A Few Heroic Men

Priya Satia: Naoroji’s Tactics, 9 September 2021

Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism 
by Dinyar Patel.
Harvard, 320 pp., £28.95, May 2020, 978 0 674 23820 6
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“... to convey this understanding of history: even controversial figures like the rapacious conqueror Robert Clive were enrolled in the pantheon of imperial greatness. The statue of the Bristol slave trader Edward Colston, toppled last year, was put up in 1895, though he died in 1721. But the strategy was a failure: more people learned about Colston in the 24 ...”

Killing Stripes

Christopher Turner: Suits, 1 June 2017

Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress 
by Anne Hollander.
Bloomsbury, reissue, 158 pp., £19.99, August 2016, 978 1 4742 5065 8
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The Suit: Form, Function and Style 
by Christopher Breward.
Reaktion, 240 pp., £18, May 2016, 978 1 78023 523 3
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“... Charles Dickens, Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand Duke Sergei of Russia’s reads ‘Assassinated’. A ‘Sundry Debtors’ list from 1909-41 fills a hundred ...”

Motorised Youth Rebellion

Andy Beckett: Radical LA, 18 February 2021

Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties 
by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener.
Verso, 788 pp., £25, April 2020, 978 1 78478 022 7
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“... in LA a few months earlier of his most likely challenger, the increasingly left-leaning Robert Kennedy. Then came the Manson killings. The LA Free Press defended Manson after his arrest as a victim of the local establishment, and radical LA seemed either to have succumbed to decadence, or to have run into the sand. Yet like many veteran ...”

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: On Greensill, 6 May 2021

“... the Atlantic Bridge lobbyist Adam Werritty, to official meetings; the current housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, remains in his job despite admitting ‘apparent bias’ in overturning a lucrative planning decision in favour of a Conservative donor he’d sat next to at a party fundraiser.Johnson has followed Cameron in promising to clean up Westminster but ...”

Bastilles and Battalions

Sarah Resnick: On Rikers Island, 22 September 2022

Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage 
by Jarrod Shanahan.
Verso, 433 pp., £20, May, 978 1 78873 995 5
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“... begins in 1954. Modelling himself on his father, who was one of the architects of the New Deal, Robert Wagner Jr won the mayoral race promising a ‘New Deal for New York’. Reforming the city jail system was part of his vision. Just as now, jails were used to manage unemployment and instability in working-class life, with young Black people and those of ...”

A Mess of Their Own Making

David Runciman: Twelve Years of Tory Rule, 17 November 2022

“... again.At a particularly stormy meeting of Tory backbenchers after Kwarteng’s tax-cutting budget, Robert Halfon accused Truss to her face of ‘trashing the last ten years of blue-collar conservatism’ by allowing her chancellor to scrap the top rate of tax and the cap on bankers’ bonuses. This missed the point. Cameron-Osborne were never blue-collar ...”

We possess all things

Pamela Crossley: The Macartney Embassy, 18 August 2022

The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire 
by Henrietta Harrison.
Princeton, 341 pp., £25, January 2022, 978 0 691 22545 6
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“... again as an interpreter (this time a passable one), working together with the Bible translator Robert Morrison for the mission of William Amherst. (Staunton and Morrison represent, for Harrison, embodiments of two different theoretical models of translation: on the one hand the exegetical Morrison, whose word-for-word approach produced stilted and ...”

United Europe?

Jan-Werner Müller, 3 November 2022

“... stand for wind turbines being put up near their homes. It’s now mainly the Greens – especially Robert Habeck, the charismatic economy minister and the party’s de facto leader – who are trying to clean up the energy mess, while also pushing for a new ‘moral foreign policy’ vis-à-vis China. The Green base has been up in arms about the extension of ...”

