Diary

Alan Bennett: Finding My Métier, 4 January 2018

... June. Watch Mrs May’s appearance in Downing St without a pang of sympathy, whereas even for Cameron one felt a bit sorry. Notable that she keeps referring to ‘our country’ whereas an ordinary person as distinct from a politician would say ‘this country’ – ‘our’ paradoxically not an inclusive term.21 June. I sit in the kitchen all this hot ...

Ruthless and Truthless

Ferdinand Mount: Rotten Government, 6 May 2021

The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism 
by Peter Oborne.
Simon and Schuster, 192 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 3985 0100 3
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Political Advice: Past, Present and Future 
edited by Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose.
I.B. Tauris, 240 pp., £21.99, February 2021, 978 1 83860 120 1
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... fate. The centralisation is one of the principal things that attracts freebooting tycoons like Sir James Dyson and Sir Jim Ratcliffe, along with the press barons, to the Brexit cause. As Rupert Murdoch, always more candid than his fellows, once remarked, the trouble with the EU was that you never knew who to call.All of Oborne’s books have been published in ...

The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... Odd Man Out, which was released in 1947. Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Didn’t Do in 2007, 3 January 2008

... Crockatt and Powell on Lower Marsh, a street opposite The Cut near the Old Vic, where I buy Henry James’s ‘The Lesson of the Master’. It’s a short story in which Henry St George, a famous novelist, supposedly Daudet but resembling James himself, gives the benefit of his experience to a young writer, Paul Overt. St ...

A Piece of White Silk

Jacqueline Rose: Honour Killing, 5 November 2009

Murder in the Name of Honour 
by Rana Husseini.
Oneworld, 250 pp., £12.99, May 2009, 978 1 85168 524 0
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In Honour of Fadime: Murder and Shame 
by Unni Wikan, translated by Anna Paterson.
Chicago, 305 pp., £12.50, June 2008, 978 0 226 89686 1
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Honour Killing: Stories of Men Who Killed 
by Ayse Onal.
Saqi, 256 pp., £12.99, May 2008, 978 0 86356 617 2
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... report of the Centre for Social Cohesion (an independent think-tank set up by Civitas in 2007), James Brandon and Salam Hafez show that honour is damaged less ‘by a person’s action than by knowledge of that action becoming public knowledge’. ‘Knowledge’ is not quite right, however, since the damage is effective, they recognise, even if the stories ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... in Walmer Road while Tilbury and PC Dave Pullan went to another temporary relief centre, Clement James in Treadgold Street. ‘Because we were in uniform,’ Rumble said, ‘we were seen as authority figures, but people wouldn’t have perceived us as having anything to do with the council. But we are council. I was inside the cordon and my team were there ...