Diary

Patrick Cockburn: A report from Baghdad, 24 July 2003

... by US officials and soldiers. One American officer, patriotically determined not to place his foot on Bush’s features, tried to step over the mosaic. The distance was too great. He strained his groin and had to be hospitalised. The mosaic was removed. Almost all of the thousands of pictures of Saddam which used to line every main street in Baghdad have ...

Churchill has nothing to hide

Paul Addison, 7 May 1987

Road to Victory: Winston Churchill 1941-1945 
by Martin Gilbert.
Heinemann, 1417 pp., £20, September 1986, 0 434 29186 2
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... of Allied troops to be flung ashore in France to establish a Second Front. In this respect Michael Foot was more gung-ho than Churchill, who feared a massacre on the beaches. One quality that did distinguish Churchill from many other figures in British public life was a brooding consciousness of the war as another stage in the descent of the 20th century into ...

Bransonism

Paul Davis: Networking in 18th-century London, 17 March 2005

Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector 1685-1750 
by Christine Gerrard.
Oxford, 267 pp., £50, August 2003, 0 19 818388 7
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... he was also later distantly linked with Bolingbroke, to whom he addressed star-struck letters as a foot-soldier in the ‘patriot’ opposition to Walpole. Hill’s connections provided Brewster with an alibi for her potentially ‘criminal’ interest in him; her book is built around two long chapters on his dealings with Pope and Richardson. Gerrard, too, is ...

The smallest details speak the loudest

John Upton: The Stephen Lawrence inquiry, 1 July 1999

The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry 
by Sir William Macpherson.
Stationery Office, 335 pp., £26, February 1999, 0 10 142622 4
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The Case of Stephen Lawrence 
by Brian Cathcart.
Viking, 418 pp., £16.99, May 1999, 0 670 88604 1
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... in law. ‘I don’t normally think it’s right for people to be witch-hunted in this way,’ Paul Foot remarked, ‘but in this case the legal process had run its course and the case against these men was overwhelming.’ Peter Preston, the former editor of the Guardian, concluded that the alternative verdict reached by the Mail (whose editor, ...

The Pope of Course

Adam Mars-Jones: Michel Houellebecq’s ‘Annihilation’, 5 December 2024

Annihilation 
by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Shaun Whiteside.
Picador, 527 pp., £22, September 2024, 978 1 0350 2639 5
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... breath while he calibrates his effects, making minute adjustments to the telescopic sight. Here Paul Raison, the central character of Annihilation, having learned that his father, Édouard, has had a severe stroke, reflects on the robustness which made the news come as such a shock: ‘in terms of his marital situation [a young second wife] ...

Rainy Days

Gabriele Annan, 18 September 1997

The File on H 
by Ismail Kadare, translated by David Bellos.
Harvill, 169 pp., £8.99, June 1997, 9781860462573
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... The cover of The File on H shows three young peasants in their Sunday best – black from head to foot. They look threatening all right, but any photography buff will recognise one of August Sanders’s most frequently reproduced images. These young men are Germans. They are not going to shoot anyone, because that was not the tribal custom in the Westerwald ...

‘The Sun Says’

Paul Laity, 20 June 1996

... though the real difference between the two is that, in the case of the Lottery, ‘the people’ foot more of the bill. Of course, the Lottery is big business for the Sun, which organises 40,000 syndicates and runs numerous spin-off stories (WHY I ADORE MY NEW LOTTERY BOOBS). It is in relation to Europe, however, that the Sun’s populist devices are more ...

Gentlemen Travellers

Denis Donoghue, 18 December 1986

Between the Woods and the Water 
by Patrick Leigh Fermor et al.
Murray, 248 pp., £13.95, October 1986, 0 7195 4264 2
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Coasting 
by Jonathan Raban.
Collins, 301 pp., £10.95, September 1986, 0 00 272119 8
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The Grand Tour 
by Hunter Davies.
Hamish Hamilton, 224 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 241 11907 3
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... I am assuming,’ Paul Fussell said in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980), ‘that travel is now impossible and that tourism is all we have left.’ To be a traveller, you have to move about alone, eschew standard procedures, avoid the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure ...

