A Hard Dog to Keep on the Porch

Christopher Hitchens, 6 June 1996

“... They were far from home and they were deeply patriotic. You could tell that they had been told by their selection committees, before embarking on the Atlantic crossing, that they should comport themselves as ambassadors and emissaries. But those local lawyers and Rotarians and Chambers of Commerce had not prepared them to hurry up, finish their studies and ...”

Wrong Again

Bruce Cumings: Korean War Games, 4 December 2003

“... the wall and make bilateral negotiations impossible. The complacent US public seems unperturbed by Bush’s failure so far to find a single WMD in Iraq, even if the much more disputatious British public was immediately up in arms (so to speak) about the remarkable Intelligence failures that were used to justify the invasion. To grasp the full extent of this ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

Even My Hair Feels Drunk

Adam Mars-Jones: Joy Williams, 2 February 2017

The Visiting Privilege 
byJoy Williams.
Tuskar Rock, 490 pp., £16.99, November 2016, 978 1 78125 746 3Show More
Ninety-Nine Stories of God 
byJoy Williams.
Tin House, 220 pp., £16.95, July 2016, 978 1 941040 35 5Show More
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“... and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny in the eleventh grade and you had to be careful about this because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left 24 suicide notes and had become just a joke. They had left the notes everywhere and they were full of misspellings and pretensions. Helen’s ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

Move like a party

Mendez: George Michael’s Destiny, 5 January 2023

George Michael: A Life 
byJames Gavin.
Abrams, 502 pp., £25, June 2023, 978 1 4197 4794 6Show More
George Michael: Freedom Uncut 
directed byDavid Austin and George Michael.
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“... English wife, Lesley Harrison. Georgios (‘Yorg’ to the family but mispronounced as ‘Yog’ by Andrew Ridgeley, whose version stuck) was the youngest of three children, and the only boy. He was six months old when Lesley’s brother Colin overdosed on schizophrenia medication while on temporary release from psychiatric care. Lesley’s father had ...”

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 ...”

Don’t wait to be asked

Clare Bucknell: Revolutionary Portraiture, 2 March 2023

A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830 
byParis Spies-Gans.
Paul Mellon Centre, 384 pp., £45, June 2022, 978 1 913107 29 1Show More
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“... back, another draws back a curtain to peer out at the street. The kind of sight the students might be distracted by is suggested in the line-up of plaster male heads and figures on a high shelf. The buttocks and thighs of a muscular plaster torso, its front primly turned to face the wall, loom over the women below....”

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 ...”

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 ...”
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