Into the Net

Neal Ascherson: Records of the Spanish Civil War, 15 December 2016

Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39 
by Adam Hochschild.
Macmillan, 438 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 1 5098 1054 3
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¡No Pasarán! Writings from the Spanish Civil War 
edited by Pete Ayrton.
Serpent’s Tail, 393 pp., £20, April 2016, 978 1 84668 997 0
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The Last Days of the Spanish Republic 
by Paul Preston.
William Collins, 390 pp., £25, February 2016, 978 0 00 816340 2
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A Distant Heartbeat: A War, a Disappearance and a Family’s Secrets 
by Eunice Lipton.
New Mexico, 165 pp., £18.50, April 2016, 978 0 8263 5658 1
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... is to be held and done in common; nobody is to be unwillingly obeyed; in the sunlight of what Robert Burns called ‘social love’, human beings return to their true nature of unselfish sharing. It’s a transfiguration first seen in the French Revolution; most recently (in flashes) during the 1968 ‘events’ of Berlin and the Paris May. We, or our ...

Populist Palatial

Rosemary Hill: The View from Piccadilly, 4 March 2021

London’s West End: Creating the Pleasure District, 1800-1914 
by Rohan McWilliam.
Oxford, 400 pp., £30, September 2020, 978 0 19 882341 4
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Survey of London: Volume 53, Oxford Street 
edited by Andrew Saint.
Paul Mellon Centre, 421 pp., £75, April 2020, 978 1 913107 08 6
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... House, survives. Burlington House was sold off to the government in the 1850s and modified by Robert Smirke, with what Pevsner called ‘high Victorian cruelty’, to house the Royal Academy. Charles Barry Jr and Robert Banks added the ranges that enclose the courtyard and house the Linnean, Geological and Astronomical ...

11 September 1973

Christopher Hitchens: Crimes against Allende, 11 July 2002

Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History 
by Andy Beckett.
Faber, 280 pp., £15.99, May 2002, 0 571 20241 1
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... the potent verses entitled ‘They Receive Instructions against Chile’ (translated here by Robert Bly):But we have to see behind all these, there is somethingbehind the traitors and the gnawing rats,an empire which sets the table,and serves up the nourishment and the bullets.They want to repeat their great success in Greece.Greek playboys at the ...

War on Heisenberg

M.F. Perutz, 18 November 1993

Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb 
by Thomas Powers.
Cape, 610 pp., £20, April 1993, 0 224 03641 6
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Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts 
introduced by Charles Frank.
Institute of Physics, 515 pp., £14.95, May 1993, 0 7503 0274 7
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... 1938, Hahn wrote a letter to Meitner reporting this puzzling result. She and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, who later became professor of what the local Cambridge paper called Unclear Physics, realised that the uranium nucleus had split in two with the release of a prodigious amount of energy, and first coined the term ‘nuclear fission’. In April ...

Fatal Realism

Andrew O’Hagan: Walter Lippmann’s Warning, 25 December 2025

Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography 
by Tom Arnold-Forster.
Princeton, 353 pp., £30, July, 978 0 691 21521 1
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... for. In doing this rough work he proved the classic if wily liberal, the man whom his biographer Robert Caro has spent a lifetime revealing as an evildoer for good. ‘He shows himself to be a passionate seeker,’ Lippmann wrote of Johnson in his syndicated column in the New York Herald Tribune, ‘with an uncanny gift for finding, beneath public ...

Diary

Leo Robson: What I Saw at the Movies, 6 November 2025

... he sat through the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta, Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanité and seven films by Robert Bresson. It was the summer I learned the word ‘austere’.My taste, or at least my appetite, was indiscriminate. As Pauline Kael wrote in 1969, ‘when you’re young the odds are very good that you’ll find something to enjoy in almost any ...

The Party in Government

Conor Gearty, 9 March 1995

... was no suggestion that Mr McGregor was involved in the decision. Other former ministers such as Robert Jackson, Tim Yeo and Robert Key have obtained jobs since leaving the government. Earlier this year, the current Conservative Party Deputy Chairman and MP, Dame Angela Rumbold, was forced vigorously to defend her £12,000 ...

