Diary

August Kleinzahler: My Last Big Road Trip, 2 December 2010

... colourful local characters the narrator meets along the way. This is true of Steinbeck, Kerouac, William Least Heat-Moon in his Blue Highways and so on. Even the insufferable Henry Miller, in his 1945 volume The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, has his unrelieved bombast interrupted by a mechanic in Albuquerque called Dutter. The Maestro and I weren’t doing ...

Dastardly Poltroons

Jonathan Fenby: Madame Chiang Kai-shek, 21 October 2010

The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China 
by Hannah Pakula.
Weidenfeld, 787 pp., £25, January 2010, 978 0 297 85975 8
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... insistence on being provided with lavish perks, left a bad taste, as did the disappearance of cash donated by the American public. When she got back to China, Chiang was fuming with jealousy: why had she met Roosevelt at the White House? There were rumours that he was having an affair with his nurse, that Meiling found a pair of high-heeled shoes under ...

How did she get those feet?

Alice Spawls: The Female Detective, 20 February 2014

The Notting Hill Mystery: The First Detective Novel 
by Charles Warren Adams.
British Library, 312 pp., £8.99, February 2012, 978 0 7123 5859 0
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The Female Detective: The Original Lady Detective 
by Andrew Forrester.
British Library, 328 pp., £8.99, October 2012, 978 0 7123 5878 1
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Revelations of a Lady Detective 
by William Stephens Hayward.
British Library, 278 pp., £8.99, February 2013, 978 0 7123 5896 5
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... And then a chance remark casts the affair in a new light. G deducts that Petleigh, desperate for cash, had arranged to be delivered to the house inside a large trunk. He had intended to steal the silver in the night and escape before anyone woke up. But the housekeeper, Mrs Quinion, realised that someone was hiding there and stabbed at a hole in the trunk ...

Down with Weathercocks

Tom Stammers: Mother Revolution, 30 November 2017

Liberty or Death: The French Revolution 
by Peter McPhee.
Yale, 468 pp., £14.99, July 2017, 978 0 300 22869 4
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... ditched, the elite blended imperceptibly with the masses. Moreover, as Marx recognised, and as William Reddy elaborated in Money and Liberty in Modern Europe (1987), by legislating that feudal rights could be redeemed through cash compensation, the revolutionaries consecrated money as the universal equaliser. The ...

Photomania

Emilie Bickerton, 22 November 2018

The Great Nadar: The Man behind the Camera 
by Adam Begley.
Tim Duggan, 247 pp., £12.99, July 2018, 978 1 101 90262 2
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... the new wet collodion process, invented in 1851 following the breakthroughs of Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot. The daguerreotype was an image printed directly onto a glass plate; Talbot’s calotype was a translucent negative image from which positive images could be reproduced. The drawback of the calotype was its lack of sensitivity, which ...

Hallelujah Times

Eric Foner: The Great Migration, 29 June 2017

A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland 
by Sydney Nathans.
Harvard, 313 pp., £23.95, February 2017, 978 0 674 97214 8
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... The purchasers did not have to put any money down, and could pay over five years, in cotton or cash as they saw fit. It remains unclear exactly why Cameron sold the land to blacks – not a common practice in the postwar South – and offered such lenient terms. Land values had plummeted because of the depression and white buyers were difficult to ...

Blame it on the Belgians

Hilary Mantel, 25 June 1992

The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe 
by Charles Nicholl.
Cape, 413 pp., £19.99, June 1992, 0 224 03100 7
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... power-base was in Lancashire, a part of England famous for clinging to Catholicism. His cousin Sir William Stanley was a notorious traitor, who after years of stalwart military service to Elizabeth had handed the Dutch town of Deventer over to the Spanish and formed a regiment in the King of Spain’s service. Lord Strange was a problem for the Government. As ...

Northern Lights

Rosalind Mitchison, 19 April 1984

Literature and Gentility in Scotland 
by David Daiches.
Edinburgh, 114 pp., £6.50, June 1982, 9780852244388
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New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland 
edited by John Dwyer, Roger Mason and Alexander Murdoch.
John Donald, 340 pp., £15, August 1982, 0 85976 066 9
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Adam Smith 
by R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner.
Croom Helm, 231 pp., £12.95, June 1982, 9780709907299
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Sister Peg 
edited by David Raynor.
Cambridge, 127 pp., £15.50, June 1981, 0 521 24299 1
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Boswell: The Applause of the Jury 1782-1785 
edited by Irma Lustig and Frederick Pottle.
Heinemann, 419 pp., £15, July 1982, 0 434 43945 2
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Muir of Huntershill 
by Christina Bewley.
Oxford, 212 pp., £8.50, May 1981, 0 19 211768 8
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... oppressive monarchy, leading to the development of liberty for the individual under the law, and cash rather than service as the basis of transactions. At the same time the economic resources of the aristocracy encouraged the development of skilled manufacturing work, and hence prosperity for many sections of society. It all sounds fine provided you remember ...

