Karl Miller Remembered

Neal Ascherson, John Lanchester and Andrew O’Hagan, 23 October 2014

... as much as they did.) He was particularly interested in the Spanner trial, in which a group of gay men involved in consensual sado-masochistic activity were sent to prison. Karl had no doubt that what the men were doing was none of the state’s business, but he was nonetheless riveted by the detail of the trial. ‘What about love?’ he ...

No Beast More Refined

James Davidson: How Good Was Nureyev?, 29 November 2007

Rudolf Nureyev: The Life 
by Julie Kavanagh.
Fig Tree, 787 pp., £25, September 2007, 978 1 905490 15 8
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... too obviously to her more helpful and positive informants. Wallace Potts, an ex, a pioneering gay pornographer and archivist for the Nureyev Foundation in Bath, on whose initiative the biography was commissioned, is depicted as saintly, which perhaps he was. Another ex, Robert Tracy, who proved difficult to dislodge from Nureyev’s apartment in the ...

Israel’s Descent

Adam Shatz, 20 June 2024

The State of Israel v. the Jews 
by Sylvain Cypel, translated by William Rodarmor.
Other Press, 352 pp., £24, October 2022, 978 1 63542 097 5
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Deux peuples pour un état?: Relire l’histoire du sionisme 
by Shlomo Sand.
Seuil, 256 pp., £20, January 2024, 978 2 02 154166 3
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Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-78 
by Geoffrey Levin.
Yale, 304 pp., £25, February 2024, 978 0 300 26785 3
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Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life 
by Joshua Leifer.
Dutton, 398 pp., £28.99, August 2024, 978 0 593 18718 0
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The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance 
by Shaul Magid.
Ayin, 309 pp., £16.99, December 2023, 979 8 9867803 1 3
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Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm 
edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner.
OR Books, 336 pp., £17.99, April 2024, 978 1 68219 619 9
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... to exert influence in American institutions of power and higher learning: the downfall of Claudine Gay, the Harvard president, engineered by the Zionist billionaire Bill Ackman, is just one illustration. As Leifer writes, the uncritical embrace of Zionism has ‘engendered a moral myopia’ with respect to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. The far ...

Is this fascism?

Daniel Trilling, 5 June 2025

Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation 
by Richard Seymour.
Verso, 280 pp., £20, October 2024, 978 1 80429 425 3
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... attack on a synagogue on the gaming platform Twitch; in 2016, the perpetrator of a massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida checked Facebook midway through his assault; in 2019, an admirer of the man who murdered 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, expressed a desire to beat that ‘high score’.Seymour’s title intentionally echoes ...

Climbing the Ziggurat

Tom Stevenson: Xi Jinping’s Inheritance, 22 January 2026

The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping 
by Joseph Torigian.
Stanford, 704 pp., £40, June 2025, 978 1 5036 3475 6
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The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China 
by Michael Sheridan.
Headline, 345 pp., £12.99, July 2025, 978 1 0354 1351 5
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On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World 
by Kevin Rudd.
Oxford, 604 pp., £26.99, January 2025, 978 0 19 776603 3
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... US Air Force dug out and restored the runways on the Pacific island of Tinian from which the Enola Gay and Bockscar took off in 1945. But there are also signs of relations easing. The latest round of the US’s poorly conceived and ill-executed trade war has begun to peter out. When Xi and Trump met in Busan on 30 ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Bennett’s Dissection, 1 January 2009

... not be recognised by his parents, so drag seemed the easiest answer. The young man may not even be gay; I actually can’t remember whether there’s anything in the script to suggest this. He could be like Eddie Izzard or indeed Grayson Perry, both of whom prefer to dress as women without it being an indication of their sexual preferences, though in 1980 the ...

Conspire Slowly, Act Quickly

David Runciman: Thatcher Undone, 2 January 2020

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. III: Herself Alone 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 1072 pp., £35, October 2019, 978 0 241 32474 5
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... the commander of the US forces, accosted his British counterpart, General de la Billière: ‘Hey Peter, what sort of country have you got there when they sack the prime minister halfway through a war?’It was not a coup, not even a very British one. But it was, as Charles Moore describes, the result of a very Tory conspiracy. Thatcher fell following the ...

