Diary

Christopher Hitchens: On the Original Non-Event , 20 April 1995

... a quintessential experience with their fellow Americans. As it turned out, not even the terrible David Letterman managed to squeeze off a burst about Mr Simpson or anything related to the trial. The evening was, as some magazines have taken to claiming on their covers, ‘100 per cent O.J.-free’. In truth, the industry does not quite know what to make of ...

Voices

Seamus Deane, 21 April 1983

The Pleasures of Gaelic Poetry 
edited by Sean Mac Reamoinn.
Allen Lane, 272 pp., £8.95, November 1982, 0 7139 1284 7
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... Irish. Hartnett confesses himself to be ‘obsessed by the work and mind of Daibhi O Bruadair’ (David Broderick or Brouder), the 17th-century poet from the Limerick area who witnessed the tragic sequence of events which destroyed his native cultural habitat: ‘the Popish Plot, the coming of Cromwell, the battle of the Boyne, the Treaty of Limerick and its ...

From Papa in Heaven

Russell Davies, 3 September 1981

Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961 
edited by Carlos Baker.
Granada, 948 pp., £15, April 1981, 0 246 11576 9
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... gifted him with plenty money when he came out. In many ways it was a balanced life. Jokes like ‘David son of Joshua Son of Isaac son of Abraham O’Neil is in town and kiking everybody with big promises’ (to Ezra in 24) don’t have anything to do with it. I wrote terrific letters to bigots like Cardinal Spellman and Joe McCarthy and only regret I ...

Undecidables

Stuart Hampshire, 16 February 1984

Alan Turing: The Enigma 
by Andrew Hodges.
Burnett, 587 pp., £18, October 1983, 0 09 152130 0
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... or fame exceeded their proven abilities. Wittgenstein, the mathematician Max Newman, the economist David Champernowne, von Neumann, Robin Gandy the logician, were men with whom he could be at ease, free of the social patina and the trappings of respectibility which repelled him. There are records of Turing’s participation in pre-war Cambridge, in ...

Just William

Doris Grumbach, 25 June 1987

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice 
by Sharon O’Brien.
Oxford, 544 pp., £22.50, March 1987, 0 19 504132 1
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... cabinet-maker, and Zichec, in ‘Neighbour Rosicky’, 1928; Claude Wheeler and his war comrade, David Gerhardt, in One of Ours; Godfrey St Peter and Tom Outland in The Professor’s House; James Mockford and Clement Sebastian in Lucy Gayheart; the compatible and tragic Russian friends, Pavel and Peter, in My Antonia; the dead sculptor Harvey Merrick and ...

Glee

Gabriele Annan, 7 September 1995

1920 Diary 
by Isaac Babel, edited by Carol Avins, translated by H.T. Willetts.
Yale, 126 pp., £14.95, June 1995, 0 300 05966 3
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Collected Stories 
by Isaac Babel, translated by David McDuff.
Penguin, 364 pp., £6.99, June 1995, 0 14 018462 7
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... found the cowed, emaciated, dirty Hassids of the Pale strange and often repulsive. The synagogues may have moved him, but so did sightings of things he associated with Western culture: a classical façade on a Polish manor house; a German bookshop in Brody, where there was even a Hotel Bristol (but can it have been any less seedy than Joseph Roth’s Galician ...

Irish Adventurers

Janet Adam Smith, 25 June 1992

The Grand Tours of Katherine Wilmot: France 1801-3 and Russia 1805-7 
edited by Elizabeth Mavor.
Weidenfeld, 187 pp., £17.99, February 1992, 0 297 81223 8
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... more manacled by the observances of etiquette.’ On less grand occasions they met the painter David, an Englishman who had befriended Charlotte Corday at her trial, and Charles James Fox – ‘rather lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine visited Tom Paine, ‘up half a dozen flights of stairs, in a remote part ...

