Love that Bird

Francis Spufford: Supersonic, 6 June 2002

... income from ticket sales never came close to covering operating costs.Then in February 1981 Sir John King was made chairman of BA, and suddenly – in the words of Bruce MacTavish, one of the civil servants who appeared with Lamont before the Select Committee – ‘it was “love that bird!” time.’ It was not that King was a visionary. He was not the ...

Depicting Europe

Perry Anderson, 20 September 2007

... for the labours of its president, Giscard d’Estaing, assisted by a British factotum, John Kerr, the two real authors of the draft, their presence was of no consequence. The future charter of Europe was written for the establishments of the West, the governments of the existing 15 member states who had to approve it, relegating the countries of ...

Not No Longer but Not Yet

Jenny Turner: Mark Fisher’s Ghosts, 9 May 2019

k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher 
edited by Darren Ambrose.
Repeater, 817 pp., £25, November 2018, 978 1 912248 28 5
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... for future projects: Red Shift, a publishing imprint, after the Alan Garner novel; an essay on John Akomfrah’s film triptych The Unfinished Conversation, featuring the memories of Stuart Hall; a book of essays about Kanye West. These interests are all evident in Fisher’s work too.The second memorial lecture was given in January by the American ...

Mrs Winterson’s Daughter

Adam Mars-Jones: Jeanette Winterson, 26 January 2012

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? 
by Jeanette Winterson.
Cape, 230 pp., £14.99, October 2011, 978 0 224 09345 3
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... who among other things improvised a more edifying ending to Jane Eyre (Jane ended up with St John Rivers), to the larger-than-life adoptive mother who among other things improvised a more edifying ending to Jane Eyre? Then there’s the rhetorical preening of Winterson’s last paragraph, which affects to pass her mother the microphone. If this ...

What most I love I bite

Matthew Bevis: Stevie Smith, 28 July 2016

The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith 
edited by Will May.
Faber, 806 pp., £35, October 2015, 978 0 571 31130 9
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... The idea that Smith didn’t develop is a dull one regardless of whether it’s true or false (as John Bayley pointed out: ‘She never needed to do anything so banal as to “develop”, for the spectrum of tone continuously present is amazingly wide’). Despite his earlier criticism of her interest in cats Larkin’s later review singled out ‘The Singing ...

Isn’t London hell?

Seamus Perry: Evelyn Waugh, 10 August 2023

Brideshead Revisited 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 480 pp., £16.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58531 3
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Decline and Fall 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 320 pp., £14.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58529 0
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A Handful of Dust 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 336 pp., £14.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58527 6
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Vile Bodies 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 304 pp., £14.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58528 3
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Sword of Honour 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 928 pp., £18.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58532 0
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... material of the book could just as well have formed the basis of a very different sort of work. John Betjeman picked up on this odd and wholly characteristic ambivalence when he wrote to congratulate him: ‘When I read the book it seemed to me so rockingly funny that nothing else would seem funny again.’Decline and Fall is one of a number of Waugh’s ...

After Nasrallah

Adam Shatz: Israel’s Forever War, 24 October 2024

... ties with Russia. But it proved as ruinous as Egypt’s intervention in the civil war in North Yemen in the 1960s, which Nasser described as ‘my Vietnam’. Not only did Hizbullah lose thousands of fighters: the party of resistance was now the party of counterinsurgency against fellow Arabs, and its collaboration with Syrian and Russian ...

Unconditional Looking

David Trotter: Mrs Dalloway’s Demons, 23 October 2025

The Inner Life of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ 
by Edward Mendelson.
Columbia, 137 pp., £20, September, 978 0 231 22171 9
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‘Mrs Dalloway’: Biography of a Novel 
by Mark Hussey.
Manchester, 222 pp., £18.99, May, 978 1 5261 7681 3
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Mrs Dalloway 
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Edward Mendelson.
NYRB, 208 pp., £15.99, September, 978 1 68137 998 2
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Mrs Dalloway 
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Trudi Tate.
Oxford, 224 pp., £7.99, May, 978 0 19 285985 3
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... of his celebrated inclination to detest ‘that animal called man’ while heartily loving ‘John, Peter, Thomas and so forth’. One of the experiences which finally persuades Septimus to seek professional help (‘He gave in’) is a hazardous stroll down Tottenham Court Road:In the street, vans roared past him; brutality blared out on placards; men ...

