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A Funny Feeling

David Runciman: Larkin and My Father, 4 February 2021

... to Kingsley Amis on 21 November 1985. He was too ill to hold the pen himself and dictated it to be typed and signed by his secretary at the Brynmor Jones Library in Hull. He told Amis he was going into hospital that day for more tests – ‘only tests, but of course they are looking for something, and I bloody well hope ...

On the Red Carpet

David Thomson, 7 March 2024

... night had 18.7 million viewers; in 1998, the Titanic year, it was 57 million. This is getting to be like the last stages in musical chairs. Folklore says the Academy hires good-looking suits and gowns to fill the theatre seats when stars and quasars retreat to the bar or take meetings. Why can’t we have pretty virtuals to take our places in the living ...

Short Cuts

David Runciman: Just ask Tony, 10 October 2024

... circuits came along. Called transistors, they transfer the resistance necessary for the current to be regulated from one end of the device to the other.’ And so on.In some ways this is charming – he has the touching enthusiasm of the recent convert, in contrast to the ‘been there, done that’ flavour of much of the rest of his advice. But it’s also ...

The World’s Most Important Spectator

David Bromwich: Obama’s World, 3 July 2014

... the plan had been intended to affirm. Just when, around the end of April, the trouble seemed to be halfway resolved, with millions finally insured and several deadlines put off, there emerged stories of faked records of treatment and months-long waiting lists at Veterans Hospitals. It was another failure of managerial competence, in another branch of ...

I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place

David Runciman: In the White House, 11 October 2018

Fear: Trump in the White House 
byBob Woodward.
Simon & Schuster, 448 pp., £20, September 2018, 978 1 4711 8129 0
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... What he meant was that in a truly political struggle the way of life of an entire community has to be on the line. The job of the political leader is to decide on what Schmitt called ‘the friend/enemy distinction’: who we can live with, and who we can’t. He meant it literally: if we can’t live with them we might have to kill them. Schmitt was, for a ...

Diary

David Craig: Scotland Changes Again, 20 December 1990

... cemetery. The old state of the battlefield was more atmospheric, less intelligible. We have to be educated consumers of history now. The National Trust for Scotland has built a tasteful visitor centre where you can choose from a great range of glamorously-jacketed and illustrated books about the sublime terrain of the Highlands and their heartbreaking ...

Comparisons with Weimar

David Biale, 16 August 1990

The False Prophet. Rabbi Meir Kahane: From FBI Informant to Knesset Member 
byRobert Friedman.
Faber, 282 pp., £14.99, June 1990, 0 571 14842 5
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... on the role of the radical Right in the history of Zionism. The state of Israel was created by left-wing elements, led by the social-democratic Labour Party. The Revisionists were the right wing of Zionism prior to 1948, but they were a small constellation in the Zionist firmament, a minority opposition in a largely ...

Sometimes a Cigar Is More Than a Cigar

David Nokes, 26 January 1995

The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 
edited byLynn Hunt.
Zone, 411 pp., £24.25, August 1993, 9780942299687
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... always had an obsession with comparisons and quantifications. It has often seemed more fascinated by quantity than quality. How many inches? How many times? How many positions? How many partners? Aretino’s Postures (1524), the first widely-circulated work of Renaissance pornography, featured an engraved display of 16 sexual positions; within a decade pirate ...

Something to Do

David Cannadine, 23 September 1993

Witness of a Century: The Life and Times of Prince Arthur of Connaught, 1850-1942 
byNoble Frankland.
Shepheard-Walwyn, 476 pp., £22.95, June 1993, 0 85683 136 0
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... younger sons and daughters, cousins and more distant relatives of big daddy and the queen bee. By birth and by definition, they are lifelong occupants of the substitutes’ bench, permanent understudies for the starring roles which rarely if ever come their way, too near the throne to ...

Felipismo

David Gilmour, 23 November 1989

The Spanish Socialist Party: A History of Factionalism 
byRichard Gillespie.
Oxford, 520 pp., £40, January 1989, 0 19 822798 1
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... the contrasts of landscape and architecture, the sensuality and austerity that exist side by side, often in the same person, have long appealed to outsiders. So have the mysticism and irrationality, the violence of politics, the idealism and barbarism of the Civil War. ‘Spain is different,’ said the Francoists in justification of their denial of ...

Disorder

David Underdown, 4 May 1989

Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England 1509-1640 
byRoger Manning.
Oxford, 354 pp., £35, February 1988, 0 19 820116 8
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... between 1509 and 1640 there were more than three hundred riots in England, many of them occasioned by the enclosure of common land or the denial of customary rights of pasture. Some were large enough to be dignified by the names ‘rising’ or ‘rebellion’, as was the case in the ...

Fusi’s Franco

David Gilmour, 4 February 1988

Franco 
byJuan Pablo Fusi, translated byFelipe Fernandez-Armesto.
Unwin Hyman, 202 pp., £12.95, October 1987, 0 04 923083 2
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... either a brutal fascist or a crusader on a white horse, Franco himself was almost wholly concealed by swags of propaganda. The ‘biographies’ which appeared in his lifetime could generally be divided into three categories: the hagiographic, the vitriolic and the subtly partisan. None of them made much effort to penetrate ...

Microcosm and Macrocosm

David Pears, 3 June 1982

Reason, Truth and History 
byHilary Putnam.
Cambridge, 222 pp., £15, February 1982, 0 521 23035 7
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... to the original. Perhaps the human predicament is really like that. The truth about the world may be difficult or even impossible to attain by ordinary methods. The way to develop this kind of speculation is to take a part of human experience that is known to provide us with inadequate representations and to suggest that ...

Barclay’s War

David Chandler, 19 March 1981

The Commander: A Life of Barclay de Tolly 
byMichael Josselson and Diana Josselson.
Oxford, 275 pp., £12.95, June 1980, 0 19 215854 6
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... Bagration, the epitome of dash and colour, whose mortal wounding at Borodino was deeply mourned by Tsar, people and army alike. Instead he was immensely thorough, cautious and intensely professional. Nor did he enjoy the mystique of the veteran Kutusov, detested by the Tsar and with the stigma of Austerlitz on his ...

Whose war is it anyway?

David Daiches, 24 August 1995

Days of Anger, Days of Hope: A Memoir of the League of American Writers, 1937-1942 
byFranklin Folsom.
Colorado, 376 pp., £24.50, July 1994, 0 585 03686 1
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... In 1934 I came to Oxford from Edinburgh, where I had obtained my first degree. I found the place to be full of left-wing political feeling. The rise of Hitler had provoked many hitherto non-political young people to agitated concern about the future of Europe. The developing policy of appeasement; the ‘non-intervention’ policy of the British and French governments with respect to the Franco rebellion in Spain; the helpless feeling that the humane liberal traditions in which so many of us had been brought up were dangerously threatened: all of this had us seriously worried ...

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