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Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2010, 16 December 2010

... with all the hardships of his young life. While he was in St James’s one of the patients on his ward hanged himself in the toilets, presumably driven mad by the intolerable itching. Michael P. is as kindly as ever and me as dull, three old(-ish) men having their lunch, next stop the bowling green. 10 March. To Durham where there are not many visitors this ...

Fed up with Ibiza

Jenny Turner: Sybille Bedford, 1 April 2021

Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life 
by Selina Hastings.
Chatto, 432 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 1 78474 113 6
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... of formal education. So she started writing about the law instead, in pieces about the Stephen Ward and Lady Chatterley trials for Esquire, Jack Ruby for Life, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial for the Saturday Evening Post. ‘The law, the workings of the law, the daily application of the law to people and situations, is an essential element in a country’s ...

What was it that drove him?

David Runciman: Gordon Brown, 4 January 2018

My Life, Our Times 
by Gordon Brown.
Bodley Head, 512 pp., £25, November 2017, 978 1 84792 497 1
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... Dowie, Jimmy Dyce, Charlie Logan, Margaret Logan, Bert Lumsden, George Manclark, Derek Stubbs, Peter Young and also Alex Falconer’). As this shows, they didn’t all have to be men, but usually they were. There is no doubt that Brown tried to re-create these bonds with groups of personal allies throughout his political career, and he often succeeded. His ...

I thought you were incredible

Bee Wilson: Elizabeth Taylor’s Magic, 16 November 2023

Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon 
by Kate Andersen Brower.
HarperCollins, 495 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 0 00 843582 0
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... unwatchable.She also seems to have had plenty of Sunset Boulevard moments in which she tried to ward off the ‘sad and stealing messengers of grey’. Tim Mendelson, her personal assistant for the last few years of her life, said it took her two hours to do her make-up; an hour devoted just to her eyes. It was complicated for Taylor to have built a career ...

The Lives of Ronald Pinn

Andrew O’Hagan, 8 January 2015

... have been at the school during those years, and saw that his first friends could have been Paul Ward, Brian Foster and Terry Klepka.Many of our modern crimes are crimes of the imagination. We think of the unspeakable and exchange information on it. We commit a ‘thought-crime’ – giving the illicit or the abominable an audience. Some of us pretend to ...

Light Entertainment

Andrew O’Hagan: Our Paedophile Culture, 8 November 2012

... the mere thought of liberated sex: Thursday, 26 September 1963: The Denning Report on the Profumo-Ward case is out. Apparently it says that well-known actors were at these filthy parties. It is a disgrace that such people should bring our profession into disrepute in this vile way. Thank the powers that my own private fantasies have been left to wrestle with ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Bennett’s Dissection, 1 January 2009

... life’s work. 24 April. I like uniforms. I preferred nurses when they looked like nurses not just ward cleaners. I found the sight of district nurses in their navy blue raincoats both reassuring and appropriate. White coats have gone too now, with doctors indistinguishable from patients except that the doctors are in shirt-sleeves. I like white coats. But ...

Open in a Scream

Colm Tóibín, 4 March 2021

Francis Bacon: Revelations 
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.
William Collins, 869 pp., £30, January, 978 0 00 729841 9
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... work was called Wound for a Crucifixion. John Russell described it as being ‘set in a hospital ward … On a sculptor’s armature was a large section of human flesh: a specimen wound.’ It didn’t sell, so Bacon took it home and destroyed it, something he would continue to do throughout his life. This time, he regretted the loss: ‘I may never be able ...

The Shoah after Gaza

Pankaj Mishra, 21 March 2024

... Israel’s Western patrons have turned out to be the country’s worst enemies, ushering their ward deeper into hallucination. As Evron said, Western powers act against their ‘own interests and apply to Israel a special preferential relationship, without Israel seeing itself obligated to reciprocate’. Consequently, ‘the special treatment given to ...

How to Grow a Weetabix

James Meek: Farms and Farmers, 16 June 2016

... spoke to anybody, the shop was privately run so you couldn’t afford to shop here anyway.’ Peter Harris, another volunteer, was one of the first to move in, from his native Fakenham, in 2008. His career as a road engineer had been cut short when he slipped while carrying a 75kg kerbstone and badly injured his back. He hasn’t worked since. The ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...

Daughter of the West

Tariq Ali: The Bhuttos, 13 December 2007

... Court were now to declare his re-election by a dying and unrepresentative assembly illegal? To ward off disaster, the ISI had been preparing blackmail flicks: agents secretly filmed some of the Supreme Court judges in flagrante. But so unpopular had Musharraf become that even the sight of judicial venerables in bed might not have done the trick. It might ...

Russia’s Managed Democracy

Perry Anderson: Why Putin?, 25 January 2007

... leverage is bound to grow. No diplomatic revolution is in prospect. But Russia has ceased to be a ward of the West. How has the change been received there? Reactions to Putin’s regime vary, but they form a certain pattern, falling within a given range. At one end of the spectrum, there is virtually unconditional endorsement of the Russia that is now ...

The Club and the Mob

James Meek: The Shock of the News, 6 December 2018

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now 
by Alan Rusbridger.
Canongate, 464 pp., £20, September 2018, 978 1 78689 093 1
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... the past two decades have been spent trying simultaneously to embrace the possibilities and ward off the menace of the internet while financing paper editions to which significant, if dwindling, numbers of readers and advertisers remain loyal. Smaller local newspapers, unable to impress the rest of the world with their deep knowledge of affairs in Des ...

The Lady in the Van

Alan Bennett, 26 October 1989

... against the (very watery) sun. It looked like a favour worn by a Medieval knight or a fillet to ward off evil spirits. Still, it’s better than last week’s effort, an Afrika Korps cap from Lawrence Corner: Miss Shepherd – Desert Fox. September 1979 Miss S. shows me a photograph she has taken of herself in a cubicle at Waterloo. She is very low in the ...

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