Do lobotomies have a smell?

Adam Mars-Jones: Adèle Yon’s ‘Mon vrai nom est Elisabeth’, 5 March 2026

Mon vrai nom est Elisabeth 
by Adèle Yon.
Sous Sol, 392 pp., £18, February 2025, 978 2 36468 957 2
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... two young women hadn’t spoken before). She shared it and left what remained when she went home. Somehow news of this encounter reached her grandparents, giving them the impression that she was a drug dealer. She reassured them as best she could – but when she visited them that summer, they spoke to her on the subject, warning her that there was a ...

Whatever you do, buy

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s First Folio, 15 November 2001

The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book Vol. I: An Account of the First Folio Based on Its Sales and Prices, 1623-2000 
by Anthony James West.
Oxford, 215 pp., £70, April 2001, 0 19 818769 6
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... itself. The Folger, the establishment of which guaranteed America’s pre-eminence as a home for Shakespearean textual studies, is only the most spectacular example of the trend for that country’s 19th and early 20th-century capitalists to make F1 a high-prestige bequest to their fellow-citizens – or, to put it more cynically, a commodity of ...

And you, what are you doing here?

Michael Gilsenan: The Haj, 19 October 2006

A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage 
by Abdellah Hammoudi, translated by Pascale Ghazaleh.
Polity, 293 pp., £12.99, January 2006, 0 7456 3789 2
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... Conrad, who had landed in Singapore in 1883 after himself being forced to abandon ship, to write Lord Jim. As a steam rather than a sailing ship, the Jeddah was itself a small part of the transformations which affected the calculations of economy, means of transport and time that Muslim pilgrims (then usually referred to by the British as ...

Let him be Caesar!

Michael Dobson: The Astor Place Riot, 2 August 2007

The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama and Death in 19th-Century America 
by Nigel Cliff.
Random House, 312 pp., $26.95, April 2007, 978 0 345 48694 3
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... Mohawk Indians), Forrest played a noble American savage up against the English, notably the evil Lord Fitzarnold. Its sub-Ossianic script gives a vivid impression both of the bare-chested, full-bodied acting that was Forrest’s stock-in-trade and of some of the sentiments that would animate the Astor Place rioters: If ye love the silent spots where the ...

Diary

Patrick McGuinness: Back to Bouillon, 6 June 2024

... My grandfather Eugène worked in the metal factory but retired early with emphysema and ailed at home, or in cafés or on his allotment. My sister and I were surrounded by very old people – women in their eighties and nineties, like my great-grandmother Julia and her sister, Eugénie – but it’s my grandfather who symbolises old age for me, even though ...

Biff-Bang

Ferdinand Mount: Tariffs before Trump, 14 August 2025

Exile Economics: If Globalisation Fails 
by Ben Chu.
Basic Books, 310 pp., £25, May, 978 1 3998 1716 5
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No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China and Helping America’s Workers 
by Robert Lighthizer.
Broadside, 384 pp., £25, August 2023, 978 0 06 328213 1
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... who had once enjoyed a 25 per cent share of global trade, but of whom a 19th-century proconsul, Lord William Bentinck, was to write: ‘The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India.’ The impact of these harsh tariffs on actual trade levels remains ...

Old Dad dead?

Michael Neill: Thomas Middleton, 4 December 2008

Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works 
edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino.
Oxford, 2016 pp., £85, November 2007, 978 0 19 818569 7
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Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works 
edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino.
Oxford, 1183 pp., £100, November 2007, 978 0 19 818570 3
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... demand. For most of his career Shakespeare not only enjoyed the backing of a single company (the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s Men), but had the singular advantage of working in a symbiotic relationship with a group of fellow actors whose skills he learned how to develop as he was testing and exploring his own genius. Middleton, while valuing ...

Malfunctioning Sex Robot

Patricia Lockwood: Updike Redux, 10 October 2019

Novels, 1959-65: ‘The Poorhouse Fair’; ‘Rabbit, Run’; ‘The Centaur’; ‘Of the Farm’ 
by John Updike.
Library of America, 850 pp., £36, November 2018, 978 1 59853 581 5
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... as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Notes on 1997, 1 January 1998

... on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his days. Such lacing of extravagance with prudence has since ...

My Darlings

Colm Tóibín: Drinking with Samuel Beckett, 5 April 2007

... the year? Not a stir, not a shoot, not a breath. And I know that at some stage that summer I went home and got a message to come back. We had no phone in our house, so I do not know how I was contacted and it was not to say that I was needed for work, but to say that there was something interesting happening in Gorey, too interesting for a 16-year-old to ...

Cardenio’s Ghost

Charles Nicholl: The Bits Shakespeare Wrote, 2 December 2010

The Arden Shakespeare: Double Falsehood 
edited by Brean Hammond.
Arden Shakespeare, 443 pp., £16.99, March 2010, 978 1 903436 77 6
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... She looks down at him, this importunate upper-class dandy serenading under her balcony. ‘Home, my lord!’ she says firmly. And then this: What you can say is most unseasonable; what sing, Most absonant and harsh. Nay, your perfume, Which I smell hither, cheers not my sense Like our field-violet’s breath. Of ...

American Manscapes

Richard Poirier, 12 October 1989

Manhood and the American Renaissance 
by David Leverenz.
Cornell, 372 pp., $35.75, April 1989, 0 8014 2281 7
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... no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with father-fixations in one section of the United States, in a period of three or four decades, as represented in American works only. There is no attention whatsoever to the possible impingement on those works of English or Classical works wherein ...

The Saudi Trillions

Malise Ruthven, 7 September 2017

... domination than a defensive operation designed to stoke up anti-Iranian and anti-Shia feeling at home – even when the Iranian influence is largely invented. ‘We are a primary target for the Iranian regime,’ MBS said in May, shortly before Trump’s visit, accusing the Iranians of seeking to take over Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia. ‘We won’t ...

I only want the OM

Christopher Tayler: Somerset Maugham, 1 September 2005

Somerset Maugham: A Life 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Vintage, 411 pp., £12, April 2005, 1 4000 3052 8
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... to England, where his older brothers were already being educated. (One of them, Frederic, became lord chancellor in 1938.) He lived with an uncle and aunt in Whitstable – lightly disguised as ‘Blackstable’ in his novels – and developed a stammer, perhaps as a result of being teased about his Frenchified ways. ‘I have never forgotten the roar of ...

Kurt Waldheim’s Past

Gitta Sereny, 21 April 1988

Waldheim 
by Luc Rosenzweig and Bernard Cohen.
Robson, 192 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 86051 506 0
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Waldheim: The Missing Years 
by Robert Edwin Herzstein.
Grafton, 303 pp., £12.95, April 1988, 0 246 13381 3
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... when he was still a boy. Some kind people – socialists, as it happened – provided him with a home, a country and ideals. He developed into a warm, idealistic man, dedicated to repaying the kindness shown to him in Vienna by rehabilitating his adopted city in the eyes of foreign Jews. It was to one of the friends he had made in New York during his years ...