On Thatcher

“... long, new right ideology has been translated into policy: but no one calls it Thatcherism.Gordon Brown, 2 February 1989I realise​ it’s too much to expect a sense of our common lot from this government (‘you common lot’ more often the note), but since Mrs Thatcher has schooled half the nation to put its foot in the face of the other half it’s not so ...”

Under the Staircase

Karl Whitney: Hans Jonathan, Runaway Slave, 19 October 2017

The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan 
by Gisli Palsson, translated by Anna Yates.
Chicago, 288 pp., £19, October 2016, 978 0 226 31328 3Show More
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“... by a man who worked in a local shop. The surveyor wrote in his journal that his guide was ‘very brown skinned, with coal-black woolly hair. His father is a European, but his mother is a negress … He is from the West Indies, and has no surname … but calls himself Hans Jonathan.’ Hans Jonathan left only a few traces of himself in the historical ...”

Diary

Andrew O’Hagan: Grief and the Cameras, 3 December 2009

“... I’m a Celebrity … Get Me out of Here! will be on later, followed by a documentary about Peter Andre, a previous contestant on I’m a Celebrity who recently split up with the nation’s most frightening glamour girl, Jordan. ITV2 has been running a lot of ads for an album called Coming Home by The Soldiers. The singers are Sergeant Major Gary ...”

Can Clegg be forgiven?

Ross McKibbin: 5 May, 2 June 2011

“... for AV were slight, but he should have insisted on the legislative alternative (it is said that Brown offered him this) and threatened to end negotiations when he didn’t get it. That the Tories were ‘calculating, ruthless and tribal’ in their campaign against AV seems to have surprised Clegg, although a quick reading of any history of the Conservative ...”

Reports from the Not Too Distant Canon

Frank Kermode, 23 May 2002

The Invasion Handbook 
by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 201 pp., £12.99, April 2002, 0 571 20915 7Show More
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“... When the Germans occupied His Pasteur Institute With all those poor dogs Paulin has also praised Peter Reading for being ‘user-hostile’, and for contriving, by avoiding iambs, to demonstrate ‘his dissidence from the state’. The preface to Paulin’s excellent Faber Book of Vernacular Verse explains his preference for demotic diction and the natural ...”

In Florence

Anna McGee: A Madonna in the Market, 24 July 2025

“... they encapsulate the evolution of Italian Renaissance sculpture, from Brunelleschi’s marble Peter for the butchers’ guild to Giambologna’s bronze Luke for the judges and notaries. The earliest of them are widely considered to be the first free-standing sculptures since those of the Ancient Greeks, and the delicate, perspectively rigorous rilievo ...”

Fear and Loathing in Limehouse

Richard Holme, 3 September 1987

Campaign! The Selling of the Prime Minister 
by Rodney Tyler.
Grafton, 251 pp., £6.95, July 1987, 0 246 13277 9Show More
Battle for Power 
by Des Wilson.
Sphere, 326 pp., £4.99, July 1987, 0 7221 9074 3Show More
David Owen: Personally Speaking 
by Kenneth Harris.
Weidenfeld, 248 pp., £12.95, September 1987, 0 297 79206 7Show More
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“... over the years: fear of Scargill, fear of Galtieri, fear of inflation, fear of black and brown people. And in 1987, whatever the raggedness in the presentation of her own policies, she played it again to perfection. In a book clearly designed to serve the interests of the Lord Young-Tim Bell faction in the intrigues around the Peacock Throne, the ...”

Dirty Money

Paul Foot, 17 December 1992

A Full Service Bank: How BCCI stole millions around the world 
by James Ring Adams and Douglas Frantz.
Simon and Schuster, 381 pp., £16.99, April 1992, 0 671 71133 4Show More
Bankrupt: The BCCI Fraud 
by Nick Kochan and Bob Whittington.
Gollancz, 234 pp., £4.99, November 1991, 0 575 05279 1Show More
The BCCI Affair: A Report to The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations 
by Senators John Kerry and Hank Brown.
US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 800 pp., September 1992Show More
Inquiry into the Supervision of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International 
by Lord Justice Bingham.
HMSO, 218 pp., £19.30, October 1992, 0 10 219893 4Show More
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“... of the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. Senator Kerry believes (though Senator Brown does not always agree) that his investigation was deliberately and continually impeded by the Bush Administration. The close proximity of Bush to Irangate and now to Iraqgate makes that seem very likely. For British readers, however, the Senator’s report ...”

