I figured what the heck

Jackson Lears: Seymour Hersh, 27 September 2018

Reporter 
by Seymour M. Hersh.
Allen Lane, 355 pp., £20, June 2018, 978 0 241 35952 5
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... are many officers, including generals and admirals, who understood that the oath of office they took was a commitment to uphold and defend the constitution and not the president, or an immediate superior. Want to be a good military reporter? Find those officers.’ The same can be said about the decent operatives within the intelligence agencies ...

Some Sad Turtle

Alison Light: Spinsters and Clerics, 29 July 2021

The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym: A Biography 
by Paula Byrne.
William Collins, 686 pp., £25, April 2021, 978 0 00 832220 5
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... Italian hilltop towns and dined under the stars. After the war she moved to London and in 1946 took a job at the International African Institute, editing Africa, an anthropological journal, and worked there until she retired, writing her fiction in her spare time. A busy London life included regular churchgoing. Readers could now make the obvious ...

Out of Rehab

Alice Hunt: Two Kings or One?, 25 December 2025

The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of James VI & I 
by Clare Jackson.
Allen Lane, 524 pp., £35, August 2025, 978 0 241 61127 2
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Queen James: The Life and Loves of Britain’s First King 
by Gareth Russell.
William Collins, 478 pp., £25, February 2025, 978 0 00 866085 7
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... verging on modesty.’ Three centuries later, in 1956, David Harris Willson’s biography took the hostile line. Scottish historians tended to be fairer, prompting Jenny Wormald to ask in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the border. Wormald and other historians have done ...

Wouldn’t you like to be normal?

Lucie Elven: Janet Frame’s Place, 8 May 2025

The Edge of the Alphabet 
by Janet Frame.
Fitzcarraldo, 296 pp., £12.99, August 2024, 978 1 80427 118 6
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... A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in unwarranted ...

Writing and Publishing

Alan Sillitoe, 1 April 1982

... like that. Did I want to get us all chucked in jail? I told her it was for my novel, but she took no notice of this lunatic excuse, and threw my first literary effort into the flames. Undaunted, I went to the public library, and took out a book on how to make a career as a writer. The first sentence went something ...

Responses to the War in Gaza

LRB Contributors, 29 January 2009

... in what appears to have been an effort to remove witnesses from the scene before the crime took place. Cell phone transmission was interrupted to prevent the circulation of photos and videos. The result, in Israel and the US, has been an astonishingly sanitised war, in which, in a bizarre attempt at ‘balance’, the highly inaccurate rocket attacks ...

What can the matter be?

Denis Donoghue, 5 April 1990

Ulster Politics: The Formative Years, 1868-86 
by B.M. Walker.
Ulster Historical Foundation/Institute of Irish Studies, 327 pp., £15, February 1990, 0 901905 40 2
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Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society 
by J.J. Lee.
Cambridge, 754 pp., £55, January 1990, 0 521 26648 3
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... seas’. On 1 March 1990 two Unionists, Dr Christopher McGimpsey and his brother Michael, took a case to the Supreme Court in Dublin, claiming that the Anglo-Irish Agreement, signed on 15 November 1985 by Mrs Thatcher and the Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald, is unconstitutional; that is, in breach of the 1937 Constitution. Thatcher and Fitzgerald solemnly ...

Not Making it

Stephen Fender, 24 October 1991

The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and how it changed America 
by Nicholas Lemann.
Macmillan, 410 pp., £20, August 1991, 0 333 56584 3
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... and skill at organising forced them into the public consciousness. From 1954, when the NAACP took Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education to the Supreme Court and won its judgment that state education could not be ‘equal’ if it was also ‘separate’, through a decade of Martin Luther King’s non-violent marches, boycotts and sit-ins against ...

