In the Egosphere

Adam Mars-Jones: The Plot against Roth, 23 January 2014

Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books 
by Claudia Roth Pierpont.
Cape, 353 pp., £25, January 2014, 978 0 224 09903 5
Show More
Show More
... I hate to say it, but it can be very helpful to us. I mean you hear a singer even as brilliant as Richard Tucker and he’s a Jew. HALDEMAN: Is he? NIXON: He’s pushy … HALDEMAN: There are a lot more anti-Semites than there are Jews, and the anti-Semites are with us generally and the Jews sure aren’t. The Breast was a grotesque fable out of Kafka ...

Depicting Europe

Perry Anderson, 20 September 2007

... religion and capital punishment, not to speak of national bravado, divide the US from the EU and foster a more regressive conception of international relations. Reversing Goethe’s dictum, we have it better here. The crystallisation of these images came with the invasion of Iraq. The mass demonstrations against the war of 15 February 2003, Habermas ...

How to Grow a Weetabix

James Meek: Farms and Farmers, 16 June 2016

... the responsibility of running the country; the black middle class Smith was apparently trying to foster; the paternalistic British-descended white farmers who paid their black workers partly in money, partly in food; the harsh Afrikaner farmers who chained their black workers up; the even less pleasant Portuguese. Of all his Rhodesia memories he was most ...
... of a more general sense of idealism and elation created by the new generation in Dublin which Roy Foster describes in Vivid Faces (2015). Mary Colum, for example, later wrote about her time teaching at Pearse’s school:The teaching staff was young, and we seemed, all of us, to be travelling on the same road … Looking back, it seems incredible that so many ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... in the flats above and below don’t even know there’s been a fire. This was something else.’ Richard Welsh is a senior officer with the London Fire Brigade. His pager went off at 1.18 a.m. ‘Initially they had six machines there,’ he said. ‘Then they asked for eight, and then ten, and then 15, 20, and then 25. I’m hearing that on the way there, so ...