Short Cuts

Tom Crewe: The Party Conferences, 19 October 2017

... power and that is why we cannot rest.’ ‘The free market,’ proclaimed the beleaguered Theresa May, ‘remains the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created. So let us win this argument for a new generation and defend free and open markets with all our might. Because there has rarely been a time when the choice of futures for Britain has ...

On Douglas Crase

Matthew Bevis, 5 December 2019

... other collection of verse – a slim chapbook, The Astropastorals, first published in 2017. One may well wonder what Crase was doing in those intervening decades.Among other things, he was writing essays and books of non-fiction. Lines from London Terrace, published last year, brings together a range of his pieces on literature, painting and culture ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: The Je Ne Sais Quoi, 15 December 2005

... of a scientific examination of nature. The conscientious study of nature or of sexual technique may or may not provide the answer to the tides or the allure of particular women, but the assumption is that God-given won’t do and that an answer to the question does exist even if it cannot be found yet, or by me. At any ...

At the Sainsbury Centre

Mike Jay: Ayahuasca Art, 5 December 2024

... Upper Amazon (2009), Stephan Beyer speculates that the combination of plants in the ayahuasca brew may have been developed for its spectacular purgative qualities as much as its visionary ones.The global spread of ayahuasca has been driven by two overlapping beliefs in its possibilities: as a life-changing spiritual experience and as a miraculous healing ...

On the Sofa

Thomas Jones: ‘Wild Isles’, 4 May 2023

... insects’, ‘our traditional hay meadows’, ‘our Wild Isles’) suggests that the filmmakers may have succumbed to a degree of post-Brexit isolationism, even a form of eco-nationalism, however unconscious.It needn’t be the work of a nature documentary to ask who ‘we’ are, but Wild Isles raises the question repeatedly without examining it. The scene ...

In Velvet-Lined Rooms

Helen Pfeifer: Princess Gulbadan, 26 June 2025

Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan 
by Ruby Lal.
Yale, 248 pp., £11.99, April, 978 0 300 28195 8
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... who is said to be buried in the city). Glimpsing the Kaaba in Mecca for the first time, the women may have recalled traditions casting the building as a bride, with its sacred and inviolable nature hidden beneath gold-embroidered cloth. Near Medina was the Garden of Women, where a well provided water said to heal seventy female ailments; inside the city, not ...

Goodbye Black Zero?

Thomas Meaney: Germany without Washington, 20 March 2025

... even if he can find a way to do so while keeping the debt brake intact – the SPD and Die Linke may still be in a position to extract concessions on social spending, although the CDU could just as easily use increased military spending as an excuse for belt-tightening elsewhere.A kind of dual shadowing of the two former Volksparteien (‘people’s ...

Who do you think you are?

Jacqueline Rose: Trans Narratives, 5 May 2016

... was convincing’ (you could argue that a convincing pastiche is a contradiction in terms). Ormond may have found for the plaintiff on the grounds that Ashley couldn’t fulfil the role of a wife (‘the essential role of a woman in marriage’), but it is obvious from Corbett’s statements that this was never exactly what he had had in mind. For ...

Thousands of Cans and Cartons

Christopher Hitchens, 24 May 1990

Against the Grain: An Autobiography 
by Boris Yeltsin, translated by Michael Glenny.
Cape, 215 pp., £12.95, March 1990, 0 224 02749 2
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... if you treat people well they will respond with improved performance in whatever their occupation may be. This has remained my credo to this day ...’ ‘The chief consideration was the contacts I had built up with people – strong, enduring, worthwhile, the kind that take a long time to create. And since I was above all accustomed to working closely with ...

Bilal and Samir

Swee Chai Ang, 7 January 1988

... back to broken homes without water and electricity, to a blue sky from which bombs and shells may fall without warning. The treatment of the boys at Stoke Mandeville has been made possible by the generosity of the British public. For these boys it has been a happy few months – a respite from the nightmare of war and the squalor of the refugee ...

Sonata for Second Fiddle

Penelope Fitzgerald, 7 October 1982

A Half of Two Lives: A Personal Memoir 
by Alison Waley.
Weidenfeld, 326 pp., £10.95, September 1982, 0 297 78156 1
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... flew to him, all but carried him to the armchair... Above us was a kitchen ceiling-rack on which May-the-maid had hung socks to dry ... With the damp woollen things I wiped his face – cheeks, eyes, matted hair – again and again; and then my own; our tears mingled in the damp wool. And soon I became aware that the pounding heart was quiet; tears continued ...

Owners and Editors

David Astor, 15 April 1982

... knock. In the Thirties, there were a number of editors to whom this could not have happened. They may have been right or wrong as political guides, but they were a power in the land and had secure arrangements with their publishers. J.L. Garvin, a gifted Irishman, edited the Observer (of which my father was proprietor) and wrote signed leaders for thirty ...

Sound Advice for Scotch Reviewers

Karl Miller, 24 January 1980

... could be known, and could attract a blaze of publicity – and he rode them on a tight rein. It may be supposed, however, that, for reasons of friendship and for the sake of both of the friends in question, Cockburn’s letter describes Jeffrey’s editorial methods as more fearsomely authoritarian than they really were. Contributing to this quarterly can ...

At the Biennale

Daisy Hildyard: ‘Sun and Sea (Marina)’, 20 June 2019

... electric blankets, and came back empty-handed: not many shops in Venice sell electric blankets in May. Eventually some were sourced, delivered and concealed under beach towels, and their cables covered over with sand. Sun and Sea (Marina) is an hour-long opera written by three Lithuanian women, Lina Lapelytė, Vaiva Grainytė and Rugilė ...

At Tate Modern

Peter Campbell: Kandinsky, 20 July 2006

... had founded a group of avant-garde artists, Der Blaue Reiter. The ‘almanac’ they published in May 1912 reproduced tribal art, peasant art and children’s drawings as well as work by Delaunay, Rousseau and Van Gogh. Kandinsky contributed articles. Münter kept his pictures from this period, despite legal attempts to wrest them from her, even after his ...