Believing in Unicorns

Walter Benn Michaels: Racecraft, 7 February 2013

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life 
by Karen Fields and Barbara Fields.
Verso, 302 pp., £20, October 2012, 978 1 84467 994 2
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“... is that ‘attacks on the use of race as a concept’ appear to anti-racist writers like David Roediger as a ‘distressingly new’ critique of anti-racism, all the more unsettling because it comes from the left – which Racecraft does. In her brilliant essay of 1990, ‘Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America’ (reprinted in ...”

Looking for a Way Up

Rosemary Hill: Roy Strong’s Vanities, 25 April 2013

Self-Portrait as a Young Man 
by Roy Strong.
Bodleian, 286 pp., £25, March 2013, 978 1 85124 282 5
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“... That was in 1963, his ‘annus mirabilis’, and the next year saw another breakthrough when David Piper became director of the Portrait Gallery and allowed Strong free rein. He now had ‘a super job’, as he confided to a friend: ‘new publications … theatre designers let loose in the rooms … super sound guide’. Sound guides were then a novelty ...”

After Mubarak

Adam Shatz, 17 February 2011

“... Israel’s fears of Egyptian democracy were instantly echoed by its supporters in the US. David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy worried that ‘what starts as a Berlin revolution of 1989 morphs into a Tehran revolution of 1979.’ Israel would then find itself with a Hizbullah-led government to the north, Hamas to the west ...”

From Swindon to Swindon

Mary Beard, 17 February 2011

Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us 
by Ferdinand Mount.
Simon and Schuster, 438 pp., £20, June 2010, 978 1 84737 798 2
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“... to the designer atheism of the early 21st century, with a nice sideswipe at the pornography of David Attenborough’s nature programmes thrown in:‘Isn’t there something faintly repellent about a posse of cameramen training their sights on a python slowly swallowing an antelope or on a coot killing her surplus young – and then countless millions of us ...”

Angry White Men

R.W. Johnson: Obama’s Electoral Arithmetic, 20 October 2011

“... moving in the opposite direction. Perhaps the most significant statistic in this regard, quoted by David Kuhn in The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma (2007), is that the average wage for working-class men over 25 was (measured in terms of the 2001 dollar) $34,532 in 1970 and $28,763 in 2003. That’s to say, the working class gained less ...”

Society as a Broadband Network

William Davies, 2 April 2020

“... airport: men unthinkingly aim at them, reducing the amount of urine that ends up on the floor.David Cameron’s government, hungry for a new political idea but reluctant to rock any ideological boats, was quick to seize on ‘nudges’, along with its ‘Big Society’ vision of volunteering and social enterprise. What these things had in common was a ...”

A Boundary Where There Is None

Stephen Sedley: In Time of Meltdown, 12 September 2019

Trials of the State: Law and the Decline of Politics 
by Jonathan Sumption.
Profile, 128 pp., £9.99, August 2019, 978 1 78816 372 9
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“... The other is that this formula was put into the convention by its Conservative drafters, David Maxwell Fyfe, Duncan Sandys and others associated with the European Movement. Its purpose was to prevent member states, particularly those with socialist and social democratic regimes (Britain among them), from invoking state necessity as an excuse for ...”

Surrealist Circus Animals

Ned Beauman: Jeff VanderMeer, 17 August 2017

Borne 
by Jeff VanderMeer.
Fourth Estate, 323 pp., £12.99, June 2017, 978 0 00 815917 7
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“... really separates Borne from the creations of artists like Bourgeois and de Bruyckere – and of David Cronenberg, whom VanderMeer has noted as a major influence – is that the rank odours of sex and disease are what give body horror its potency. In comparison, VanderMeer’s menagerie can feel rather antiseptic, not to mention symbolically ...”

Weaponising Paperwork

William Davies: The Windrush Scandal, 10 May 2018

“... echoed by Nigel Farage. But the most significant precursor to the ‘hostile environment’ was David Cameron’s ill-fated pledge of 2010 to reduce net migration (the number entering the UK minus the number leaving) to less than 100,000 a year, at a time when the figure was more than 250,000. New Labour had treated immigration merely as a labour market ...”

Snobs v. Herbivores

Colin Kidd: Non-Vanilla One-Nation Conservatism, 7 May 2020

Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism 
by Nick Timothy.
Polity, 275 pp., £20, March 2020, 978 1 5095 3917 8
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“... when Hill and Timothy became scapegoats for the loss of the slim majority May inherited from David Cameron. But the real surprise wasn’t the downfall of May’s advisers so much as their earlier rise to brief but utter dominance in a party whose upper reaches have in recent times seemed to belong almost exclusively to Old Etonians. Hill was born in ...”

Dear boy, I’d rather see you in your coffin

Jon Day: Paid to Race, 16 July 2020

To Hell and Back: An Autobiography 
by Niki Lauda.
Ebury, 314 pp., £16.99, February 2020, 978 1 5291 0679 4
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A Race with Love and Death: The Story of Britain’s First Great Grand Prix Driver, Richard Seaman 
by Richard Williams.
Simon and Schuster, 388 pp., £20, March 2020, 978 1 4711 7935 8
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“... Roger Williamson was burned to death at Zandvoort in 1973, while his friend and fellow driver David Purley tried desperately to beat out the flames as millions of TV viewers watched, Lauda was asked by the press why he hadn’t stopped to help. ‘I’m paid to race,’ he said, ‘not to stop.’ The ‘formula’ of F1 refers to the various rules ...”

Pillors of Fier

Frank Kermode: Anthony Burgess, 11 July 2002

Nothing like the Sun: reissue 
by Anthony Burgess.
Allison and Busby, 234 pp., £7.99, January 2002, 0 7490 0512 2
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“... another example of ‘to fire out’ meaning what it is here taken to mean, and I notice that David and Ben Crystal, in their new glossary Shakespeare’s Words,* do not admit the venereal sense, giving only ‘to drive away by fire’. The poet is not even sure the parties have slept together, and could only have been certain of the consequence accepted ...”

An Urbane Scholar in a Wilderness of Tigers

Robert Irwin: Albert Hourani, 25 January 2001

A Vision of the Middle East: An Intellectual Biography of Albert Hourani 
by Abdulaziz Al-Sudairi.
Tauris, 221 pp., £12.99, January 2000, 9781860645815
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“... escaped from a prison camp and joined a band of Italian partisans during the Second World War. David Storm Rice, an expert on Islamic metalwork, had an affair with Clara Malraux, fought as a commando in Ethiopia and, after a distinguished career as an art historian, suffered a nervous breakdown and committed suicide. Robin Zaehner carried out dangerous ...”

Slipper Protocol

Peter Campbell: The seclusion of women, 10 May 2001

Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature 
by Ruth Bernard Yeazell.
Yale, 314 pp., £22.50, October 2000, 0 300 08389 0
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“... landscape painters have chosen subjects close to home. Those who decided to go East – like David Roberts and Edward Lear – tend to be of the second rank. Writers, too, grow strong on a diet of familiar material. Harems of the Mind is mostly an account of talent betrayed by ignorance into shallowness or excess; only a few spirits were strong enough to ...”

Diary

Christopher Turner: Summerhill School and the real Orgasmatron, 3 June 2004

“... liberty’. Faced with the verdict that Summerhill was ‘not providing an adequate education’, David Blunkett threatened to shut the school down unless it gave up its philosophy of freedom. After a protracted and costly legal battle, Summerhill held onto its ideological commitment to voluntary lessons – an Independent Schools Tribunal overturned the ...”