Canned Soup and Canapés

Em Hogan: Hujar and Thek, 8 October 2026

The Wonderful World that Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek 
by Andrew Durbin.
Granta, 480 pp., £25, April, 978 1 80351 213 6
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“... Thek who seems to have attracted Hujar’s interest. He is photographed lying down in a forest in white T-shirt and shorts, propping up his head like a pin-up girl. His look is slightly insolent: he seems to be daring the photographer to come closer. In another, he is lying on a couch, in ‘an early version of what would become a signature Hujar pose’.By ...”

Crimes of Passion

Sam Sifton, 11 January 1990

Missing Beauty: A True Story of Murder and Obsession 
by Teresa Carpenter.
Hamish Hamilton, 478 pp., £15.95, October 1989, 0 241 12775 0
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Wasted: The Preppie Murder 
by Linda Wolfe.
Simon and Schuster, 303 pp., $19.95, September 1989, 0 671 64184 0
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“... Levin was found strangled in Central Park in New York City on an August morning in 1986. She was white, pretty, 18, and she travelled in the wealthy circle of New York’s private-school set. Her murderer, who had secretly watched the police collect the body from across the street, confessed a few hours later. He was Robert Chambers, 19, another member of ...”

Diary

Mike Marqusee: The Ancient Argument between Bat and Ball, 18 August 1994

“... he had not used it to alter the condition of the ball. ‘We have to be seen to be whiter than white,’ he explained. ‘Things have gone on in Test cricket – not England but other sides – and they have got away with it. But we have taken firm and prompt action. As far as I am concerned the matter is closed.’ The affair preoccupied the media for the ...”

Short Cuts

Rupert Beale: Wash Your Hands, 19 March 2020

“... bad, it’s a bit like flu, we will have a vaccine soon: stopping flights from China was enough. Tony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, deftly cut across Trump at a White House press briefing. No, it isn’t only as bad as flu, it’s far more dangerous. Yes, public health ...”

The Limit

Rosemary Hill, 2 November 1995

Christopher Wood: An English Painter 
by Richard Ingleby.
Allison and Busby, 295 pp., £25, May 1995, 0 85031 849 1
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Barbara Hepworth: A Life of Forms 
by Sally Festing.
Viking, 343 pp., £20, May 1995, 0 670 84203 6
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“... to him. They were perhaps more perceptive than his other friends, even his loyal protector/lover Tony Gandarillas. Certainly they took him seriously as a painter. Ben Nicholson’s work during their association owed much to Wood. Yet the Nicholsons were as shocked as everyone else when, on 21 August 1930, Wood threw himself in front of a train at Salisbury ...”

Has US power destroyed the UN?

Simon Chesterman and Michael Byers: International Relations, 29 April 1999

“... than Rwanda had been because it was closer, there were more pictures, and the victims were white. Frustrated at the Serbian massacres of Bosnians in UN ‘safe havens’ and at Europe’s powerlessness to stop the madness, Nato found a cathartic release in air strikes. With the benefit of an ambiguously worded UN mandate, it bombed Serbian armour and ...”

A New Twist in the Long Tradition of the Grotesque

Marina Warner: The monstrousness of Britart, 13 April 2000

High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s 
by Julian Stallabrass.
Verso, 342 pp., £22, December 1999, 1 85984 721 8
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This is Modern Art 
by Matthew Collings.
Weidenfeld, 270 pp., £20, June 1999, 0 297 84292 7
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“... themes and media and sites and forms of attention have been emulsified into a phenomenon on which Tony Blair smiles. Stallabrass follows the tracks of this social monster, which can be identified by what seems to be an infinitely elastic, numbing permissiveness, from mannikins of children with penises for noses and vulvae for mouths to used sanitary towels ...”

At the Young V&A

Malin Hay: ‘Inside Aardman’, 5 November 2026

“... wasn’t very compelling or interesting’, in Lord’s words. Their next idea drew on a black and white film they’d seen on TV called Clay, or The Origin of Species (1965). It’s eight minutes long and can be watched on YouTube. Against a jazz soundtrack, a lump of clay spreads itself across the screen and is moulded and remoulded by an invisible hand. It ...”

‘This is Africa, after all. What can you expect?’

Bernard Porter: Corruption and Post-Imperialism, 26 March 2009

It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower 
by Michela Wrong.
Fourth Estate, 354 pp., £12.99, February 2009, 978 0 00 724196 5
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“... The name for them in Kenya, Wrong tells us, is ‘coconuts’: brown on the outside, but white inside. ‘The people John really wanted to impress were not the House of Mumbi, but the House of Windsor,’ a Kenyan journalist said to her. ‘His loyalty to Western values – things like a belief in the importance of rules, transparency, honesty and ...”

Diary

Stephen Sharp: The ‘Belgrano’ and Me, 8 May 2014

“... into my mind at lunchtime every day for the World at One. Reagan was long gone and Bush was in the White House. He didn’t send me any messages but he had the same initials as the General Belgrano. ‘GB’ was quite common on cars. The drivers would convey me to the president even though he was in Washington and I didn’t have a passport. I knew my ...”

Lola did the driving

Inigo Thomas: Pevsner’s Suffolk, 5 May 2016

Suffolk: East, The Buildings of England 
by James Bettley and Nikolaus Pevsner.
Yale, 677 pp., £35, April 2015, 978 0 300 19654 2
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“... feel about the placing of such an establishment in this location, has a magical quality … The white dome, which is the outer shell of the containment building that protects the reactor and its steam generator, is about 230 ft (70 metres) high and can be glimpsed from miles around. Pevsner, admirer of Gropius and risk-taker that he was, had no obvious ...”

Like Oysters in Their Shells

Malcolm Gaskill: The Death Trade, 18 August 2022

All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation into the Death Trade 
by Hayley Campbell.
Raven, 268 pp., £18.99, March, 978 1 5266 0139 1
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“... a brick-lined oven ‘as ravaged as the surface of the moon’ to be blasted into charcoal, while Tony and Dave, nose-blind to the odour of steamed clams, sit around with tea and muffins waiting for the next delivery in the hydraulic lift. Tumours are apparently hardest to burn and glow like gold in the inferno. Outside, as mourners file from the chapel, the ...”

Populism and the People

Jan-Werner Müller, 23 May 2019

“... history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.’ What is specific to our age, as Tony Judt once observed, is that we have become extremely skilful at teaching the lessons of history, but quite bad at teaching actual history. The truth is that today’s threats to democracy don’t parallel 20th-century experiences. Fascism – as distinct ...”

That Wild Mercury Sound

Charles Nicholl: Dylan’s Decade, 1 December 2016

The Bootleg Series, Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965-66 
by Bob Dylan.
Columbia, £60, November 2015
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“... this can be seen in D.A. Pennebaker’s film Dont Look Back, which records in unblinking black and white a two-week slice of Dylan’s British tour in the summer of 1965. Pennebaker was also present with his camera on the even crazier world tour of 1966, but his footage was hijacked by Dylan, who worked with another director, Howard Alk, to produce a seldom ...”

Memories of Amikejo

Neal Ascherson: Europe, 22 March 2012

“... vans. At that time, remembering pictures of jolly Wehrmacht soldiers wrenching down the red and white Polish border gates, I felt quite protective about frontiers. But then I read a Polish novel. An allegory contrived to lull the censor, it described a tiny sliver of land between Belgium and Germany which had been overlooked by the surveyors as they drew ...”