‘That’s my tank on fire’

James Meek: Video War, 13 April 2023

... into the front plate of his flak jacket as he rocks to and fro in the cold – he discusses the war in the tones of a self-consciously patriotic veteran, laconic, fatalistic, deadpan.His ostensible message is an appeal to Volodymyr Zelensky to withdraw his troops from Bakhmut to prevent further bloodshed. The city, he claims, is almost surrounded. The ...

All the Sad Sages

Ferdinand Mount: Bagehot, 6 February 2014

Memoirs of Walter Bagehot 
by Frank Prochaska.
Yale, 207 pp., £18.99, August 2013, 978 0 300 19554 5
Show More
Show More
... tickets.’ But he had never penetrated the haute bourgeoisie. ‘His delineations of middle-class life have in consequence a harshness and meanness which do not belong to that life in reality.’ The Dedlocks and the Veneerings and Sir Mulberry Hawk are simply not like the people one meets. By the same token, Dickens’s pictures of our higher ...

Moonlight Robbery: China 1938

William Empson, 5 October 1995

... is that all that had been cleared up by about twelve years ago, not only well before the China war but well before there was any central government control over Yunnan. All that political work had to have been done first before the Burma Road could have been built at all. The point to get clear about the Chinese bandit situation is that it had been slowly ...

Grotty Cecil

Simon Raven, 1 July 1982

Dornford Yates: A Tragedy 
by A.J. Smithers.
Hodder, 240 pp., £8.95, March 1982, 0 340 27547 2
Show More
Show More
... invalided home. There, though still in uniform, he recruited for a civilian ministry, and when the war was over he married a girl called Bettine. This seedy curriculum vitae was now about to become even duller and dimmer. There seems to have been a little money about by 1919 (a legacy or two), so Cecil and Bettine went to Pau, where in those days you could ...

Aspects of My Case

Hugo Williams, 21 April 1983

... father was young again, a soldier, or throwing back his head on slicked-back Derby Days before the war. I stared at all that fame and handsomeness and thought they were the same. Good looks were everything where I came from. They made you laugh. They made you have a tan. They made you speak with conviction. ‘Such a nice young man!’ my mother used to ...

Short Cuts

James Butler: Love of the Gardenesque, 23 June 2022

... nobody thought it worthwhile recording anything about them. Only with the rise of the middle class, and the new suburban villas, of the 19th century does something like a recognisable modern garden appear in the record. The 19th-century horticulturalist John Claudius Loudon devotes much of his work to ‘fourth-rate’ gardens, by which he meant gardens ...

At the National Portrait Gallery

Peter Campbell: The Portraits of Angus McBean, 3 August 2006

... picture more.) Some portrait photographs are memorable because the photographer has won a tug of war with the subject – Richard Avedon has described the process in his account of taking photographs of people picked out of the crowd in the American West. Unlike Avedon, McBean, who began his career as a mask-maker, didn’t look for cracks. His photographs ...

Short Cuts

Jeremy Harding: Spook Fiction, 3 August 2006

... that empire was shoddy, that the end of empire was botched, that British intelligence in the Cold War era was incompetent and that ‘the wan, humiliated, failing country of the 1950s and 1960s’ was ‘propped up … by the monarchy, the Beatles and James Bond’. You may not like the wall-to-wall assertion of decline, but Winder is proposing what he calls ...

Short Cuts

Jeremy Harding: La Grande Hollandaise, 25 September 2014

... like himself to her own wonderful family. It’s here that she drags in another of Hollande’s class jokes: ‘In reality the president doesn’t like the poor. A man of the left, he refers to them in private as “les sans-dents”, very proud of his witticism.’ (It’s a joke about the word sans: les sans abri, people sleeping rough; les sans ...

From the Dialysis Ward

Hugo Williams, 24 January 2013

... role in Bridge on the Fucking River Kwai the penny drops. Trapped in his own Japanese prisoner-of-war camp for ten years, he’s lied and cursed his way free. ‘I won’t be coming in on Monday’, he tells me confidentially. ‘I’m going to the fucking races.’ Of course he is. I may be there myself. Diality The shock of remembering, having forgotten for ...

At the Whitechapel

Jeremy Harding: William Kentridge, Thick Time, 3 November 2016

... In South Africa, a highly capitalised economy, mainstream opposition to apartheid took the form of class struggle, not race war, and Kentridge is fascinated both by the failures of the Russian Revolution and the successes of revolutionary avant-gardism. A dazzling multi-channel video collaboration with Miller and Meyburgh ...

Warrior Librarians

Neal Ascherson: Cultural Pillaging, 2 July 2020

Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers and Spies Banded Together in World War Two Europe 
by Kathy Peiss.
Oxford, 296 pp., £22.99, March, 978 0 19 094461 2
Show More
Show More
... Afew​ months after the end of the Second World War, Stephen Spender returned to Germany. His plan was to contact German intellectuals. This was not very fruitful: most were dead or in exile, and Ernst Jünger, whom he did meet, evaded his invitation to show unqualified guilt for the Nazi past. But then Spender was asked to reopen libraries in the British zone of occupation, having first purged them of their Nazi staff and Nazi literature ...

Thin Pink Glaze

Holly Case: Habsburg Legacies, 20 November 2025

Lost Fatherland: Europeans between Empire and Nation-States, 1867-1939 
by Iryna Vushko.
Yale, 352 pp., £25, April 2024, 978 0 300 26755 6
Show More
Show More
... he claimed, was uniquely tolerant in Europe, and he noted that when the Dual Monarchy entered the war the cabinet had a Hungarian minister president (István Tisza) and a Polish minister of finance (Leon Biliński). ‘How many Irish ministers are there in Britain?’ he asked. ‘And how many Finnish ministers in Russia?’ He insisted the Austro-Hungarian ...

That’s democracy

Theo Tait: Dalton Trumbo, 2 March 2000

Johnny Got His Gun 
by Dalton Trumbo.
Prion, 222 pp., £5.99, May 1999, 1 85375 324 6
Show More
Show More
... the screenplay for Spartacus; President Kennedy crossed the thinning picket lines of Catholic War Veterans to watch the film in a cinema in Washington DC. The blacklist, at least in principle, was broken. So Trumbo entered Hollywood legend as ‘The Man who Broke the Blacklist’. As Pauline Kael put it, he became ‘the leading exponent of the ...

Desperate Responses

Richard Hyman, 5 April 1984

Industry, Unions and Government: Twenty-One Years of NEDC 
by Keith Middlemas.
Macmillan, 240 pp., £17.50, January 1984, 0 333 35121 5
Show More
Strikes in Post-War Britain: A Study of Stoppages of Work Due to Industrial Disputes, 1946-73 
by J.W. Durcan, W.E.J. McCarthy and G.P. Redman.
Allen and Unwin, 448 pp., £20, November 1983, 0 04 331093 1
Show More
Picketing: Industrial Disputes, Tactics and the Law 
by Peggy Kahn, Norman Lewis, Rowland Livock and Paul Wiles.
Routledge, 223 pp., £5.95, April 1983, 0 7100 9534 1
Show More
Show More
... The incredible frequency of these strikes proves best of all the extent to which the social war has broken out all over England. No week passes, scarcely a day, indeed, in which there is not a strike in some direction, now against a reduction, then against a refusal to raise the rate of wages ... sometimes against new machinery, or for a hundred other reasons ...