Upriver

Iain Sinclair: The Thames, 25 June 2009

Thames: Sacred River 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Vintage, 608 pp., £14.99, August 2008, 978 0 09 942255 6
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... their equivalent in the 2005 reissue of Our Island Story by the right-wing think-tank Civitas. John Clare, the education editor of the Daily Telegraph, appealed to his readers for donations to support this project. ‘They responded by sending in an astonishing £25,000.’ There were messages of endorsement from Lady Antonia Fraser and the feisty ...

Courage, mon amie

Terry Castle: Disquiet on the Western Front, 4 April 2002

... example, author, with her husband, of My Boy Jack? The Search for Kipling’s Only Son (1998). (John Kipling died in his first half-hour in action – at the age of 18 – at Loos in 1915. Though his stricken father carried on a 20-year search for his grave, his remains were not found until 1992.) When not writing, the Holts run a sprightly operation known ...

Travels with My Mom

Terry Castle: In Santa Fe, 16 August 2007

... Cather-Pueblo-Cliff-Dwellers-Death-Comes-for-the-Archbishop thing. Maybe we’ll even see Julia Roberts. (The sun-dried actress – a fortysomething Roma tomato in disguise? – has a ranch near Taos.) Our hotel is right on the plaza and has the requisite Navajo rugs; the rental car is good to go; and we’ve got big museum plans for our next three days.The ...

Somerdale to Skarbimierz

James Meek, 20 April 2017

... making the country’s first chocolate bar, Chocolat Délicieux à Manger. Like Joseph Fry, John Cadbury had gone from selling cups of drinking chocolate to manufacturing the base product, in 1831, with the help of a steam engine, in a rented four-storey building in a back alley in Birmingham. In the early years his cocoa got a warrant from Queen ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... That’s what he said without prompting, and on the Wednesday evening he had a conversation with John Barradell, the City of London’s extremely well-connected town clerk. Barradell has what you might call a leading interest in the operations of London Resilience, the set of protocols that go into action during a major emergency in the capital. At this ...