Tag Archives: Stoddard Martin

Leaving Sneddonland

Leaving Sneddonland On Michael Jackson, Margo Jefferson, Granta, £9.99, reviewed by Stoddard Martin It is unfortunate, if perhaps inevitable, that great creators, not least of music, should morph into personalities to be analysed to death, or beyond. Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner … Continue reading

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Casting Back

Casting Back The Estancia, Martín Cullen, Adelphi, £20, hb, 399 pp, reviewed by Stoddard Martin As a rule, this reader finds tales of childhood dull. True growing-up happens with first love, sexual encounters, jobs, facing the adult world on one’s … Continue reading

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Antiquity Matters

Antiquity Matters Antiquity Matters, Frederic Raphael, Yale University Press, 2017, £20, 376 pp., $26.00, reviewed by STODDARD MARTIN At first glance, this is a work of almost bewildering erudition. Reminded of Roberto Calasso’s Cadmus and Harmony, one prepares to sit … Continue reading

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Whither Ukraine?

Whither Ukraine? THE FOURTH REPUBLIC: Why Europe Needs Ukraine and Why Ukraine Needs Europe, Borys Lozhkin, Kyiv: Novyj Druk, 2016, reviewed by Stoddard Martin It is a principle nearly unarguable in the capitalist West that the ‘shock therapy’ delivered by … Continue reading

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Class Act

Class Act EVELYN WAUGH: A Life Revisited, Philip Eade, 2017, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £10.99, reviewed by STODDARD MARTIN Middle class folk beyond a certain age in Britain and its cultural tributaries may recall a social order so cleverly depicted by … Continue reading

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The Body Dandiacal

The Body Dandiacal The Dandy at Dusk: Taste and Melancholy in the Twentieth Century, 2017, Philip Mann, Head of Zeus, £25, reviewed by STODDARD MARTIN For one who grew up by the sea and sequoias of California in the 1960s, … Continue reading

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The Way We Write Now

The Way We Write Now Stoddard Martin goes with the flow The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online, edited by Houman Barekat, Robert Barry and David Winters. O/R Books, 14 GBP. http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/the-digital-critic/ A decade ago Jeff Bezos remarked that at 500 … Continue reading

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Last Post

Last Post Stoddard Martin enjoys Linda Kelly’s latest offering TALLEYRAND IN LONDON: The Master Diplomat’s Last Mission, by Linda Kelly, I. B. Tauris, £25 Linda Kelly is a pioneer in the genre of what one might call the non-fiction novella. … Continue reading

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When the Chips are Down

When the Chips are Down Stoddard Martin reviews a timely tome NINE LOVE LETTERS, by Gerald Jacobs. Quartet Books, £20 We are living through a neo-expressionistic, intolerant era. Famous lines come to mind: “The best lack all conviction, while the … Continue reading

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Hitler’s Architect

Hitler’s Architect Stoddard Martin reviews a new biography of Albert Speer In the rogue’s gallery of National Socialism, good boy Albert Speer usually gets short shrift. As a rogue, he seems on the surface deficient – none of the public … Continue reading

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