At Kettle’s Yard

Rosemary Hill: Lucie Rie, 15 June 2023

“... a central theme in her work. They were thrown in two pieces, a process that she demonstrated to David Attenborough when he interviewed her in 1982 for a short BBC film. The film, which coincided with a retrospective of her work at the V&A, is on show at the exhibition and gives a flavour of Rie’s laconic, sour-sweet temperament. Her answers to his ...”

Short Cuts

Rory Scothorne: Labour or the SNP?, 20 June 2024

“... people saw in the ‘Yes’ campaign. Instead, they were trying to get things back to normal.When David Cameron emerged from 10 Downing Street after the referendum to announce a policy of ‘English votes for English laws’, the scales tipped. One of Bennie et al’s interviewees recalls that Cameron ‘thought Scotland was back in its box. We remembered ...”

At the Royal Academy

Julian Bell: On Kerry James Marshall, 4 December 2025

“... curling brush trails heading nowhere; wanton drips and splats: all this is not so far from what David Salle, the field leader of ‘postmodern’ painting, was then up to. One form of art-world good behaviour plays off against another: the springy triangular torque generated by the gardeners’ poses is a lesson learned from Old Master figure painting. We ...”

At Charleston

Dennis Duncan: Hogarth Press, 13 August 2026

“... in July, and sold out its run of 134 almost exclusively to friends and acquaintances. When David Garnett wrote to tell Virginia that he had enjoyed her story, her reply gives the sense that it was the press – specifically the slowness and difficulty of composing type – that had pushed her to dabble in short-form fiction: ‘In a way its easier to ...”

Short Cuts

Matt Foot: Rejected Appeals, 24 September 2026

“... W hen David Lammy​ and Sarah Sackman, justice ministers in Keir Starmer’s government, tried to justify their attempt to reduce the number of cases tried by jury, they always praised ‘our judges’. The suggestion was that defendants would suffer no real disadvantage in losing the right to be tried by their peers (it’s not clear whether Andy Burnham’s government will proceed with these changes ...”

Like a Thunderbolt

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Solzhenitsyn’s Mission, 11 September 2008

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 
by Liudmila Saraskina.
Molodaia gvardiia, 935 pp., €30, April 2008, 978 5 235 03102 9
Show More
Show More
“... might know its heroes. It’s ironic that Liudmila Saraskina’s deeply admiring biography of the David who challenged the Soviet Goliath should now appear under its imprint. As Saraskina tells the story, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian patriot and Orthodox Christian, was a man with a mission from the first. Unswerving, uncompromising, beset by perils and ...”

Smarter, Happier, More Productive

Jim Holt: ‘The Shallows’, 3 March 2011

The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember 
by Nicholas Carr.
Atlantic, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2010, 978 1 84887 225 7
Show More
Show More
“... Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired, ‘because I can instantly retrieve the information online.’ David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, writes: ‘I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realised the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external ...”

Sins of the Three Pashas

Edward Luttwak: The Armenian Genocide, 4 June 2015

‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’: A History of the Armenian Genocide 
by Ronald Grigor Suny.
Princeton, 520 pp., £24.95, March 2015, 978 0 691 14730 7
Show More
Show More
“... have done in reality: quite a few young non-Muslims believed in the Young Turks promise, including David Ben-Gurion, who went to Istanbul University to study law in 1912, envisaging a future as a community leader-cum-loyal official; in 1914 he personally raised a militia of forty Jews to serve the empire. For many in the Young Turks movement the response of ...”

Along the Divide

Nathan Thrall: Israel’s Allies, 5 November 2015

Periphery: Israel’s Search for Middle East Allies 
by Yossi Alpher.
Rowman and Littlefield, 196 pp., £23.95, January 2015, 978 1 4422 3101 6
Show More
Show More
“... known as the periphery doctrine, put in place in the 1950s by Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben Gurion, and the first heads of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. The strategy’s basic premise was that Israel faced a proximate ‘core’ of implacable Arab hostility, which could be countered only through action at its ...”

Brexit Blues

John Lanchester, 28 July 2016

“... attention came when Goldsmith himself stood in the 1997 general election in Putney against David Mellor, the cabinet minister who had been caught having an affair with an actress. Her fuck-and-tell story ran in the tabloids and included the fictional detail that (to quote the front page of the Sun) ‘Mellor Made Love in Chelsea Strip’. In a ...”

Top Brands Today

Nicholas Penny: The Art World, 14 December 2017

The Auctioneer: A Memoir of Great Art, Legendary Collectors and Record-Breaking Auctions 
by Simon de Pury and William Stadiem.
Allen and Unwin, 312 pp., £9.99, April 2017, 978 1 76011 350 6
Show More
Rogues’ Gallery: A History of Art and Its Dealers 
by Philip Hook.
Profile, 282 pp., £20, January 2017, 978 1 78125 570 4
Show More
Donald Judd: Writings 
edited by Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray.
David Zwirner, 1054 pp., £28, November 2016, 978 1 941701 35 5
Show More
Show More
“... point, of an artist’s work and then describing the impression that art makes on an open mind. (David Sylvester was especially good at this.) It has seldom generated a productive debate because it tends to be defensive, but also because there is such a fear of encouraging philistinism or of being mistaken for a philistine. Artists themselves have not always ...”

Diary

Julian Barnes: People Will Hate Us Again, 20 April 2017

“... insider when Cameron and Johnson were first seen as rivals for the leadership. ‘Boris thinks David’s a lightweight, and David thinks Boris is a loose cannon,’ said my source. ‘And the trouble is – they’re both right.’ Now Johnson, Fox and David Davis, another whose career ...”

The Pills in the Fridge

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Christodora’, 30 March 2017

Christodora 
by Tim Murphy.
Picador, 432 pp., £16.99, February 2017, 978 1 5098 1857 0
Show More
Show More
“... a leisurely luxury, and early writing about the epidemic was raw testimony, often from people like David Wojnarowicz who knew they didn’t have the time for subtlety, fighting rhetoric with rhetoric by diagnosing a disease whose symptoms were ‘sweating palms, angry outbursts, hysteria, the discharging of handguns’.* Even journalism struggled to keep up ...”

Resistance from Elsewhere

Kevin Okoth: Black Marxism, 7 April 2022

Black Marxism 
by Cedric Robinson.
Penguin, 436 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 0 241 51417 7
Show More
Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition 
by Joshua Myers.
Polity, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2021, 978 1 5095 3792 1
Show More
Show More
“... of Racial Capitalism in South Africa’, by the South African historians Martin Legassick and David Hemson. In the late 1970s, the official position of the UN’s International Labour Organisation was that the policy of apartheid was in direct conflict with economic growth, and that growth would eventually undermine and force an end to ...”

Good enough for Jesus

Charlotte Brewer, 25 January 1990

The State of the Language: 1990 Edition 
edited by Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels.
Faber, 531 pp., £17.50, January 1990, 9780571141821
Show More
Clichés and Coinages 
by Walter Redfern.
Blackwell, 305 pp., £17.50, October 1989, 0 631 15691 7
Show More
Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion 
by Walter Nash.
Blackwell, 241 pp., £25, October 1989, 0 631 16754 4
Show More
Show More
“... and Randolph Quirk) jostle with poets and novelists (including Medbh McGuckian and Amy Tan). David Dabydeen writes ‘On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, and discusses, in impeccably establishment English, a question that might just as well come under ‘Art’: how does a black writer in English find an authentic voice: what does s/he ...”