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Chris Mullin: Anonymous and Abuse, 21 November 2019

... occupational hazards. Not long before I retired my wife and I were woken up at around 1 a.m. by a man hammering on our front door. It seems that on his way home from the pub he decided he urgently needed to talk to his MP. I didn’t open the door. He was eventually removed by the police. On several occasions, also late at night, a ...
Cary Grant: A Class Apart 
by Graham McCann.
Fourth Estate, 346 pp., £16.99, September 1996, 1 85702 366 8
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... A man has been mistaken for somebody else. He has been kidnapped, forced to drink a bottle of bourbon and sent off to meet his death in a stolen car. He survives, and decides it is time to get things straight. He bribes his way into the hotel room of the man he is supposed to be ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, 6 March 2014

The Wolf of Wall Street 
directed by Martin Scorsese.
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... echoes a famous line from the earlier film. ‘I always wanted to be rich,’ he says. What Ray Liotta always wanted to be was a gangster. And of course DiCaprio is a gangster, and this is a gangster movie. The old trope has just slithered from New Jersey to downtown Manhattan. Gangsters in the movies – I have no doubt that in real life they pursue ...

Fans and Un-Fans

Ferdinand Mount, 22 February 2024

More Than a Game: A History of How Sport Made Britain 
by David Horspool.
John Murray, 336 pp., £25, November 2023, 978 1 5293 6327 2
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... and Nigerians? Not because of where they come from, but because they are playing for Arsenal or Man U, is the simple answer.To un-fans, the grief and joy outpoured on triumph and disaster seem crazed and disproportionate. For fans, Hillsborough and Heysel are tragedies that move them more than memories of legendary military disasters. To un-fans, they are ...

Exercises and Excesses

Frank Kermode: Kazuo Ishiguro, 14 May 2009

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall 
by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Faber, 221 pp., £14.99, May 2009, 978 0 571 24498 0
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... songs and recordings, and to favourite singers, some fictional and some historical, such as Ray Charles or Sarah Vaughan. Much of the action takes place at night, or in darkness. A more substantial recurrent theme is that of threatened or collapsing marriages or relationships, some of which are sad and some heartlessly funny. Much of the pleasure of the ...

Dealing with Disappointment

Adam Phillips: Bertrand Russell, 8 March 2001

Bertrand Russell 1921-70: The Ghost of Madness 
by Ray Monk.
Cape, 574 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 224 05172 5
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... to the first volume of his biography of Russell, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, Ray Monk was clear, as his title indicated, about the story he had to tell, though also daunted by the amount of material he had to work with. The bibliography of Russell’s work lists more than three thousand publications, and this doesn’t include the letters ...

In Bexhill

Peter Campbell: Unpopular Culture, 5 June 2008

... of fashion, heels and veils’) hit the same sweetly rasping note as Tish Murtha’s unemployed man and his family in Newcastle, Martin Parr’s empty, rained-on tables for a Jubilee street party, Tony Ray-Jones’s group on deckchairs making the best of a cold day on Brighton Beach, Homer Sykes’s naked girls in a ...

Scrabble

Reg Gadney, 26 January 1995

The Escape from Whitemoor Prison on Friday, 9 September 1994: The Woodcock Enquiry 
by John Woodcock.
HMSO, 144 pp., £16.50, December 1994, 0 10 127412 2
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... the inmate’s outgoing telephone call, six of their charges, five convicted IRA terrorists and a man with a previous record of armed prison escape, made last-minute preparations for their departure from custody. Three of the convicts wore double sets of clothing, well prepared for a long night ahead, on the run in the bleak countryside. Somewhere between the ...

Reaganism

Anthony Holden, 6 November 1980

The United States in the 1980s 
edited by Peter Duignan and Alvin Rabushka.
Croom Helm, 868 pp., £14.95, August 1980, 0 8179 7281 1
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... his ability to govern. His only remaining political asset, the belief that he is a decent, honest man of some moral courage, is being remorselessly eroded by his conduct of the campaign. Reagan’s puppeteers, meanwhile, may be wrong to wrap him in cotton wool. He can weave oratorical magic in front of disenchanted ‘Middle Americans’. There is ...

Outside in the Bar

Patrick McGuinness: Ten Years in Sheerness, 21 October 2021

The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness 
by Patrick Wright.
Repeater, 751 pp., £20, June, 978 1 913462 58 1
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... history. One of the most fascinating connections he reveals is between Johnson and the sociologist Ray Pahl, who carried out fieldwork on Sheppey’s informal economy in the 1970s. Pahl was attracted by its paradoxically close-at-hand remoteness from the mainland, and by its self-contained island status. In a book full of echoes and doublings, ...

Ranting Cassandras

Jonathan Meades: Refugee Artists, 26 June 2025

The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British 20th Century 
by Owen Hatherley.
Allen Lane, 596 pp., £35, March, 978 0 241 37820 5
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... the place where the desperate alighted was hardly Cockaigne. It was more likely the Isle of Man, whose low-rent hotels and boarding houses fulfilled their drear destiny as improvised internment camps for the fortunate among the wretched.One way to survive was through internal exile. Thirty years after the war, Christian Schad, so forgotten that he had ...

Jacob and Esau

Giles Merritt, 24 November 1988

Upwardly Mobile 
by Norman Tebbit.
Weidenfeld, 280 pp., £14.95, October 1988, 0 297 79427 2
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Reflect on things past: The Memoirs of Lord Carrington 
Collins, 406 pp., £17.50, October 1988, 9780002176675Show More
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... Tebbit must be the Jacob and Esau of the Tory Party. Peter Carrington is beyond question a smooth man, and Tebbit is, if not hairy, certainly very prickly. They are also chalk and cheese politically, even though both have in their time been chairman of the Conservative Party. Lord Carrington is the scion of generations of Whigs, a ...

Southern Belle

Russell Davies, 21 January 1982

Elvis 
by Albert Goldman.
Allen Lane, 598 pp., £9.95, December 1981, 0 7139 1474 2
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... polishing job especially in the groin area of the statue. Final polishing was done by Diana and Ray who together with Fiona Jardine saved the statue from destruction when an accident occurred transporting the statue to the unveiling site. Diana and Ray are still suffering from their injuries ... The Elvis bazaar is ...

Who is Stewart Home?

Iain Sinclair, 23 June 1994

... Lowes in touch with a network of global collaborators, a conspiracy of the unheard, and with one man in particular, the sharp-witted London activist Stewart Home.Home, in stark contrast to the brothers on the Celtic fringe, was a dynamo of invention, recycling Dadaist provocation into fugues of inspired counter-terror, then moving on. A suspicion lingers in ...

Teeth of Mouldy Blue

Laura Quinney: Percy Bysshe Shelley, 21 September 2000

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Volume I 
edited by Donald Reiman and Neil Fraisat.
Johns Hopkins, 494 pp., £58, March 2000, 0 8018 6119 5
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... dwelt upon the ties that bind The mazy volume of commingling things, When fell and wild misrule to man stern sorrow brings. Already it is possible to detect in this passage some of the methods he used later to invigorate the Spenserian stanza: the complex syntax, for example, helps to develop a momentum which drives the stanza towards its epigrammatic ...

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