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The Excursions

Andrew O’Hagan, 16 June 2011

... morning: “Get up and get the stink blown off ye.”’ In the National Gallery we looked at some Jack Yeats paintings and then went to the shop, where I pointed to a line of postcards featuring Seamus. He tutted. I took one down, a portrait painted by Edward McGuire in 1974. It showed a sullen, tousle-haired graduate of the bog. Karl immediately plucked a ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2004, 6 January 2005

... the cabinet and outside it ready to help the prime minister along. And so much nodding, and from Jack Straw in particular, still nodding on the front bench today like a dog in the back window of a Fiesta. The newspapers fall for Butler’s smooth speaking even when they know how specious it is. One of his predecessors as master of University College, Oxford ...

Ten Bullets to One, Twenty to Another

Thomas Meaney: Sri Lanka, 2 February 2017

Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World 
by Steven Kemper.
Chicago, 480 pp., £31.50, January 2015, 978 0 226 19907 8
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Tamil: A Biography 
by David Shulman.
Harvard, 416 pp., £25, September 2016, 978 0 674 05992 4
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The Seasons of Trouble: Life amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War 
by Rohini Mohan.
Verso, 368 pp., £16.99, October 2015, 978 1 78168 883 0
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... Ceylon alone among the former colonies not only retained but promoted the monarchy: the Union Jack flew alongside the Ceylon flag; a new constitution was drafted by an LSE professor, Ivor Jennings; Colombo debutantes were presented at Buckingham Palace; and, thanks to some genealogical ingenuity, George VI was recognised as the latest monarch in the ...

Issues of Truth and Invention

Colm Tóibín: Francis Stuart’s wartime broadcasts, 4 January 2001

The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart 
edited by Brendan Barrington.
Lilliput, 192 pp., £25, September 2000, 1 901866 54 8
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... with it an uncertain stigma. In 1983 Robert Fisk published In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality 1939-45 and this seemed to settle the argument about what Stuart had been doing in Germany. Fisk’s account of the episode was based on transcripts of Stuart’s broadcasts in the Northern Irish Public Record Office and an interview with ...

Every Field, Every Yard

James Meek: Return to Kyiv, 10 August 2023

... slight, pale, bearded soldier in cammos smoking outside a restaurant called Mafia. He had a Union Jack patch on his sleeve. I asked if he was British. He said he was from Scunthorpe. He used to be a shipbuilder, but, he said, he was ‘attracted to war’. He’d fought in Syria. Now he was serving with a Ukrainian unit in Kramatorsk in Donbas, about fourteen ...

A Journey in the South

Andrew O’Hagan: In New Orleans, 6 October 2005

... and the city’s poorest citizens are notoriously bad: last year, according to the columnist Jack Shafer, when 700 blank rounds were fired in one of those neighbourhoods, nobody called the police. New Orleans’s homicide rate is ten times the national average. ‘Unless the government works mightily to reverse migration,’ Shafer wrote, ‘a positive ...

Witchcraft

Perry Anderson, 8 November 1990

Storia Notturna: Una Decifrazione del Sabba 
by Carlo Ginzburg.
Einaudi, 320 pp., lire 45,000, August 1989, 9788806115098
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... an ‘association of practices’. This would be one way of describing what Ginzburg has done. The price, however, is the same. Just as, at the level of the paradigm, there is no way of identifying what is not a valid form of divination, so at the level of the morphology there is no point at which the associations need ever stop – falsifications never ...

The Reptile Oculist

John Barrell, 1 April 2004

... Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the long-deified Mrs Siddons and very many more. There were peers of the realm, baronets, famous churchmen, a duchess. One hundred or so of these subscribers had been the subjects or recipients of ...