Diary

Michael Neill: A Place of ‘Kotahitanga’, 6 October 2022

... government had been voted out of office in 1984, and the incoming Labour administration of David Lange did at least begin to take the Crown’s obligations under the Te Tiriti (the 1840 treaty between the British and the Māori) seriously. The Waitangi Tribunal, through its major 1986 report on the preservation of Te Reo (the Māori language), had also ...

In the Photic Zone

Liam Shaw: Flower Animals, 17 November 2022

Life on the Rocks 
by Juli Berwald.
Riverhead, 336 pp., £23.99, April 2022, 978 0 593 08730 5
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... coral towards the surface is a way of tracking the even slower subsidence of the ocean floor. As David Dobbs observed in Reef Madness (2005), Darwin’s account of atoll formation has similarities with his later theory of natural selection. Tiny creatures can build islands; minute variations can create species. Both theories offer a natural-historical ...

Our Soft-Shelled Condition

Katha Pollitt: Corsets, 14 November 2002

The Corset: A Cultural History 
by Valerie Steele.
Yale, 204 pp., £29.95, September 2001, 0 300 09071 4
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Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset 
by Leigh Summers.
Berg, 302 pp., £15.99, October 2001, 9781859735107
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... her a wonderful massage, and instantly transforms her from sex object to sensuous liberated woman. David Kunzle challenged this narrative in Fashion and Fetishism: A Social History of Corsets, Tight Lacing and Other Forms of Body Sculpture in the West (1982), arguing that the dangers of corsets were exaggerated or even invented. Women, he claimed, wore corsets ...

Divinely Ordained

Eric Foner: Lincoln, 23 October 2003

Lincoln 
by Richard Carwardine.
Longman, 352 pp., £16.99, May 2003, 0 582 03279 2
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Lincoln's Constitution 
by Daniel Farber.
Chicago, 240 pp., £20.50, May 2003, 0 226 23793 1
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... a lifelong enemy of slavery and an inveterate racist. The most recent full-scale biography, by David Donald, published in 1995, offered a Lincoln buffeted by forces outside his control, a man of few deep convictions who failed to lead public opinion – rather like Bill Clinton. Although conceived before 11 September, both Richard Carwardine and Daniel ...

Past v. Present

Phil Withington: Blair Worden’s Civil War, 10 May 2012

God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell 
by Blair Worden.
Oxford, 421 pp., £35, March 2012, 978 0 19 957049 2
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... between the classes and between the sexes, but it was not especially interested in politics. This may have been a relief for the revisionists, inadvertently confirming them in their belief that the social had little to do with the political. But it made little sense in terms of the English Revolution itself. The old debates about whether the ‘rise of the ...

Cameron’s Crank

Jonathan Raban: ‘Red Tory’, 22 April 2010

Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix it 
by Phillip Blond.
Faber, 309 pp., £12.99, April 2010, 978 0 571 25167 4
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... been chiming insistently with my reading of Phillip Blond’s Red Tory and my listening to David Cameron’s ‘big society, small government’ speeches. When Cameron speaks of Britain’s ‘atomised’ and ‘broken’ society, and calls for a return to a ‘broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation’, or Blond writes about the ...

White Lies

James Campbell: Nella Larsen, 5 October 2006

In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Colour Line 
by George Hutchinson.
Harvard, 611 pp., £25.95, June 2006, 0 674 02180 0
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... to. In 1987, in the catalogue published to accompany an exhibition about the Harlem Renaissance, David Levering Lewis referred to Larsen as ‘the mysterious and lovely Virgin Islander’. Eight years later, in When Harlem Was in Vogue, Lewis relayed the (unsourced) information that Larsen was looked down on by ‘some of her fellow Virgin Islanders’ for ...

Diary

Patrick Cockburn: A report from Baghdad, 18 March 2004

... regime loyalists, with tribal loyalties to Saddam Hussein, and a second are foreign fighters who may be coming in from Syria.’ The pilots themselves admitted they see few Iraqis and then only from the air. A troop commander said: ‘The men are mostly 5'6"; to 5'10"; tall and are between 150 to 180 pounds. The hardest part is picking out the bad ...