Diary

David Margolick: Fred Sparks’s Bequest, 21 November 2024

... today – to the PLO.The bequest was the third of thirteen listed in his will of 7 May 1975, after another, larger one to the Catholic Missions Society of America, Maryknoll Fathers. There was no ringing oratory: he simply directed the money to go to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, 101 Park Avenue in New York, or if they had ...

Burning Age of Rage

Mendez: On Linton Kwesi Johnson, 11 September 2025

Time Come: Selected Prose 
by Linton Kwesi Johnson.
Picador, 312 pp., £10.99, April 2024, 978 1 0350 0633 5
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... had briefly worked for them as a freelance copywriter, and a friend gave him an address for Richard Branson, who was impressed by his demo tape and offered him a multi-album deal. Johnson had the foresight to turn it down, agreeing only to one album. (He would subsequently sign to Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, then Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong ...

Battle of the Wasps

C.K. Stead: Eliot v. Mansfield, 3 March 2011

... however, is not forgotten, and when a new collection of her stories is published Eliot writes to Richard Aldington asking him to order a review copy: ‘I think her inflated reputation ought to be dealt with.’ There is now a peculiar tone in letters to Murry, one or two of which are almost like love letters: Thanks, dear John, for your adorable ...

Rise of the Rest

Pankaj Mishra: After America, 6 November 2008

The Post-American World 
by Fareed Zakaria.
Allen Lane, 292 pp., £20, July 2008, 978 1 84614 153 9
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The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order 
by Parag Khanna.
Allen Lane, 466 pp., £25, April 2008, 978 0 7139 9937 2
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... competitive and technologically innovative as any European country. The politicians in Washington may be know-nothings, but the country’s major research universities are still the best, attracting talent from all over the world. Besides, ‘the rise of the rest is a consequence of American ideas and actions.’ It follows that countries such as ...

A Misreading of the Law

Conor Gearty: Why didn’t Campbell sue?, 19 February 2004

Report of the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly CMG 
by Lord Hutton.
Stationery Office, 740 pp., £70, January 2004, 0 10 292715 4
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... the excitement of the success of their ploy, Blair and his (former?) spokesperson (ventriloquist?) may have strayed towards it. Given that it remains the case that a neocolonial war has been fought to please neo-conservative friends in an administration despised abroad and at home, this crowing may prove not to have been the ...

Magnifico

David Bromwich: This was Orson Welles, 3 June 2004

Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life 
by Peter Conrad.
Faber, 384 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 571 20978 5
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... slow swing replaced by a nocturne. The station cut in again with a learned authority, ‘Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer’, direct from the Princeton observatory to explain the discharge and point out that Mars could not support intelligent life. Pierson, however, confessed that he could not explain the regularity of the emissions. More ...
... echoes that of Darwin’s joint presentation with Wallace to the Linnaean Society in 1858 may appear not only presumptuous but also inappropriate to a commemoration of Radcliffe-Brown, whose lifelong concern was with structure and function rather than with evolution, and whose vision of ‘a natural science of society’ was, it has often been ...

All in Slow Motion

Dani Garavelli: The Murder of Nikki Allan, 15 June 2023

... through the windows of Newcastle’s law courts. Inside Court One, the prosecuting barrister, Richard Wright, was about to show a video of the murder scene. Wright has a commanding presence and an instinct for the dramatic. What the jurors were about to see was disturbing, he said. There would be blood, although Nikki’s body would be pixellated. Boyd ...

Rat Poison

David Bromwich, 17 October 1996

Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Beacon, 143 pp., $20, February 1996, 0 8070 4108 4
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... phrase, yet it is telling enough when you consider how one person, out of a mass of others, may become suddenly vivid through an accident of acquaintance or perception. Nussbaum does not cite Mead on this useful point. She tries to recruit help further afield, from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The name of Smith is cunningly brought in, and ...

Beyond Mesopotamia

Tom Stevenson: Linear Elamite Deciphered, 6 March 2025

... account for 96 per cent of the sign occurrences in the Linear Elamite corpus. Four signs, which may correspond to the gaps in Desset’s phonetic grid, remain to be deciphered, as do thirty or so hapax legomena (isolated instances), which he believes may be chronological or geographical variants. Remarkably, one Linear ...

The Real Magic

David Sylvester, 8 June 1995

A Biographical Dictionary of Film 
by David Thomson.
Deutsch, 834 pp., £25, November 1994, 0 233 98859 9
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... it is because of that attentiveness and the feeling that what is being said or done to him may provoke extra-ordinary and unexpected reactions. No one could move so arbitrarily from tranquillity to dementia, because Cagney was a dancer responding to a melody that he alone heard. Like a sprite or goblin he seemed to be in touch with an occult source of ...

Ronbo

Michael Rogin, 13 October 1988

Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North 
by Ben Bradlee.
Grafton, 572 pp., £14.95, September 1988, 0 246 13364 3
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For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington 
by Donald Regan.
Hutchinson, 397 pp., £16.95, June 1988, 0 09 173622 6
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... The President finally decided he couldn’t remember what he had or hadn’t signed. Regan may think he and Reagan shared a relationship to Iran/Contra of amnesia, ignorance and inattention, but Regan was not the President’s fairy godfather who aided the Contras and sold arms to Iran. That figure was Reagan’s ‘national hero’, Lieutenant-Colonel ...

The Poetry of John Ashbery

John Bayley, 2 September 1982

Shadow Train 
by John Ashbery.
Carcanet, 50 pp., £3.25, March 1982, 0 85635 424 4
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... is a way of abdicating from the inexpressible mode of being that it also sustains. The clarity may be illusory, but the Romantic dawn and the Age of Reason unite to give it a great and naive confidence, so that the reader feels it is trembling on the verge of some great revelation, some breakthrough about the state of the universe and man’s nature. As ...

Making strange

John Sutherland, 19 March 1981

Other people 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 223 pp., £5.95, March 1981, 0 224 01766 7
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The Magic Glass 
by Anne Smith.
Joseph, 174 pp., £6.50, March 1981, 9780718119867
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The Book of Ebenezer Le Page 
by Gerald Edwards.
Hamish Hamilton, 400 pp., £7.50, March 1981, 0 241 10477 7
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Sharpe’s Eagle 
by Bernard Cornwell.
Collins, 266 pp., £6.50, February 1981, 0 00 221997 2
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XPD 
by Len Deighton.
Hutchinson, 397 pp., £6.95, March 1981, 0 09 144570 1
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... murderer, Mr Wrong, are sorted out. There’s an Incident at Owl Creek-like ending in which Mary may be executed, or reborn, or returned by time-loop to the novel’s opening situation. Other People, this is to say, does not easily give up its secret – at least not to me. Amis’s cleverness has always been of the kind which makes the clodhopping reader ...

Nationalising English

Patrick Parrinder, 28 January 1993

The Great Betrayal: Memoirs of a Life in Education 
by Brian Cox.
Chapmans, 386 pp., £17.99, September 1992, 1 85592 605 9
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... the University of Hull, across the river from his home town. There, supported by colleagues like Richard Hoggart and Philip Larkin, he founded Critical Quarterly, a journal which continues to appeal to a mixed audience of schoolteachers and professional academics. After a year at Berkeley, during which his classes were disrupted by the Free Speech ...