Child of Evangelism

James Wood, 3 October 1996

The Quest for God: A Personal Pilgrimage 
by Paul Johnson.
Weidenfeld, 216 pp., £14.99, March 1996, 0 297 81764 7
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Is There a God? 
by Richard Swinburne.
Oxford, 144 pp., £20, February 1996, 0 19 823544 5
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God in Us: A Case for Christian Humanism 
by Anthony Freeman.
SCM, 87 pp., £5.95, September 1993, 0 344 02538 1
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Robert Runcie: The Reluctant Archbishop 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Hodder, 401 pp., £20, October 1996, 0 340 57107 1
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... Did ecclesiastical anti-semitism have absolutely nothing to do with Auschwitz? Historians like Robert Ericksen (in Theologians under Hitler) and Wolfgang Gerlach (in When the Witnesses Were Silent) have documented the complicity, and sometimes the encouragement, that the Catholic and Protestant Churches in Germany lent to Nazi anti-semitism, and not merely ...

A Hard Dog to Keep on the Porch

Christopher Hitchens, 6 June 1996

... now I live in Washington and I see the old Rhodes Class of those years going about its business: Robert Reich running the Labour Department and Strobe Talbott managing US-Russian relations from Foggy Bottom and Ira Magaziner trying to recover from his moment as person-in-charge of Bill and Hillary’s health care ‘reform’.When I want to recall those ...

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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... Patel, would have had to go for being officially found guilty of bullying her staff; so would Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, for a ripe lobbying scandal.As for policymaking, a concern for accuracy was supposed to go hand in hand with a thorough and detailed examination of pros and cons, a proper submission of papers and keeping of records, rather ...

Karl Miller Remembered

Neal Ascherson, John Lanchester and Andrew O’Hagan, 23 October 2014

... to the mighty poets of Milne’s Bar and the Abbotsford: Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch, among others. MacIver played some of the part of a father, taking Karl all over town to whatever was happening on stage or on screen. MacCaig was to become a lifelong friend, guide and admirer; they shared the same dryness of wit and much the same ...

Adieu, madame

Terry Castle: Sarah Bernhardt, 4 November 2010

Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt 
by Robert Gottlieb.
Yale, 233 pp., £18.99, October 2010, 978 0 300 14127 6
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... crucial analytic concept after her: the Female Ovation Complex, perhaps. And indeed, why not? As Robert Gottlieb’s concise yet stylish new biography reminds us, the great actress’s sumptuously chequered life would have presented even the most dimwitted Viennese shrink with a veritable orchestra pit of things to quiz her about. Consider, Herr Doktor, some ...

We Are All Victims Now

Thomas Laqueur: Trauma, 8 July 2010

The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood 
by Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, translated by Rachel Gomme.
Princeton, 305 pp., £44.95, July 2009, 978 0 691 13752 0
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... set trauma on a new course. And psychoanalysis reciprocated the favour. Not only did analysts like Robert Jay Lifton and Bruno Bettelheim help construct the Holocaust as the paradigmatic case of a traumatic event that could not fail to leave ‘a trace on the individual and collective memory’, they also developed a clinical entity, ‘survivor syndrome’ or ...

Gentlemen and ladies came to see the poet’s cottage

Tom Paulin: Clare’s anti-pastoral, 19 February 2004

John Clare: A Biography 
by Jonathan Bate.
Picador, 650 pp., £25, October 2003, 0 330 37106 1
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‘I Am’: The Selected Poetry of John Clare 
edited by Jonathan Bate.
Farrar, Straus, 318 pp., $17, November 2003, 0 374 52869 1
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John Clare, Politics and Poetry 
by Alan Vardy.
Palgrave, 221 pp., £45, October 2003, 0 333 96617 1
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John Clare Vol. V: Poems of the Middle Period 1822-37 
edited by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson.
Oxford, 822 pp., £105, January 2003, 0 19 812386 8
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... own son, John, who also became an adept fiddler, like his grandfather. Clare felt an affinity with Robert Burns, collected songs as Burns did, and during his asylum years wrote a number of songs in the Scottish vernacular. Clare says in his autobiography that both his parents were ‘illiterate to the last degree’. Concerned to dispel the myths, Bate points ...

Tickle and Flutter

Terry Castle: Maude Hutchins’s Revenge, 3 July 2008

... art studies Maude Phelps McVeigh married the precocious, prodigious, ‘collar-ad handsome’ Robert Maynard Hutchins, a brilliant young teacher and law student who became secretary to the Yale Corporation in 1923 at the age of 24. In 1928, soon after receiving his law degree and a professorship, he was made dean of the Law School – the youngest in Yale ...