“I saw that book.” Are we likely to hear this more and more from the next generation? A reviewer recently described a book by Joan Didion as “a novel that doesn’t have to be filmed to make you feel you’re watching it, not reading it.” Television adaptations of fiction are notoriously common these days, and...
Author: Geoffrey Wagner (Geoffrey Wagner)
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The First Racquet in the West
Every man has his Holy Grail. Mine was a racquet held in the hand of a truculent priest some four centuries ago. I had heard about the ball player of Yagul in southern Mexico from colleagues in archaeology, but it was only after several trips south of the border that I decided to flush him...
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Letter From Grenada: Revenge of the Cat
I recently noticed an article in the Trinidad Guardian about two male teenagers who had been charged with savagely “chopping” an old man (though not to death). Each youth received a sentence of 42 years in prison plus 20 strokes of the birch. It was the latter part of the sentence, the instrument designated by...
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Peter Mayle and All That
Eleven years ago an Englishman called Peter Mayle followed in so many of his countrymen’s footsteps and, tired of rain and taxes, bought a house in sunny Provence. The book he wrote about his life there, truly no more than a bundle of anecdotes about funny foreigners and their enviable gastronomy, did remarkably well, despite...
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Eccentricity as Education
“Sir, it is a great thing to dine with the Canons of Christ Church.” Samuel Johnson, Boswell’s Life. Though perhaps not with Canon Jenkins. Universities are, or should be, the last refuge of great eccentrics who emphasize our humdrum norms. Such I discovered when I went up to Henry VIII’s 1545 refounding of Wolsey’s Cardinal...
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Susan Sontag
“Side by Side by Sontag” was the London Observer‘s headline describing an evidently turbulent scene at the last Edinburgh Festival. The comedian Simon Fanshawe spotted a famous couple hobnobbing hard together— photographer Annie Leibovitz and her bosom buddy: “the great critic and writer Susan Sontag.” As the Observer’s “Arts Diary” put it: “Unable to contain...
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Semper Fidel?
It is over ten years now since the last Cuban left Grenada. My wife and I happened to own a retirement property on the island less than a hundred meters from the huts put up to house the thousand-odd “freedom fighters” sent down by Fidel Castro (whom I met) to spread the Good Old Cause....
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An Artful Success
Half a century ago Puerto Rico was the poorest country in the West, including Haiti. At that time I was living penuriously in what was to become New York’s Spanish Harlem, then the preserve of Italian immigrants. This Little Italy of the Upper East Side was virtually ruled by the colorful communist Congressman Vito Marcantonio,...
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Life as a Picture Postcard
The girls are in dirndls. Usually pink, with a darker apron and neckerchief and a waist-cinching bodice of black velveteen, buttoned up under old-fashioned chests. Puff-sleeves of white starched blouses. They wear this folkloric costume quite unselfconsciously, about their everyday jobs, in bank or supermarket alike. This is a feminist’s nightmare. The apple-cheeked men are...
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Crime and Punishment Among the Last Englishmen
England abolished capital punishment in the mid-1960’s when few capital crimes were committed there, and corporal punishment was abolished long before that. Sometimes when I am in Manhattan, reading of the constant homicides there, I recall the four “Mayfair Playboys” of my not-so-distant youth who were sentenced to the “cat” in two doses of eight...
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The Best of Our Time
Elected Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, in his 30’s and subsequently Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, Lord Annan is a delightful person who has given us a delightful book of scintillating erudition that ranges far beyond the confines of its subtitle. Indeed, there can hardly be a single English intellectual of significance in this...
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Crusoe’s Island
Because William York Tindall’s Forces in Modern British Literature extends itself only to 1946, and because there has been nothing as wide-ranging published since, I looked forward to George Watson’s book repairing the omission. Watson, a Cambridge don, is also the author of a splendid study of English criticism from Dryden to Eliot, which I...
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America in Spanish?
American Airlines flies you down to San Jose daily, all announcements in English. Indeed, almost everyone in the Costa Rican capital seems able to speak excellent English, prompting the irony of local kids all studying the language hard, to be impeded from practicing it should they reach compulsorily bilingual schools in America. As a matter...