11 September

LRB Contributors, 4 October 2001

... on. This was just one of the domestic surprises that came in the wake of 11 September. Another was Peter Mandelson’s strangely off-key suggestion that the secret services should be recruiting in Bradford rather than St James’s (apparently on the grounds that immigrants would find it easier than Old Etonians to disguise themselves as Islamic ...

Carnival of Self-Harm

Tom Crewe: Good Riddance to the Tories, 20 June 2024

Haywire: A Political History of Britain since 2000 
by Andrew Hindmoor.
Allen Lane, 628 pp., £35, June 2024, 978 0 241 65171 1
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No Way Out: Brexit from the Backstop to Boris 
by Tim Shipman.
William Collins, 698 pp., £26, April 2024, 978 0 00 830894 0
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The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life 
by Theresa May.
Headline, 368 pp., £12.99, May 2024, 978 1 0354 0991 4
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The Conservative Party after Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation 
by Tim Bale.
Polity, 368 pp., £25, March 2023, 978 1 5095 4601 5
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Johnson at 10: The Inside Story 
by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell.
Atlantic, 640 pp., £12.99, April 2024, 978 1 83895 804 6
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The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson 
by Nadine Dorries.
HarperCollins, 336 pp., £25, November 2023, 978 0 00 862342 5
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Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within 
by Rory Stewart.
Vintage, 454 pp., £10.99, June 2024, 978 1 5299 2286 8
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Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room 
by Liz Truss.
Biteback, 311 pp., £20, April 2024, 978 1 78590 857 6
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Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party 
by Samuel Earle.
Simon and Schuster, 294 pp., £10.99, February 2024, 978 1 3985 1853 7
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... as a sop to those on the right of his party who were agitating against his plan to introduce gay marriage (when it came to a vote, nearly half the parliamentary party anyhow opposed the bill, and it passed only with support from the opposition). The result was that Cameron went into the 2015 election with the referendum as a manifesto promise, and ...

Barely under Control

Jenny Turner: Who’s in charge?, 7 May 2015

... schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in ...

In the Egosphere

Adam Mars-Jones: The Plot against Roth, 23 January 2014

Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books 
by Claudia Roth Pierpont.
Cape, 353 pp., £25, January 2014, 978 0 224 09903 5
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... It would be surprising if psychiatric practice from 1967 coincided with modern ideas: plenty of gay men were still going to their analysts to be told that their impulses were intrinsically disordered (it was in 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its classifications of mental illness). But Kleinschmidt’s account of ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Notes on 1997, 1 January 1998

... in the WAAFs or as seamen on the Western Approaches makes one want to raise a cheer, not for gay liberation particularly, but for toleration and common sense, and also for courage.In tonight’s programme there’s an unlikely homosexual, a Doncaster miner, Fred Dyson; photographs show him as a merry-faced boy built like the proverbial brick ...

The Ground Hostess

Francis Wyndham, 1 April 1983

... As I had never made any kind of pass at either of them, Harriet had convinced herself that I was gay, while Jeremy had vaguely assumed that I must be straight. When they began to inquire a little further about the course of my romance, she automatically used the masculine pronoun and he the feminine. Somehow unable to maintain a total silence on the ...

I Could Sleep with All of Them

Colm Tóibín: The Mann Family, 6 November 2008

In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story 
by Andrea Weiss.
Chicago, 302 pp., £14.50, May 2008, 978 0 226 88672 5
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... early.”’ Some things ran in the family. Homosexuality, for instance. Thomas himself was gay most of the time, as his diaries make clear. So were three of his children: Erika (also just most of the time; she made an exception for Bruno Walter, among others), Klaus and Golo. Suicide was a family theme too. Both of Thomas Mann’s sisters committed ...

Cancelled

Amia Srinivasan: Can I speak freely?, 29 June 2023

... Charles Vaughan, chief of staff of Thiel Capital, owned by the billionaire former Trump supporter Peter Thiel, and Jordan Peterson, who was invited by Orr and other academics to be a visiting fellow at the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity in 2019. After a photo emerged of Peterson with a man wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘I’m a proud ...