Now is your chance

Matthew Kelly: Irish Wartime Neutrality, 5 October 2006

The Emergency: Neutral Ireland 1939-45 
by Brian Girvin.
Macmillan, 385 pp., £25, March 2006, 1 4050 0010 4
Show More
Show More
“... during the war does little to allay that fear. Once convinced of the need for some kind of home rule for Ireland, Churchill, who had played a leading role in the negotiations behind the Anglo-Irish treaty, was not keen on partition. He, Lloyd George and Lord Birkenhead had seen it as a temporary staging post on the ...”

Grab more hills, expand the territory

Henry Siegman: The History of the Settlements, 10 April 2008

The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-77 
by Gershom Gorenberg.
Holt, 454 pp., £16.99, March 2007, 978 0 8050 8241 8
Show More
Lords of the Land: The War over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007 
by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar.
Nation, 531 pp., $29.95, October 2007, 978 1 56858 370 9
Show More
Show More
“... with the Palestinians whose lands were being confiscated. Most have argued they should be granted home rule and Jordanian citizenship. Over the years, some cabinet members – Rehavam Ze’evi, Rafael Eitan, Effi Eitam and Avigdor Lieberman, for example – have openly advocated ‘transfer’, a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. There has been general ...”

Rogering in Merryland

Thomas Keymer: The Unspeakable Edmund Curll, 13 December 2007

Edmund Curll, Bookseller 
by Paul Baines and Pat Rogers.
Oxford, 388 pp., £30, January 2007, 978 0 19 927898 5
Show More
Show More
“... of Curll’s output since such early publications as The Case of Sodomy, in the Tryal of Mervin Lord Audley, Earl of Castlehaven and The Case of John Atherton, Bishop of Waterford in Ireland; who was Convicted of the Sin of Uncleanness with a Cow, and other Creatures (both 1710); Fielding also misses the transparent pose of righteous indignation that Curll ...”

Free from Humbug

Erin Maglaque: The Murdrous Machiavel, 16 July 2020

Machiavelli: His Life and Times 
by Alexander Lee.
Picador, 762 pp., £30, March 2020, 978 1 4472 7499 5
Show More
Show More
“... on the farm and playing cricca in the tavern. But in the evening, he told Vettori,I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable court of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I ...”

War is noise

Jonathan Raban: Letters from My Father, 17 December 2020

“... her recent batch of ‘five most perfectly lovely airletters’, which promise the arrival of a home-made cake and a home-knit sweater. He goes on to warn her of his latest present in return, having made various attempts to procure acceptable underwear for her (not black! not pantaloons!) on his regiment’s first arrival ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: A Shameful Year, 8 January 2004

“... But the chime, a full Westminster chime, was so appealing that we talked about it on the way home and later asked Mrs H. to put it on one side. Today we collect it and it looks every bit as dull as we remember, but now on the table behind the living-room door it seems very much at home. And the chime is of such ...”

Fat Man

Steven Shapin: Churchill’s Bomb, 26 September 2013

Churchill’s Bomb: A Hidden History of Science, War and Politics 
by Graham Farmelo.
Faber, 554 pp., £25, October 2013, 978 0 571 24978 7
Show More
Show More
“... in the Pacific, still wary of the slaughter that would surely attend an invasion of the Japanese home islands, and it wasn’t likely that another landing on the Atlantic coast of Europe could be mounted for several years. British and Canadian carpet-bombing of German cities continued, but ever since the Russians had been dealt an almost fatal blow by the ...”

A Revision of Expectations

Richard Horton: Notes on the NHS, 2 July 1998

The National Health Service: A Political History 
by Charles Webster.
Oxford, 233 pp., £9.99, April 1998, 0 19 289296 7
Show More
Show More
“... from this technique.’ It fell to the Royal College of Physicians to offer an olive branch. Lord Moran, its president, asked the Minister to make it clear that he would amend the Act to ensure that a system of salaries would not be implemented, suggesting that, in return, doctors would support the NHS. Bevan agreed, and an amending Act was drawn ...”

Why should you be the only ones that sin?

Colm Tóibín, 5 September 1996

Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature 
by Anthony Heilbut.
Macmillan, 636 pp., £20, June 1996, 9780394556338
Show More
Thomas Mann: A Biography 
by Ronald Hayman.
Bloomsbury, 672 pp., £20, March 1996, 0 7475 2531 5
Show More
Thomas Mann: A Life 
by Donald Prater.
Oxford, 554 pp., £20, September 1995, 0 19 815861 0
Show More
Show More
“... Felix Krull which Mann wrote the following year he portrayed himself very precisely as hotel guest Lord Kilmarnock (Lord Strathbogie in other editions) who wished to employ the personal services of the waiter Felix Krull. Krull turned him down. Mann let no experience go to waste: being in love with Klaus Heuser was the ...”

Making and Breaking in Shakespeare’s Romances

Barbara Everett: The Late Plays, 22 March 2007

“... which is to be – as the plays recurrently tell us – ‘not altogether fool, my lord’. He transforms a native looseness of culture, a romanticism always available, into liberty rather than licence. Rather than narrowing and ‘making it new’, Shakespeare found range and richness in the intellectual spectrum of his time: he found more ...”

NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

“... breakdown. In universe one, the NHS will be upturned to give most of the healthcare people need at home or on their doorstep and admit to the big hospitals only patients with major trauma, or suffering diseases that demand intensive care, or complex surgical or biochemical expertise. Big hospitals are to become centres of research, high technology, rare skills ...”

Belt, Boots and Spurs

Jonathan Raban: Dunkirk, 1940, 5 October 2017

“... with dark skin and a shock of coal-black hair, shy and socially awkward, my father returned home to the village of Hadzor in Worcestershire, just outside Droitwich Spa, to spend the summer hunting for a job within commuting distance of his father’s rectory. Some time in the 19th century the Church Commissioners had combined Hadzor and its equally ...”

Daughter of the West

Tariq Ali: The Bhuttos, 13 December 2007

“... diplomat. Her two brothers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, were in London, having been forbidden to return home by their imprisoned father. The burden of trying to save her father’s life fell on Benazir and her mother, Nusrat, and the courage they exhibited won them the silent respect of a frightened majority. They refused to cave in to General Zia’s military ...”

Love Stories

Edmund White, 4 November 1993

To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life: A Novel 
by Hervé Guibert, translated by Linda Coverdale.
Quartet, 246 pp., £12.95, November 1991, 9780704370005
Show More
The Man in the Red Hat 
by Hervé Guibert, translated by James Kirkup.
Quartet, 111 pp., £12.95, May 1993, 0 7043 7046 8
Show More
The Compassion Protocol 
by Hervé Guibert, translated by James Kirkup.
Quartet, 202 pp., £13.95, October 1993, 9780704370593
Show More
Show More
“... title of a subsequent work, The Man in the Red Hat. During his final year of life he also made a home video, La Pudeur et l’impudeur, which was screened on television a month after his death. Yet another Aids book, Cytomégalovirus, was published at this time and a posthumous novel, Le Paradis, appeared at the beginning of 1993. As an heir to Sade and ...”

Nora Barnacle: Pictor Ignotus

Sean O’Faolain, 2 August 1984

“... Later, a chatter starts when the parcel-carrying women crowd in to warm up for the long drive home into the bogs. In their wake comes the gabble of businessmen like boys released from school. After them the shoulder-to-shoulder nightlong battalions rising and rising to a roar booming like the last fifty yards of the Grand National. You couldn’t hear a ...”