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‘We prefer their company’

Sadiah Qureshi: Black British History, 15 June 2017

Black and British: A Forgotten History 
by David Olusoga.
Pan Macmillan, 624 pp., £25, November 2016, 978 1 4472 9973 8
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... draws on new research that supports the argument made in Capitalism and Slavery (1944) by Eric Williams, the future prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, that the wealth generated by enslavement contributed to 19th-century industrialisation and thus to the reshaping of British culture and society.In the Victorian era black people weren’t an unusual ...

Agent Untraceable, Owner Not Responding

Laleh Khalili: Abandoned Seafarers, 30 March 2023

Cabin Fever: Trapped On Board a Cruise Ship When the Pandemic Hit 
by Michael Smith and Jonathan Franklin.
Endeavour, 259 pp., £20, July 2022, 978 1 913068 73 8
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Dead in the Water: Murder and Fraud in the World’s Most Secretive Industry 
by Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel.
Atlantic, 268 pp., £10.99, May 2023, 978 1 83895 255 6
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... This seems to have been the fate of almost all the cruise ships stranded by Covid border closures.Michael Smith and Jonathan Franklin tell the horror story of another plague ship, the Zaandam, owned and operated by Holland America, which left Buenos Aires on 6 March 2020. The cruise ship companies already knew that their vessels were hothouses for the ...

Good Activist, Bad Activist

Adam Mars-Jones: ACT UP grows up, 29 July 2021

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-93 
by Sarah Schulman.
Farrar, Straus, 736 pp., £30.99, June, 978 0 374 18513 8
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... then for the stock price of Burroughs Wellcome. On another page the direct quotation of Dan Keith Williams, a group member who embezzled thousands of dollars, serves to shine a light on his equivocation: This is something that Dan Williams did, and if you want to hate me, if you want to think I’m a crook, if you want to ...

Good enough for Jesus

Charlotte Brewer, 25 January 1990

The State of the Language: 1990 Edition 
edited by Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels.
Faber, 531 pp., £17.50, January 1990, 9780571141821
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Clichés and Coinages 
by Walter Redfern.
Blackwell, 305 pp., £17.50, October 1989, 0 631 15691 7
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Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion 
by Walter Nash.
Blackwell, 241 pp., £25, October 1989, 0 631 16754 4
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... Keywords’, Jan Zita Grover runs through a lexicon of Aids vocabulary after the manner of Raymond Williams, angrily expounding the ways in which PLWA (people living with Aids) are linguistically punished by the rest of the community. Her approach is determinedly polemical, so that despite what must be an overwhelming sympathy with many aspects of her ...

The Getaway Car

Glen Newey: Machiavelli, 21 January 2016

Machiavellian Democracy 
by John McCormick.
Cambridge, 252 pp., £21.99, March 2011, 978 0 521 53090 3
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Machiavelli in the Making 
by Claude Lefort, translated by Michael Smith.
Northwestern, 512 pp., £32.50, January 2012, 978 0 8101 2438 7
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Redeeming ‘The Prince’: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece 
by Maurizio Viroli.
Princeton, 189 pp., £18.95, October 2013, 978 0 691 16001 6
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... come out in English until 2012, but it still isn’t very reader-friendly: it has no introduction (Michael Smith adds a brief translator’s note), sketchy endnotes and no index. It’s basically Lefort’s doctoral thesis, though he was pushing fifty by the time it saw the light of day in French. His thesis supervisor, Raymond Aron, described its style as ...

The God Squad

Andrew O’Hagan: Bushland, 23 September 2004

... impulses of their enemies. ‘It’s no fun to protest on an empty stomach,’ said Mayor Michael Bloomberg to assembled journalists, ‘so you might want to try a restaurant. Or you might want to go shopping, maybe for another pair of sneakers for the march.’ New York is a Democrat city, but also a famous backdrop, and the Republicans took the ...

A Terrible Bad Cold

John Sutherland, 27 September 1990

Dickens 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 1195 pp., £19.95, September 1990, 1 85619 000 5
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... through his fiction just as it flowed through the city itself. There’s a strong whiff of Emlyn Williams ham in all this and one reaches for Trollope’s prissy ‘Of Dickens’s style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules ... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of ...

