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 1 October 2008
- Belchamber
by Howard Sturgis
The
story of Belchamber’s publication is probably better known than the
book itself, which, like its author, has suffered the ambiguous fate of becoming
an accessory to the life of a more important writer. It is his friend Henry
James who keeps Sturgis’s novel distantly in view, at the same time as casting a
long shadow over it. James read it in pr oof, and wrote a characteristic
sequence of letters to Sturgis about it, beginning with neat praise and mild
demurrals, but quickly building up to such fundamental criticisms of the book
that the demoralised author said he would withdraw it altogether; at which James
protested and pleaded, successfully though not with any retraction of the
criticisms he had made.
Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing, powerful, but
inchoate movement in US political life that one might see as a mutant strain of
Poujadism, inflected with a modern American accent. There are echoes of the
Poujadist agenda of 1950s France in its contempt for metropolitan elites,
fuelling the resentment of the provinces towards the capital and the countryside
towards the city, in its xenophobic strain of nationalism, sturdy,
paysan resistance to taxation, hostility to big business, and
conviction that politicians are out to exploit the com mon man.
- Jews
and Shoes edited by Edna Nahshon
Great
shoemakers of our day: Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo, Christian Louboutin. None of
them, I think, very Jewish. And if there had been any great pre or postwar
Jewish shoe mavins they would certainly have been pointed out to me by my
parents, who identified any Jewish achiever in any sphere as one of the family:
Alma Cogan, Einstein, Marx, boxing promoter Jack So lomons (the Sultan of Sock),
it didn’t matter what they were known for, everyone counted. Even, like the Kray
Twins, a little bit Jewish and murderers would make them ours and make us proud
– but there was never a mention of shoe designers.
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