Somerdale to Skarbimierz

James Meek, 20 April 2017

... one by one, dismantled and shipped off. The Mini Eggs production line was trucked the thousand miles to the new factory in the village of Skarbimierz in February 2010. In March, Caramel and Freddo were moved to Cadbury’s Bournville plant and Fry’s Chocolate Cream went to Blois in France. In June, the Crunchie bar line and Fry’s Turkish Delight were ...

No Mythology, No Ghosts

Owen Hatherley: Second City?, 3 November 2022

Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain 
by Richard Vinen.
Allen Lane, 545 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 0 241 45453 4
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... set within a shopping mall, Grand Central, which blurs into another shopping mall, the Bull Ring. Richard Vinen, writing the first serious history of Birmingham in a long while, is aware of how hard it is to pin the city down, to explain what it is or what it is for. Planners in the 1960s, he says, ‘were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had been ...

Things go kerflooey

Ruby Hamilton: David Lynch’s Gee-Wizardry, 11 September 2025

David Lynch’s American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema 
by Mike Miley.
Bloomsbury, 272 pp., £21.99, January, 979 8 7651 0289 3
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... longue while Frost typed. There was something glossy and irreal about Twin Peaks, the town ‘five miles south of the Canadian border, twelve miles west of the state line’, where a high schooler could look like Elizabeth Taylor in saddle shoes and MacLachlan, as Special Agent Dale Cooper, had the same quality Kael detected ...

The Darwin Show

Steven Shapin, 7 January 2010

... nexus from which the Origin emerged:        ‘I never dreamedthat islands sixty miles apart, made of the            same stone, of nearly equal height in the same climate, could have different tenants.’ Fast forward             twenty yearsand you see him write of this scatter-burst ...

A Djinn speaks

Colm Tóibín: What about George Yeats?, 20 February 2003

Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats 
by Ann Saddlemyer.
Oxford, 808 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 19 811232 7
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... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care … She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written ...

Hopi Mean Time

Iain Sinclair: Jim Sallis, 18 March 1999

Eye of the Cricket 
by James Sallis.
No Exit, 190 pp., £6.99, April 1998, 1 874061 77 7
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... to build careers on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal ...

Pattern in the Carpet

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Novel Catholics, 23 July 2026

Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century 
by Melanie McDonagh.
Yale, 384 pp., £12.99, September, 978 0 300 30619 4
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... Greene’s fiction turns from proclaiming such realities to exploring their instability. Sarah Miles vows to God that she will renounce her lover Maurice Bendrix if he is spared death from a German rocket. Although Greene evokes the pathos of her bargain, he is more interested in its cognitive charge. Faith and love resemble each other in being less a ...

Rain, Blow, Rustle

Nick Richardson: John Cage, 19 August 2010

No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage’s 4'33" 
by Kyle Gann.
Yale, 255 pp., £16.99, April 2010, 978 0 300 13699 9
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... Depression, convinced his future lay in music. In 1933 he sent a clarinet sonata to the pianist Richard Buhlig who, impressed by its maturity, sent it on to the composer Henry Cowell, then a major figure in the American avant-garde and an outspoken advocate of non-Western musical traditions. He liked the piece enough to include it in a concert programme and ...

From Wooden to Plastic

James Meek: Jonathan Franzen, 24 September 2015

Purity 
by Jonathan Franzen.
Fourth Estate, 563 pp., £20, September 2015, 978 0 00 753276 6
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... stage of evolution the family has reached – where family members can be at once thousands of miles apart and pressing in on one another on the phone and the internet every minute of every day, never more than a few hours away by plane. The nuclear family has become the quantum family, its particles entangled over vast stretches of space. And vast ...

It hits in the gut

Will Self, 8 March 2012

Militant Modernism 
by Owen Hatherley.
Zero, 146 pp., £9.99, April 2009, 978 1 84694 176 4
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A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain 
by Owen Hatherley.
Verso, 371 pp., £9.99, July 2011, 978 1 84467 700 9
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... desire to build a ‘Brasilia of the North’ on top of the Newcastle town centre laid out by Richard Grainger in the 1830s. It is urbanity in and of itself that attracts Hatherley. On his road trip to Glasgow he remarks (one assumes the humour is unintentional) that the first thing he notices in the purlieus of the motorway is ‘space ...

Pop your own abscess

Rory Scothorne: Definitions of Poverty, 22 February 2018

The New Poverty 
by Stephen Armstrong.
Verso, 242 pp., £12.99, October 2017, 978 1 78663 463 4
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Poverty Safari 
by Darren McGarvey.
Luath, 244 pp., £7.99, November 2017, 978 1 912147 03 8
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... efforts to reinvent a British tradition of patriotic, elite paternalism were heavily influenced by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book The Spirit Level, with its strange subtitle, ‘Why Equality Is Better for Everyone’. Its underlying assumption was that inequality could only be tackled by an appeal to the rationality and self-interest of those ...

Into the Alley

Daniel Soar: Dashiell Hammett, 3 January 2002

Nightmare Town: Stories 
by Dashiell Hammett, edited by Kirby McCauley and Martin Greenberg et al.
Picador, 396 pp., £16.99, March 2001, 0 330 48109 6
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Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett 1921-60 
edited by Richard Layman and Julie Rivett.
Counterpoint, 650 pp., £28.99, June 2001, 1 58243 081 0
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... on the first page of The Maltese Falcon, and the descriptions keep coming. Even Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, who appears on page four and is dead by page eight, can’t be skipped. ‘He was of medium height, solidly built, wide in the shoulders, thick in the neck, with a jovial heavy-jawed red face and some grey in his close-trimmed hair.’ You would ...

Toxic Inner Critic

Leo Robson: On Nicola Barker, 2 April 2026

TonyInterruptor 
by Nicola Barker.
Granta, 208 pp., £16.99, August 2025, 978 1 80351 254 9
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... as a ‘Toxic Super-Ego’, a concept he has learned from the charismatic YouTube psychologist Richard Grannon. But Charles reckons there’s something about Grannon himself that ‘doesn’t entirely add up’. If he’s really a lost soul like Charles, how can he also be ‘a life-coach/therapist and teach high-level martial arts and do a series of other ...

Longing for Mao

Hugo Young: Edward Heath, 26 November 1998

The Curse of My Life: My Autobiography 
by Edward Heath.
Hodder, 767 pp., £25, October 1998, 0 340 70852 2
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... more detached, even principled, vision of the world. Such might be our expectation of a Tory wet, miles removed from the scene of the action. But not at all, as his autobiography spends some time recounting. At bottom, Heath remains what he has always been, an insatiable attender on the upper echelons of global power. He longs for the world of Tito, Churchill ...

‘We’ know who ‘we’ are

Edward Said: Palestine, Iraq and ‘Us’, 17 October 2002

... populate Pentagon and State Department committees, including the Defense Policy Board, run by Richard Perle (who was appointed by Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz), where Israeli security is equated with US security. According to Jason Vest in the Nation, JINSA spends the ‘bulk of its budget taking a bevy of retired US generals and admirals ...