Poor Dear, How She Figures!

Alan Hollinghurst: Forster and His Mother, 3 January 2013

The Journals and Diaries of E.M. Forster Volumes I-III 
edited by Philip Gardner.
Pickering and Chatto, 813 pp., £275, February 2011, 978 1 84893 114 5
Show More
Show More
... be heightened by the ‘drive against male vice’ initiated in 1954 under David Maxwell Fyfe as home secretary, whose most notable victim was Lord Montagu, imprisoned for 12 months for homosexual offences. On the Tube, Forster closely observes an ‘enormous young foreigner’. Was he perhaps ‘a Cossack dancer? I would ...

The ‘People’s War’

Pankaj Mishra: The Maoists of Nepal, 23 June 2005

... title to his uncle Gyanendra. Dipendra’s obsession with guns at Eton, where he was admired by Lord Camoys as a ‘damn good shot’, his heavy drinking, which attracted the malice of the Sun, his addiction to hashish and his fondness for the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger – all this outlines a philistinism, and a potential for violence, commonplace ...

In the Workshop

Tom Paulin: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 22 January 1998

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 672 pp., £23.50, December 1997, 0 674 63712 7
Show More
Shakespeare's Sonnets 
edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones.
Arden, 503 pp., £7.99, September 1997, 1 903436 57 5
Show More
Show More
... Vendler remarks, it is by such ‘confirmatory coffin nails’ that correspondences are hammered home. But as she points out, grace has some hooks of its own, not only in its initial consonants and vowels which remind us of the greater grief that grace has caused, but also its possession of the same ‘satanic hiss’ that exists in ...

Our Island Story

Stefan Collini: The New DNB, 20 January 2005

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 
edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison.
Oxford, sixty volumes, £7,500, September 2004, 9780198614111
Show More
Show More
... his heels – Elizabeth I (1533-1603, ‘queen of England and Ireland’), Cromwell (1599-1658, ‘Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland’), Wellington (1769-1852, ‘army officer and prime minister’), Victoria (1819-1901, ‘queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and empress of India’), Churchill (1874-1965, ‘prime ...

Wringing out the Fault

Stephen Sedley: The Right to Silence, 7 March 2002

... yourself before others, but that you obey the prophet when he said: “Reveal your ways unto the Lord.”’ This is some way from saying that nobody should be made to confess, but like much other sanctified text it did service as the source of a succession of medieval assertions of a privilege against self-incrimination. But medieval Church practice mocked ...

Cancelled

Amia Srinivasan: Can I speak freely?, 29 June 2023

... someone who opposes a net zero emissions goal has in becoming a university vice chancellor. As Lord Wallace of Saltaire remarked in the Lords debate on the higher education legislation last year, ‘If challenging the allegedly oppressive liberal cultural elite means insisting on climate change sceptics being appointed to senior academic positions ...

After Kemal

Perry Anderson, 25 September 2008

... government with the largest majority since the time of Menderes. Its victory was widely hailed, at home and abroad, as the dawn of a new era for Turkey: not only would the country now be assured stable government, after years of squabbling coalition cabinets, but – still more vital – the prospect of a long overdue reconciliation of religion and ...

Kemalism

Perry Anderson: After the Ottomans, 11 September 2008

... might be fought. The whole swathe of territory extending across both sides of the frontier was home to Armenians. What place could they have in the conflict that had now been unleashed? Historically the oldest inhabitants of the region, indeed of Anatolia at large, they were Christians whose Church – dating from the third century – could claim priority ...

Devoted to Terror

Thomas Laqueur: How the Camps Were Run, 24 September 2015

KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps 
by Nikolaus Wachsmann.
Little Brown, 865 pp., £25, April 2015, 978 0 316 72967 3
Show More
Show More
... Otto Koch, commandant first of Majdanek and then Buchenwald, stole on the scale of a major drug lord. He was executed by an SS firing squad just before the war ended. In keeping with the KL’s macho ethos, he refused a blindfold. The needs​ of German industry in late 1943 and 1944 changed the KL as much as the Holocaust had in early 1942. Hundreds of new ...

The School of English

Hilary Mantel: ‘The School of English’: A Story, 7 May 2015

... all seeking domestic work,’ she said. ‘It is only a magazine. It is not the works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It is not a manual of magic spells.’ ‘Impertinence will not carry you far,’ the butler said. ‘Only by a short route to dismissal, and no employment tribunal for you, do not think it. Her Majesty’s Government in its wisdom is pleased to ...

Another Country

Adam Shatz: Visions of America, 5 February 2026

... detail that the idea of freedom has gone hand in hand, for many white Americans, with the right to lord it over others, especially Black people and Native Americans, but also the victims of the country’s foreign adventures and, indeed, anyone who stands in its way, including its (former?) European allies. Freedom, as most Americans understand it, is the ...

The Europe to Come

Perry Anderson, 25 January 1996

The Rotten Heart of Europe 
by Bernard Connolly.
Faber, 427 pp., £17.50, September 1995, 0 571 17520 1
Show More
Orchestrating Europe: The Informal Politics of European Union 1973-93 
by Keith Middlemas.
Fontana, 821 pp., £27.50, November 1995, 0 00 255678 2
Show More
Show More
... master of the continent again? Are not the creation of jobs and growth of incomes issues closer to home? In France the next years are likely to offer an interesting test of the relative weights of consumption and strategy in the process of European integration. Meanwhile the pressures from below, already welling up in strikes and demonstrations, can only ...

Barbed Wire

Reviel Netz, 20 July 2000

... had the desired effect as the owner saw his hogs were getting terribly marked and kept them at home.’ What set Rose apart was that he took the trouble to patent his idea and to have it displayed at a farm exhibition held in de Kalb, Illinois.At this stage, iron barbs supplemented wood rather than substituting for it. Wire fencing already existed ‘for ...
Rationalism in Politics, and Other Essays 
by Michael Oakeshott, edited by Timothy Fuller.
Liberty, 556 pp., $24, October 1991, 0 86597 094 7
Show More
Show More
... his political ideals had not attracted the support they merited, and that he had failed to bring home that ‘the predominant model of liberal democratic institutions’ in the Western world ‘necessarily leads to a gradual transformation of the spontaneous order of a free society into a totalitarian system’. To avert this fatal propensity, which Hayek ...

One Exceptional Figure Stood Out

Perry Anderson: Dmitri Furman, 30 July 2015

... World War, supposedly with some role in the surrender of Von Paulus at Stalingrad, before coming home damaged from the battle for Budapest in 1944. After the war this stepfather remained a fervent believer in communism, but not in Stalin, in time befriending others – mostly Jews like himself – who had returned from the camps. Observing such incompatible ...