Even Immortality

Thomas Laqueur: Medicomania, 29 July 1999

The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present 
by Roy Porter.
HarperCollins, 833 pp., £24.99, February 1999, 0 00 637454 9
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... his doctor could watch exactly what went on in his stomach when he ate. Some of this is real ‘north face of the Eiger’ stuff. Jesse Lazear let a mosquito bite a yellow-fever victim and then munch on his own arm; the now standard diagnostic heart catheterisation was first done by a 25-year-old German medical student, Werner Forssmann, on himself. Two ...

The Satoshi Affair

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 June 2016

... The RaidTen men raided​ a house in Gordon, a north shore suburb of Sydney, at 1.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 9 December 2015. Some of the federal agents wore shirts that said ‘Computer Forensics’; one carried a search warrant issued under the Australian Crimes Act 1914. They were looking for a man named Craig Steven Wright, who lived with his wife, Ramona, at 43 St Johns Avenue ...

The Price of Safety

Clair Wills: Constance Marten’s Defiance, 14 August 2025

... the Channel in the opposite direction from the usual migrant journey. She hoped to make it to North Cyprus, which has no extradition treaty with the UK, and to continue her legal battle for the return of her other children from there.In Harwich they stayed for two nights in different hotels, paying in cash and giving false names. But on the morning of 7 ...

Day 5, Day 9, Day 16

LRB Contributors: On Ukraine, 24 March 2022

... explode in blood and there will be an exodus of yet more refugees. They are – from south-east to north-west – Artsakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, the two Donbas ‘republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, and Transnistria. Crimea, now formally annexed into the Russian Federation, is a borderline case. None of them is recognised as a sovereign state except by one ...

The Arrestables

Jeremy Harding: Extinction Rebellion, 16 April 2020

... blasts and a recording delivers XR’s apocalyptic version of the shipping forecast: ‘Viking, North Utsire, severe gales, summer heatwaves … moderate or poor, becoming desperate soon.’Trafalgar Square, 7 October 10.30 p.m. A heavy downpour has let up. A young activist – an economist who works in a government department he asks me not to name – is ...

I am a knife

Jacqueline Rose: A Woman’s Agency, 22 February 2018

Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus 
by Vanessa Grigoriadis.
Houghton Mifflin, 332 pp., £20, September 2017, 978 0 544 70255 4
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Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus 
by Laura Kipnis.
HarperCollins, 245 pp., £20, April 2017, 978 0 06 265786 2
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Living a Feminist Life 
by Sara Ahmed.
Duke, 312 pp., £20.99, February 2017, 978 0 8223 6319 4
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Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body 
by Roxane Gay.
Corsair, 288 pp., £13.99, July 2017, 978 1 4721 5111 7
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Difficult Women 
by Roxane Gay.
Corsair, 272 pp., £13.99, January 2017, 978 1 4721 5277 0
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... belts’ were unwilling to bend to ‘Eisenhower’s moral strictures at home’. In 2016, the North American Interfraternity Conference joined with the National Panhellenic Conference and agreed to spend $300,000 on lobbying against, among other things, fraternities going co-educational, as they had at Harvard and Wesleyan. They were also calling for ...
... House staff, aides indeed often recruited from the research institutes dedicated to the study of North America. The insulation of the US original is notorious in its own context; but at least the Presidency is directly elected, on a Party platform – however weak. In the Soviet setting, the reproduction of this rootless structure, a political air-capsule ...