Anything but Benevolent

Ross McKibbin: Who benefits?, 25 April 2013

“... to her career tell us much more about ourselves than they do about her. We did not hear from David Cameron that she eventually became an embarrassment to the Conservative Party. Before the great banking bust of 2008, which owed much to her policies, he had ditched her and her legacy. No one pointed out either that, despite her well-known convictions and ...”

Imps and Ogres

Marina Warner, 6 June 2019

Big and Small: A Cultural History of Extraordinary Bodies 
by Lynne Vallone.
Yale, 339 pp., £20, November 2017, 978 0 300 22886 1
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“... and folk tales are clumsy and blundering and foolish, and their strength doesn’t always prevail: David fells Goliath with a slingshot (like a child in a bombsite playground), and poor boy Jack can outwit the ogre at the top of the beanstalk, however big and strong and vicious and rich he is, and make off with the golden goose. Such stories are popular ...”

Diary

Inigo Thomas: Michael Wolff’s Book Party, 8 February 2018

“... Fire and Fury: ‘better books’, she said, would be published soon. Better books? She mentioned David Frum’s Trumpocracy as an example, with its less than thrilling subtitle ‘The Corruption of the American Republic’. The errors of Wolff’s book, and its stylistic shortcomings, were said to be indicative of deeper flaws in Michael Wolff the man: was ...”

Roman Fever

Sarah Perry, 26 September 2019

Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire 
by Jessica Howell.
Cambridge, 238 pp., £75, October 2018, 978 1 108 48468 8
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“... David Soren​ of the University of Arizona was excavating the remains of a villa just outside Lugnano in Umbria in 1992 when he uncovered a fifth-century mass grave: 47 small skeletons had been interred in layers, some pressed into large amphorae. A number of them were newborn babies. The deepest layer held only a corpse or two, but the higher levels were increasingly populated ...”

Covid-19 in the Time of Netanyahu

Yonatan Mendel: Bibi has done it again, 7 May 2020

“... government.’ The media rallied to his call, and so did less likely allies. The novelist David Grossman went on TV to urge a ‘unity government’ of Likud and Blue and White. ‘Hatred will wait for better days … we need an emergency unity government now,’ Aviv Geffen, a rock star and once a leading peace activist, said in an op-ed. Even the ...”

Clever, or even Clever-Clever

Adam Kuper: Edmund Leach, 23 May 2002

Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life 
by Stanley Tambiah.
Cambridge, 517 pp., £60, February 2002, 0 521 52102 5
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The Essential Edmund Leach: Vol. I: Anthropology and Society 
by Stephen Hugh-Jones and James Laidlaw.
Yale, 406 pp., £30, February 2001, 0 300 08124 3
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The Essential Edmund Leach: Vol. II: Culture and Human Nature 
by Stephen Hugh-Jones and James Laidlaw.
Yale, 420 pp., £30, February 2001, 0 300 08508 7
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“... But in his own eyes he remained the gangling, untidy public school rebel, still recognisable in David Hockney’s official portrait of him as Provost. ‘Quirky, unpredictable, a believer that truth emerges from contradiction, a roughneck in argument’, according to Noel Annan, his predecessor as Provost of King’s. His friend Audrey Richards said that he ...”

Blood Boiling

Paul Foot: Corporate takeover, 22 February 2001

Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain 
by George Monbiot.
Macmillan, 430 pp., £12.99, September 2000, 0 333 90164 9
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No Logo 
by Naomi Klein.
Flamingo, 501 pp., £8.99, January 2001, 0 00 653040 0
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“... to its masters in big business. Any minister who for a moment threatened the corporations – David Clark on freedom of information, Nigel Griffiths on consumer influence, Mark Fisher on the arts – has been summarily sacked. Meanwhile, corporation tax and capital gains tax have been cut to ribbons, but income tax has stayed the same. The theoretical ...”

