At the Grand Palais: The Lagerfeld Fandango
Andrew O’Hagan, 18 July 2019
18 July 2019 · 11mins
Andrew O’Hagan reads his piece about attending Karl Lagerfeld’s memorial in Paris.
Andrew O’Hagan reads his piece about attending Karl Lagerfeld’s memorial in Paris.
James Wood reads his piece recalling his time at Eton College with Messrs Cameron, Johnson, Rees-Mogg and others.
Between October 1940, when he left for Oxford, and 1977, when Eva died at the age of 91, Larkin fired off a letter home at least once a week, nearly always on Sundays; and towards the end of Eva’s life he would write several times during the week too.
Perhaps the deepest irony of all is that in clearing Trump of conspiracy the Mueller report poses a direct challenge to his worldview.
They do not all look the same. But group them together and they clearly form a political family: Orbán, Erdoğan, Kaczyński, Trump, Modi, perhaps Netanyahu, Bolsonaro for sure.
The original Holloway building was a flamboyant mock-up of Warwick Castle. What better place than a castle for all those women in need of rescue?
Véra Nabokov, Nora Joyce, Ann Malamud, Vivien Eliot – the list of literary victim-wives is long, but none commands as much attention as Zelda Fitzgerald.
On the night of 26 September 2014, in the town of Iguala in the Mexican state of Guerrero, local police opened fire at several buses – some full of students, one carrying football players coming home from a match. Six people were killed. By midnight, 43 more students had disappeared, or, rather, had been forcibly disappeared.
If you are able to name the last four leaders of the United Kingdom Independence Party, then you really ought to get out more. And no, none of them was or is Nigel Farage.
About half of all buying and selling on many of the world’s crucial financial markets is now automated high-frequency trading. HFT is ultrafast. Data released last September by Eurex, Europe’s leading futures exchange, indicated that the speed is now 84 nanoseconds (billionths of a second): sixty times faster than it was in 2011.
I remember the first time I paid a bribe. It was the summer of 1993, and I was standing at the ticket counter of the Aeroflot office in Voronezh; I was nine years old.
Elizabeth Holmes was said to be the ‘youngest self-made female billionaire’ of all time. And why not? Her invention was going to be the reason people – Americans first, but eventually everyone in the world – would lead better, healthier, longer lives.
George H.W. Bush and Arthur Moreau’s activities have remained secret, and, as I learned while reporting on this aspect of history, those who knew of his activities at the time remain sceptical that they can be written about today.
Alan Bennett reads from his 2018 diary, in which he puts on a new play and finds himself on someone’s arm.
John Lanchester dissects Agatha Christie’s compulsive readability, and considers why, despite her brazen lack of style, she can be read as a great formalist.