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Snow and Chocolates
I shall not easily forget my first visit to Switzerland. The end of the war left my battalion encamped north of Perugia. Leave was suddenly generous, and rides in military transport easy to find, at least for a young ensign in the Brigade of Guards. Hoping to flush a retired uncle in the Bernese Oberland...
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The Intransigent Uninvited
Today the United States takes in annually more than twice as many immigrants as all other countries in the world put together. Many Asian countries permit no immigration at all, and openly despise foreigners. The top U.S.immigrant exporter last year, Mexico (with 95,039), is also a vigorous deporter, sending back an average of 150 Central...
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No Pedestrians
The last time I visited Brazil I arrived on a Ladeco flight from Santiago clutching a copy of Chile’s best newspaper, El Mercurio, wherein I was much impressed by an exclusive from the ever-erudite pen of Thomas Molnar. His article dealt with the architectural rape of modern cities, of which Pei’s monstrosity in front of...
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On Holiday
A couple of easy hours from Miami, Guatemala is a time warp. One of the physically closest of our Central American friends, it is at the same time one of the most culturally different—more so, certainly, than modern Mexico. These days, when you can be waved through US immigration not only in the Bahamas but...
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The End of Art
Reflections on the 1989 Whitney Biennial of American Art “Among the Neo-Minimalists Liz Larner makes a strangely regular tapestry out of human eyelashes. The team of Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler compares bottles of powdered pigment. Meg Webster makes a big low-lying circle out of nothing but dirt; a second sculpture populates soil with plants,...
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The Caribbean
For Albert Camus, the French Revolution initiated the modern age, killing God in the person of His representative on earth, the monarch. After which “Utopia replaces God by the future,” as Camus nicely phrases it in L’Homme Revoke. God’s anointed could no longer justify arbitrary action in this world by divine transcendence, and man (read...
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Postwar Oxford
It was an interesting time. The Second World War had gone on two years longer than the First, with resultant fatigue in England’s industrial north, which gave the Labour government its 1945 landslide. Such is admirably explained in Corelli Barnett’s The Audit of War, which shows how the appeal of the shadow Attlee government, particularly...
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Socialism and Reality in Central America
“It is good also not to try experiments in states.” —Francis Bacon As a term, imperialism underwent a number of visions and revisions at the turn of the century when the fact itself was receding. There was Bernard Bosanquet’s British interpretation and, in France, the Baron de la Seilliere’s multivolume opus. Such were radically redefined...
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Among the Lakes
My advice to anyone who wants to see some of the most polite people around is to get to Chile soon—before we declare war on it or the media level it into the likeness of a London suburb, with a bust of Lenin in every town hall, tax-funded homes for lesbians, and a veto on...
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The Middle of the World
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, Cayambe, Antisana, Tungurahua—the jaw-cracking, eye-chart names thunder from the map with the grandeur of the 6,000-meter, snow-capped volcanoes most of them are, staking out the spine of the Ecuadorian Andes, some of the world’s finest scenery. Indeed, no fewer than 11 such nevados may be seen on a clear day from the Latacunga...
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Between Two Worlds
Reflecting on his upbringing in Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul denies cultural identity to his part of the Caribbean: “Nothing bound us together except this common residence.” Indeed, the area called Caribbean is constantly redefining itself. Its tongues include English, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Its population shows large deposits of Chinese and Indians as well as African...
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Traveling in the Black
“I never save less than $400 on a round-trip ticket Kennedy-de Gaulle,” said the 40ish, balding businessman in the paneled bar of his Manhattan club. “I fly Concorde to Paris once a month. My secretary buys my New York-Paris ticket, which is presently around $1,200, and books my return. In Paris I change dollars at...
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Memories and Modernity in Kasbah Country
I first visited Morocco in January 1943 as a young officer affected, with others, to the Casablanca Conference; it was considered sack time, after sterner service in the Western Desert, so called, or Libya. Originally it was to have been between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, but Uncle Joe, as both called the Russian dictator, sulked...
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A Cultural Evening in Grenada
During the four-and-one-half years of Cuban hegemony in Grenada, I often had cause to cross a country road from my house on the Pointe Salines peninsula to the Headquarters of the DGI (Directorio General de Intelegencia) to complain about the noise. Would they please turn down the altavoz or speaker system beaming Castro’s speeches at...