A Feeling for Ice

Jenny Diski, 2 January 1997

... What a talker, such a charmer, the old women had said, sighing. Sunday mornings at Petticoat Lane, buying pickled cucumbers, bagels and cream cheese, and then, after a Chinese lunch in Soho, an afternoon spent at the cinema, first at the news and cartoon house in the Charing Cross Road, and then to Leicester Square for a proper film, in the dark, the ...
... the plan has survived – but there was certainly no intention of seizing power.Another historian, David Fitzpatrick, has commented on the civilian casualties:By raising their tricolour in the centre of the main shopping area and close to Dublin’s northside slums, the rebels ensured massive human and material losses once their position was attacked. It is ...

My Heroin Christmas

Terry Castle: Art Pepper and Me, 18 December 2003

... 5, greyed-out almond orchards, the California state prison at Avenal, then the three-hour, eight-lane chaos of LA: Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, Anaheim, Irvine, Long Beach, Oceanside and Camp Pendleton. All along the southern coast the Marines were doing sea-to-land exercises. Bev, at the wheel and the long-suffering target of my ire, turned on the radio in ...

The End of British Farming

Andrew O’Hagan: British farming, 22 March 2001

... further up from the Turners, looking at Constable’s The Cornfield. We see an English country lane at harvest time where nothing is unusual but everything is spectacular. Corn spills down an embankment, going to grass and ferns, going to pepper saxifrage or hog’s fennel, dandelion and corn poppy, down to a stream. Giant trees reach up to the ...

Who holds the welding rod?

James Meek: Our Turbine Futures, 15 July 2021

... bars, garages, flophouses and dormitories and, these days, some quite fancy hotels. With twelve-lane highways planned to replace the six-laners and a new international airport about to open between Phu My and Ho Chi Minh City (which many still refer to by its old name, Saigon) a property bubble has inflated. Some building plots have gone up in price by 50 ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... waving cushions and towels, and some were leaning out. It happened that one of the firefighters, David Badillo, knew two of the uncles, Carlos and Manfred Ruiz, from the sports centre – they had all worked there as lifeguards – and Melanie gave Badillo her keys to their flat, 176 on the 20th floor. (They still hadn’t heard from Jessica.) Badillo went ...

NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

... New Labour and the Conservatives have encouraged; and the inept restructuring carried out under David Cameron in the early 2010s, sometimes called the Lansley reforms after their patron, the erstwhile Conservative health secretary Andrew Lansley. The Lansley reforms left seven local organisations responsible for healthcare in Leicestershire. Five are part ...