Husbands and Wives
Terry Castle: Claude & Marcel, Gertrude & Alice

• Don’t Kiss Me edited by Louise Downie
• Two Lives by Janet Malcolm

First, a somewhat spittle-laden squawk: how one positively slavers for a good biography of the astonishing French artist known as Claude Cahun (1894-1954). Mention her in conversation and you are likely to draw a puzzled ‘Claude who?’ even from otherwise predatory culture vultures. In my own case – it’s true – certain vile French diphthongs may be part of the problem: the phonetic distinctions between Cahun, Caen, Caïn, Cannes, Cohn, canne, cane, cagne, camp, cône and con remain, sadly, a perpetual trial. Yet it’s also undeniable: though one of the most extraordinary personalities associated with both the French Surrealist movement and the Resistance, Cahun is still scarcely known to an English-speaking public. Read more

Daughter of the West
Tariq Ali on the Bhuttos

The fatal bullet had been fired at close range. The trap had been carefully laid, but as is the way in Pakistan, the crudeness of the operation – false entries in police logbooks, lost evidence, witnesses arrested and intimidated, the provincial PPP governor (regarded as untrustworthy) dispatched to a non-event in Egypt, a policeman killed who they feared might talk – made it obvious that the decision to execute the prime minister?s brother had been taken at a very high level. Read more

Onion-Pilfering
Brian Dillon: Michael Ondaatje

• Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

On the Petaluma Road, in the former Gold Rush territory of Northern California, a man inherits a farm, marries a miner’s daughter called Lydia Mendez and adopts a four-year-old boy from a neighbouring farm, whose parents have been murdered by a farm hand. His wife dies giving birth to their daughter, Anna. He leaves the hospital with two girls: the second, Claire, is the daughter of another mother who has died in childbirth. He raises all three children as his own and now and then, Anna later remembers, embraces them ‘as any father would’. The boy, Coop, however, begins to move away in adolescence, restoring an old cabin nearby that belonged to his adoptive grandfather, and dreaming of the gold that might still be found in the riverbeds. He becomes ever more distant, and more fascinating, to Claire and Anna. Read more

Partnership of Loss
Roy Foster: Ireland since 1798

• Ireland by Paul Bew

‘Nothing Dr Bew writes is without interest.’ The wearily Olympian judgment was delivered by a distinctly peeved F.S.L. Lyons, doyen of historians of modern Ireland, when faced 27 years ago with a short life of Charles Stewart Parnell which took implicit but cheeky issue with his own magnum opus on the Chief. The young Bew – Belfast-born and a graduate of People’s Democracy marches as well as of the Cambridge history faculty – had already published a radical marxisant version of the 1879-82 Irish Land War, stressing the only partly suppressed war of interests between large and small tenants as much as the struggle against the landlord oppressor, and casting a cold eye on the cloak of unity that nationalist historiography tried to throw over the enterprise. He would go on to write critiques both of the modern Irish state in the Sean Lemass era and of power relations in Northern Ireland (in collaboration with other figures from Northern Ireland&rsqu o;s leftist intelligentsia), to redefine the attempted politics of reconciliation in the Edwardian era and to continue the story of land struggle in the years just before World War One. Read more

Also in this issue

At the Movies:
Michael Wood on the gangster movie

• American Gangster directed by Ridley Scott