Erasures

Colm Tóibín: The Great Irish Famine, 30 July 1998

... Famine.In a lecture delivered on Irish radio in 1995 and published in The Great Irish Famine: The Thomas Davis Lecture Series, James Donnelly remarked thatthroughout the rest of the Famine years, the Gregory clause or ‘Gregoryism’ became a byword for the worst miseries of the disaster – eviction, exile, disease and death. When in 1874 Canon John ...

The Price

Dan Jacobson: The concluding part of Dan Jacobson’s interview with Ian Hamilton, 21 February 2002

... to ask for some public money to pay for the last issue, so that you could do the next one. The grant for issue three had to go on issue two. But the money problem was extreme; it was the Review times ten. I was the manager of this magazine and I discovered I didn’t know how to run a business. I thought I did. Looking back, that side of it was a complete ...

Somerdale to Skarbimierz

James Meek, 20 April 2017

... workers are cheaper. In 1996, in Britain, the Welsh Development Agency agreed a £124 million grant to LG electronics on its promise to invest £1.7 billion and create six thousand jobs. In the end, LG invested much less and ten years later shut down its last assembly lines in Wales, as it ramped up production at its new, subsidised plant outside ...

Here was a plague

Tom Crewe, 27 September 2018

How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed Aids 
by David France.
Picador, 624 pp., £12.99, September 2017, 978 1 5098 3940 7
Show More
Patient Zero and the Making of the Aids Epidemic 
by Richard A. McKay.
Chicago, 432 pp., £26.50, November 2017, 978 0 226 06395 9
Show More
Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1989-90 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 314 pp., £9.99, May 2018, 978 1 78487 387 5
Show More
Smiling in Slow Motion: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1991-94 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 388 pp., £9.99, August 2018, 978 1 78487 516 9
Show More
The Ward 
by Gideon Mendel.
Trolley, 88 pp., £25, December 2017, 978 1 907112 56 0
Show More
Show More
... sex had – has – always been shadowed by threat, by violence, by shame and by death. In 1823 Thomas Buttle was indicted for ‘unlawfully receiving the naked private parts of a person in his mouth’; John Day for ‘permitting a person to handle [his] private parts naked’. In 1835 John Smith and James Pratt were spied through a keyhole having sex in a ...

The Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, 23 March 2006

... discriminatory’ manner towards them. Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights. A third justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe only in a ...

The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennett, 8 March 2007

... and wheelchairs. Wave, for God’s sake.’ When they arrived at the palace she had a word with Grant, the young footman in charge, who said it was security and that while maam had been in the Lords the sniffer dogs had been round and security had confiscated the book. He thought it had probably been exploded. ‘Exploded?’ said the Queen. ‘But it was ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... sort of help. David and Sally did a lot of running around – for instance, getting a government grant and a laptop for a family in hospital, doing lots of practical arranging, shopping, replacing lost items, and getting items to hotels. ‘But there was a narrative forming,’ Sally said. ‘It was becoming more and more narrow, with no real room for ...