Megalo

R.W. Johnson, 9 March 1995

The State We’re In 
by Will Hutton.
Cape, 352 pp., £16.99, January 1995, 0 224 03688 2
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“... the same case and more than ever aware of its faults and deficiencies. Things start to go wrong on page two. It is an odd treatise on political economy which, by this stage, is already deeply into the national crisis occasioned by ... the breakdown of royal marriages, which, apparently, are ‘symbolic of the age’. It is all so pantingly retailed: the ...”

Flytings

Arnold Rattenbury: Hamish Henderson, 23 January 2003

Collected Poems and Songs 
by Hamish Henderson, edited by Raymond Ross.
Curly Snake, 163 pp., £9.99, March 2000, 1 902141 01 6
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“... was accidental. The folksinger Ewan MacColl asked Henderson to assist the American folklorist Alan Lomax put together a one-hour-per-country compilation of world song for Columbia records. The recordings that followed, together with others by Calum MacLean, formed the basis of the archive at the School of Scottish Studies. Henderson said that collecting ...”

Young People Are Different

William Davies: What do Neets need?, 13 August 2026

“... has attracted a lot of political attention since Labour took office in 2024. In November 2025, Alan Milburn, a former Labour health secretary, was asked to conduct a review of the evidence and policy options. He produced an interim report in May. Further reports, policy recommendations, focus group findings, stakeholder perspectives, league tables and ...”

That’s what Wystan says

Seamus Perry, 10 May 2018

Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography 
by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 912 pp., £27.95, May 2017, 978 0 691 17249 1
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“... And it remains pretty well known: the quirkiest testimony to its renown comes in The Habit of Art, Alan Bennett’s play about Auden and Benjamin Britten, when two of the wrinkles come alive and engage in a brief dialogue about themselves. As its furrows gradually deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard ...”

Liquidator

Neal Ascherson: Hugh Trevor-Roper, 19 August 2010

Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Weidenfeld, 598 pp., £25, July 2010, 978 0 297 85214 8
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“... the lead book review, the lecture series polished up for publication, the heavyweight foreign-page reporting in the Observer or the Sunday Times. On that scale, he produced his best and most influential work, launching challenges and controversies that permanently altered interpretations of the English and European past. In his abandoned books, he would ...”

There is no cure

Michael Wood: Freud’s Guesswork, 6 July 2006

The Penguin Freud Reader 
edited by Adam Phillips.
Penguin, 570 pp., £14.99, January 2006, 0 14 118743 3
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“... as much impact on neurotic symptoms as distributing menus would have on hunger during a famine. A page or so later, in a characteristic complicating move, Freud suggests that the ‘clumsy treatment’ offered by amateur psychoanalysis, the equivalent of handing a menu to a hungry person, nevertheless probably does more good than not letting the person know ...”

The Clothes They Stood Up In

Alan Bennett, 28 November 1996

“... how it was spelled). They had names that defied gender: Robin, Bobby, Troy and some, like Tiffany, Page and Kirby, that in Mrs Ransome’s book weren’t names at all. The presenters and their audience spoke in a language which Mrs Ransome, to begin with anyway, found hard to understand, talking of ‘parenting’ and ‘personal interaction’, of ...”

Gentlemen and ladies came to see the poet’s cottage

Tom Paulin: Clare’s anti-pastoral, 19 February 2004

John Clare: A Biography 
by Jonathan Bate.
Picador, 650 pp., £25, October 2003, 0 330 37106 1
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‘I Am’: The Selected Poetry of John Clare 
edited by Jonathan Bate.
Farrar, Straus, 318 pp., $17, November 2003, 0 374 52869 1
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John Clare, Politics and Poetry 
by Alan Vardy.
Palgrave, 221 pp., £45, October 2003, 0 333 96617 1
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John Clare Vol. V: Poems of the Middle Period 1822-37 
edited by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson.
Oxford, 822 pp., £105, January 2003, 0 19 812386 8
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“... book, penny chapbooks, an agricultural manual and an old book of essays that had lost its title page. He acquainted himself with ‘Mathematics Particularly Navigation and Algebra, Dialling, Use of the Globes, Botany, Natural History, Short Hand, with History of all Kinds, Drawing, Music’. He never studied ‘Grammer’, and always expressed a dislike of ...”