At the North Miami Museum

Mary Ann Caws: Alice Paalen Rahon, 20 February 2020

... was separated from her husband, Roland. The women spent two months together in an ashram at the foot of the Himalayas, and then Alice returned to Paalen. In 1938 her second collection of poems, Sablier couché, which could be translated as ‘Hourglass Lying Down’ or ‘Sleeping Hourglass’, came out. The book was described by André Breton as a ...

Delirium

Jeremy Harding: Arthur Rimbaud, 30 July 1998

Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91 
by Charles Nicholl.
Vintage, 336 pp., £7.99, May 1998, 0 09 976771 6
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A Season in Hell and Illuminations 
by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Mark Treharne.
Dent, 167 pp., £18.99, June 1998, 0 460 87958 8
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... is.’ Then, of course, there was Mme Rimbaud. To young Arthur, it was worth thirty kilometres on foot any day to forgo his mother’s company. (His father had felt much the same and disappeared for good some years earlier.) Vitalie Rimbaud had, in Izambard’s judgment, an incorrigible blind spot when it came to Arthur. She gave him few signs that she knew ...

Lunch with Mussolini

Thomas Jones: Ferrari Speeds Ahead, 14 August 2025

Enzo Ferrari: The Definitive Biography of an Icon 
by Luca Dal Monte.
Cassell, 520 pp., £12.99, February 2025, 978 1 78840 475 4
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... in a Ferrari, and he’s an inch taller than me. Enzo Ferrari himself was well over six foot.) I ducked down and settled in. The instructor in the passenger seat, also wearing a helmet, shook my hand and introduced himself as Paolo.He talked me through the controls: keep your left foot well away from the ...

Send no postcards, take no pictures

John Redmond, 21 May 1998

One Train 
by Kenneth Koch.
Carcanet, 74 pp., £7.95, March 1997, 9781857542691
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A World where News Travelled slowly 
by Lavinia Greenlaw.
Faber, 53 pp., £6.99, January 1997, 0 571 19160 6
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A Painted Field 
by Robin Robertson.
Picador, 98 pp., £6.99, February 1997, 0 330 35059 5
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... sequence called ‘On Aesthetics’, which, amongst many other things, takes in the aesthetics of Paul Valéry, of jazz, of moss, of air and of being the youngest of four sisters. In tone, the sequence is something like a cross between Auden’s ‘Academic Graffiti’ and the Private Eye scribbling of E.J. Thribb. Often, the line-breaks are deliberately ...

At the Royal Academy

Eleanor Birne: Tacita Dean, 7 June 2018

... in the catalogue: it shows three deformed feet labelled as belonging to Oedipus (of the swollen foot), Byron (with his club foot) and ‘Bootsy’ (a family friend, and Antigone’s godfather, nicknamed for the special orthopaedic shoe he wore). Shortly before she left the Slade, Dean too started limping: the first sign ...

I’m here to be mad

Christopher Benfey: Robert Walser, 10 May 2018

Walks with Robert Walser 
by Carl Seelig, translated by Anne Posten.
New Directions, 127 pp., £11.99, May 2017, 978 0 8112 2139 9
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Girlfriends, Ghosts and Other Stories 
by Robert Walser, translated by Tom Whalen, Nicole Köngeter and Annette Wiesner.
NYRB, 181 pp., £9.99, October 2016, 978 1 68137 016 3
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... remarkable and sympathetic objects’, which are actually portraits in nothingness. ‘Put your foot in ash, and you hardly feel you’ve stepped on anything.’ As for the ‘little pencil, what makes it so remarkable, as we have every reason to know, is that as it’s sharpened and sharpened, eventually there’s nothing to sharpen anymore, whereupon we ...

How far down the dusky bosom?

Eric Korn: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin, 26 November 1998

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals 
by Charles Darwin, edited by Paul Ekman.
HarperCollins, 473 pp., £16.99, February 1998, 0 00 255866 1
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... now so largely accepted; but it forms no part of my duty here to argue on the general question.’ Paul Ekman puts it more strongly: Darwin conspicuously ignores the possibility that these expressions have been preserved and modified because of their adaptive value in providing information to other members of the species. Burkhardt has offered two ...