Putin’s Counter-Revolution

James Meek, 20 March 2014

“... leave. Shaking and white-faced, they passed through the jeering throng. ‘Prostitutes!’ an old lady shrieked. ‘Rats!’ A man tried to leave the building, helped through the mob by some elderly men dressed as Cossacks, but the protesters followed him down the road. ‘Beat him! Beat him!’ one of the old women cried, chivvying the protesters on. He was ...”

It is still mañana

Matthew Bevis: Robert Frost’s Letters, 19 February 2015

The Letters of Robert Frost, Vol. 1: 1886-1920 
edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson and Robert Faggen.
Harvard, 811 pp., £33.95, March 2014, 978 0 674 05760 9
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“... tone enhances and complicates meaning: ‘Suppose Henry Horne says something offensive to a young lady named Rita when her brother Charles is by to protect her. Can you hear the two different tones in which she says their respective names, “Henry Horne! Charles!” I can hear it better than I can say it.’ On other occasions, Frost makes his point by ...”

The Angry Men

Jean McNicol: Harriet Harman, 14 December 2017

A Woman’s Work 
by Harriet Harman.
Allen Lane, 405 pp., £20, February 2017, 978 0 241 27494 1
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The Women Who Shaped Politics 
by Sophy Ridge.
Coronet, 295 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 4736 3876 1
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“... were born into an upper-middle-class London family: her father (whose sister, Elizabeth, became Lady Longford; Antonia Fraser is Harman’s cousin) was a doctor and her mother had qualified as a barrister, though she gave up work when she had children. Their four daughters were to be educated but marriageable; not too submissive or too assertive; and to be ...”

Tied to the Mast

Adam Mars-Jones: Alan Hollinghurst, 19 October 2017

The Sparsholt Affair 
by Alan Hollinghurst.
Picador, 454 pp., £20, October 2017, 978 1 4472 0821 1
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“... have secrets of his own. In a literary novel with a Connie and a Clifford there is certainly a Lady Chatterley allusion lurking, but it isn’t Connie who is the focus of attention here. The chapter is set just before the affair erupts, and the book avoids dramatising those events, but jumps forward again by a handful of years, leaving a scattered trail of ...”

The Animalcule

Nicholas Spice: Little Mr De Quincey, 18 May 2017

Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey 
by Frances Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 397 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 1 4088 3977 5
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“... Saracen’s Head’ of going with William and Dorothy Wordsworth to dinner with a certain literary lady in the neighbourhood of Grasmere and being served a meagre dinner while the hostess gobbled up the only pheasant; Coleridge’s old father, the vicar of Ottery St Mary, badly short-sighted, mistaking a lady’s gown for ...”
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 
by Brian Boyd.
Chatto, 783 pp., £25, January 1992, 0 7011 3701 0
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“... the News’, the widow has not been on speaking terms with Frau Doktor Schwarz, her land-lady, for a week.) If this is the comic germ of the story, the tragic germ occurred only a few months later, in March l922, when Nabokov’s father was assassinated, as he defended a political rival. The assassins didn’t even know who Nabokov’s father ...”

God’s Own

Angus Calder, 12 March 1992

Empire and English Character 
by Kathryn Tidrick.
Tauris, 338 pp., £24.95, August 1990, 1 85043 191 4
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Into Africa: The story of the East African Safari 
by Kenneth Cameron.
Constable, 229 pp., £14.95, June 1990, 0 09 469770 1
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Burton: Snow upon the Desert 
by Frank McLynn.
Murray, 428 pp., £19.95, September 1990, 0 7195 4818 7
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From the Sierras to the Pampas: Richard Burton’s Travels in the Americas, 1860-69 
by Frank McLynn.
Barrie and Jenkins, 258 pp., £16.99, July 1991, 0 7126 3789 3
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The Duke of Puddle Dock: Travels in the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles 
by Nigel Barley.
Viking, 276 pp., £16.99, March 1992, 0 670 83642 7
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“... were at the desks in foyer and restaurant. But at breakfast next morning the familiar yellow-faced lady was there. Her eyes flickered hither and thither, sending silent signals to the staff. Her mouth was clamped in an enigmatic sardonic smile. Memsahib still owned the place, but her dominance had dwindled to management. Does that image mean that the nightmare ...”

