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 ...

If I Turn and Run

Iain Sinclair: In Hoxton, 1 June 2000

45 
by Bill Drummond.
Little, Brown, 361 pp., £12.99, March 2000, 0 316 85385 2
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Crucify Me Again 
by Mark Manning.
Codex, 190 pp., £8.95, May 2000, 0 18 995814 6
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... vestry, a town hall, is remembered and recorded. The work of the architects (Caesar Augustus Long, William Hunt, A.G. Cross) responsible for its development and redevelopment is acknowledged. More recent exploitations of a building denied any proper function since the 1980s are ignored. No notices commemorate ‘Whirlygig’ club nights when New Age ravers ...

A Hard Dog to Keep on the Porch

Christopher Hitchens, 6 June 1996

... care ‘reform’.When I want to recall those Leckford Road days, I can turn up a letter that William Jefferson Clinton wrote, on 3 December 1969, to a certain Colonel Holmes of the University of Arkansas Reserve Officers Training Corps. Clinton wanted to clarify his attitude to the military draft:Let me try to explain. As you know, I worked for two years ...

Hard Romance

Barbara Everett, 8 February 1996

... all on the make, in a quiet way, in Jane.’ These are folk or fairy stories in which cash has a real presence. In the satire ‘The Beautiful Cassandra’, or in ‘Lady Susan’, it is easy for writer and reader to distinguish between love and money. Sense and Sensibility starts off the career we honour by making it clear that to choose between ...

We did and we didn’t

Seamus Perry: Are yez civilised?, 6 May 2021

On Seamus Heaney 
by R.F. Foster.
Princeton, 228 pp., £14.99, September 2020, 978 0 691 17437 2
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... has been temporarily usurped or infringed by a new male cult whose founding fathers were Cromwell, William of Orange and Edward Carson, and whose godhead is incarnate in a rex or caesar in a palace in London.‘The fury of Irish Republicanism is associated with a religion like this,’ he had said a year or two earlier, referring to the Mother Earth paganism ...