Crops, Towns, Government

James C. Scott: Ancestor Worship, 21 November 2013

The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? 
by Jared Diamond.
Penguin, 498 pp., £8.99, September 2013, 978 0 14 102448 6
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... realistically. And, when it comes to daily health tips, you have to imagine Diamond putting on his white coat and stethoscope as he recommends ‘not smoking; exercising regularly; limiting our intake of total calories, alcohol, salt and salty foods, sugar and sugared soft drinks, saturated and trans fats, processed foods, butter, cream and red meat; and ...

Thanks for being called Dick

Jenny Turner: ‘I Love Dick’, 17 December 2015

I Love Dick 
by Chris Kraus.
Tuskar Rock, 261 pp., £12.99, November 2015, 978 1 78125 647 3
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... outed in New York magazine as the English writer Dick Hebdige, a former star student of Stuart Hall’s at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the author of a great book about the 1970s punk-reggae crossover, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). Hebdige, Kraus has said, was ‘appalled’ to hear what she had done with ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

... en route home I generally stop and have some tea at Bettys in Ilkley where I also buy an organic white loaf. Today the assistant tells me that the café (and presumably the four or five other branches in the Bettys chain) no longer does organic produce as they’ve changed their flour miller. ‘However,’ she assures me, ‘the flour is locally ...

Success

Benjamin Markovits: What It Takes to Win at Sport, 7 November 2013

... swung each way from session to session. But on the fourth afternoon, a spell of fast bowling from Stuart Broad turned a promising run-chase into an Aussie collapse. After the fall of Brad Haddin’s wicket, the only question remaining was whether the light would hold long enough to allow England’s seamers to bowl Australia out. The clouds came and England ...

Liquidator

Neal Ascherson: Hugh Trevor-Roper, 19 August 2010

Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Weidenfeld, 598 pp., £25, July 2010, 978 0 297 85214 8
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... intelligence war with some important and lasting friendships including those with Gilbert Ryle, Stuart Hampshire, Guy Liddell and Dick White, who after the war became the head of MI5 and then MI6 – an invaluable contact. And Trevor-Roper enjoyed the company of Kim Philby, whom he found the most intelligent and ...

How can it work?

David Runciman: American Democracy, 21 March 2013

... of a brutally divided nation, as divided as it has been at any point in its recent history. Among white voters, who still account for 72 per cent of the total, Romney won the popular vote by a margin of 59 per cent to 39 per cent, a Reaganesque landslide. Men voted in large numbers for Romney; women in even larger numbers for Obama (more women actually ...

Flailing States

Pankaj Mishra: Anglo-America Loses its Grip, 16 July 2020

... deaths in both countries, with ethnic minorities heavily overrepresented. Meanwhile, rage against white supremacism is exploding on American streets. Whatever the fate of these uprisings, the largest since the 1960s, a period of devastation lies ahead. Tens of millions of people are likely to lose their livelihoods and their dignity.As a general insurrection ...

Lotti’s Leap

Penelope Fitzgerald, 1 July 1982

Collected Poems and Prose 
by Charlotte Mew, edited by Val Warner.
Carcanet/Virago, 445 pp., £9.95, October 1981, 0 85635 260 8
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... appearance had altered, and shocked. ‘Her wind-blown gray hair, her startled gray eyes, her thin white face, belonged to a reluctant visitor from another world, frightened at what she had undergone in this one.’ The biographer has not so much to reconstruct her life as to account for what life did to her. Charlotte Mew was the third child (out of eight) of ...

With a Da bin ich!

Seamus Perry: Properly Lawrentian, 9 September 2021

Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence 
by Frances Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 488 pp., £25, May 2021, 978 1 4088 9362 3
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... itself,’ he says in his Study of Thomas Hardy, a sentiment which might have been uttered by John Stuart Mill himself. But what Lawrence meant by ‘self’ was not to be confused with the ‘cheap egotism’ of the ‘self-conscious little ego’ described by modern individualism. ‘I know that life, and life only, is the clue to the universe,’ Lawrence ...

Here you are talking about duck again

Mark Ford: Larkin’s Letters Home, 20 June 2019

Philip Larkin: Letters Home, 1936-77 
edited by James Booth.
Faber, 688 pp., £40, November 2018, 978 0 571 33559 6
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... fathers of cold-eyed lascivious daughters on the pill … and cannabis-smoking jeans-and-bearded Stuart-haired sons whose oriental contempt for ‘bread’ is equalled only by their insatiable demand for it… men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the ...

Plimsoll’s Story

Stephen Sedley, 28 April 2011

The Oxford History of the Laws of England 1820-1914: Vol. XI, English Legal System; Vol. XII, Private Law; Vol. XIII, Fields of Development 
edited by William Cornish et al.
Oxford, 3571 pp., £495, February 2010, 978 0 19 925883 3
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... Defying the advice of the King of Hearts to the White Rabbit, the Oxford History of the Laws of England began in the middle, with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R.H. Helmholz’s opening volume on early canon law ...

In the Hothouse

Peter Howarth: Swinburne, 8 November 2018

21st-Century Oxford Authors: Algernon Charles Swinburne 
edited by Francis O’Gorman.
Oxford, 722 pp., £95, December 2016, 978 0 19 967224 0
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... tragedy on families living out a curse: Atalanta in Calydon, three plays on the grim fate of Mary Stuart and her lover, and three versions of the doomed affair of Tristram (‘Queen Yseult’, ‘Tristram and Iseult’, ‘The Sailing of the Swallow’). There are many lyric poems set on cliffs, beaches or marshes which must endure the relentless assault of ...

Trouble down there

Ferdinand Mount: Tea with Sassoon, 7 August 2003

Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet 1886-1918 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Duckworth, 600 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 0 7156 2894 1
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Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches 1918-67 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Duckworth, 526 pp., £30, April 2003, 0 7156 2971 9
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Sassoon: The Worlds of Philip and Sybil 
by Peter Stansky.
Yale, 295 pp., £25, April 2003, 0 300 09547 3
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... includes a dozen of them, mostly in their entirety.Interest in his life is sharpening. After John Stuart Roberts’s compact and readable single volume of 1999, we now have Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s double-header, with Max Egremont’s somewhat shorter Life expected soon. Sassoon’s story has also reached a wider audience through television re-creations and ...

Plan A

Jamie Martin: Economic Warfare, 7 May 2026

Chokepoints: How the Global Economy Became a Weapon of War 
by Edward Fishman.
Elliott and Thompson, 538 pp., £10.99, January, 978 1 78396 893 0
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... speeches and efforts to accelerate Iranian nuclear enrichment. In 2006, a Treasury lawyer called Stuart Levey, drawing on the personal connections of his boss, Henry Paulson (the former CEO of Goldman Sachs), met with the heads of the world’s largest banks to warn them to cut ties with Iran. This again proved very unpopular: ‘You fucking ...

Into the Underworld

Iain Sinclair: The Hackney Underworld, 22 January 2015

... made the Hole into a camera obscura with lid and lens. The collective painted the walls of the pit white, with gesso and gum. Those who came down the ladder into the earth cell, after their eyes adjusted to the absence of light, found the experience captivating. The world above appeared in phantom form, inverted, a ribbon of articulate shadows, trees like ...