Diary

Zachary Leader: Oscar Talk at the Huntington, 16 April 1998

... and she’s better-looking than Stuart. Last week at lunch, much of the Oscar talk focused on Gordon Wood, Professor of History at Brown. Wood is here on a year’s fellowship to write Volume IV of the new Oxford History of the United Sates, but he has also spent the odd moment reflecting on Matt Damon and Ben ...

A Difficult Space to Live

Jenny Turner: Stuart Hall’s Legacies, 3 November 2022

Selected Writings on Marxism 
by Stuart Hall, edited by Gregor McLennan.
Duke, 380 pp., £25.99, April 2021, 978 1 4780 0034 1
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Selected Writings on Race and Difference 
by Stuart Hall, edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Duke, 472 pp., £27.99, April 2021, 978 1 4780 1166 8
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... it (‘When Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about,’ Gordon Brown was still quipping in the LRB in 1989). The Leninists to the left of Labour, meanwhile, were looking at history as a ‘series of repeats’ – crisis, general strike, Winter Palace, here we come – although history suggests that the ...

In Farageland

James Meek, 9 October 2014

... him goofily grinning or laughing; it was strange to see him without a smile. I remembered watching Gordon Brown at a press conference once while Tony Blair was PM, curious about what he would do with his face while Blair was taking questions, and I saw Farage was doing what Brown had: looking away from the other ...

At Charleston

Emily LaBarge: Nina Hamnett, 1 July 2021

... here and there with luminous accents. A painting from 1915 shows an angular white jug, a brown-striped teacup and what looks like a packet of butter arranged on a table. A stack of papers overlap at odd angles: a slender, russet-coloured book with a white label; a copy of Der Sturm, the avant-garde German magazine published between 1910 and 1932. The ...

‘Make sure you say that you were treated properly’

Gareth Peirce: Torture, Secrecy and the British State, 14 May 2009

... with Obama’s blessing, the last grisly details of what was already largely publicly known. Gordon Brown has been driven to announce that new standards will be set; but it is too little and it comes too late. To protect ourselves for the future, we need to know what has occurred in the past. We cannot do it on trust; investigations by the bodies ...

New Ground for the Book Trade

John Sutherland, 28 September 1989

... been willing to gobble up their weaker brethren. ‘Longman’ is modern shorthand for Longman, Brown, Rees, Orme and Green; Routledge for Routledge, Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner. Chatto and Windus began in the 1870s as a partnership between Andrew Chatto who had drive, and W.E. Windus, a minor poet who had some capital. But the firm only took off with ...

It makes yer head go

David Craig: James Kelman and Gordon Legge, 18 February 1999

The Good Times 
by James Kelman.
Secker, 246 pp., £14.99, July 1998, 0 436 41215 2
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Near Neighbours 
by Gordon Legge.
Cape, 218 pp., £9.99, June 1998, 0 224 05120 2
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... himself at home in the world’. In comparison with The Good Times, or even considered on its own, Gordon Legge’s Near Neighbours gave me the feeling of listening to a tone-deaf pianist plonking away, or of looking at pictures painted by numbers with the broadest brush. On the cover Duncan McLean makes a strenuous effort to enlist Legge in the brother and ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Didn’t Do in 2007, 3 January 2008

... 30 April-1 May. To Essential Music in Great Chapel Street to record The Uncommon Reader, which Gordon House, former head of drama at BBC Radio, has adapted and is producing. What other readers are like I’ve no idea, but I always feel I am a sound editor’s nightmare, breaking off in the middle of a sentence to start again, redoing paragraphs when ...
Once a Jolly Bagman: Memoirs 
by Alistair McAlpine.
Weidenfeld, 269 pp., £20, March 1997, 9780297817376
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... to put together an anthology of Parliamentary applications for Private Eye’s Order of the Brown Nose would stumble before long on an obsequious supplementary question from David Evans, one of the very first Tories to make a million out of privatisation (in his case from rubbish collection). Again and again, at Prime Minister’s Question Time, the ...

Diary

Jean Sprackland: In the Mud, 6 October 2011

... of the rest of the beach. A series of miniature cliffs, islands and peninsulas, all made of dark brown stuff like clay, were moated around by channels and pools of icy water which the sea had left behind. This strange and incongruous sight was a piece of the distant past. The muddy outcrops offer an opportunity to visit a piece of a world lost thousands of ...

The Revolution No One Wanted

Alex de Waal: War in Khartoum, 18 May 2023

... converge, just opposite the modern parliament building, and for some miles downstream, the pale brown and blue waters run next to each other, unmixed. The site was chosen by Ismail Kamil ‘Pasha’, son of Muhammad Ali, khedive of Egypt, who had dispatched an army to conquer what is now Sudan. He also licensed a multinational band of freebooters to roam ...

Neo-Blairism

David Runciman: Blair’s conference speech, 21 October 2004

... and foreign affairs an all-or-nothing struggle to the death. It has the politicians to do this. Gordon Brown’s conference speech was also a clarion call for progressive politics, but the inflexibility was all in his defence of the public services, and the adaptability was in his programme for African debt relief, where it must be possible to make ...

Not My Fault

John Lanchester: New Labour’s Terrible Memoirs, 17 July 2008

Speaking for Myself: The Autobiography 
by Cherie Blair.
Little, Brown, 421 pp., £18.99, May 2008, 978 1 4087 0098 3
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Prezza, My Story: Pulling No Punches 
by John Prescott, with Hunter Davies.
Headline, 405 pp., £18.99, May 2008, 978 0 7553 1775 2
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A Question of Honour: Inside New Labour and the True Story of the Cash for Peerages Scandal 
by Michael Levy.
Simon and Schuster, 310 pp., £18.99, May 2008, 978 1 84737 315 1
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... in private, you tend to believe him. Blair, while still in Downing Street, on the prospects for Brown v. Cameron: Gordon ‘“can’t defeat Cameron” … Cameron had major strengths – a sense of political “timing”, a winning personality, and a natural ability to communicate and connect with people outside the ...

Madmen and Specialists

Anthony Appiah, 7 September 1995

Colonial Psychiatry and the ‘African Mind’ 
by Jock McCulloch.
Cambridge, 185 pp., £35, January 1995, 0 521 45330 5
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... you will occasionally have seen people half-clothed in filthy rags, hair matted with the red-brown dust thrown up from the laterite earth, wandering the streets largely unmolested; talking, perhaps, to themselves; begging sometimes; or scratching through rubbish heaps looking for something to eat. When I was a child in Kumasi we were taught to fear these ...