One Summer in America

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2019

... Joaquin Castro and his twin brother, Julián, the presidential candidate; Bernie Sanders; Elizabeth Warren and various news anchors. Then he goes to sleep.*As the president is landing in El Paso on his healing mission, 600 ICE agents arrest 680 people, including many who have been in the US for more than a decade, at chicken processing plants in ...

Cancelled

Amia Srinivasan: Can I speak freely?, 29 June 2023

... philosophers wrote a letter of protest, as if we should have hoped for better from Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other realms and territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.) What would a government seriously committed to academic freedom ...

NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

... husband was out of work, lost her mind and tried to gas her two children. In Lincoln in 1924, Maud Elizabeth-Norman, a 24-year-old former domestic servant, was found guilty of the attempted murder of her newborn. ‘I did it because I was homeless, out of work, and starving, and I could not bear to see the child want. She had been ailing for some time. I could ...

Women beware men

Margaret Anne Doody, 23 July 1992

Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women 
by Susan Faludi.
Chatto, 592 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 7011 4643 5
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The War against Women 
by Marilyn French.
Hamish Hamilton, 229 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 241 13271 1
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... more or less eliminating women from both the class and the cause. It has recently been argued by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in Feminism without Illusions that feminism when cultivated as ‘sisterhood’ is in danger of eluding class realities: ‘Sisterhood invokes non-political relations ... In so doing it missed the point ... feminist politics of the ...

You better not tell me you forgot

Terry Castle: How to Spot Members of the Tribe, 27 September 2012

All We Know: Three Lives 
by Lisa Cohen.
Farrar Straus, 429 pp., £22.50, July 2012, 978 0 374 17649 5
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... makes an apt parallel between her sophisticated fashion work in the 1940s and 1950s and Elizabeth David’s ‘postwar education of the English palate’.) Garland became fairly well-to-do along the way: the owner of houses in South Kensington and Shoreham in Kent, both of them graced with art and furnishings by glamorous friends like Marie ...

When Bitcoin Grows Up

John Lanchester: What is Money?, 21 April 2016

... money, the English five or ten or twenty quid note. On one side we have a famous dead person: Elizabeth Fry or Charles Darwin or Adam Smith, depending on whether it’s a five or ten or twenty. On the other we have a picture of the queen, and just above that the words ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of’, and then the value of the ...

Erasures

Colm Tóibín: The Great Irish Famine, 30 July 1998

... you on the highways and byways. He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with.’ Or Elizabeth Smith, the Scottish-born wife of a Wicklow landlord: ‘The Irish landlord is in no essential different from the Irish peasant – his superior position has raised him in many points above his labouring countryman but the character of this race is ...

Love in a Dark Time

Colm Tóibín: Oscar Wilde, 19 April 2001

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde 
edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Fourth Estate, 1270 pp., £35, November 2000, 1 85702 781 7
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... and dark is the abyss of the theatre.’ On the night his play closed James wrote to the actress Elizabeth Robins: ‘It has been a great relief to feel that one of the most detestable incidents of my life has closed.’ On 22 February he wrote to his brother: ‘Oscar Wilde’s farce which followed Guy Domville is, I believe, a great success – and with ...

West End Vice

Alan Hollinghurst: Queer London, 8 May 2025

Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1945-59 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 445 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 0 241 37060 5
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Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960-67 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 416 pp., £30, September 2024, 978 0 241 68370 5
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... makes it immaterial. In an enchanting piece in the People in 1950, a New Zealand journalist called Elizabeth Parsons quizzed ‘Britain’s three most eligible bachelors’ about what they might be looking for in a wife. The bachelors are Ivor Novello, Terence Rattigan and Norman Hartnell. Parsons catches Novello in his dressing room applying his make-up ...

Moderation or Death

Christopher Hitchens: Isaiah Berlin, 26 November 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 386 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6325 9
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The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin 
by György Dalos.
Murray, 250 pp., £17.95, September 2002, 0 7195 5476 4
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... biography, in circumstances that are severally illuminating.In November 1933, writing to Elizabeth Bowen, he advanced in capsule form his two chief propositions or preoccupations: I quote Ignatieff’s summary:The philosopher Malebranche had observed that since the moral ends which human beings commonly pursued were in conflict with each other, the ...

Where will we live?

James Meek: The Housing Disaster, 9 January 2014

... brick bungalows for the elderly, grouped around a garden with a fountain and a bronze sculpture by Elizabeth Frink, The Blind Beggar and His Dog. The toylike bungalows are superficially so different from the beige and green high rises behind them that you might assume they had nothing to do with each other, yet they were part of the plan from the ...

Emily of Fire & Violence

Paul Keegan: Eliot’s Letters, 22 October 2020

... into Eliot’s orbit was consistent with her being so far away, and distance was what he craved. Elizabeth Bowen summarised an evening at home with the Eliots in August 1932 as ‘two highly nervous people shut up together in grinding proximity’. When he accepted the invitation to give the Norton lectures, he was thrown by the thought that being on the ...

You Muddy Fools

Dan Jacobson: In the months before his death Ian Hamilton talked about himself to Dan Jacobson, 14 January 2002

... a piece in the New Statesman about Ezra Pound. It was very lively so he was recruited.He wrote on Elizabeth Bishop and Richard Wilbur for the ‘Review’. And on Lowell?No, I don’t think on Lowell, but he wrote well on those two and others. He wrote various things in the later issues. I’d certainly moved to London by then. We’d published about, I ...

After Martha

Paul Laity, 25 September 2025

... the medical profession. In a 2020 article in the Journal of Medical Ethics on no-blame culture, Elizabeth Duthie and her co-authors wrote about a ‘real-life example’ of a nurse who met a patient’s family after she had made a mistake. The nurse was ‘remorseful, traumatised’, though the error had led to ‘no harm’; the patient’s wife was ...

The Price of Safety

Clair Wills: Constance Marten’s Defiance, 14 August 2025

... of the Queen Mother; George VI attended her wedding. Marten’s father had been a page to Queen Elizabeth II. The papers ran stories about the once carefree aristocrat who had grown up on the £34 million Crichel Estate in Dorset but had suddenly cut off all contact with her family and friends, and dropped out of her course at East 15 Acting ...