... Wright for ‘yielding too little of the roadway to a white man as he passed in his wagon’. Anthony Crawford rejected a ‘white merchant’s bid for cottonseed’. Mary Turner was ‘lynched with her unborn child [it was cut from her belly and murdered] for complaining about the lynching of her husband, Hayes Turner’. There were 11 more lynchings in ...

Abolish the CIA!

Chalmers Johnson: ‘A classic study of blowback’, 21 October 2004

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to 10 September 2001 
by Steve Coll.
Penguin, 695 pp., $29.95, June 2004, 1 59420 007 6
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... and first Bush administrations, including Gates, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Armitage and Powell, all bear some responsibility for the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, 2.6 million refugees and 10 million unexploded land-mines that followed from their decisions. They must also share the blame for the blowback that struck New York and Washington on 11 ...

Alan Bennett chooses four paintings for schools

Alan Bennett: Studying the Form, 2 April 1998

... leg, if you like. I only saw Nureyev dance once, in Manon at Covent Garden. He was partnered by Anthony Dowell, who is much more delicately made. There was nothing delicate about Nureyev. He had legs, like the leg in the painting, that were not so much legs as hindquarters. Nureyev was often compared to Nijinsky and the comparison is apt. He was like ...

The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennett, 8 March 2007

... lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.’ ‘I was giving the CH once, I think it was to Anthony Powell, and we were discussing bad behaviour. Notably well-behaved himself and even conventional he remarked that being a writer didn’t excuse one from being a human being. Whereas (one didn’t say this) being Queen does. I have to seem like a ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2004, 6 January 2005

... as it wants it to be, making the whole play some sort of expiation. I often read and reread Anthony Powell’s Journals where a recurring theme is the stupidity and bad behaviour of journalists by whose crassness Powell was always unsurprised. So no change there. 26 May. Do a question and answer session at ...

The Lady in the Van

Alan Bennett, 26 October 1989

... feared concerning it, or something like that.’ ‘Enoch’, as she invariably called Mr Powell, had got it right and she wrote him several letters telling him so, but in the absence of a wholly congenial party she founded her own, the Fidelis Party. ‘It will be a party caring for Justice (and as such not needing opposition). Justice in the world ...

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

... tight hippie ready to tell you you were bourgeois for liking, say, Earl Grey tea or for reading Anthony Powell. In that same vein, Julian scorns all attempts at social graces. He eats like a pig. He marches through doors and leaves women in his wake. He talks over everybody. And all his life he has depended on being the impish one, the eccentric ...