Making sentences

Philip Horne, 21 November 1991

The Jameses: A Family Narrative 
by R.W.B. Lewis.
Deutsch, 696 pp., £20, October 1991, 0 233 98748 7
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Meaning in Henry James 
by Millicent Bell.
Harvard, 384 pp., £35.95, October 1991, 9780674557628
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... in Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry and Alice James (1986); Michael Anesko in ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986); Rayburn Moore in Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse (1988); and Lyall Powers in Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters 1900-1915 (1990). There’s ...

I met murder on the way

Colin Kidd: Castlereagh, 24 May 2012

Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny 
by John Bew.
Quercus, 722 pp., £25, September 2011, 978 0 85738 186 6
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... Unionism. Unsurprisingly, Unionists had few friends in the newspapers. A bizarre exception was Michael Wharton, a satirical and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions ...

Like a Manta Ray

Jenny Turner: The Entire History of Sex, 22 October 2015

The Argonauts 
by Maggie Nelson.
Graywolf, 143 pp., £23, May 2015, 978 1 55597 707 8
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... more than mark that wildness’s grave. Being by trade a poet of plain language – William Carlos Williams would be another hero, also George Oppen, also Eileen Myles – Nelson finds her artistic focus drawn in two main directions. On the one hand, she crafts her words until she gets them to ‘facet’ as accurately as she can: ‘How to explain that for ...

The Slightest Sardine

James Wood: A literary dragnet, 20 May 2004

The Oxford English Literary History. Vol. XII: 1960-2000: The Last of England? 
by Randall Stevenson.
Oxford, 624 pp., £30, February 2004, 0 19 818423 9
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... discusses the rise of a large, literate reading public (the first in history, Raymond Williams thought). In a big book I could find only two tiny slips: the Australian novelist Christina Stead is called ‘New Zealand-based’ (a confusion with the critic and novelist C.K. Stead), and the Nicolson of Weidenfeld and Nicolson receives a spurious ...

Did Harold really get it in the eye?

Patrick Wormald: The Normans, 3 June 2004

The Battle of Hastings, 1066 
by M.K. Lawson.
Tempus, 288 pp., £16.99, October 2003, 0 7524 1998 6
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The Normans: The History of a Dynasty 
by David Crouch.
Hambledon, 345 pp., £25, July 2002, 1 85285 387 5
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Domesday Book: A Complete Translation 
edited by Ann Williams and G.H. Martin.
Penguin, 1436 pp., £18.99, October 2003, 0 14 143994 7
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... to be earlier stages in the survey. The transition ‘From Memory to Written Record’, charted by Michael Clanchy a quarter-century ago, has no more eloquent harbinger. There hadn’t been anything like it before; or if there had, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicler had never heard of it. Yet the system it documents so thoroughly was not introduced by the survey, or ...

What does a chicken know of bombs?

David Thomson: A Key to Brando, 5 December 2019

The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando 
by William J. Mann.
HarperCollins, 718 pp., £22, November 2019, 978 0 06 242764 9
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... hard to manage. But he had a mixture of brute and poet that Kazan urged on Selznick and Tennessee Williams.That was just the start, for in rehearsal Kazan built up Stanley’s role, and lavished attention on his guy. In the text, it is Blanche’s play – and in its subsequent history it has become a vehicle for spectacular actresses. But Kazan was edgy at ...

Woke Capital

Laleh Khalili, 7 September 2023

The Key Man: How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale 
by Simon Clark and Will Louch.
Penguin, 342 pp., £10.99, February 2023, 978 0 241 98894 7
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Icarus: The Life and Death of the Abraaj Group 
by Brian Brivati.
Biteback, 349 pp., £9.99, January 2022, 978 1 78590 733 3
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Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World 
by Brett Christophers.
Verso, 310 pp., £20, April 2023, 978 1 83976 898 9
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... by eminent thinkers of Africa and the Caribbean, from C.L.R. James, George Padmore and Eric Williams of Trinidad, to Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Michael Manley of Jamaica. The New International Economic Order (NIEO) called for and the 1974 charter of economic rights put forward by the UN ...

The Virgin

David Plante, 3 April 1986

... the bold lettering VENEREAL DISEASES, a colleague came to the desk and Charles shut the directory. Michael said, ‘Have you spoken to anyone here this morning yet?’ ‘No.’ Michael was American, too. They worked in an American investment company. ‘No one’s told you about Harold Cripps?’ ‘No.’ ...

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