What mattered to Erasmus

James McConica, 2 March 1989

Erasmus’s Annotations on the New Testament. The Gospels: Facsimile of the final Latin text with all earlier variants 
edited by Anne Reeve.
Duckworth, 284 pp., £35, March 1986, 9780715619902
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Erasmus’s Annotations on the New Testament: From Philologist to Theologian 
by Erika Rummel.
Toronto, 234 pp., £24.50, January 1987, 0 8020 5683 0
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A New Rabelais Bibliography: Editions of Rabelais before 1626 
by Stephen Rawles and M.A. Screech.
Droz, 691 pp.
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The Library of Robert Burton 
by Nicholas Kiessling.
Oxford Bibliographic Society, 433 pp., £25, May 1988, 0 901420 42 5
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... from further manuscript study, and, as his irrepressible desire to communicate with his readers took charge, his reflections on a variety of topics engendered by the momentous doings of his day. The edition of the Annotationes by Anne Reeve, of which the present volume on the gospels is the first of a projected three, is thus of great importance for our ...

No Sense of an Ending

Jane Eldridge Miller, 21 September 1995

Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson 
edited by Gloria Fromm.
Georgia, 696 pp., £58.50, February 1995, 0 8203 1659 8
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... had acquaintances in the literary world (her correspondents included H.G. Wells, Bryher, H.D. and John Cowper Powys), most of her life was lived in obscurity, and her friendships were mainly epistolary ones. Her aversion to having her picture taken and her reluctance to submit to interviews (she believed that readers should ‘keep their illusions’ about ...

A life, surely?

Jenny Diski: To Portobello on Angel Dust, 18 February 1999

The Ossie Clark Diaries 
edited by Henrietta Rous.
Bloomsbury, 402 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7475 3901 4
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... a gaggle of ducks into the heated swimming-pool. In 1969 he and Celia holidayed in Marbella with John Aspinall’s half-sister, Jennifer ... In London he spent every night in clubs like the Aretusa, the Speakeasy, Tramps and Yours or Mine ... He holidayed in Marrakech with Paul Getty’s wife, Tahlita, Christopher Gibb (close friend and mentor of Mick Jagger ...

Sunshine

David Goldie: Morecambe and Wise, 15 April 1999

Morecambe and Wise 
by Graham McCann.
Fourth Estate, 416 pp., £16.99, October 1998, 1 85702 735 3
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... with the gloss of apparent spontaneity. Working on this material with them was their producer, John Ammonds, the man who persuaded Morecambe to trust the camera, to play to it with his asides and use it as a mirror for his idiot grin. The other member of the team, their new writer Eddie Braben, was only rarely present. While Hills and Green had entered ...

Angel Gabriel

Salman Rushdie, 16 September 1982

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 
by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa.
Cape, 122 pp., £5.95, September 1982, 0 224 01990 2
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... Spanish American literature, finally to reach the enormous audiences they deserve. Already, John Fowles in a Guardian essay has used the Chronicle to great effect as a prism through which to see the battle for the Malvinas. No doubt the Sun will shortly advise its readers to do the same. No doubt Sandy Woodward is a fan of the tale of Colonel Aureliano ...

The Story of Joe

Craig Raine, 4 December 1986

The Orton Diaries 
edited by John Lahr.
Methuen, 307 pp., £12.50, November 1986, 0 413 49660 0
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... just before Christmas 1966, Orton met ‘an ugly Scotsman who said he liked being fucked. He took me somewhere in his car and I fucked him up against a wall.’ An ordinary participant, an ugly Scotsman perhaps, might have stopped there, or discussed his feelings. Orton concludes: ‘the sleeve of my rainmac is covered with white-wash from the wall. It ...

Diners-out

E.S. Turner, 3 July 1986

Augustus Hare: Victorian Gentleman 
by Malcolm Barnes.
Allen and Unwin, 240 pp., £20, May 1986, 9780049201002
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Midway on the Waves 
by James Lees-Milne.
Faber, 248 pp., £10.95, October 1985, 0 571 13723 7
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... and drifted into the writing of guidebooks for the expanding railway age. His first publisher was John Murray the third, who wanted an anonymous Handbook on Berks, Bucks and Oxfordshire and insisted on facts, not fancies. Hare regretfully accepted this limitation. Much of his early travelling was done with Maria, by now a prey to hysterical trances. When he ...