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The money’s still out there

Neal Ascherson: The Scottish Empire, 6 October 2011

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 
by T.M. Devine.
Allen Lane, 397 pp., £25, August 2011, 978 0 7139 9744 6
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The Inner Life of Empires: An 18th-Century History 
by Emma Rothschild.
Princeton, 483 pp., £24.95, June 2011, 978 0 691 14895 3
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... suddenly became the source of loyal battalions ready to die for the Hanoverians and the Union Jack. Jacobite refugees who had settled in America almost unanimously rejected the revolution and fought for the king who had crushed them at Culloden. How was that possible? Some say that Jacobitism was always blindly authoritarian. Devine, on the other ...

Sisyphus at the Selectric

James Wolcott: Undoing Philip Roth, 20 May 2021

Philip Roth: The Biography 
by Blake Bailey.
Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021, 978 0 224 09817 5
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Philip Roth: A Counterlife 
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021, 978 0 19 984610 8
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Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth 
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020, 978 0 525 50524 2
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... hate-bursts Roth could handle, employing his rhetorical ninja skills. Such Sturm und Drang was the price of breaking the sound barrier that separated Promising Upstart from Major League Sensation, and there was way more money in the bigs. What was flummoxing for Roth was finding his name and his protagonist turned into punchline material. He didn’t share the ...

Taste, Tact and Racism

Ian Hamilton: The death of Princess Diana, 22 January 1998

Assassination of a Princess 
by Ahmad Ata.
Dar Al-Huda, 75 pp., £5, September 1997, 977 5340 23 3
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Diana: A Princess Killed by Love 
by Ilham Sharshar.
Privately published, 125 pp., £10, September 1998, 977 5190 95 9
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Who Killed Diana? 
by Muhammad Ragab.
Privately published, 127 pp., £5, September 1998, 977 08 0675 7
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Harrods: A Place in Knightsbridge 
by Tim Dale.
Harrods, 224 pp., £35, November 1995, 1 900055 01 5
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... of British sailors lined up on the decks, in their crisp white uniforms, saluting the Union Jack, and apparently experienced some kind of Anglophile epiphany, from which he has not yet recovered. This story has often been related in the press here, but when I repeated it in Egypt people laughed. Mohamed, they said, may well have visited the docks and ...

When the beam of light has gone

Peter Wollen: Godard Turns Over, 17 September 1998

The Films of Jean-Luc Godard 
by Wheeler Winston Dixon.
SUNY, 290 pp., £17.99, March 1997, 0 7914 3285 8
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Speaking about Godard 
by Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki.
New York, 256 pp., $55, July 1998, 0 8147 8066 0
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... an irreversible disenchantment with the industry, portraying Prokosch, the producer (played by Jack Palance), as ‘simultaneously ruthless, vain, childish, arrogant, stupid, greedy, self-deluding’. After Le Mépris, Le Gai savoir and the work of the Dziga Vertov group seem inevitable. Dixon sees King Lear, which he observes ‘might arguably be ...

Act One, Scene One

David Bromwich: Don’t Resist, Oppose, 16 February 2017

... Peter Orszag, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, William Daley, Michael Froman, Jason Furman and Jack Lew were all finance-to-government mediators of this stamp. Trump, however, gives up all pretence of a distinction between finance and government. A possible reaction is delight, as at an honest revelation. A later reaction may be fury, as at a betrayal. But ...

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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... Ezra Pound, Virgil and Sextus Propertius.’ He also introduced his girlfriend to Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Carolee Schneemann. ‘Her eyes opened wide.’In later years, Acker often said that she had studied linguistics under Roman Jakobson. This wasn’t true, Kraus thinks: Jakobson taught at Harvard, which didn’t take girls until the mid-1970s. Acker ...

More than ever, and for ever

Michael Rogin: Beauvoir and Nelson Algren, 17 September 1998

Beloved Chicago Man: Letters to Nelson Algren 1947-64 
by Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.
Gollancz, 624 pp., £25, August 1998, 0 575 06590 7
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America Day by Day 
by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Carol Cosman.
California, 355 pp., $27.50, January 1999, 0 520 20979 6
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... assigned on grounds of his subject-matter to the naturalist tradition of Dreiser, Frank Norris, Jack London, James T. Farrell and Wright, Algren departs from these writers in his prose; Malcolm Cowley called him a ‘poet of the Chicago slums’. All Algren’s losers have tales to tell, flights of fancy that fail to get them out of trouble. At the ...

