Richard Davenport-Hines

Richard Davenport-Hines has written the entries on Jack the Ripper and other serial killers for the New Dictionary of National Biography. The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics 1500-2000 was published in 2001.

Letter

Bye Bye Britain

24 September 2020

One thought on Neal Ascherson’s splendid piece (LRB, 24 September). Countries can only be heaved off their permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council if their frontiers change. When the Russian Federation relinquished its hold on the colonised republics of the Soviet Union in 1991, its seat was briefly forfeit but swiftly restored in recognition of its global status. No one can imagine...
Letter
British Library users such as James Obelkevich, who deplore the current accessibility of the library to the young and eager and pine for the days of narrow exclusivity when tickets were limited to what he calls ‘core users’ need to be reminded how unpleasant the old regime was, and how improved the new management is in most ways (Letters, 23 May). When my first reader’s ticket expired in 1978,...
Letter

Odd Men Out

9 October 2008

Alan Hollinghurst in his essay on Howard Overing Sturgis’s Belchamber notes that three gay novelists – Sturgis, Forster in The Longest Journey and Maugham in Of Human Bondage – each have a limping hero (LRB, 9 October). The various meanings of ‘limp’ made it an irresistible and increasingly prevalent 20th-century metaphor for sexual difference. Lord Arran, in the historic speech of 12 May...
Letter

Blame Namier

22 May 2008

Salah el Serafy is wrong to suggest that A.J.P. Taylor was cheated of the Regius chair in modern history at Oxford because – unlike his rival Hugh Trevor-Roper – he had been ‘ a wise and eloquent critic’ of the Israeli and British invasion of Egypt (Letters, 5 June). Adam Sisman, in his biography A.J.P. Taylor (1994), and Trevor-Roper in Letters from Oxford (2006), which I edited, show that...
Letter
I don’t know why Mary Beard (LRB, 18 August) and Humphrey Cooper (Letters, 1 September) bother to write for, or read, the LRB if all they can say about the story of Patrick Leigh Fermor exchanging lines from Horace with a German general whom he had kidnapped in wartime Crete is that it is objectionably ‘blokeish’ or ‘distasteful’ for implying that ‘if we go high enough up the social or...

Take a bullet for the team: The Profumo Affair

David Runciman, 21 February 2013

Britain in the early 1960s was a divided country, torn by conflicting impulses, towards the past and the future, tradition and experimentation, dignity and fun.

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Even before the ship sank the century of progress was pregnant with the Titanic’s fate.

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Allergic to Depths: gothic

Terry Eagleton, 18 March 1999

All over the world, postgraduate students of English who might once have written on Wordsworth or Mrs Gaskell are now turning out theses on vampires, monsters, sado-masochism and mutilation. Most...

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Concierge

John Lanchester, 16 November 1995

Pound died in 1972; Auden, who was 22 years younger, in 1973. Both writers underwent the usual posthumous dip in attention and reputation. This familar dégringolade is a mysterious process, and...

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Baring his teeth

Peter Clarke, 25 June 1992

On 10 January 1957 the momentous news reached the family publishing house in St Martin’s Lane. ‘Mr Macmillan has just been made prime minister,’ his elder brother Daniel was...

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