Literary Friction

Jenny Turner: Kathy Acker’s Ashes, 19 October 2017

After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography 
by Chris Kraus.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 1 63590 006 4
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... relative and let her know she was ill.Acker grew up in Sutton Place in Manhattan, and was a star pupil at the Lenox School, at that time ‘the only “white glove” Upper East Side private girls’ school that was widely open to Jews’. Classmates remember her as academically brilliant – ‘Modern Library editions of ...

Untold Stories

Alan Bennett, 30 September 1999

... of the city where sufferers were usually consigned. Later, teaching at Magdalen, I had as a pupil an irritating, distracted boy who would arrive two hours late for tutorials or ignore them altogether, and if he did turn up with an essay it would be sixty or seventy pages long. When I complained about him in pretty unfeeling terms, one of the fellows ...

Europe at Bay

Jeremy Harding: The Immigration Battle, 9 February 2012

... parents’, somewhere in ‘the tens of thousands’. Assume it takes £4000 per annum to have a pupil in the UK state system and posit a low figure of 60,000 irregular children, to produce £240 million.Nonetheless, there is a demand in the UK for irregular migrant labour which, if it weren’t met, would result in social costs – absence of care for the ...

Why Partition?

Perry Anderson, 19 July 2012

... the national movement under the Raj was concerned, there was far less distance between mentor and pupil than the contrast in their cultural backgrounds might have suggested.Gandhi did not claim much book learning. In London, he had found his legal textbooks full of interest – a manual on property law ‘read like a novel’ – but Bentham too difficult to ...

Iraq, 2 May 2005

Andrew O’Hagan: Two Soldiers, 6 March 2008

... the first were eye-witnesses and servants of the Word.’ Memory was the issue for Mr Simpson. A former maths teacher at the school, he now suffers from Parkinson’s disease and he said he found it difficult to settle and remember things. Mr Simpson sat in a high-backed chair wearing purple pyjamas. His living-room was small but it housed a great many ...

The Suitcase: Part Three

Frances Stonor Saunders, 10 September 2020

... now nine, went back to Gezira Preparatory School where, according to Edward Said, a fellow pupil, lessons were ‘mystifyingly English: we read about meadows, castles, and Kings John, Alfred and Canute with the reverence that our teachers kept reminding us they deserved.’ Equally baffling was the tradition of celebrating the king’s birthday with ...

A Piece of White Silk

Jacqueline Rose: Honour Killing, 5 November 2009

Murder in the Name of Honour 
by Rana Husseini.
Oneworld, 250 pp., £12.99, May 2009, 978 1 85168 524 0
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In Honour of Fadime: Murder and Shame 
by Unni Wikan, translated by Anna Paterson.
Chicago, 305 pp., £12.50, June 2008, 978 0 226 89686 1
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Honour Killing: Stories of Men Who Killed 
by Ayse Onal.
Saqi, 256 pp., £12.99, May 2008, 978 0 86356 617 2
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... the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. At the William Morris Academy in Hammersmith, where she was a pupil, Heshu repeatedly expressed her fear of a forced marriage, but teachers ignored her. When her parents discovered her relationship with a Christian Lebanese boy, she ran away from home – her teachers, concerned that he was having an adverse effect on her ...

Quickening, or How to Plot an Abortion

Clair Wills: The Abortion Plot, 16 March 2023

... girl come back.’Les Armoires vides was published in 1974, which is late for the scholarship pupil plot in Britain and Ireland. John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams: they were all born between the end of the First World War and the early 1930s, and published their stories of class alienation in the late 1950s and early ...

Carnival of Self-Harm

Tom Crewe: Good Riddance to the Tories, 20 June 2024

Haywire: A Political History of Britain since 2000 
by Andrew Hindmoor.
Allen Lane, 628 pp., £35, June 2024, 978 0 241 65171 1
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No Way Out: Brexit from the Backstop to Boris 
by Tim Shipman.
William Collins, 698 pp., £26, April 2024, 978 0 00 830894 0
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The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life 
by Theresa May.
Headline, 368 pp., £12.99, May 2024, 978 1 0354 0991 4
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The Conservative Party after Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation 
by Tim Bale.
Polity, 368 pp., £25, March 2023, 978 1 5095 4601 5
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Johnson at 10: The Inside Story 
by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell.
Atlantic, 640 pp., £12.99, April 2024, 978 1 83895 804 6
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The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson 
by Nadine Dorries.
HarperCollins, 336 pp., £25, November 2023, 978 0 00 862342 5
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Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within 
by Rory Stewart.
Vintage, 454 pp., £10.99, June 2024, 978 1 5299 2286 8
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Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room 
by Liz Truss.
Biteback, 311 pp., £20, April 2024, 978 1 78590 857 6
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Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party 
by Samuel Earle.
Simon and Schuster, 294 pp., £10.99, February 2024, 978 1 3985 1853 7
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... as having been built with collapse-prone concrete). In the decade after 2010, spending per pupil in England fell by 9 per cent in real terms, meaning that 2020 levels were the same as in 2006. Average teacher pay, in real terms, has been reduced to 2001 levels. The legal system has been put under enormous pressure. Since 2010, 43 per cent of the courts ...

Bournemouth

Andrew O’Hagan: The Bournemouth Set, 21 May 2020

... The prison was excellent; it was of that nature of touch that I sometimes achingly miss from your former work; with some of the grime, that is, and some of the emphasis of skeleton there is in nature. I pray you to take grime in a good sense … dirt may have dignity; in nature it usually has; and your prison was imposing.James admitted in a letter to Grace ...

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

... paranoid, controlling, unreliable and slightly off his head, which naturally made Julian feel his former collaborator was out to get him. But both newspapers, in concert with others, had given over vast numbers of pages to the leaks and given WikiLeaks top billing in bringing the material. I always felt the involvement of the New York Times would save Julian ...

The European Coup

Perry Anderson, 17 December 2020

... for justice and internal security. Thereafter, the end of the Cold War assured the entry of the former neutrals Austria, Finland and Sweden into the Union, and then its progressive enlargement into Eastern Europe, more than doubling the number of signatories to Maastricht. An important side-effect was to qualify the juridical fiction that all member states ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... floor flat in Grenfell Tower. ‘Some people are famous in a block for loving their dogs,’ a former neighbour of Zainab’s said. ‘Like, there was this guy on the 15th floor, Steven Power, he had two bull terriers, you know those dogs? Loved them, he did. Would’ve died for those two dogs.’ People in the tower would go round to Steven’s for a ...