Old Europe

Jeremy Harding: Britain in Bosnia, 20 February 2003

Indictment at The Hague: The Milosevic Regime and the Crimes of the Balkan Wars 
by Norman Cigar and Paul Williams.
New York, 339 pp., $24.95, July 2002, 0 8147 1626 1
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Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia 
by Brendan Simms.
Penguin, 464 pp., £8.99, July 2002, 0 14 028983 6
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Under Orders: War Crimes in Kosovo 
by Fred Abrahams.
Human Rights Watch, 593 pp., £18, October 2001, 1 56432 264 5
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Milosevic: A Biography 
by Adam LeBor.
Bloomsbury, 386 pp., £20, October 2002, 0 7475 6090 0
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“... or at least its dedicated mourner. He has written a polemic against John Major’s Government and David Owen, the EU mediator in the remains of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, for their connivance in the ferocious dismantling of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is keen on Major’s New Labour successors, and confident that Tony Blair’s support for the Milosevic ...”

We Are Conquerors

Adam Shatz: Ben-Gurion’s Obsession, 24 October 2019

A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion 
by Tom Segev.
Head of Zeus, 804 pp., £30, August 2019, 978 1 78954 462 6
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“... David Ben-Gurion​ , the founder of the state of Israel, was brooding, explosive, often on the verge of collapse: every obstacle he faced was a ‘catastrophe’. He dabbled in mysticism, consulted fortune-tellers, claimed to see flying saucers, and lived according to his whims. At one point he went on an unannounced holiday from his duties as prime minister to take driving lessons on the French Riviera; on another occasion, he spent a week studying Buddhism in Burma, and tried to persuade his teachers that he’d stumbled on a contradiction in their doctrine no one else had unearthed ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1998, 21 January 1999

“... and after, with reminiscences by various advertisements for the system, including Kenneth Clarke, David Puttnam and Barry Hines. Listening to their recollections of taking and passing the eleven-plus makes me wonder whether I ever took it at all. I had jumped one or two classes at my primary school so by July 1944 when I left to go to secondary school, I was ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: My 2006, 4 January 2007

“... do. But so also do a collection of people whom I’ve never seen before, and in such numbers that David Hyde Pierce, who is presenting it, is practically elbowed out of the way. These turn out to be the backers who, of course, have every reason to be pleased and indeed one of them duly adjusts my tie. I am then bundled out through a back door and across the ...”

At the National Gallery

Charles Hope: Veronese, 8 May 2014

“... Supper at Emmaus’ (1555) ‘The Conversion of Mary Magdalene’ (1548) ‘The Anointing of David’ (1550) ‘The Adoration of the Kings’ (1573) ‘The Adoration of the Kings’ (1573-4) ‘Lucretia’ (1585) ‘Perseus and Andromeda’ (1576-78) ‘The Rape of Europa’ (1575)PreviousNext That having been said, the exhibition does contain some ...”

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, 6 March 2014

The Wolf of Wall Street 
directed by Martin Scorsese.
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“... the word ‘merely’. Or ‘subjective’. Funny, scary, impressive. Or none of these things. David Denby thinks Scorsese has tried to out-Tarantino Tarantino, and he is largely right. The Wolf of Wall Street has none of Goodfellas’ discretion. But it has an unpreachy loyalty to people and moments, so that even if it doesn’t add up to a story we can ...”

The Right to Die

Stephen Sedley, 27 August 2015

“... debate and a vote that reflects public opinion may be disappointed. There are several reasons. David Cameron, who is known to be opposed to the measure, has declined to make parliamentary time – i.e. time allocated by the government whips – available for it. This means that Marris will have to run the gauntlet of the private member’s bill ...”

Short Cuts

Nick Richardson: ‘The Bestseller Code’, 17 November 2016

“... amount of time to get to the boardroom for an important meeting’). The lead characters in David Nicholls’s One Day spend the first twenty pages in bed together categorically refusing to have sex, settling for ‘human closeness’ instead. ‘Let’s just cuddle,’ Emma Morley says. ‘Of course,’ Dexter Mayhew replies, ‘though in truth he had ...”

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Anomalisa’, 21 April 2016

“... like him, has a voice of her own. In her case it’s that of Jennifer Jason Leigh, in his it’s David Thewlis, Lancashire accent and all. Lisa loves Cyndi Lauper, offers a plausible rendering of one her songs (‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’), and is generally so original in her sweetness and modesty that Stone, all but deadened by the repetitive ...”

On Richard Hollis

Christopher Turner: Richard Hollis, 24 May 2018

“... posters and catalogues for exhibitions of the work of Donald Judd, Patrick Heron, Richard Long and David Hockney. When Hockney drew a portrait of Glazebrook, he chose to represent him with Hollis’s 1970 catalogue in his lap. Christopher Wilson’s excellent Richard Hollis Designs for the Whitechapel, the final book from Hyphen Press, is not only a detailed ...”

In the Studio

Rye Dag Holmboe: Howard Hodgkin, 3 June 2021

“... rooms and the individuals and things that existed inside them. He played a parlour game with David Sylvester in which they challenged each other to remember the names and exact positions of paintings in small museums that they knew by heart. His memories of childhood interiors were so precise that they sometimes read like the entries of auction ...”

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Wonder Woman’, 13 July 2017

Wonder Woman 
directed by Patty Jenkins.
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“... who seems to have been both for and against the armistice, expertly and unctuously represented by David Thewlis in his Harry Potter schoolmaster mode, and who appears to Diana as the god himself, levitating, changing forms and throwing thunderbolts. Finally, and this is probably the film’s low point, he abandons all pretence of being anything other than a ...”

At the Ikon Gallery

Brian Dillon: Jean Painlevé , 1 June 2017

“... of Etienne-Jules Marey and Lucien Bull, and the popular adventures of Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough. In another light Painlevé is a photographic modernist, attending to tiny spines on the rostrum of a shrimp with the abstracting eye that Karl Blossfeldt brought to fiddlehead ferns or László Moholy-Nagy to the geometry of a city street. On ...”

In Battersea

Owen Hatherley, 2 February 2023

“... signage survives (‘THIS IS A SAFETY HELMET AREA’). It is easy to detect the influence of David Chipperfield’s Neues Museum in Berlin, or OMA’s Garage Museum in Moscow, where clean and complete restorations were rejected and the damage of history left visible, stitched together with stark, unfussy new additions. But in Battersea this ...”

In Athens

Richard Clogg, 5 July 2012

“... anywhere in occupied Europe. Despite the fact that the UK is not a member of the eurozone, David Cameron has joined with Merkel in hectoring the recalcitrant Greeks. Not so long ago Cameron, on his first visit to the US as prime minister, declared in an interview with ABC News that, in 1940, Britain was the junior partner to America in the anti-Nazi ...”