Colonels in Horsehair

Stephen Sedley: Human Rights and the Courts, 19 September 2002

Sceptical Essays on Human Rights 
edited by Tom Campbell and K.D. Ewing.
Oxford, 423 pp., £60, December 2001, 0 19 924668 8
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... care of children; most interestingly where the gate is pushed open by wealthy and powerful people (Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, for instance, suing a magazine for publishing unauthorised photographs of their wedding), and through it in their wake come vulnerable people like Venables and Thompson. I used to argue ...

What are they after?

William Davies: How Could the Tories?, 8 March 2018

... of Brexit options at a Tory Conference fringe event in October, the former Brexit minister David Jones concluded: ‘If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he ...

The Most Beautiful Icicle

Inigo Thomas: Apollo 11, 15 August 2019

Reaching for the Moon: A Short History of the Space Race 
by Roger D. Launius.
Yale, 256 pp., £20, July 2019, 978 0 300 23046 8
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The Moon: A History for the Future 
by Oliver Morton.
Economist Books, 334 pp., £20, May 2019, 978 1 78816 254 8
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... even the photography was practised and programmed. ‘They would loan us a Hasselblad,’ said Michael Collins, the third member of the Apollo 11 mission, who stayed behind in the moon’s orbit in Columbia, the command module, while his companions descended to its surface. Mia Fineman, curator of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New ...

In Clover

Laleh Khalili: What does McKinsey do?, 15 December 2022

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm 
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe.
Bodley Head, 354 pp., £20, October 2022, 978 1 84792 625 8
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... and evaluating international markets.Even when their projects failed – Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe write that a McKinsey-led reorganisation of the NHS in 1974 was a ‘proliferation of paper’ and a bureaucratic mess – they were hired again and again by the British government to reduce employee numbers and institute unpopular ...

The Fight for Eyeballs

John Sutherland: The Drudge Report, 1 October 1998

... is American schoolkids downloading the Starr report and Penthouse’s free photo-set of ‘Paula Jones – Nude!’ for their civics classes. The press were no exception: they, too, got the computer revolution all wrong. Over the last three years leading British and American newspapers (Times, Telegraph, LA Times) have invested heavily in ‘electronic ...

Brave as hell

John Kerrigan, 21 June 1984

Enderby’s Dark Lady, or No End to Enderby 
by Anthony Burgess.
Hutchinson, 160 pp., £7.95, March 1984, 0 09 156050 0
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Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Modern Edition 
edited by A.L. Rowse.
Macmillan, 311 pp., £20, March 1984, 0 333 36386 8
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... continued decline in our belief in William of Stratford’. Nicholas Shrimpton, D.A.N. Jones and others are cited in such a way as to make them suggest that, when not translating the 46th Psalm, Shakespeare was copying Paley’s papers. Burgess and his reviewers may resent their conscription into the anti-Stratford camp, but the company is ...

Mantegna’s Revenge

Nicholas Penny, 3 September 1987

Mantegna 
by Ronald Lightbown.
Phaidon/Christie’s, 512 pp., £60, July 1986, 0 7148 8031 0
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The Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo Rediscovered 
edited by Massimo Giacometti, translated by Paul Holberton.
Muller, Blond and White, 271 pp., £40, September 1986, 0 584 11140 1
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... Gonzaga – was chaste. This very important poem was discussed with great subtlety by Roger Jones in a scholarly article in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes for 1981 – an article which Lightbown uses and then dismisses. According to Lightbown, it is important to interpret ‘the individual figures and symbols of a picture like the ...

Mass-Observation in the Mall

Ross McKibbin, 2 October 1997

... Diana’s social authority depended on political powerlessness. As Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones, argued of George V (and the argument holds for Diana), once the monarch becomes divorced from the discharge of political power, once government ‘decomposes’ into two persons, one ‘untouchable, irremovable and sacrosanct’ (the king), and the other ...

Added Fashion Value

David A. Bell: Capitalism’s Rosy Dawn, 7 October 2021

Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in 18th-Century France 
by William H. Sewell Jr.
Chicago, 412 pp., £28, April, 978 0 226 77046 8
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... primitive banks and setting up grey markets with the tacit approval of royal officials. And, as Michael Kwass showed in his brilliant Contraband (which I discussed in the LRB of 8 January 2015), where legal workarounds failed, criminal gangs stepped in with huge smuggling operations.Fashionable clothing was just one of the products flooding into urban ...

Save it for HBO

Jenny Diski: Stanley Fish and ‘The Fugitive’, 17 March 2011

The Fugitive in Flight: Faith, Liberalism and Law in a Classic TV Show 
by Stanley Fish.
Pennsylvania, 152 pp., £16.50, November 2010, 978 0 8122 4277 5
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... In 1993 The Fugitive was made into a huge action movie with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, and then briefly resuscitated in modern dress for TV and DVD in 2001. In the original, the story starts before the series begins. Richard Kimble, a paediatrician, got home one night, having left to cool down after an argument with his wife about her ...

Because We Could

David Simpson: Soldiers and Torture, 18 November 2010

None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture 
by Joshua Phillips.
Verso, 237 pp., £16.99, September 2010, 978 1 84467 599 9
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... but is cited by the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Bush’s head of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, who claimed that Bauer provided a model of how to interrogate prisoners. The movie Rules of Engagement was another common source of populist legalism, invoked to exonerate those who use extreme measures to extract ‘vital’ information. And ...

Tea with Medea

Simon Skinner: Richard Cobb, 19 July 2012

My Dear Hugh: Letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and Others 
Frances Lincoln, 240 pp., £20, October 2011, 978 0 7112 3240 2Show More
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... his experience of the demi-monde and the down-and-out in pre and postwar France so that, as Colin Jones (another former student) put it, ‘the poor, the destitute, the marginal, the outsider, the delinquent, the criminal, the unmarried mother, the prostitute’ became enfranchised in his narratives. Cobb, it was said, put the pimp into the Scarlet ...

The Medium is the Market

Hal Foster: Business Art, 9 October 2008

... vanished into thin air, both victims of the metastatic crisis in mortgage securities. The Dow Jones plunged five hundred points on 15 September, its worst day since 9/11, and nearly another five hundred two days later, even though the US government had bailed out the insurance giant AIG the day before in yet another act of socialised capitalism whereby ...

King Cling

Julian Bell: Kings and Collectors, 5 April 2018

Charles I: King and Collector 
Royal Academy, London, until 15 April 2018Show More
Charles II: Art and Power 
Queen’s Gallery/London, until 13 May 2018Show More
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... just as he had schmoozed Buckingham. In London there were two men – the architect Inigo Jones and the collector Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel – who could claim to be authorities when it came to art in Italy, but on the ground there they had to deal, as did Charles, with the piratical broker Daniel Nijs. Nijs pounced on the Gonzagas of Mantua when ...

Cool Tricking

David Thomson: Terrence Malick melts away, 22 May 2025

The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick 
by John Bleasdale.
Kentucky, 257 pp., £31.50, December 2024, 978 1 9859 0119 3
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... This was easily promotable as a great American war movie. It came from a novel by James Jones, who had written From Here to Eternity; it focused on the taking of a hill in the Guadalcanal campaign; and it was crowded with regular soldiers depicted by big Hollywood names – Malick’s legend had grown such that the stars were eager to work for ...