Saturday, March 27, 2010

My hero / John Keats by Helen Dunmore


MY HERO

John Keats by Helen Dunmore

 

Helen Dunmore
Saturday 27 March 2010

"Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine – good God, how fine. It went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy – all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry."

Whereas Byron drank soda water to preserve his figure and Shelley wrote a treatise on the natural diet, Keats ate his nectarine, and we taste it 200 years later. Keats was always the man for me. I read his letters in my mid-teens, before I knew much of his poetry. He was warm, earthy, self-mocking, funny and endlessly interested in gossip, weaving a brilliant weft under and over the letters' darker warp of sickness, death and mental anguish.

In the Keats-Shelley house in Rome, you can stand in Keats's bedroom and see the flowers on the ceiling that he saw when he lay dying. All the furniture was burned, as it had to be by law, because he had died of tuberculosis. He'd foreseen the whole ugly business from the first moment that he coughed up arterial blood, because his medical training forbade self-deception as much as his nature forbade self-pity. "I cannot be deceived in that colour; – that drop of blood is my death-warrant; – I must die."

The words reveal an essential toughness. Keats sees things as they are, with all their contradictions. He moves within a few lines from a joke about Winchester's fresh-flannelled doorsteps to the news that he has been writing the "Ode to Autumn". He remarks ironically, in one of his most agonised letters: "The knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem, are great enemies to the recovery of the stomach."

When I first read these words I barely understood them, but all the same there was a shock of recognition. At school, poems were all about meaning, and that didn't correspond to what I experienced when I tried to write them. Keats knew that you could write with a nectarine in one hand, and the juice would run into a poem.


THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016





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Friday, March 26, 2010

Lost Booker prize shortlist overlooks Iris Murdoch but plumps for Muriel Spark



Lost Booker prize shortlist overlooks Iris Murdoch but plumps for Muriel Spark

Acclaimed Scottish author, who never won the Booker prize during her lifetime, has been shortlisted for a one-off award intended to honour the books which fell through the net in 1970

Allison Flood
25 Mar 2010

Muriel Spark missed out on the first ever Booker prize in 1969 to PH Newby, and then again in 1981 to Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Today, four years after she died, one of the grand dames of British literature has been shortlisted for the third time, with her novel The Driver's Seat one of six titles in the running for the Lost Man Booker prize.
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Monday, March 22, 2010

My hero / Cyd Charisse by Tony Parsons

 

Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire



My hero: 

Cyd Charisse

by Tony Parsons

 'When she danced she made the rest of the world melt away'


Tony Parsons
Saturday 22 March 2010

N

o human being ever moved like Cyd Charisse. When she danced – with Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain, or Fred Astaire in Silk Stockings, or by herself in Party Girl – she brought an effortless grace to every move. She made dancing look as natural as breathing. She made it look easy. But it wasn't easy. Cyd was as dedicated to her craft as any sportsman, any artist. She had to be. Because in her childhood was an illness that could have confined her to a wheelchair for life.



Cyd Charisse

Cyd had polio as six-year-old girl in Texas and took up ballet to build her wasted, underdeveloped muscles. No natural, she started dancing as this frail little child and never stopped. It gave her body a lean, uncanny strength that no other dancer in Hollywood or beyond ever matched. Cyd acted and sang a bit. But when she danced she made the rest of the world melt away. In her greatest role, running rings around Kelly in Singin' in the Rain, dancing was all Cyd did. Never said a word. Never needed to.

Debbie Reynolds was Singin' in the Rain's leading lady. But Cyd was the girl who appears to tempt and torment Kelly in the extraordinary 15-minute dance sequence that is the film's heart. Playing a gangster's moll who turns her back on true love for easy money, Cyd stole the show. "Beautiful dynamite," was Fred Astaire's verdict on her. "When you danced with her, you stayed danced with."

Cyd's thing was supreme erotic elegance. She wasn't that tall – 5ft 6in – but the sublime aerodynamics of the woman, and the astonishing length of legs that had once been wasted by polio, made her appear six inches taller. "As streamlined as the Chrysler Building" was one contemporary verdict.

But beyond the silk stockings, Cyd had a thread of steel. She was more beautiful than Monroe, and tougher than Muhammad Ali. There should be statues of Cyd Charisse.

THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016




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Sunday, March 21, 2010

The New Review Q&A / Naomie Harris / 'I want to play Elizabeth Bennet'

Naomie Harris stars in BBC2's Blood and Oil. Photograph: Tim Bret-Day

The New Review Q&A

Interview

Naomie Harris: 'I want to play Elizabeth Bennet'


The Pirates of the Caribbean actress on her new BBC thriller, getting revenge on bullies, and her dream of being cast as an Austen heroine


Kate Kellaway
Sunday 21 March 2010

You recently starred in the BBC's Small Island. And you were in Pirates of the Caribbean as a voodoo princess. You are often described as a chameleon. Is this how you see yourself?
I do, completely. It is disconcerting. I have many different sides; I can be the life and soul of the party – or a wallflower. But what I love about being an actor is the leap into being someone else. I think my roles have been wonderfully varied. Not one has been racially stereotypical, and I have purposely chosen them like that.
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The big picture / Christine Keeler in Cannes, 1963


Christine Keeler on the beach in Cannes, May 1963. Photograph: Popperfoto

The big picture: Christine Keeler in Cannes, 1963

It's high nooon on the beach at Cannes for the woman who made a Tory government totter with a film about her notorious affair

 Peter Conrad
Sunday 21 March 2010
On the beach is where you wait for the world to end, or watch a continent crumbling into powder that washes away with every wave that thuds on the shore. It's a laboratory for studying erosion: the hill beyond the Cannes waterfront may have been covered with Italianate villas made of stone quarried from local mountains, but down here in the foreground there are only granules of dirt, churned up by the child in the sun hat. The beach is where earth sifts away like sand trickling through an hour glass.
The woman with the hooded eyes, long nose and unkempt hair is walking across the beach towards oblivion; in the shorter term, she is on her way to jail. Christine Keeler had supposedly endangered national security by sleeping with both Harold Macmillan's secretary of state for war and a Russian naval attaché. At home she was notorious but in this paradise of cooking flesh she looks quaintly prim: the former topless showgirl from a Soho cabaret has chosen to wear a prudish one-piece bathing suit. The few men whose gazes stray towards her were probably wondering why anyone would bother to take her photograph. If the palms along the corniche are too exotic for Cannes, she's not exotic enough.
Her walk was a stunt to publicise a tacky film about her affair with Profumo, made in Denmark and never licensed in the UK. Keeler recited the credit titles at the end, beginning with her admission that "I was played by Yvonne Buckingham": she wasn't even allowed to be the heroine of her own life story. The film disappeared like a footprint in dry sand, leaving behind only an image from another publicity campaign – Lewis Morley's nude portrait of Keeler astride a curvy biomorphic copy of a chair designed by Arne Jacobsen. Morley photographed her in a studio, with her white limbs and the blond wood of the chair eerily radiant in the darkness. Outdoors, in the unsparing sunlight, she looks ordinary, despoiled of aura. Was this the face that made a Tory government totter?
What gives the image interest is two passages of abstract form that have nothing to do with its documentary content. One is the pattern on Keeler's bathing suit, as much a relic of Sixties design as a Jacobsen chair: zoom in on those stripes and you'll find yourself inside a piece of op art by Bridget Riley. The other is her shadow etched on the sand, foreshortened because the sun is so high overhead at noon: it looks like a frisky dog, leashed to her ankle. This spirit animal was only there for a fortuitous instant, and vanished before Keeler did. Photographs, like beaches, are lessons in ephemerality.


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Monday, March 15, 2010

My hero / Colette by Helen Simpson


Colette


My hero: 

Colette 

by Helen Simpson

'When I was a teenager, reading her bestowed a sense of entitlement to pleasure'

Helen Simpson
Saturday 15 May 2010

T

he great French writer Colette has nearly 80 volumes of fiction, journalism and memoirs to her name. When I was a teenager, reading her bestowed a sense of entitlement to pleasure which a procession of Victorian heroines had gone a fair way to extinguish. Self-abnegation played no part in Colette's world, fictional or otherwise. Her writing is as sensuous and acute as it is unsentimental, dwelling on "Ces plaisirs qu'on nomme, à la légère, physiques." Inspiringly resourceful, she broke free from an exploitative husband after the early succès fou of her Claudine novels to work the music-halls, playing a half-naked faun and an Egyptian mummy in a jewelled bra. She married three times, yet she never put the needs of others before her own and she never stopped making money from her writing. Far from worrying about the children, when she had a baby at 40 by her second husband (exactly nine months from the day her own mother had died), she planted her in Brittany with a strict English nanny and only visited every few months or so. At 47 she started an affair with her 16-year-old stepson which was to last almost five years.

While not exactly a role model, at least she showed there were other ways of doing it. Hard-headed and hard-working, she was low on pity for herself and others. Her letters are full of descriptions of meals; at 50, weighing an unapologetic 13 stone, she still looked good in a swimsuit. Her novels were admired by Proust and Gide. The third marriage was her happiest, and she was at her most productive in her 50s and 60s. Immobilised by arthritis in her final years, she continued to write from the daybed she called her "raft" up at a window in the Palais-Royal (her last word was "Regarde!"). Nor did she die horribly, or suffer vile punishment; she lived to be over 80 and was the first woman in France to be accorded a state funeral. Her prose is very beautiful and subtle, and I feel more alive when I read her.

THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016


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