The Atmosphere of the Clyde

Jean McNicol: Red Clydeside, 2 January 2020

When the Clyde Ran Red: A Social History of Red Clydeside 
by Maggie Craig.
Birlinn, 313 pp., £9.99, March 2018, 978 1 78027 506 2
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Glasgow 1919: The Rise of Red Clydeside 
by Kenny MacAskill.
Biteback, 310 pp., £20, January 2019, 978 1 78590 454 7
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John Maclean: Hero of Red Clydeside 
by Henry Bell.
Pluto, 242 pp., £14.99, October 2018, 978 0 7453 3838 5
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... continued, with Maxton, James MacDougall, a friend of Maclean’s who was also in the BSP, and Jack Smith, another shop steward, held after speaking at a demonstration in favour of the deported men. ‘Not a rivet should be struck on the Clyde until the deported engineers are returned to their families,’ Maxton had said. ‘In case there are any ...

A Man of Parts and Learning

Fara Dabhoiwala: Francis Williams Gets His Due, 21 November 2024

... was writing that chapter, he had this painting in front of him and was describing it. The dealer, Jack Spink, is delighted to have this information and uses it to advertise the picture. He recognises it as an unusual object, with excellent ‘associative’ value, and is sure it will make a quick sale for a good ...

My Heroin Christmas

Terry Castle: Art Pepper and Me, 18 December 2003

... and then when I fixed I could say: ‘Hey, wait a minute! I gotta feed mah man! He’s hungry, jack!’ You know. ‘Come on, baby, I gotta go first. Mah man’s hungry. He needs some blood!’You can see some of the tattoos in the super-grotty ex-felon pic of him – a cadaverous Nan Goldin-style mug shot – on the cover of Art Pepper: Living Legend ...

Who said Gaddafi had to go?

Hugh Roberts, 17 November 2011

... and British (if not also American) governments was made clear when it was echoed word for word by Jack Straw in the House of Commons. The formula allowed the government to give the public the impression that Libya was indeed guilty, while also allowing Tripoli to say that it had admitted nothing of the kind. The statement does not even mention al-Megrahi by ...

Last Exit

Murray Sayle, 27 November 1997

The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong 
by Jonathan Dimbleby.
Little, Brown, 461 pp., £22.50, July 1997, 0 316 64018 2
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In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major 
by Percy Cradock.
Murray, 228 pp., £18.99, September 1997, 0 7195 5464 0
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Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule: The Economic and Political Implications of Reversion 
edited by Warren Cohen and Li Zhao.
Cambridge, 255 pp., £45, August 1997, 0 521 62158 5
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The Hong Kong Advantage 
by Michael Enright, Edith Scott and David Dodwell.
Oxford, 369 pp., £20, July 1997, 0 19 590322 6
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... year of US $26,000, higher than that of Britain, Australia or Canada. Under the discreet Union Jack and omnipresent portrait of the Queen (governors, mostly former diplomats, kept a low profile) it was as stable, secure and friendly to money-making as any place on earth has ever been. There was no audible call for local self-rule, a strange idea to most of ...

Who had the most fun?

David Bromwich: The Marx Brothers, 10 May 2001

Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx 
by Stefan Kanfer.
Penguin, 480 pp., £7.99, April 2001, 0 14 029426 0
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The Essential Groucho 
by Groucho Marx, edited by Stefan Kanfer.
Penguin, 254 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 0 14 029425 2
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... one night in Waukegan, Illinois – fabled town: was it not the Waukegan conservatory that taught Jack Benny the violin? – the brothers looked past the footlights and saw at the piano, inexplicably, the wandering right hand of Chico, whom they had long since written off. Harpo, wearing a fruit-covered hat, plucked an apple and an orange, Chico dodged and ...

Walk on by

Andrew O’Hagan, 18 November 1993

... buy copies from the Big Issue’s distributor for 20 pence and then sell them at the cover price of 50 pence. Most of the regular vendors I spoke to shifted around thirty copies a day. Charismatic, friendly showmen sold a lot more; those who drank or looked dirty sold fewer. An old vendor I spoke to at Oxford Circus said the secret was to ‘smile a ...

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