In the Butcher’s Shop

Peter de Bolla: Deleuze on Bacon, 23 September 2004

Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation 
by Gilles Deleuze, translated by Daniel Smith.
Continuum, 209 pp., £9.99, March 2004, 0 8264 7318 0
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“... Deleuze’s book is on the work of Francis Bacon it is certainly not so in the same way that, say, David Sylvester’s Looking Back at Francis Bacon is. Yet it does contain moments of looking that prompt me to see Bacon’s art in new ways. I was most struck by the fourth chapter, entitled ‘Body, Meat and Spirit, Becoming-Animal’, where Deleuze ...”

Flip-flopping

Emily Wilson: Can heroes hesitate and still be heroic?, 17 November 2005

Hesitant Heroes: Private Inhibitions, Cultural Crisis 
by Theodore Ziolkowski.
Cornell, 163 pp., £17.50, March 2004, 0 8014 4203 6
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“... of hesitation or doubt. His examples include Achilles, Odysseus, Beowulf, Hildebrand, Samson and David. A hero of this type ‘so perfectly embodies the values of his culture that he experiences no doubts’: Achilles, for instance, is said to be motivated entirely by ‘archaic blood vengeance’. Yet the Iliad could be said to fit Ziolkowski’s model ...”

The Disappointing Trajectory of Amir Peretz

Ilan Pappe: Will Peretz make a difference?, 15 December 2005

“... solution, preferring the narrow Israeli interpretation of the Oslo Accords and, later, the Camp David summit and the Geneva programme. This means consenting to a Palestinian state in control of the Gaza Strip and those parts of the West Bank where Jews are not densely settled (thereby allowing Israel to annex Greater Jerusalem and the large settlement ...”

Sir Jim

Reyner Banham, 22 May 1980

Memoirs of an Unjust Fella: An Autobiography 
by J.M. Richards.
Weidenfeld, 279 pp., £10, March 1980, 9780297777670
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“... of which three-quarters are people, from Aalto to Zuckermann, taking in Fidel Castro, Elizabeth David, Erskine Childers, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Robert Byron, Lawrence Durrell, Le Corbusier, Malcolm MacDonald, Tambimuttu ... and Donald Maclean. It is completely typical of the whole book that Maclean (whom he knew at school at Gresham’s) is characterised ...”

The Englishness of English

Roy Harris, 6 November 1980

Studies in English Linguistics for Randolph Quirk 
edited by Sidney Greenbaum and Jan Svartvik.
Longman, 304 pp., £18, September 1980, 0 582 55079 3
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“... Geoffrey Leech, Jennifer Coates, F.R. Palmer, R.A. Close, John Sinclair, Jan Firbas, Nils Enkvist, David Crystal, Jan Svartvik, Wolf-Dietrich Bald, Nelson Francis, Morton Bloomfield, E.L. Epstein, John Lyons, Archibald Hill, James Sledd, R.I. McDavid Jr, R.K. O’Cain, Linda Barnes, Josef Vachck and Barbara Strang. So varied as well as distinguished a ...”

Death of a Poet

Karl Miller, 22 January 1981

“... but these attacks ought not to be forgotten. They are what this country is capable of. The poet David Holbrook said that the Beatles were talentless, and that their music, and the dancing that went with it, were ‘a low form of masturbation’. This was in a letter of 1964 to the New Statesman, the people’s friend, where Paul Johnson had proclaimed that ...”

What is what

A.J. Ayer, 22 January 1981

Sameness and Substance 
by David Wiggins.
Blackwell, 238 pp., £12.50, May 1980, 0 631 19090 2
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“... Professor Wiggins’s new book was originally intended to be a revision of his book Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity, which appeared in 1967 and had been allowed to go out of print. Like the earlier book, it is concerned with questions of identity, and especially with the identity of things which persist through change, and it advances the same theory of individuation ...”

In search of Eaffry Johnson

Brigid Brophy, 22 January 1981

Reconstructing Aphra 
by Angeline Goreau.
Oxford, 339 pp., £8.95, November 1980, 0 19 822663 2
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“... stagecraft and of her dialogue diction from Shakespeare, a dramatic ancestry that was audible in David Buxton’s 1978 production of The Rover at Colchester. Ms Goreau’s feminist dogma rests, however, on the manifestly false assumption, which is at the same time bitterly insulting to women, that no woman possesses imagination enough to identify herself ...”