Eyes that Bite

Anne Enright, 5 January 2023

The Bluest Eye 
by Toni Morrison.
Vintage, 240 pp., £9.99, February 2023, 978 1 78487 644 9
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“... a Bible in a tube of sunlight’. So, all right, there is no comma here – Morrison’s editor, Robert Gottlieb, said he was always inserting commas into her sentences and she was always taking them out again – but it is not so distinctive as the word ‘tube’. Thirty-four years ago, I stopped reading, right here, to puzzle whether this should be a ...”

The Beast He Was

Tim Parks: ‘Kapo’, 26 May 2022

Kapo 
by Aleksandar Tišma, translated by Richard Williams.
NYRB, 306 pp., £14.99, August 2021, 978 1 68137 439 0
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“... Vera avoids instinctual behaviour. She is studying German with Anna because her Jewish father, Robert Kroner, who has lost control of his business following the introduction of the race laws, wants her to speak proper, cultured German (unlike her mother, a German woman from a modest family). Milinko, brought up by a poor widow, is taking lessons as part of ...”

Surprise!

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth: Fragonard’s Abdications, 6 January 2022

Fragonard: Painting Out of Time 
by Satish Padiyar.
Reaktion, 284 pp., £35, September 2020, 978 1 78914 209 9
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“... to have been unable or unwilling to play the social game at which his friend and colleague Hubert Robert excelled. In his infrequent self-portraits, Fragonard preferred to depict himself in the same tondo format that he used to paint his wife, Marie-Anne Gérard; his sister-in-law, Marguerite (who moved in with the couple in 1775); his daughter, Rosalie; and ...”

In the Mad Laboratory

Gill Partington: Invisible Books, 16 February 2023

Literature’s Elsewheres: The Necessity of Radical Literary Practices 
by Annette Gilbert.
MIT, 419 pp., £30, April 2022, 978 0 262 54341 5
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Inventing the Alphabet: The Origin of Letters from Antiquity to the Present 
by Johanna Drucker.
Chicago, 380 pp., £32, July 2022, 978 0 226 81581 7
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“... every time it’s reproduced (the poet Craig Dworkin even commissioned a version on a rug). Robert Barry’s ‘The Space between Pages’ calls attention to its own material location in a different way. Carried in 1969 by the New York avant-garde periodical 0 TO 9, it was listed on the contents page, but readers searched for it in vain. The magazine ...”

Sleeves Full of Raisins

Tom Johnson: Mobs of Wreckers, 13 April 2023

Shipwrecks and the Bounty of the Sea 
by David Cressy.
Oxford, 313 pp., £30, September 2022, 978 0 19 286339 3
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“... in a Ship, as well as in the State’). A good woman was ‘like a ship’, the preacher Robert Wilkinson ventured, because ‘her countenance and conversation are ballasted with soberness and gravity’ – though she ‘must not have one quality of a ship, and that is too much rigging’.Beneath the bluster, however, was hard-nosed calculation. A ...”

Let’s go to Croydon

Jonathan Meades, 13 April 2023

Iconicon: A Journey around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain 
by John Grindrod.
Faber, 478 pp., £10.99, March, 978 0 571 34814 5
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“... overlooked co-author of the ham-fisted National Gallery extension (with her much praised husband, Robert Venturi), wrote that ‘architects lost their social concern: the architect as macho evolutionary was succeeded as the architect as dernier cri of the artworld.’ Simpson doesn’t conform to any of these templates. He is an apostate to all current ...”

Who takes the train?

Michael Wood, 8 February 1990

Letters 
by François Truffaut, edited by Gilles Jocob, Claude de Givray and Gilbert Adair.
Faber, 589 pp., £17.50, November 1989, 0 571 14121 8
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“... continue to the year of Truffaut’s death. He has some regular correspondents and confidants – Robert Lachenay, his school friend, Helen Scott, who worked with him on the Hitchcock book, Annette Insdorf, who wrote a book about him – but also writes to friends at the Cahiers, to actors with whom he is working, to journalists requesting information, people ...”