The Great War Revisited

Michael Howard, 23 April 1987

The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War 1914-1918 
by Trevor Wilson.
Polity, 864 pp., £35, September 1986, 9780745600932
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British Strategy and War Aims 1914-1916 
by David French.
Allen and Unwin, 274 pp., £25, September 1986, 0 04 942197 2
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The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos 
by Peter Parker.
Constable, 319 pp., £15, March 1987, 0 09 466980 5
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... but the retention of that power is probably the most indispensable element of success.’ Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, stated the contrary view a month later: ‘The attitude of some ministers is rather to find out what is the smallest amount of money and the smallest number of men with which we may hope, some day, to win ...

Getting high

Charles Nicholl, 19 March 1987

The Global Connection: The Crisis of Drug Addiction 
by Ben Whitaker.
Cape, 384 pp., £15, March 1987, 0 224 02224 5
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... as Geneva – familiarised by British tipplers as ‘gin’ – was introduced by the Court of William of Orange in the 1690s. By the mid-18th century, a quarter of London’s population – almost exclusively from the poorer classes – had a gin habit averaging a pint a day. A survey of 1750 shows that every fourth house in the parish of St Giles was a ...

Mmmm, chicken nuggets

Bee Wilson: The Victorian Restaurant Scene, 15 August 2019

The London Restaurant: 1840-1914 
by Brenda Assael.
Oxford, 239 pp., £60, July 2018, 978 0 19 881760 4
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... can buy a chicken katsu curry in a paper bucket for £6.75 at Wasabi, or if you have a little more cash and time, you can sit down and eat a marginally more refined version for £9.95 at a branch of Wagamama, where it is garnished with a small salad and a few Japanese pickles. Like many British comfort foods, katsu depends on a fine balance between sogginess ...

King Cling

Julian Bell: Kings and Collectors, 5 April 2018

Charles I: King and Collector 
Royal Academy, London, until 15 April 2018Show More
Charles II: Art and Power 
Queen’s Gallery/London, until 13 May 2018Show More
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... broker Daniel Nijs. Nijs pounced on the Gonzagas of Mantua when they happened to be short of cash in the late 1620s and came away with far more of their patrimony than anyone in London had meant to acquire. In the history of art’s dislocations, Charles’s reign precedes America’s robber barons and today’s big spenders in the Gulf. Thanks to ...

Astonish Mould and Mildew

Andrew O’Hagan: Bless this House with Less, 10 October 2019

Hinch Yourself Happy: All the Best Cleaning Tips to Shine Your Sink and Soothe Your Soul 
by Mrs Hinch.
Michael Joseph, 288 pp., £12.99, April 2019, 978 0 241 39975 0
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... the endless gadgets, and the need to clean them or tidy them away. We had come a long way from William Morris’s thinking on household objects, that one should keep nothing that is neither useful nor beautiful, and our house, in the middle of our street, was testament to the ugliness of half-arsed consumption, a Bedlam of miniature wants. Storage ...

A Dangerously Liquid World

John Sutherland: Alcoholics Anonymous, 30 November 2000

Bill W. and Mr Wilson: The Legend and Life of AA’s Co-Founder 
by Matthew Raphael.
Massachusetts, 206 pp., £18.50, June 2000, 1 55849 245 3
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... is, of complicating doctrine or confusing theory. Nor does AA have any money; it accumulates no cash, capital or material assets. There are good reasons for this austerity. Alcoholics (whether practising or recovering) are hopeless with money, you might as well give them whisky. Those groups which collect funds to set up their own premises or accumulate ...

Do you Floss?

Lawrence Lessig: The sharing economy, 18 August 2005

The Success of Open Source 
by Steven Weber.
Harvard, 312 pp., £19.95, August 2004, 0 674 01292 5
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Democratising Innovation 
by Eric von Hippel.
MIT, 208 pp., £19.95, May 2005, 0 262 00274 4
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... things of value to Microsoft. Money is off the table because Smith doesn’t believe that ‘cash exchange for community support’ helps. ‘There are numerous social benefits that amply incentivise contributions to communities,’ he explains. Money isn’t one; indeed, money would probably be harmful. To people with a certain view of human ...