Roaring Boy

Adam Phillips: Hart Crane, 30 September 1999

The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane 
by Paul Mariani.
Norton, 492 pp., $35, April 1999, 0 393 04726 1
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O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane 
edited by Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber.
Four Walls Eight Windows, 562 pp., $35, July 1997, 0 941423 18 2
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... of the earnest side of life,’ Crane’s father writes to him after yet another request for cash. ‘People may laugh at your jokes, they may regard you as a prodigy; they may occasionally buy a book,’ but ‘sooner or later your affections are expressed in beefsteaks.’ Whatever else you do, you have to eat and provide. There is wit in this, and in ...

Play for Today

Adam Smyth: Rewriting ‘Pericles’, 24 October 2019

Spring 
by Ali Smith.
Hamish Hamilton, 336 pp., £16.99, March 2019, 978 0 241 20704 8
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The Porpoise 
by Mark Haddon.
Chatto, 309 pp., £18.99, May 2019, 978 1 78474 282 9
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... the 18th and 19th centuries, Pericles sank to the bottom of the sea. ‘Not much to our taste,’ William Hazlitt wrote in the Edinburgh Review in 1816, and ‘not like Shakespear’. We tend now to call Pericles a late work but Dryden thought its weaknesses signalled an early play, even a kind of apprentice piece. ‘A slender poet must have time to ...

Liquor on Sundays

Anthony Grafton: The Week that Was, 17 November 2022

The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Made Us Who We Are 
by David M. Henkin.
Yale, 264 pp., £20, January, 978 0 300 25732 8
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... maypole, topped by deer antlers. A lawyer called Thomas Morton became the local Lord of Misrule. William Bradford, the governor of the colony, viewed this revival of the ancient Bacchanalia with horror. Armed men arrested Morton, who was sent back to England, and the maypole was chopped down the following year.It isn’t surprising that many New Englanders ...

Diary

Deborah Friedell: The Heart and the Fist, 24 May 2018

... paper that although one of her professors at Stanford had been Clinton’s defence secretary, William Perry, her ‘dream job’ was to be national security adviser. She knew Korean and was studying Mandarin: as a student she had published articles about North Korean counterfeiters and smuggling networks. So on paper she fitted in with all the other ...

Diary

Thomas Jones: My Life as a Geek, 22 June 2006

... you to skip ahead next time. When Citadel was released, the manufacturers offered a substantial cash prize to the first person to complete it, and no wonder: success depended not only on a considerable amount of ingenuity and dexterity, but also on a phenomenally high boredom threshold. Indisputably the greatest game ever written for the BBC was Elite, by ...

The Looting of Asia

Chalmers Johnson: Japan, the US and stolen gold, 20 November 2003

Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold 
by Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave.
Verso, 332 pp., £17, September 2003, 1 85984 542 8
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... negotiable than money, being backed by gold itself. With this seemingly inexhaustible source of cash, the CIA set up slush funds to influence politics in Japan, Greece, Italy, Britain and many other places around the world. For example, money from what was called the ‘M-Fund’ (named after Major-General William Marquat ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Thatcher in Gravesend, 9 May 2013

... Social Club. The unfortunately named Stallions fast food restaurant offers kebabs and burgers. The cash-for-gold pawnshop, apologising to loyal customers, says that it will remain closed for the foreseeable future. ‘Sorry for the Pinconvenience’: a neat coinage. The only illumination in the whole set is the faded sign for SUNLIGHT SOAP still surviving on ...

Widowers on the Prowl

Tom Shippey: Britain after Rome, 17 March 2011

Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070 
by Robin Fleming.
Allen Lane, 458 pp., £25, August 2010, 978 0 7139 9064 5
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... forces. But as Rome abandoned hopes of further expansion on its northern frontiers, the inflow of cash and supplies into Britain dwindled, and the military transport wasn’t there for private merchants to cadge a lift on. Trade shrank accordingly. As it declined, local industries like Oxfordshire pottery sprang up to replace imports. Nevertheless, the third ...

Leaping on Tables

Norman Vance: Thomas Carlyle, 2 November 2000

Sartor Resartus 
by Thomas Carlyle, edited by Rodger Tarr and Mark Engel.
California, 774 pp., £38, April 2000, 0 520 20928 1
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... Manuscripts, written in 1844, and contributed to The Communist Manifesto the idea of the cash nexus as the only real connection between master and men in a degraded capitalist society. But Carlyle’s obnoxious ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ (1849) and his violent, jingoistic and misanthropic Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) seemed to ...

How Does It Add Up?

Neal Ascherson: The Burns Cult, 12 March 2009

The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography 
by Robert Crawford.
Cape, 466 pp., £20, January 2009, 978 0 224 07768 2
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... practice. Many Scottish writers since Dunbar in the 15th century have avoided starvation by taking cash and cottages from noble patrons. But most of those writers have found ways to bite the feeding hand (yet not so hard that it is withdrawn). This pattern was still noticeable in the 20th century, as radical poets accepted handouts from kindly ...

Pop your own abscess

Rory Scothorne: Definitions of Poverty, 22 February 2018

The New Poverty 
by Stephen Armstrong.
Verso, 242 pp., £12.99, October 2017, 978 1 78663 463 4
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Poverty Safari 
by Darren McGarvey.
Luath, 244 pp., £7.99, November 2017, 978 1 912147 03 8
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... costs, ‘resorted to popping her own mouth abscess with a fork’. The New Poverty revisits William Beveridge’s Social Insurance and Allied Services Report 75 years after it made the case for a comprehensive welfare state in Britain. Armstrong’s epigraph, lifted from Beveridge, restates the old managerialist dream: ‘The object of government in ...

Against boiled cabbage

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Falling for Vivekananda, 2 February 2023

Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda 
by Ruth Harris.
Harvard, 560 pp., £34.95, October 2022, 978 0 674 24747 5
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... was pragmatic: it was true because it worked for people who tried it. Sara Bull suggested to William James that he write a preface to Rāja Yoga. James, the son of a Swedenborgian, yearned for a more open-ended model of selfhood, which could account for religious experience without resorting to an outmoded supernaturalism. An amateur Sanskritist and ...

Stay Classy

Andrew O’Hagan: Mummy’s Favourite, 19 March 2026

Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York 
by Andrew Lownie.
Collins, 456 pp., £22, August 2025, 978 0 00 877545 2
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Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice 
by Virginia Roberts Giuffre.
Doubleday, 367 pp., £25, October 2025, 978 1 5299 8524 5
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... rude, arrogant, petulant, shallow, uninformed, unethical, contrary, childish and spoiled. Prince William called him a ‘tosser’, and it’s said, though he denies it, that Prince Harry had a go at punching him out. The Yorks seemed convinced that everybody was just fussing. This attitude could be mistaken for nonchalance, but it’s more like American ...

No One Can Live on Iron

Oliver Cussen: History after Climate Change, 7 May 2026

The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last Five Hundred Years 
by Sunil Amrith.
Penguin, 432 pp., £12.99, September 2025, 978 0 14 199386 7
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... diphtheria) caused planetary cooling. The initial hypothesis, proposed by the palaeoclimatogist William Ruddiman, held that the severe depopulation of the Americas – a 90 per cent collapse within a century – allowed for the growth of immense amounts of carbon-devouring vegetation. Further research into Antarctic sea ice, where air from as long ago as ...