Is this how democracy ends?

David Runciman: A Failed State?, 1 December 2016

... by victory, rounding on his opponents in the free press. His ten-year-old son is still too young to join in, but he was by his father’s side on election night, looking hardly less bemused than the rest of us, as Trump delivered his notably conciliatory victory speech. Words of conciliation followed by the ruthless personal appropriation of the ...

All of a Tremble

David Trotter: Kafka at the pictures, 4 March 2004

Kafka Goes to the Movies 
by Hanns Zischler, translated by Susan Gillespie.
Chicago, 143 pp., £21, January 2003, 0 226 98671 3
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... be shown to have extended significantly the repertoire of behaviour and reflection available to a young would-be author in Prague in the years before the First World War. It might, for example, alter our sense of the state of the family romance to know that Kafka’s youngest sister, Ottla, was, as Zischler puts it, his ‘real cinematic companion and secret ...

What does a chicken know of bombs?

David Thomson: A Key to Brando, 5 December 2019

The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando 
by William J. Mann.
HarperCollins, 718 pp., £22, November 2019, 978 0 06 242764 9
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... had an urge to repudiate his audience.Mann is at his best recounting the speed with which the young Brando went from the New School to playing Stanley Kowalski. His progress was spurred by two people. Stella Adler was an actress and a dynamic teacher of acting. She fell for Brando and his chronic originality. Her approach had two anchors: respect the text ...

This Charming Man

Frank Kermode, 24 February 1994

The Collected and Recollected Marc 
Fourth Estate, 51 pp., £25, November 1993, 1 85702 164 9Show More
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... It sometimes happens that an exceptionally talented person dies rather young, leaving behind him friends, still in their prime, who happen to be good writers – witness the posthumous celebrations of Shelley and D.H. Lawrence. Mark Boxer was famous at Cambridge; he was even famous for the manner of his leaving it; and then, without serious intermission, he became and remained famous in London ...

Parable of the Parakeets

David Todd: Mélenchon’s Ambitions, 9 October 2025

Now, the People! Revolution in the 21st Century 
by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, translated by David Broder.
Verso, 300 pp., £22, April, 978 1 80429 794 0
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... the sudden propelling to stardom of these three old hands of the radical left, especially among young progressives. But to the extent that LFI looks to foreign models, it usually invokes the Five Star Movement in Italy, for its canny use of new media, or Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, for their radical hostility to neoliberal ...

Modern Virginity

Paul Delany, 27 February 1992

Song of Love: The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier 1909-1915 
edited by Pippa Harris.
Bloomsbury, 302 pp., £17.99, November 1991, 0 7475 1048 2
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... them: ‘they destroy all one’s judgment – turn one into an ape.’ For an upper-middle-class young lady, born in the reign of Victoria, these were unusual sentiments. Song of Love provides a much clearer picture of Noel’s character than could be seen in the documents previously available. She told Rupert that when she was a child Edward Garnett had ...

Dear Mohamed

Paul Foot, 20 February 1997

Sleaze: The Corruption of Parliament 
by David Leigh and Ed Vulliamy.
Fourth Estate, 263 pp., £9.99, January 1997, 1 85702 694 2
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... was left. The cover-up was carefully supervised by the Tory Whips office, in particular by two young MPs, David ‘Two Brains’ Willetts and Andrew Mitchell, whose father, David Mitchell, is also a Tory MP, and once chose Neil Hamilton to be his Parliamentary Private Secretary. The ...

At the Met

David Hansen: Richard Serra, 30 June 2011

... and events. Pacific Judson Murphy is a reference to one of the steel mills where he worked as a young man to earn the money for college; Zadikians is a tribute to his then assistant Zadik Zadikian; The United States Government Destroys Art is an angry, blunt, polemical response to the Tilted Arc affair. But don’t try to get too close. Make no ...

