Hinsley’s History

Noël Annan, 1 August 1985

Diplomacy and Intelligence during the Second World War: Essays in Honour of F.H. Hinsley 
edited by Richard Langhorne.
Cambridge, 329 pp., £27.50, May 1985, 0 521 26840 0
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British Intelligence and the Second World War. Vol. I: 1939-Summer 1941, Vol. II: Mid-1941-Mid-1943, Vol. III, Part I: June 1943-June 1944 
by F.H. Hinsley, E.E. Thomas, C.F.G. Ransom and R.C. Knight.
HMSO, 616 pp., £12.95, September 1979, 0 11 630933 4
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... Did he not, as Denis Smyth shows in another article, agree under pressure from Halifax and Sam Hoare in Madrid to appease Franco and expel from Britain Juan Negrin, the Spanish Republican leader? And was he not stopped from doing so only by his Labour colleagues? We should note the exact words which Churchill used when he exhorted his ministers to put ...

How We Remember

Gilberto Perez: Terrence Malick, 12 September 2013

... impressions. A train crossing a high bridge near the beginning, with nothing but a blue sky and white clouds in the background, seems headed for heaven; seconds later the narrator is talking about the flames of hell. This is a film of continual interruptions, breaks in perspective and mood. One moment we are asked to respond to the grandeur of nature, the ...

Tankishness

Peter Wollen: Tank by Patrick Wright, 16 November 2000

Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine 
by Patrick Wright.
Faber, 499 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 571 19259 9
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... the project’s managers and engineers. The design team established themselves in Lincoln at the White Hart and set to work with Foster & Co, Engineers and Boilermakers. After a series of revisions were made by Wilson, the first armoured box (known affectionately as ‘Little Willie’) finally waddled round the factory on 6 September. Unfortunately, it ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Allelujah!, 3 January 2019

... has given us a cow creamer she has made. Unglazed, it is chunky and solid and striped black and white like a bovine zebra. It’s a delightful object, a convict cow, and could she be bothered to make more and market them I’m sure they would sell for a substantial price. As it is, it stands on the kitchen table waiting to find its – or her – place. A ...

Courage, mon amie

Terry Castle: Disquiet on the Western Front, 4 April 2002

... snaps, is a necrophile’s delight: photograph after photograph, in tiny, eye-straining black and white, of crosses, graves, plaques, inscriptions, bombed-out block-houses converted into monuments, decaying trench relics, dank rows of cypresses, grassed-over mine and shell craters, obscene-looking barrows, and yet more crosses and graves. Some of the photos ...

The Girl in the Shiny Boots

Richard Wollheim: Adolescence, 20 May 2004

... she told me, a brother in the Free French navy. As I was slowly undressing, struggling with my Sam Browne, she picked up a silver-framed photograph from the dressing-table, and, giving it a quick kiss, put one knee on the bed, and passed it to me. It showed a very good-looking young man who was wearing a sailor’s uniform, and so, in her own way, I now ...

In the Streets of Londonistan

John Upton: Terror, Muslims and the Met, 22 January 2004

... between the United Kingdom and the US. Even in some government circles our relationship to Uncle Sam is seen as that of rent boy rather than special friend. Unthinkingly muscular in intelligence and security matters, the Government fails to acknowledge any distinction in the source and intensity of potential threats, and increasingly identifies any ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... in Mile End because the markets were better over there, but at least Westfield was near her now in White City. She was 31. ‘I was born in Egypt 11,426 days ago,’ she told one of her neighbours, pleased with the new app on her iPhone that could count days. Rania was a great fan of Snapchat, she posted there every spare minute she had, and on Instagram and ...