Just Two Clicks

Jonathan Raban: The Virtual Life of Neil Entwistle, 14 August 2008

... deep in the sagebrush of the far West, and this was gun play with real live rounds of ammunition: John Ford, John Wayne, Henry Hathaway and the Colt, legendary instrument of masculine power and decisiveness. The general’s impromptu movie was a good deal more exciting than the twenty-minute one that we were actually ...

Fear in Those Blue Eyes

David Runciman: Thatcher in Her Bubble, 3 December 2015

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. II: Everything She Wants 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 821 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 7139 9288 5
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... Like all the best whodunnits, it is a slow burner. A group of clever young men – Oliver Letwin, John Redwood, William Waldegrave, among others – gather in various restaurants and country house hotels to bat around ideas for reforming the financing of local governance, encouraged and provoked by their mentor, Lord Rothschild. They were much clearer about ...

Paralysed by the Absence of Danger

Jeremy Harding: Spain, 1937, 24 September 2009

Letters from Barcelona: An American Woman in Revolution and Civil War 
edited by Gerd-Rainer Horn.
Palgrave, 209 pp., £50, February 2009, 978 0 230 52739 3
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War Is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War 
by James Neugass.
New Press, 314 pp., £16.99, November 2008, 978 1 59558 427 4
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We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War 
by Paul Preston.
Constable, 525 pp., £9.99, June 2009, 978 1 84529 946 0
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... they lived mostly in expatriate circles, but their friendships with other foreigners, including John McNair, the ILP representative in Barcelona, were rewarding. Lois was close to Eileen O’Shaughnessy (‘nice but very vaguish when she talks and is eternally smoking cigarettes’), who spent most of her time in the city while Orwell was at the front. In ...

Nothing Natural

Jenny Turner: SurrogacyTM, 23 January 2020

Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against Family 
by Sophie Lewis.
Verso, 216 pp., £14.99, May 2019, 978 1 78663 729 1
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Making Kin Not Population 
edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway.
Prickly Paradigm, 120 pp., £10, July 2018, 978 0 9966355 6 1
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... of Ham’, in Gilead language – are resettled in ‘Homeland One’, somewhere in North Dakota. In The Testaments, a sequel set 15 years later, Gilead’s ‘ridiculous Certificate of Whiteness Scheme’ has collapsed.* The TV show got round such awkwardness by dint of hardly mentioning race at all, casting black and brown-skinned actors ...

Fed up with Ibiza

Jenny Turner: Sybille Bedford, 1 April 2021

Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life 
by Selina Hastings.
Chatto, 432 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 1 78474 113 6
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... beginning of November 1918, the sailors of the German High Seas Fleet mutinied in ports across the North Sea and Baltic coasts. Red flags went up first in Kiel, then in Berlin on 9 November, when Wilhelm II was deposed. Seven-year-old Sybille Bedford, meanwhile, was on a train with her amazing, ludicrously flighty mother, trying to get back to the family ...

In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

Rebecca Solnit: Losing San Francisco, 8 February 2024

... to San Francisco in 1980 when street life and bar life were vibrant, but cafés were rare outside North Beach’s Italian neighbourhood. They proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s as places to hang out, maybe read, maybe chat to whomever was around or just people-watch. In this millennium, in cafés frequented by young white people, every customer seems to be ...

Loafing with the Sissies

Colm Tóibín: The Trials of Andy Warhol, 10 September 2020

Warhol: A Life as Art 
by Blake Gopnik.
Allen Lane, 931 pp., £35, March, 978 0 241 00338 1
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... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not known for ...

My Heroin Christmas

Terry Castle: Art Pepper and Me, 18 December 2003

... just finished Ashley Kahn’s absorbing history of a date, ‘A Love Supreme’: The Creation of John Coltrane’s Classic Album.* Trane was a nice sheets-of-sound antidote to the ormolu, love-nests and scheming courtiers of the Ancien Régime. Yet despite having a workable assortment of Mulligans and Bakers and Konitzes, I was also feeling vaguely ...

When the Floods Came

James Meek: England’s Water, 31 July 2008

... can’t carry much at my age. A little pint bottle is quite heavy.’ He introduced me to John Russell, an 88-year-old ex-engineer in a residential care home. ‘I saw one old lady trying to stagger off with six bottles,’ Russell said. ‘They were carried for her by a complete stranger.’ He introduced me to Joan Bufton, whose daughter needs ...

Memoirs of a Pet Lamb

David Sylvester, 5 July 2001

... and Willesden Green Station on the Metropolitan Line. This was one of several neighbourhoods in North-West London to which prospering Jews tended to migrate from East London in the 1920s and 1930s, the most notorious being Golders Green, otherwise known as Goldberg Green or the Polish Corridor. We were to live in Teignmouth Road till 1940, so it is ...
... viewed with dismay the lack of restraint and caution in O’Donovan Rossa’s violent rhetoric. John Devoy, one of the leaders of Clan na Gael, the main Irish nationalist organisation in America, believed, as Kenna writes, that O’Donovan Rossa ‘had given the British ample warning of his plans through a desire for notoriety and theatricality, thus ...

The King and I

Alan Bennett, 30 January 1992

... III so much resented Fox, who was briefly his minister following a disreputable coalition with North in 1783. All governments were to some degree coalitions and a majority in the Commons did not reflect some overall victory by Whigs or Tories in a general election. Leading figures in Parliament had their groups of supporters; there were ...

Boomerang

Sylvia Lawson, 18 February 1988

Australians: A Historical Library 
Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, AUS $695Show More
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... an Arcady, the safe place at the other end of everything. That’s how it is echoed in the dark north European limbo of Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, as in the East German conversations Wolf writes about in Cassandra.Ambrose Bierce’s old frivolity can be profitably re-worked. The problem with national commemoration is that it returns the place to island ...

Notes on a Notebook

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 September 1999

... Robert Megaw was shot when his patrol was ambushed in Edward Street in Lurgan. And Constable John Forsyth was blown up in Market Street on 18 June 1974. There have been many others. The RUC is currently 93 per cent Protestant. The action of Loyalist informers and double agents in Northern Ireland has often involved them in liaising between the Loyalist ...

More than ever, and for ever

Michael Rogin: Beauvoir and Nelson Algren, 17 September 1998

Beloved Chicago Man: Letters to Nelson Algren 1947-64 
by Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.
Gollancz, 624 pp., £25, August 1998, 0 575 06590 7
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America Day by Day 
by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Carol Cosman.
California, 355 pp., $27.50, January 1999, 0 520 20979 6
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... her years of greatest success, The Man with the Golden Arm initiated Algren’s Cold War downfall. John Garfield, fresh from his triumphs in the left-wing films noirs Body and Soul and Force of Evil, wanted to play Frankie Machine, but he was about to die from a heart attack, a victim of the Blacklist. When Otto Preminger acquired the film rights to the novel ...