Follow the Money

David Conn, 30 August 2012

... documented a class-divided sport, the directors helping themselves to the boardroom buffet while young fans died on the terraces. Taylor recommended that run-down grounds be modernised and terraces replaced with seats (the latter change was applied only in the top two divisions). His verdict was damning – ‘old grounds, poor ...

Apoplectic Gristle

David Trotter: Wyndham Lewis, 25 January 2001

Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis 
by Paul O'Keeffe.
Cape, 697 pp., £25, October 2001, 0 224 03102 3
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Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer 
by Paul Edwards.
Yale, 583 pp., £40, August 2000, 0 300 08209 6
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... No one answered his knock, but the door was open, so he went in. A splendidly built young man, stripped to the waist, and with a torso of dazzling white, was standing not far from me. He was tall, handsome and serene, and was repelling with his boxing gloves a hectic assault of Ezra’s. After a final swing at the dazzling solar plexus Pound ...

Comparisons with Weimar

David Biale, 16 August 1990

The False Prophet. Rabbi Meir Kahane: From FBI Informant to Knesset Member 
by Robert Friedman.
Faber, 282 pp., £14.99, June 1990, 0 571 14842 5
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... seats to lead the third-largest party in Israel. Polls also show that significant numbers of young Israelis approve of his radical ideas. More socially respectable voices, such as that of Rehavam Zevi, the leader of the Moledet Party which also advocates expulsion of the Arabs, have cashed in on his appeal. While the movement he heads remains both small ...

Dykes, Drongs, Sarns, Snickets

David Craig: Walking England, 20 December 2012

The English Lakes: A History 
by Ian Thompson.
Bloomsbury, 343 pp., £16.99, March 2012, 978 1 4088 0958 7
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The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot 
by Robert Macfarlane.
Hamish Hamilton, 432 pp., £20, June 2012, 978 0 241 14381 0
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... a white eyeball wrapped in layers of brown linen’ and the geologist tells him that chert is the young Palestinians’ favourite throwing stone: ‘During the first intifada the young ones who took on the Israeli military with chert became known as the “children of the stones”.’ ‘Elterwater, 12 August ...

Dialect with Army and Navy

David Wheatley: Douglas Dunn and Politovsky, 21 June 2001

The Donkey’s Ears: Politovsky’s Letters Home 
by Douglas Dunn.
Faber, 176 pp., £7.99, May 2000, 0 571 20426 0
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The Year's Afternoon 
by Douglas Dunn.
Faber, 81 pp., £7.99, October 2000, 0 571 20427 9
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... did they make of him? Peering at the mature student Dunn hard at work at his window, the local young women in rollers find ‘a specimen under glass, being protected,/And laugh at me watching them’. Except for a single moment of first-person plural solidarity, in ‘Ins and Outs’, the inhabitants of Terry Street are always ‘they’, not ‘we’, the ...

A x B ≠ B x A

David Kaiser: Paul Dirac, 26 February 2009

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius 
by Graham Farmelo.
Faber, 539 pp., £22.50, January 2009, 978 0 571 22278 0
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... piano sonatas into the small hours and traipsing up mountains in Lederhosen; Louis de Broglie, a young French aristocrat, who studied literature and history before brazenly introducing the notion that solid matter might consist of waves; and Erwin Schrödinger, a dapper Austrian who led a surprisingly bohemian life: openly promiscuous, he sustained a string ...

Spookery, Skulduggery

David Runciman: Chris Mullin, 4 April 2019

The Friends of Harry Perkins 
by Chris Mullin.
Scribner, 185 pp., £12, March 2019, 978 1 4711 8248 8
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... He looked around, his eyes alighting upon Jason Joslin – J.J. to his friends – a smug young man of modest origins who had, by fair means or foul, clawed his way to considerable wealth. Witness the Armani suit and the gold cufflinks that protruded a full three inches from the sleeves of his jacket. ‘I give way.’ ‘The honourable gentleman ...