Space Wars

Fredric Jameson, 4 April 1996

The Invisible in Architecture 
edited by Ole Bouman and Roemer van Toorn.
Academy, 516 pp., $115, February 1994, 1 85490 285 7Show More
The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism 
by Roger Scruton.
Carcanet, 158 pp., £19.95, October 1994, 1 85754 054 9Show More
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“... and satisfying menu; but the reader who misses the great names of the period should be warned that Peter Eisenman, Richard Rogers, Alvaro Siza, Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas (along with the central figure in Barcelona’s historic renewal, Oriol Bohigas) are all represented by substantial essays or interviews. I am not sure whether the distribution of these ...”

You Dying Nations

Jeremy Adler: Georg Trakl, 17 April 2003

Poems and Prose 
by Georg Trakl, translated by Alexander Stillmark.
Libris, 192 pp., £40, March 2001, 1 870352 51 3Show More
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“... Knussen recognised the affinity, and coupled poems by Trakl and Plath in his Second Symphony, and Peter Maxwell Davies has also set Trakl to music. This new collection is the most substantial so far published in England, and should finally win Trakl wider recognition. Alexander Stillmark’s selection of around 125 poems, including most of the major ones, is ...”

Shock Cities

Susan Pedersen: The Fate of Social Democracy, 2 January 2020

Thatcher’s Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town 
by Guy Ortolano.
Cambridge, 301 pp., £29.99, June 2019, 978 1 108 48266 0Show More
Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Postwar England 
by Jon Lawrence.
Oxford, 327 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 0 19 877953 7Show More
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“... and then their grey successors. We were so happy when those fresh-faced challengers, the Blair/Brown and Clinton/Gore double acts, showed them the door. People smarter than I was probably foresaw the compromises that would follow, but I doubt any of us fully anticipated our financialised, deregulated world – a world in which we now individually struggle ...”

To King’s Cross Station

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Lenin’s London, 7 January 2021

The Spark That Lit the Revolution: Lenin in London and the Politics That Changed the World 
by Robert Henderson.
I.B.Tauris, 270 pp., £17.99, March 2020, 978 1 78453 862 0Show More
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“... reports, and he has ferreted out applications from more than ninety of them, including Prince Peter Kropotkin, Sergei Stepniak, Vladimir Burtsev and Vera Zasulich. Lenin was more difficult to track down than some, as he first applied under his London pseudonym of Dr Jacob Richter and later under his own name of Ulyanov, registered by the BM as Oulianoff ...”

The Suitcase

Frances Stonor Saunders, 30 July 2020

“... Sean Crampton had lost a leg (his prosthetic replacement, which was always attached to the same brown brogue, was placed behind a curtain at night, with only the foot showing, to deter intruders); Roger Lloyd had lost an arm (I initially thought that his huge dog, Gozo, so fierce that he had to be housed in a derelict tennis court, had torn it from its ...”

Mother One, Mother Two

Jeremy Harding: A memoir, 31 March 2005

“... is a good word for the way water seemed to me when I was young and still seems now: sustaining, brown, benign – or white, decisive, invigorating, rushing over a weir, churning from the back of a boat. Having been adopted, I was spared the binding notion of blood, with all its passion and fatalism. I simply took the platitude and stood it on its head. I am ...”

Vendlerising

John Kerrigan, 2 April 1987

The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry 
edited by Helen Vendler.
Faber, 440 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 571 13945 0Show More
Selected Poems 
by John Ashbery.
Carcanet, 348 pp., £16.95, April 1986, 0 85635 666 2Show More
The Poetry Book Society Anthology 1986/87 
edited by Jonathan Barker.
Hutchinson, 94 pp., £4.95, November 1986, 0 09 165961 2Show More
Two Horse Wagon Going By 
by Christopher Middleton.
Carcanet, 143 pp., £5.95, October 1986, 0 85635 661 1Show More
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“... sublimity: I have carried it with me each day: that morning I took my uncle’s boat from the brown water cove and headed for Mosher Island. Small waves splashed against the hull and the hollow creak of oarlock and oar rose into the woods of black pine crusted with lichen. I moved like a dark star, drifting over the drowned other half of the world ...”
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