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Take a tinderbox and go steady with your canoe

John Bossy: Jesuits, 20 May 2004

The Jesuits: Missions, Myths and Histories 
by Jonathan Wright.
HarperCollins, 334 pp., £20, February 2004, 0 00 257180 3
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... it is a long time since the Society ceased to make difficulties about access to them, and Fr Edmond Lamalle, who ran its Roman archives into very old age, was something like a saint. Archives are not everything, but where we have them they are our best hold on reality. And no one is required to start from scratch: a century or so ago, the Society ...

Prosecco Notwithstanding

Tobias Gregory: 21st-Century Noir, 3 July 2008

The Lemur 
by Benjamin Black.
Picador US, 144 pp., $13, June 2008, 978 0 312 42808 2
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... allude to William Mulholland, the Belfast-born engineer who built the Los Angeles Aqueduct, or to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive? But these things are not a major distraction. The plot thickens as it should, and enough ends are left loose that the story could readily be continued. Perhaps another instalment is in the ...

Everything You Know

Ian Sansom: Hoods, 3 November 2016

Hood 
by Alison Kinney.
Bloomsbury, 163 pp., £9.99, March 2016, 978 1 5013 0740 9
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... mostly about America, Kinney is at her best when writing about America, though she is good too on David Cameron’s 2006 ‘hug a hoodie’ speech. She describes it as ‘clumsy’, but approves of one part, which she describes, in a telling phrase, as ‘haunting’. ‘For young people, hoodies are often more defensive than offensive,’ Cameron ...

Short Cuts

Frances Webber: Family Migration, 30 March 2017

... but it didn’t cut the numbers coming in. And May’s driving purpose was to cut numbers, after David Cameron had recklessly pledged to bring net annual migration down to the ‘tens of thousands’ from nearly a quarter of a million. Family migration was not the only target – May also capped work permits and student numbers – but the language test was ...

The End of Avoidance

Martin Loughlin: The UK Constitutional Crisis, 28 July 2016

... a failure of statecraft on a scale unmatched since Lord North lost the American colonies, David Cameron has managed to convert a problem of party management into a constitutional crisis. The result of the EU referendum raises serious constitutional issues which haven’t been properly confronted. The media are now comfortably immersed in the political ...

Short Cuts

Patrick Wright: The Moral of Brenley Corner, 6 December 2018

... Dover, but the bypasses were on the way by 28 June 1973, when the conservative MP for Canterbury, David Crouch, told the House of Commons that he was merely asking that the A2 be raised to ‘the standard obtaining in Europe’. Crouch quoted a report showing that freight through Dover had increased by 30 per cent less than a month after Britain joined the ...

On Douglas Crase

Matthew Bevis, 5 December 2019

... debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original. ‘I think I speak for many,’ David Kalstone wrote, ‘in saying it appeared with that sense of completeness of utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens (Harmonium) and Elizabeth Bishop (North and South).’ The book they were talking about was ...

Surely, Shirley

J. Robert Lennon: Ottessa Moshfegh, 21 January 2021

Death in Her Hands 
by Ottessa Moshfegh.
Cape, 259 pp., £14.99, August 2020, 978 1 78733 220 1
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... as an experimental novelist, but the narrative slackness of these books isn’t like that of David Markson’s novels, for instance, which have the minimalist, unnerving rhythm of a needle trapped in the final groove of a record. Their dark outlook isn’t like that of Thomas Bernhard, whose cynicism is driven by a kind of grim joy, nor do they have the ...

At the National Gallery

Clare Bucknell: Artemisia, 4 March 2021

... herself in her art. (Male painters might project aspects of themselves onto their depictions of David, but couldn’t do the same with their Judiths and Lucretias.) In her allegorical works, Artemisia brought artist and subject together by reifying the female personifications used in academic painting to represent abstract qualities and ideals. With superb ...

The Bad Thing

Lidija Haas: Ariel Levy’s Memoir, 4 May 2017

The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir 
by Ariel Levy.
Fleet, 207 pp., £16.99, March 2017, 978 0 349 00529 4
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... moment of maturity never arrives; success does instead. By the age of 34, Levy has talked David Remnick into hiring her as a staff writer at the New Yorker, and after that there is, as her dad rather ominously puts it, ‘Nowhere to go but down.’ When she and Lucy decide to have a baby – Levy, never one to miss out on an adventure, does the ...

Peine forte et dure

Hazel V. Carby: Punishment by Pressing, 30 July 2020

... brutality. In 2010 two of its officers, Timothy Gorman and Timothy Callahan, tackled 28-year-old David Smith, who was experiencing a mental health crisis, at the downtown YMCA. They pinned him on his stomach and applied ‘prone restraint’: Gorman kneeled on Smith’s upper back for nearly four minutes, causing his death. Or perhaps Chauvin learned it when ...

The Skull from Outer Space

John Bossy: ‘The Ambassadors’, 20 February 2003

The Ambassadors’ Secret: Holbein and the World of the Renaissance 
by John North.
Hambledon, 346 pp., £25, January 2002, 1 85285 330 1
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... Then, on the basis of various points on this line, we are to construct a hexagram (a Star of David) inside a circle, which patterns the space at the top of the painting between one sitter and the other. Then, we are to observe that a horoscope square (the skeleton of a ‘geniture’, or birth-prediction of someone’s fortune) fits handily over the ...

At the Sainsbury Centre

Mike Jay: Ayahuasca Art, 5 December 2024

... themselves. In his essay for the exhibition catalogue, the curator of the Paris show, David Dupuis, argues that the power of motifs such as the kené emerges from deep communal immersion in the ayahuasca state: they are keys or ciphers that ‘enchant’ by unlocking a shared experience. They are ‘devices for making us see rather than images ...

Short Cuts

Matt Foot: Failures at the CCRC, 23 January 2025

... off on the decision to refer a case to the Court of Appeal. Among the first commissioners were David Jessel, who presented the TV series Trial and Error, whose investigations had helped overturn numerous cases, and the forensic psychiatrist James MacKeith, who provided expert evidence for the defence for the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six. Miscarriages ...

Short Cuts

Chris Armstrong: High Seas Fishing, 18 May 2023

... having illegally thrown them out decades ago. In 2010, during the very last days of New Labour, David Miliband declared a Chagos MPA – at the time the world’s largest. The proportion of the oceans which was highly protected went from less than 1 per cent to 1.5 per cent overnight, and local ecosystems began to recover. Clover played a significant ...

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