Jeffery Meyers

Latest by Jeffery Meyers in Chronicles

• Correspondence

  December 2007

  The Lady Vanishes

  In September 2000, I went to Burma to see the places where George Orwell had worked as a policeman in the 1920’s. As I planned my trip, I fantasized about meeting the brave and beautiful Suu Kyi, daughter of the national hero, Aung San, who was assassinated by a rival political faction in 1947.

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• Reviews

  January 2004

  Objective, Burma!

  The Burma campaign began in January 1942 with the Japanese invasion from Thailand in the south. Chinese troops, with Stilwell as Chiang’s chief of staff, invaded from the east, along the 715-mile Burma Road from Kunming to Lashio.

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• Reviews

  October 2003

  Flawed Genius

  Vladimir Nabokov—like Hemingway, Lorca, and Borges—was born in 1899, began life in the stable Victorian era, lived through the horrors of the Great War, and came to artistic maturity in the 1920’s.

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• Reviews

  September 2003

  The Authority of Pain

  In April 1970—between the fall of Prince Sihanouk's government and the American and South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia—the young Sean Flynn, war photographer and son of Errol Flynn, deliberately drove into a Vietcong roadblock in Cambodia.

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• Reviews

  August 2003

  Bad News From Africa

  In previous books, now classics of travel writing, Paul Theroux described his long train journeys through India and Russia, South America, and China; his ramblings around England and the Mediterranean; his paddling through Oceania.

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• Reviews

  May 2003

  Agonies of Intrigue

  Lord Byron was the most fascinating literary figure of the 19th century. Fiona MacCarthy’s solid and competent biography covers the ground in great detail (the deformed foot, the scandalous exile, the endless wandering, the early death in Greece) but fails to engage our interest or do justice to its subject.

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• Reviews

  April 2003

  Tame Monster

  Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville in 1914 and grew up in Tennessee and Southern California. He studied under poet and critic John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt University and followed him to Kenyon College, where he lived in Ransom’s attic with the young Robert Lowell and wrote his thesis on A.E. Housman.

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• Correspondence

  April 2003

  Unseen Places

  In Huysmans’ Against the Grain (1884), the precious hero Des Esseintes has “the idea of turning dream into reality, of traveling [from France] to England in the flesh as well as in the spirit, of checking the accuracy of his visions.

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• Reviews

  February 2003

  Palm and Pine

  David Gilmour’s witty and elegant, original and useful book chronicles “Kipling’s political life, his early role as apostle of the Empire, the embodiment of imperial aspiration, and his later one as the prophet of national decline.”

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• Reviews

  July 2002

  The Realms of Gold

  In Vienna, during the decade before the Great War, an astounding concentration of creative genius coincided with the final stages of political collapse.

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• Reviews

  May 2002

  In the Shadow of Bibendum

  In his Journals of the early 1990’s, English novelist Anthony Powell observed that Kingsley Amis (1922-95) “has begun to look oddly like Evelyn Waugh. He now seems to be behaving rather like Evelyn too.”

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• Reviews

  January 2002

  Hold the Gush

  Like Virginia Woolf and Mary McCarthy, Rupert Brooke and Bruce Chatwin, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s striking appearance greatly enhanced her literary reputation. Readers were drawn to her poetry by her good looks and notorious sexual behavior.

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• Vital Signs

  January 2002

  Hollywood and the Convent

  Biographers do much of their work in the study and the library, but they also get to some out-of-the-way places. I’ve interviewed people in bars, nursing homes, and insane asylums, chased down wealthy informants in country houses and elegant apartments, poor ones in drafty cottages and cluttered flats.

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• Reviews

  October 2001

  The Study of Wisdom

  The second half of the life of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is not nearly as interesting as the first, when Russell did his major work in philosophy and mathematics and, through close contacts with the Bloomsbury Group, knew all the major writers of his time.

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• Reviews

  August 2001

  Prince of Painters

  Titian, the greatest painter of the Venetian Renaissance, was born about 1488 in Pieve di Cadoro, in the foothills of the Dolomites. He came down to Venice at the age of nine and was apprenticed to the workshops of Gentile and Giovanni Bellini.

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• Reviews

  March 2001

  Hugging Himself

  James Boswell (1740-95), whose frank and revealing London Journal sold are than a million copies, is the most "modern" and widely read 18th-century author. His circle of friends—Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, Reynolds, Hume, Goldsmith, Garrick, and Fanny Burney—was the most brilliant in the history of English literature.

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• Reviews

  August 2000

  Kissing the Toad

  John Richardson, the brilliant biographer of Picasso, resembles (by his own account) those charming and attractive young men of limited means and boundless ambition who use any means to make their way in the world.

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• Reviews

  July 2000

  Military Messiah

  Orde Wingate, the most eccentric and innovative commander in World War II, was remarkably like his distant cousin Lawrence of Arabia. Both came from a guilt-ridden fundamentalist background and grew up in an atmosphere of religious gloom and repression.

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• Correspondence

  July 2000

  Dashing Through Asia

  Not as horrible as Calcutta or as ugly as Seoul, Bangkok, spreading along the flat flanks of the Chao Phraya river, is the whorehouse of Asia. Berth girls and boys will do anything you like with a Coke bottle or Ping-Pong ball.

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• Reviews

  June 2000

  The Displaced Person

  "The depravity of Tiberius, or the salacity of Suetonius," wrote Anthony Burgess, "had left its mark on an island all sodomy, lesbianism, scandal and cosmopolitan artiness."

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