drawn and pale with dark shadows under her eyes: “Quite dead!” she wrote, on her Saturday morning off, “stayed in bed till 11.” ’ This tone – when ghastly things happen to sweet people ...

Among the Rouge-Pots

Freya Johnston: ‘Yellow Book’ Lives, 16 November 2023

Decadent Women: ‘Yellow Book’ Lives 
by Jad Adams.
Reaktion, 388 pp., £20, October, 978 1 78914 789 6
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... loving cheek pressed close against thy horny breast,/I hear the roar of sap’); Max Beerbohm’s ‘Defence of Cosmetics’ (‘Artifice must queen it once more in the town … If men are to lie among the rouge-pots, inevitably it will tend to promote that amalgamation of the sexes which is one of the chief planks in the decadent ...

Gabble, Twitter and Hoot

Ian Hacking: Language, deafness and the senses, 1 July 1999

I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses 
by Jonathan Rée.
HarperCollins, 399 pp., £19.99, January 1999, 0 00 255793 2
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... of this story is told in other places, not only by Oliver Sacks, but, more extensively, by Harlan Lane, a noted deaf activist. Lane was a dedicated spokesman for a cause, however; and Sacks was taking the part of the deaf at Gallaudet University, a bastion of signing. Rée’s history is perhaps more telling than theirs ...

Looking back in anger

Hilary Mantel, 21 November 1991

Almost a Gentleman. An Autobiography: Vol. II 1955-66 
by John Osborne.
Faber, 273 pp., £14.99, November 1991, 0 571 16261 4
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... of the unacceptable faeces of theatrical capitalism’. There is some repetition: the comedian Max Miller is once again ‘a god ... a saloon-bar Priapus’, and various people are ‘a sphinx’, or, in the case of his second wife Mary Ure, ‘not a sphinx’. The spite, though, comes up new and fresh. When Look back in anger opened at the Royal ...

Honest Lies

Michael Wood: Jean Giono, 27 July 2023

Ennemonde 
by Jean Giono, translated by Bill Johnston.
Archipelago, 171 pp., £12.99, September 2021, 978 1 953861 12 2
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The Open Road 
by Jean Giono, translated by Paul Eprile.
NYRB, 212 pp., £13.99, October 2021, 978 1 68137 510 6
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A King Alone 
by Jean Giono, translated by Alyson Waters.
NYRB, 155 pp., £14.99, June 2021, 978 1 68137 309 6
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... first pages. ‘The morning moves along.’ When he is in touch with the road (more often a rural lane or mountainous path), he feels safe. ‘A road generally knows what it’s about. You just have to follow it.’ ‘An open road calms everybody’s nerves.’ He likes to philosophise. ‘There aren’t a hundred different ways of passing our time here on ...

Golden Dolly

John Pemble: Rich Britons, 24 September 2009

Who Were the Rich? A Biographical Directory of British Wealth-Holders. Vol. I: 1809-39 
by William Rubinstein.
Social Affairs Unit, 516 pp., £20, May 2009, 978 1 904863 39 7
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... Irish company, and she’d caught the eye of Thomas Coutts after she’d graduated to Drury Lane and was performing for Sheridan on £12 a week. They married after the death of his first wife (the mother of his daughters) in 1815, when she was 37 and he was 79. She was trounced as a predator and lampooned as a parvenue. Disraeli portrayed her as the ...

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