Havel’s Castle

J.P. Stern, 22 February 1990

... behind everything worthwhile I have ever managed to accomplish.’ After forty years spent in the shadow of ‘isms’ – called now ‘Communism’ or ‘Marxism’, then ‘socialism with a human face’ or realny socialismus – he acknowledges in himself ‘that traditional quality of the bourgeoisie, especially in the era of liberalism, which is the ...
... Journal of Medical Genetics in 1992, has published a book aimed at a wider audience, called A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, which includes, among chapters on spontaneous human combustion and maternal impressions, a section about Crachami, a lightly rewritten version of his earlier article.*More curiously, Christine Borland, one of the artists ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Swimming on the 52nd Floor, 24 September 2015

... offices, restaurants and residential spaces. The Shard is an Umbrian hill town hidden inside a cabinet of mirrors. I swam​ in the evening at the golden hour. There were soft barriers and checkpoints at every stage of my ascent. You come off the street, with its viral democracy, fumes from stalled buses, and into the otherness of uniformed challenge that ...

Isn’t that . . . female?

Patricia Lockwood: My Dame Antonia, 20 June 2024

Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories 
by A.S. Byatt.
Vintage, 444 pp., £9.99, November 2023, 978 1 5291 1299 3
Show More
Show More
... through The Biographer’s Tale (2000), a book which seems to take place entirely in a filing cabinet (don’t worry, there are also sadistic pictures). If you told me she had a lost novel about paperweights, I would believe you. And I would read that too.Byatt died last November, at the age of 87. That is a mellow span and a proper hour. I am not sure if ...

Down the Rabbit Hole

David Runciman: Britain’s Europe Problem, 9 October 2025

Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution, 1945-2016 
by Tom McTague.
Pan Macmillan, 546 pp., £25, September, 978 1 5290 8309 5
Show More
Show More
... struggle for the soul of the body politic. Nothing became more frightening than the idea that the shadow play might be the new reality. So the things that didn’t matter became all that mattered. And British politics went down the rabbit hole.But although the arc of Powell’s career shows what a mess the politics of timeless moments can make of the politics ...

Bush’s Choice

Tom Farer, 12 October 1989

... by investing them with torrid symbolic values. The severity of those negotiations could in turn shadow the prospect for co-operation on other matters. History, being sloppy, will probably not allow anything nearly so neat as a three-bloc world. But the centrifugal forces identified by Dornbusch and others could certainly produce a more fragmented and less ...

The Greatest

R.W. Johnson, 4 August 1994

Charles de Gaulle, Futurist of the Nation 
by Régis Debray, translated by John Howe.
Verso, 111 pp., £29.95, April 1994, 0 86091 622 7
Show More
De Gaulle and 20th-Century France 
edited by Hugh Gough and John Horne.
Edward Arnold, 158 pp., £12.99, March 1994, 0 340 58826 8
Show More
François Mitterrand: A Study in Political Leadership 
by Alistair Cole.
Routledge, 216 pp., £19.99, March 1994, 0 415 07159 3
Show More
Show More
... a virtual coup ratified by a Parliament whose nerve had snapped, France dominated by the shadow of le Général as it had been before by that of le Maréchal. The part of the young de Gaulle was played by François Mitterrand, who denounced de Gaulle’s coup at the outset. As a young résistant, Mitterrand had once looked up to de Gaulle much as de ...

Lectures about Heaven

Thomas Laqueur: Forgiving Germany, 7 June 2007

Five Germanys I Have Known 
by Fritz Stern.
Farrar, Straus, 560 pp., £11.25, July 2007, 978 0 374 53086 0
Show More
Show More
... and civil service of the Federal Republic had served the Nazis, as had some politicians of sub-cabinet and even cabinet rank.) And, he suggests, Germany might have been different had its leaders been able, for example, to honour rather than ignore or despise the memory of the 1944 Stauffenberg plot, in which aristocratic ...

Beloved Country

R.W. Johnson, 8 July 1993

... possible successor – while Manuel got the more solid promotion to ANC finance spokesman, i.e. shadow finance minister. Yengeni got nothing – a rare case of one of the SACP vanguard being forced out to the benefit of a non-Communist. Yengeni’s resentment grew as it became increasingly clear that Boesak’s ‘election’ had been a flop – for the ...

When that great day comes

R.W. Johnson, 22 July 1993

... Instead, there will be a period of power-sharing in which the ANC will sit in a cabinet alongside the party responsible for apartheid. More broadly, it is inconceivable that any government, no matter what its political stripe, will be able to run South Africa without sharing power with white civil servants, policemen, generals and ...
Congo Journey 
by Redmond O’Hanlon.
Hamish Hamilton, 480 pp., £18, October 1996, 0 241 12768 8
Show More
Show More
... way out. O’ Hanlon, on the other hand, is confidently betting everything on Jean Ngatsiebe, the Cabinet Secretary to the Ministry for Scientific Research, with whom they have an appointment; and on Marcellin Agnagna – the author of the dinosaur-appendix – who is to come with them on their journey, once he has written up his latest elephant ...

Cash Today

Andrew McGettigan: Who profits from student loans?, 5 March 2015

... well take a different stance. Conservative ministers still want a sale and Liam Byrne, Labour’s shadow minister for universities, indicated at last year’s party conference that he had been ‘pressing’ Cable to crack on, even while admitting that it might turn out Cable had made the right call. When Labour last took a line in public, in 2013, its ...

A Kind of Greek

Jeremy Harding: Frank Thompson, 7 March 2013

A Very English Hero: The Making of Frank Thompson 
by Peter Conradi.
Bloomsbury, 419 pp., £18.99, August 2012, 978 1 4088 0243 4
Show More
Show More
... death: the pro-German government had been forced to step down the day after his capture and no cabinet was sworn in until the day of the execution, which we now know was on 10 June (five days after the date he was said to have died when E.P. delivered his Stanford lectures). ‘With whom was this supposed British deal entailing Frank’s murder to be ...

Bristling Ermine

Jeremy Harding: R.W. Johnson, 4 May 2017

Look Back in Laughter: Oxford’s Postwar Golden Age 
by R.W. Johnson.
Threshold, 272 pp., £14.50, May 2015, 978 1 903152 35 5
Show More
How Long Will South Africa Survive? The Looming Crisis 
by R.W. Johnson.
Hurst, 288 pp., £12.99, July 2016, 978 1 84904 723 4
Show More
Show More
... Oxford Union, of the birch and stocks; Chris Huhne, later energy secretary in David Cameron’s cabinet; Jeremy Hunt, the current health secretary. Johnson liked teaching and had a taste for the rough and tumble. His great day was not as a young man who worried about apartheid, or a feisty libertarian outnumbered by big French Stalinists in bleus de ...

Slashed, Red and Dead

Michael Hofmann: Rilke, To Me, 21 January 2021

... or poverty or unemployment. Even by the standard of unworldly poets, he is like one of those cabinet ministers who doesn’t know the price of milk. To some extent, this is a misapprehension. An early book of his, the so-called Book of Hours, has sections ‘On Monastic Life’, ‘On Pilgrimage’ and ‘On Poverty and Death’. A slightly hallowed ...