The Raging Peloton

Iain Sinclair: Boris Bikes, 20 January 2011

“... Dome on Bugsby’s Marshes, talked confidentially to an unseen interrogator who appeared to be crouching on the floor of his chauffeured limousine as he drifted across London; and who remained, within earshot of an eavesdropped soliloquy, while the real PM perched in his office, alone with his compulsively agitated gizmos, grape-peelers, yoghurt ...”

Ich dien

Michael Neill: Shakespeare and the Servants, 22 October 2009

Shakespeare, Love and Service 
byDavid Schalkwyk.
Cambridge, 317 pp., £50, June 2008, 978 0 521 88639 0Show More
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“... though, needed to rest for 24 hours before it was broached – something her ladyship could hardly be expected to understand. But if the muddy brown liquid that hiccuped from the spigot would not serve the recalcitrant denizens of the hall, it might do for the help.Early in 1966, when I was 23 years old – married, with a baby, and a graduate student at ...”

The sea is the same sea

Adam Shatz: Bibi goes to Washington, 30 August 2018

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu 
byAnshel Pfeffer.
Hurst, 423 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 84904 988 7Show More
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“... of the journalist Anshel Pfeffer – looks increasingly like the embryo of a new world governed by atavistic fears, whose most malign symptom is the presidency of Donald Trump. Pfeffer, a correspondent for Haaretz, has written a biography of Benjamin Netanyahu as a way of explaining today’s Israel – by no means an ...”

Malfunctioning Sex Robot

Patricia Lockwood: Updike Redux, 10 October 2019

Novels, 1959-65: ‘The Poorhouse Fair’; ‘Rabbit, Run’; ‘The Centaur’; ‘Of the Farm’ 
byJohn Updike.
Library of America, 850 pp., £36, November 2018, 978 1 59853 581 5Show More
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“... and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print. But then ...”

The UN and Rwanda

Linda Melvern, 12 December 1996

“... To this end, the Security Council was given unprecedented power. Its five permanent members would be the world’s policemen; they would fulfil the UN’s central purpose of maintaining peace and security. Troops would be at their disposal since, without the ability to enforce it, there was no point to international ...”

Francis Wyndham talks about himself to Alan Hollinghurst

Francis Wyndham, 4 August 1988

“... two books, one of which is almost entirely about the period of the war. The war seems to be a magnetic subject in what you’ve written. I wondered what sort of war you’d had. FW: I had very much the same sort of war as is described in the books. I was in my teens. I was first at Oxford, then called up, invalided out of the Army, and did a TB ...”

China’s Crisis

Mark Elvin, 5 November 1992

The Dragon’s Brood: Conversations with Young Chinese 
byDavid Rice.
HarperCollins, 294 pp., £16.99, April 1992, 0 246 13809 2Show More
Time for telling truth is running out 
byVera Schwarcz.
Yale, 256 pp., £20, April 1992, 0 300 05009 7Show More
The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China’s Crisis 
byW.F.J. Jenner.
Allen Lane, 255 pp., £18.99, March 1992, 0 7139 9060 0Show More
Beyond the Chinese Face: Insights from Psychology 
byMichael Harris Bond.
Oxford, 125 pp., £8.95, February 1992, 0 19 585116 1Show More
Chinese Communism 
byDick Wilson and Matthew Grenier.
Paladin, 190 pp., £5.99, May 1992, 9780586090244Show More
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“... label. And at the beginning of the last quarter of this century, Maoist Communism ceased to be credible. It is not surprising, therefore, that a complex confusion about morals, world-views and the purposes of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s ...”

Beebology

Stefan Collini: What next for the BBC?, 21 April 2022

The BBC: A People’s History 
byDavid Hendy.
Profile, 638 pp., £25, January, 978 1 78125 525 4Show More
This Is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain? 1922-2022 
bySimon J. Potter.
Oxford, 288 pp., £20, April, 978 0 19 289852 4Show More
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“... in any discussion of its future’ and that ‘any questioning’ of the BBC’s role ought to be informed by ‘the consideration of the service which this unique institution has so far rendered, and ought to be based not on faulty recollection or hearsay but accurate ...”

