Ever Closer Union?

Perry Anderson, 7 January 2021

... figure than Hallstein, a politician who dealt on equal terms with all the national leaders of the day, Delors led them to the single currency, but failed to achieve the social objectives he had thought he could buy with it. All governments save Britain and Denmark signed up to the first. Few wanted much of the second. Delors did get cohesion funds – help ...

‘I wouldn’t pay it either’

Simon Skinner: World Cup Wallcharts, 25 June 2026

The Power and the Glory: A New History of the World Cup 
by Jonathan Wilson.
Little Brown, 608 pp., £12.99, May, 978 0 349 14573 0
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... Freyre, who coined the term futebol arte for its aesthetic, wrote in Correio da Manhã the day before the 1938 semi-final against Italy: ‘Our style of football seems to contrast with the European style because of a set of characteristics such as surprise, craftiness, shrewdness, readiness … individual brilliance and spontaneity, all of which ...

Father! Father! Burning Bright

Alan Bennett, 9 December 1999

... into his plain policeman’s prose. He could do it. At four o’clock in the morning after a day spent combing copses and dragging ponds, never mind house-to-house enquiries, he could do it. Why not his son? ‘You show me up, Martin, having to come along here. I don’t grudge coming along here. But what I would like to have come along here as is a ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... The NarrativeV: Whose Fault?VI: The RebellionVII: The FactsFilm AudioI: The FireIt was​ a clear day and you could see for miles. From her flat on the 23rd floor, Rania texted one of her best friends from back home and they talked about facts. Who you love is a fact and the meals you cook are facts. When the sun shines it is a fact of God and England is a ...