The Authentic Snarl

Blake Morrison: The Impudence of Tony Harrison, 30 November 2017

The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966-2016 
by Tony Harrison, edited by Edith Hall.
Faber, 544 pp., £25, April 2017, 978 0 571 32503 0
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Collected Poems 
by Tony Harrison.
Penguin, 464 pp., £9.99, April 2016, 978 0 241 97435 3
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“... did then, and do now, choke back my tears,’ he says in one poem. Another talks of the page he’s writing on being smeared with ‘self-examination’s grudging tears’; in a third, ‘Isolation’, he depicts himself resisting tears three times after his mother’s death until he hears his father ‘bleat/round the ransacked house for his long ...”

No Innovations in My Time

Ferdinand Mount: George III, 16 December 2021

George III: The Life and Reign of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch 
by Andrew Roberts.
Allen Lane, 763 pp., £35, October, 978 0 241 41333 3
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“... the idea that he was anything but a very ordinary person. No other writer, except possibly Alan Bennett, has set out to make us love King George more. Or admire him more. From the start, Roberts is intent on glorifying George. Gone is the difficult pupil whom J.H. Plumb in The First Four Georges described as ‘lethargic and incapable of ...”

Dog Days

Stan Smith, 11 January 1990

Plays and Other Dramatic Writings by W.H. Auden, 1928-1938 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Faber, 680 pp., £25, July 1989, 0 571 15115 9
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“... Melodrama in Three Acts’. The taxonomy of The Dance of Death, unclassified on its title page, though indicated within, was endorsed by Harold Hobson in 1933 as ‘that most frivolous of entertainments, the musical comedy’, here transformed into an instrument for serious drama, ‘as though one were to see No, No, Nanette taken, without ...”

Who is Stewart Home?

Iain Sinclair, 23 June 1994

“... with no prompts, straight into their faces, in a word-perfect articulation of the printed page. No fumbling with sheets of paper, no mumbled apologies – the business. There’s been nothing in the annals of performance art to match this tension since Jack the Hat barracked Dorothy Squires in the same gaff, back in the Sixties. The dump was known ...”

The Manners of a Hog

Christopher Tayler: Buchan’s Banter, 20 February 2020

Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan 
by Ursula Buchan.
Bloomsbury, 479 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4088 7081 5
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“... intellectuals, alien Jews and international pederasts who call themselves the Labour Party,’ Alan Bennett had Richard Hannay, Buchan’s most famous hero, muse in Forty Years On (1968). Another West End send-up of The Thirty-Nine Steps finished a nine-year run in September 2015, a century after the final instalment of Buchan’s best-known novel appeared ...”

11 September 1973

Christopher Hitchens: Crimes against Allende, 11 July 2002

Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History 
by Andy Beckett.
Faber, 280 pp., £15.99, May 2002, 0 571 20241 1
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“... explores the filiations between the Chilean ‘experiment’ and such Thatcherite figures as Sir Alan Walters and Robert Moss. In the course of his inquiries, he almost incidentally explodes one false claim, which is that Thatcher’s tenderness for Pinochet arose from his ‘helpfulness’ over the Falklands/Malvinas War. This is a canard, sometimes also ...”

Repeal the 20th Century

William Davies: Pre-MAGA, 25 September 2025

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists and the Origins of Trumpism 
by John Ganz.
Penguin, 426 pp., £10.99, June, 978 1 4059 8169 9
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“... and reach, but because of the wealth of ideas that accompanied his revival. The notorious 900-page Project 2025 document, produced by the Heritage Foundation, collated the ideas of 350 conservative thinkers and 45 organisations to create the outline of a vision and a plan for the second Trump term.While Trump’s first term looked like an aberration, a ...”