The Finchley Factor

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Thatcher in Israel, 13 September 2018

Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East 
byAzriel Bermant.
Cambridge, 274 pp., £22.99, September 2017, 978 1 316 60630 8Show More
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“... A short book​ could be written about British prime ministers and Zionism. It might begin in 1840, when Lord Palmerston, foreign secretary and prime minister-to-be, received a letter from his stepson-in-law Lord Ashley, an MP better known later as Lord Shaftesbury, the Tory philanthropist commemorated by the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus ...”

The Mask It Wears

Pankaj Mishra: The Wrong Human Rights, 21 June 2018

The People v. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It 
byYascha Mounk.
Harvard, 400 pp., £21.95, March 2018, 978 0 674 97682 5Show More
Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World 
bySamuel Moyn.
Harvard, 277 pp., £21.95, April 2018, 978 0 674 73756 3Show More
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“... Review who suggests that women who have abortions – a quarter of all American women – should be hanged. In this free-for-all, ‘thought leaders’ rise without a trace, at great speed and with little ballast. Jordan Peterson, a YouTube evangelist who believes that feminists have ‘an unconscious wish for brutal male domination’, was hailed in the New ...”

Cash Today

Andrew McGettigan: Who profits from student loans?, 5 March 2015

“... funding of undergraduate teaching in English universities and colleges, the move could be sold as consistent with fiscal austerity – it had the effect of reducing government spending. But the income of universities and colleges was spared the cuts made elsewhere because the gap was more than filled by higher ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... the old Soviet state, first the Baltic republics, then Ukraine and Central Asia. This was followed by the destruction of Yugoslavia. If Latvia and Slovenia, why not Scotland? After all, the SNP has (regrettably) decided to stay in Nato. It was intellectually exhilarating during two trips to Scotland this summer to witness and participate in the serious debates ...”

No Crying in This House

Jackson Lears: The Kennedy Myth, 7 November 2013

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy 
byDavid Nasaw.
Allen Lane, 896 pp., £12.35, September 2013, 978 0 14 312407 8Show More
Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch 
byBarbara Perry.
Norton, 404 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 393 06895 5Show More
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“... photogenic and as rambunctious as any crowd of kids in a Frank Capra film. They are presided over by Joseph Kennedy, a fabulously successful self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf links ...”

He was the man

Robert Crawford: Ezra Pound, 30 June 2016

Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and his Work: Vol. III: The Tragic Years, 1939-72 
byA. David Moody.
Oxford, 654 pp., £30, September 2015, 978 0 19 870436 2Show More
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“... that in 1944 Pound was broadcasting from Rome for Mussolini’s radio service and had come to be seen as a traitor by the US government. In 1988, 16 years after Pound’s death, Humphrey Carpenter called Chapter 3 of his thousand-page Life of Pound ‘Suburban Prejudice’, a phrase used ...”

Our Slaves Are Black

Nicholas Guyatt: Theories of Slavery, 4 October 2007

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World 
byDavid Brion Davis.
Oxford, 440 pp., £17.99, May 2006, 0 19 514073 7Show More
The Trader, the Owner, the Slave 
byJames Walvin.
Cape, 297 pp., £17.99, March 2007, 978 0 224 06144 5Show More
The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 
byColin Kidd.
Cambridge, 309 pp., £16.99, September 2006, 0 521 79324 6Show More
The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview 
byElizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese.
Cambridge, 828 pp., £18.99, December 2005, 0 521 85065 7Show More
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“... Having fled from the ‘disconsolate vault’ of Barbados, they were terrified that they might be recognised and returned to the Caribbean. ‘I am escaped,’ one said in a letter to an MP, ‘I cannot say free, but rather, as one brought over in a Coffin, out of which I may not peep, until the protection of this Parliament unlock it, and say, Arise ...”
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