The diabolist Aleister Crowley became an ardent fan, once writing to invite her to be sacrificed as a virgin in a dawn rite at Stonehenge. Gray declined on the grounds that she wasn’t an early riser.
London now has a new semi-permanent protest, an anti-bank tent village outside St Paul’s Cathedral, to match the anti-war tents across the road from the Houses of Parliament. It’s one of the incongruities of contemporary London: policemen carrying submachine guns on one side of the street; people breaking the law with impunity on the other. Still, the protestors don't seem to be impeding worshippers on their way to evensong, even those dressed like bankers.
There has been some progress over the past year. Twelve months ago, you had to register to use the bikes installed by London Mayor Boris Johnson. Now, a credit card is enough to give you the extra mobility they provide. Riding a “Boris bike” from the Brompton Oratory to my hotel, I felt I was keeping alive Orwell’s vision of the England of old maids cycling to their parish church.
If you did a blindfold test on a random passage from Jane Austen you could tell straight away it was written by a woman from Georgian England, and you could almost certainly name the author. It is the same with Clive James. His writing comes across immediately as the work of an Australian of our time. Yet it is also distinctively his own. Despite living most of his adult life in England, he has kept his Australian accent in both speech and prose. His two essays for Quadrant this year, on poet James McAuley and artist Margaret Olley, dwell on their Australian tone of voice. Clive knows this topic well since he has long been master of the art.
His tone of voice comes from the 1950s state high school system — not from the teachers but the other boys, mostly from battler families. The prevailing ethos was egalitarianism, though not the chip on the shoulder kind. At the time, you admired people of obvious ability — Clive has written memorably about rugby league centre Reg Gasnier — but you developed a sharp eye for poseurs, self-promoters, time servers and salesmen, and had fun sending them up and putting them down. These were the essential skills for literary criticism and Clive made the most of them when he went to London. They still serve him well today.
Indeed, he gets better as he gets older. In August, when I asked him to write about Margaret Olley, I received a great piece of 2500 words just three days later, composed under chemotherapy and sent from his bed in a Cambridge hospital. What a trouper!
When Garner announces “This issue isn’t going away”, under the guise of making an objective statement about the political controversy du jour (such as the Café Urban furore), he does so with the certainty of a man who will make damned sure it doesn’t go away.
What does Chris Patten think of Deng Xiaoping, or Stephen Fry of Lady Gaga? Why is Istanbul the FT readers’ favourite city? What do Bear Grylls and Gary Shteyngart dream of doing on holiday. And where can you have lunch with Angelina Jolie, Roger Waters or a Shaolin abbot?
FT Life & Arts is the place to find out. A brilliantly edited mix of features, reviews and interviews updated every weekend, featuring the FT’s finest writers, it brings together the best in arts criticism, book reviews and photography.
Regular columnists include award-winning names such as Gillian Tett, Susie Boyt and Simon Kuper, as well as the extraordinary advice of Agony Uncle Sir David Tang
The Greens and Winston should tell all their followers that a vote for them is a vote to shut down the Warehouse.
I suspect they will conveniently leave that bit out.
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Hamilton
”It’s made me totally disenfranchised as a voter,” said Susan, 61. “I’ll vote for Goldsmith because we want to get Act out.”Get that woman a dictionary.
Selected Poems by
A. I. H. Paterson
Guns hold a fascination deeper far
Than the collector finds in stamps, in fine
Bold marquetry, in prints and epitaphs —
Flints and barrels, locks with furniture
Ennobled by a dead engraver’s art,
Portraying ills that lead alone can cure,
Lend to the faintest heart a touch of steel.
“So, what did you think of the poems?”
All politicians should be made to tweet and I relish the chance we will get if Andrew Williams is elected an MP for NZ First and a techie introduces him to tweeting.Oh yes.
New Zealand’s average internet connection speed in the second quarter of 2011 was 3.8Mbits per second.
The good news is that has multiplied 90 times over the past 40 years.
#votenz will someone deface Labour’s billboards by putting their leader on them?
I live in Epsom, and I’m leftish, so I’m voting for Banks.
Rationale: this election’s gone already, and the best bet for 2014 is that Key’s second term is derailed by a nasty fight on the right. Brash (definitely) and Banks (less so) aren’t going to Parliament to support soggy sops to swing voters and the Maori Party. Let’s get them on the telly every night for three years, bickering about the Nats and each other, starting with Banks’ leadership coup (“Breaking news … it’s a tie, one vote each!”).
Save ACT! The friend of my enemy who becomes the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Or something.
It calls itself the live-music capital of the world. To match its theatre-to-resident ratio, New York would need 41,000 theatres. Avant-gardists will find little to applaud, but if you have ever wanted to board a 700-seat showboat to see a violinist in a sequined leotard hang upside down to play “Stairway to Heaven” and then right herself to thank America’s troops while belting out “My Country ’Tis of Thee”, then Branson is for you.
Hachette’s first editorial team members hit their desks at 5.30am, at Penguin, some were in as early as 5am; at HarperCollins it was a 6.30am start.
The following years were a blur of starlets and minor celebrities, including the American singer Carly Simon, whom Donaldson jilted when she was preparing to come to Britain to marry him.
Donaldson/Root’s torment of his victims was often lovingly prolonged and Donaldson readily accepted there was something unpleasant and dishonourable about the whole operation. It was claimed that one of his more redeeming features was that while he hated pomposity and hypocrisy in others, he disliked himself even more.
They were Canadian. They made videos. They questioned the values of the art world while trying their hardest to make as much money as possible from it. They were really Eighties. [. . . ]
But visiting curators are expected to bring artists from overseas and they are expected to find stuff which is “challenging.” They don’t. They find stuff which fits the same old paradigm of international curatorial practice. This is why our contemporary art spaces are like airport lounges: everything is sort of the same, wherever you go. It is never quite the same, but neither is it very different. It features videos and concepts and performances, all stuff which was done by the end of the ‘60s. The people who come to see this stuff are the MFAs and PhDs who live on K Road. Nobody else cares.
Time for my annual self-salutation: “Hello, Wheen.”
