Diary

Paul Foot: Windsor Girls School on 22 June, 4 July 1985

... human behaviour, so he would have enjoyed himself a lot at Windsor Girls School on 22 June. About a hundred and fifty people came together to celebrate his work. Was this an academic gathering, a place where scholars could show off their latest pedantry to their peers? Not at all. It was organised by Val Price, who works in computers, and Brian ...

Bad Judgment

Paul Taylor: How many people died?, 10 February 2022

... went a little further, but Johnson resisted calls for a stronger response. Case numbers rose sharply, hospital admissions and deaths rose less dramatically. The system was never overwhelmed and many will feel Johnson made the right call.But to judge how well Johnson and his government have done overall, we need to ...

Subjective Correlative

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 11 August 2016

... In January​ 1961 I came to London and started looking for a job. I’d graduated the previous June and been told by the person in charge of women’s appointments that the best I could hope for was a job as a typist. In March I started work at Faber, as the advertising manager’s secretary. Faber was T.S. Eliot’s firm: my father was very impressed ...

At the Royal Academy

Jeremy Harding: Botticelli, 5 April 2001

Botticelli's Dante 
Royal Academy, 360 pp., £48, March 2001, 0 900946 85 7Show More
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... Christ and Gabriel stranded on the rim of a monumental blank which would have been the Celestial Rose. They are diminutive figures in a daunting emptiness created by large-scale erasures: proof that the Empyrean is beyond depiction or description. As for the preceding Canto, there is nothing at all. Botticelli took the parchment set aside for this ...

Diary of a Dead African

Chuma Nwokolo, 22 February 2001

... Name: Meme Jumai. Occupation: Farmer. Residence: Ikerre-Oti, Delta State, Nigeria. Date of Birth: 5 June 1950. Date of Death: 15 June 2000. Cause of Death: Awaiting Inquest. 1 June 2000. When I woke, I was sweating as if I were on the farm. Yet it wasn’t the sweat of hard work that wet my bed-sheet so ...

Inky Pilgrimage

Mark Ford, 24 May 2007

The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie 
edited by Donald Blount.
South Carolina, 430 pp., £30.95, January 2006, 1 57003 248 3
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... of Verses’, which he presented to her on her 22nd birthday in 1908, and ‘The Little June Book’, given the following year. ‘It would only be proper,’ he wrote, ‘for you to have your own private book of verses, even if it were very small and if the verses were very bad.’ Although certain lines and images from both are carried over into ...

Arrayed in Shining Scales

Patricia Lockwood: Solving Sylvia Plath, 10 July 2025

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath 
by Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg.
Faber, 812 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 571 37764 0
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... got: ‘a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love’. Plath and Hughes were married on 16 June 1956 at St George the Martyr in London, less than four months after they met at the St Botolph’s Review launch party at Falcon Yard in Cambridge. (You can watch Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig attempt to re-create this clash of violence, cheek-biting and ...

A Different Life

Thomas Laqueur: Can cellos remember?, 9 October 2025

Cello: A Journey through Silence to Sound 
by Kate Kennedy.
Apollo, 468 pp., £10.99, August, 978 1 80328 704 1
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... began to help prisoners forge false papers. They were caught, tried, convicted and sent to jail in June 1943 – not as Jews but, to their ultimate good fortune, as ordinary criminals. This was the first of the absurd contingencies that accounted for their survival.After a year in prison, Lasker-Wallfisch ‘voluntarily’ signed papers to be sent to ...

Short Cuts

Rosemary Hill: Stonehenge for the solstice, 6 July 2006

... custodianship of the World Heritage Site has been widely criticised. In a press announcement on 15 June Sir William Proby, the chairman of the National Trust, accused the government, and by implication English Heritage, of posing an ‘urgent, serious and imminent’ threat to the monument with its ‘second-rate solution’ for improving the site. The ...

Diary

Jérôme Tubiana: Safe and Unsafe Ports, 22 May 2025

... and traffickers.The ransom included payment for crossing the Mediterranean. On the night of 30 June, Even got on a ‘plastic’ (an inflatable dinghy) at Khoms, east of Tripoli. There were around 120 passengers, mostly fellow Eritreans. After several hours, the helmsman – a South Sudanese migrant picked by the smuggler and offered free passage in ...

Manila Manifesto

James Fenton, 18 May 1989

... Ativan gang In Alabang By the Superhighway, South. ‘For seven days and seven nights Your voice rose o’er the fray And you would tremble had you heard The things I heard you say.’ *** I saw Emily Dickinson in a vision, and asked if it was merely by coincidence that so much of her poetry could be sung to the tune of ‘The Yellow ...

Diary

Chris Mullin: A report from Westminster, 25 June 2009

... part in it. Then Douglas Carswell, the Tory backwoodsman who has tabled a motion of no confidence, rose and demanded that time be made available for a debate. ‘It’s not a substantive motion,’ the Speaker replied. ‘Oh yes it is,’ came voices from all sides. Extraordinary. I’ve never seen the Speaker heckled before. It was like watching Ceausescu’s ...
... bloom – cabbages lures lambs broom sex milk money! These kill death. I still have that one red rose dried to powder now. It did not mean hymen as she thought. XIV. Running your hand over it to calculate its dimensions you think at first it is stone then ink or black water where the hand sinks in then a bowl of elsewhere from which you pull out no hand ...

One Long Scream

Jacqueline Rose: Trauma and Justice in South Africa, 23 May 2019

... On​ 27 June 2016, Lukhanyo Calata issued a public statement about corruption at the South African Broadcasting Corporation, where he had worked as a journalist for several years. He knew that it would probably result in his dismissal. The corporation had succumbed to what has come to be known in South Africa as ‘state capture’: working in the interests of Zuma’s government, which had itself been captured by big business ...

In Senegal

Ken Silverstein, 5 January 2012

... that believes its protests can force the court to reject the president’s legal request – last June Wade had to withdraw an electoral reform bill tied to his re-election bid in the face of widespread protests and rioting. The first president of Senegal was Léopold Sédar Senghor, a poet and intellectual who served from independence until 1980. A leftist ...