Come and Stay

Arnold Rattenbury, 27 November 1997

England and the Octopus 
by Clough Williams-Ellis.
CPRE, 220 pp., £10.95, December 1996, 0 946044 50 3
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Clough Williams-Ellis: RIBA Drawings Monograph No 2 
by Richard Haslam.
Academy, 112 pp., £24.95, March 1996, 1 85490 430 2
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Clough Williams-Ellis: The Architect of Portmeirion 
by Jonah Jones.
Seren, 204 pp., £9.95, December 1996, 1 85411 166 3
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... gentle-mannered son was a friend of mine – was a positively grande dame. Then she asked after Jack Haldane, Sage Bemal, Jo Needham, none of whom I yet knew. The response next day when I passed all this on to Montagu and Edgell was, ‘Ah, Red Ammo! Hasn’t changed a bit. After the scientists still.’ Between systems must always be an awkward place: you ...

Bastard Foreigners

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare v. the English, 2 July 2020

Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness 
by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton.
Cambridge, 245 pp., £75, October 2019, 978 1 108 49373 4
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... character in the Henry VI plays (1590-92) is not an honourable warrior but the populist rebel Jack Cade, who has Lord Saye beheaded because ‘he can speak French, and therefore he is a traitor.’ The xenophobic rhetoric favoured by Cade is assigned to another repulsive character in the last of this sequence of histories, Richard III (1593), when before ...

Come hungry, leave edgy

Sukhdev Sandhu: Brick Lane, 9 October 2003

Brick Lane 
by Monica Ali.
Doubleday, 413 pp., £12.99, June 2003, 9780385604840
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... passers-by to bid for the one item he had for sale – a single, dirty sock. ‘Go on, name your price.’) This is meant to be a gilded age for Brick Lane. Young Bangladeshis have driven away the packs of racists who even in the middle of the 1990s would head there to provoke and maraud. Now all of its four parts are safe for non-whites: the patch nearest ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: A Shameful Year, 8 January 2004

... it even when I was a part of it.16 March. One of the lowest moments this year was Tony Blair and Jack Straw misrepresenting the French and German position on Iraq in order to encourage xenophobia and get more support from the Murdoch papers.17 March. A bin Laden associate reported as being ‘quizzed’ by American agents in Pakistan. Were suspects ...

Two Armies in One

James Meek: What now for Ukraine?, 22 February 2024

... and the deaths and maiming of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Russians, as the necessary price of success. It would have brutally and successfully shown its power to crush what little internal opposition remains. It would have exposed the limits of Nato and the EU – Ukraine gets talks about membership, not membership – and of US ...

Cutty, One Rock

August Kleinzahler: My Big Bad Brother, 21 August 2003

... rate. I had dropped out of college, and had been knocking around the continent pretending I was Jack Kerouac. My folks weren’t too thrilled with me, so when I came to town I stayed in the Village with my brother. He had begun to take more of an interest in me now that I showed signs of developing into a fully fledged fuck-up. I remember the particular day ...

A Feeling for Ice

Jenny Diski, 2 January 1997

... of course, the reason for our being there could be put off no longer, and, for me, the price of being with my father had to be paid for by seeing my mother. She wasn’t dramatically mad any more; she was a shell now, an emptiness, either drugged or semi-catatonic, or both, which passively received our bunch of flowers from the nurse, who took them ...

Serious Mayhem

Simon Reynolds: The McLaren Strand, 10 March 2022

The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren: The Biography 
by Paul Gorman.
Constable, 855 pp., £14.99, November 2021, 978 1 4721 2111 0
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... next Top Ten single. Originally, the song was called ‘Cosh the Driver’, a callous reference to Jack Mills, the British Rail employee beaten with a metal bar during the robbery by one of Biggs’s gang – he never fully recovered, and died seven years later. Virgin baulked at that, and the single was released as ‘No One Is Innocent (A Punk Prayer by ...

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