On the imagining of conspiracy

Christopher Hitchens, 7 November 1991

Harlot’s Ghost 
by Norman Mailer.
Joseph, 1122 pp., £15.99, October 1991, 0 7181 2934 2
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A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs 
by Theodore Draper.
Hill and Wang, 690 pp., $27.95, June 1991, 0 8090 9613 7
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“... it. Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidante to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott Abrams, while working as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State, dunned the Sultan of Brunei for a $10 million backhander to the Contras and then lost the money in a Swiss computer error. Ronald Reagan sent three ...”

Anti-Dad

Adam Mars-Jones: Amis Resigns, 21 June 2012

Lionel Asbo: State of England 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 288 pp., £18.99, June 2012, 978 0 224 09620 1
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“... wrong. Those ‘lone middle-aged men with their barley wines’ watching the strip show at the Lady Godiva: bearing in mind that ‘middle-aged’ means the author’s age or younger, is that really what they’re drinking? Stranger drinks have survived in the marketplace, either by defiant unwholesomeness (Irn-Bru) or energetic rebranding (Lucozade). So ...”

Diary

James Meek: In Athens, 1 December 2011

“... or money you’re in a difficult position. It’s easier to refuse money. There was an elderly lady who repeatedly came here and brought me chocolates.’ Had he taken the gifts? Had he taken money? ‘Gifts, without a doubt. I won’t answer the second part of the question.’ Even allowing for the low season, the coast has a desolate air. A few heads in ...”

Dropping Their Eggs

Patrick Wright: The history of bombing, 23 August 2001

A History of Bombing 
by Sven Lindqvist, translated by Linda Haverty Rugg.
Granta, 233 pp., £14.99, May 2001, 1 86207 415 1
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The Bomber War: Arthur Harris and the Allied Bomber Offensive 1939-45 
by Robin Niellands.
Murray, 448 pp., £25, February 2001, 0 7195 5637 6
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Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War 
by Frances FitzGerald.
Touchstone, 592 pp., $17, March 2001, 0 7432 0023 3
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“... masculinity’, for example, and leering female figures that irked summer visitors who knew what a lady should look like, with or without her clothes. The piece that really ‘started people coming to see my work’, he wrote in his memoir Southern English (1942), was a crucifix featuring a baby nailed to a cross (‘small children can suffer the torment of ...”

Controversy abating and credulity curbed?

Ronald Syme, 4 September 1980

“... view.’ He then went on to expound his own theory. Virgil had for ancestress a Jewish lady. Kidnapped by pirates, she ended up in Italy, having married on the way in Thrace the priest of Apollo called Maron. Furthermore, her descendant himself became ‘acquainted with the Hebrew Prophets’ and we may even contemplate him ‘reverently poring ...”

In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

Rebecca Solnit: Losing San Francisco, 8 February 2024

“... themselves or send their children out to play on the street or sit on the train with the Black lady in the picture. In 2022, Andreessen and his wife inveighed against building multi-family housing in their swanky Peninsula hometown of Atherton – average annual income $539,000, median home price $7.9 million – with an email to city government that ...”

My God, they stink!

Seamus Perry: Wyndham Lewis goes for it, 5 December 2024

The Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis: ‘Time and Western Man’ 
edited by Paul Edwards.
Oxford, 566 pp., £190, November 2023, 978 0 19 878583 5
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“... title of Portrait of an Englishwoman might promise a helping hand; but then again maybe not: the lady has been replaced by an impossible pile of stacked and suspended slabs, a giant non-figure of fantastic reinforced concrete viewed from somewhere around her unseen feet. ‘THE ACTUAL HUMAN BODY BECOMES OF LESS IMPORTANCE EVERY DAY,’ Lewis wrote elsewhere ...”

I prefer my mare

Matthew Bevis: Hardy’s Bad Behaviour, 10 October 2024

Thomas Hardy: Selected Writings 
edited by Ralph Pite.
Oxford, 608 pp., £19.99, February 2024, 978 0 19 890486 1
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Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems 
edited by David Bromwich.
Yale, 456 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 0 300 09528 9
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Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy and Poetry 
by Mark Ford.
Oxford, 244 pp., £25, July 2023, 978 0 19 288680 4
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“... Satires of Circumstance a wife tells her husband that she’s seen a vision of a pale, passionless lady who laid critical eyes on her; the husband says he’s seen nothing, before confessing to the reader that his ‘dead Love’ used to tell him, ‘with a small smile’, that she would come back posthumously ‘To any newer Love I might have found,/But show ...”