What you can get away with

James Wolcott: Updike Reconsidered, 19 February 2026

John Updike: A Life in Letters 
by John Updike, edited by James Schiff.
Hamish Hamilton, 874 pp., £40, November 2025, 978 0 241 70758 6
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... his own. His mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, later published stories in the magazine and his son David would also find a path into the fiction section. Having secured a berth in the upper echelon of eminence, Updike never forgot to acknowledge the ancestral tribe of authors, editors and cartoonists who came before – Peter Arno, Charles Addams, John ...

Nothing Natural

Jenny Turner: SurrogacyTM, 23 January 2020

Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against Family 
by Sophie Lewis.
Verso, 216 pp., £14.99, May 2019, 978 1 78663 729 1
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Making Kin Not Population 
edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway.
Prickly Paradigm, 120 pp., £10, July 2018, 978 0 9966355 6 1
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... doesn’t help that the IPs we get to hear about are usually the celebrities: Elton John and David Furnish; Annie Leibovitz; Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Surrogacy is one of those subjects on which ‘colour-blind – white – feminism’ tends not to mince words. ‘A human-rights violation’, the journalist Julie Bindel called it in 2018 when the ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: The Plutocrat Tour, 7 July 2022

... through the prison are John Worboys (taxi rapist), Ronnie Biggs (veteran Great Train Robber), David Copeland (Brixton and Brick Lane bomber), Ali Harbi Ali (assassin of the Southend West MP David Amess) and Michael Adebolajo, who mutilated and murdered the off-duty Fusilier Lee Rigby as he walked along Wellington Street ...

Where will we live?

James Meek: The Housing Disaster, 9 January 2014

... today, as the Notting Hill Housing Association, has 27,000 homes in London. In 1968 the architects David Levitt and David Bernstein and the planner Beverly Bernstein set up Circle 33, now part of a consortium of nine housing associations across England called Circle Housing.The shift of housing associations away from their ...

Apartheid’s Last Stand

Jeremy Harding, 17 March 2016

Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola since the Civil War 
by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira.
Hurst, 291 pp., £25, March 2015, 978 1 84904 284 0
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A Short History of Modern Angola 
by David Birmingham.
Hurst, 256 pp., £17.99, December 2015, 978 1 84904 519 3
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Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the Struggle for Southern Africa 
by Piero Gleijeses.
North Carolina, 655 pp., £27.95, February 2016, 978 1 4696 0968 3
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A General Theory of Oblivion 
by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn.
Harvill, 245 pp., £14.99, June 2015, 978 1 84655 847 4
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In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre 
by Lara Pawson.
I.B. Tauris, 271 pp., £20, April 2014, 978 1 78076 905 9
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Cuito Cuanavale: Frontline Accounts by Soviet Soldiers 
by G. Shubin, I. Zhdarkin et al, translated by Tamara Reilly.
Jacana, 222 pp., £12.95, May 2014, 978 1 4314 0963 1
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... coffee plantations, and a handful threw in their lot with the FNLA. But the ethnic strains, which David Birmingham describes very well in his new history of Angola, were too great for this arrangement to last: in 1966 Jonas Savimbi, an ambitious and volatile character, left the FNLA to embark on a venture of his own, Unita (União Nacional para a ...

Who do you think you are?

Jacqueline Rose: Trans Narratives, 5 May 2016

... person within.’ (Hoyer is the editor of Elbe’s own notes and diaries, not to be confused with David Ebershoff, on whose ghastly novel The Danish Girl is based.) Jan Morris defines her transition as a journey on the path to identity: ‘I had reached Identity’; Ashley speaks of her desire ‘to be whole’, and her ‘great sense of purpose to make ...

Underwater Living

James Meek, 5 January 2023

... to brainstorm ideas to save the club. Kempster was on holiday, so the owner and boss of Chestnut, David Newton, sat in for him. Newton – who was not a Bostonian, or a Boston United supporter – said later that he experienced a sentimental epiphany. ‘I sat there with a lump in my throat,’ Newton told the Boston Standard. ‘I spent the rest of the day ...

The Arrestables

Jeremy Harding: Extinction Rebellion, 16 April 2020

... support from celebrities, among them Rowan Williams, Emma Thompson, Grayson Perry, Noam Chomsky, David Byrne, David King (the former chief scientific adviser to the government) and Thunberg.Less well known is their following among lawyers, farmers (including livestock farmers), medics (last year the Lancet called for ...

Operation Backfire

Francis Spufford: Britain’s space programme, 28 October 1999

... would not underestimate the romantic reasons why we got into Black Arrow,’ the historian David Wright says. ‘Even people who worked in the Ministry went home and read science fiction, saw science fiction stuffon the TV; they dreamed, too. But there were people, and perhaps the same people, who had to make hard-headed decisions about what would pay ...

Cancelled

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

... and donors complained about his tweets criticising Israel. The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have donated huge sums to advance their project of converting university students to free-market fundamentalism and then placing them in positions of political power. At the College of Charleston in South Carolina, Koch money was donated on the ...

The Club and the Mob

James Meek: The Shock of the News, 6 December 2018

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now 
by Alan Rusbridger.
Canongate, 464 pp., £20, September 2018, 978 1 78689 093 1
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... would lead to the iPhone. The main wireless protocol – the system that later acquired the ‘Wi-Fi’ trademark – was launched. On the morning of Sunday, 31 August 1997, for no particular reason, I got up first thing. In Moscow, where I was living at the time (employed by the Guardian, as it happens, the paper Alan Rusbridger edited from 1995 to ...

You’ll Love the Way It Makes You Feel

Mark Greif: ‘Mad Men’, 23 October 2008

Mad Men: Season One 
Lionsgate Home Entertainment, £29.99, October 2008Show More
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... and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (whose eponymous antihero worked in PR). Emerging stars like David Ogilvy and Norman B. Norman publicised the ad man’s mystique of deep creative force, genius and restraint, as an up-to-date alternative to the old market barker’s persistence. Industry opened its purses to pay for strange approaches (Louis Cheskin’s ...

Making Do and Mending

Rosemary Hill: Penelope Fitzgerald’s Letters, 25 September 2008

So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald 
edited by Terence Dooley.
Fourth Estate, 532 pp., £25, August 2008, 978 0 00 713640 7
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... Wilhelm Müller or that Arcadia is a play by Tom Stoppard. Patric Dickinson, Felicity Ashbee and David Cecil are among the dozens of names who pass by unnoted and still more are missing from the index. How Fitzgerald came to know Stevie Smith and when it was that T.S. Eliot told her that the staircase from the Poetry Bookshop featured in ‘Ash ...

Sterling and Strings

Peter Davies: Harold Wilson and Vietnam, 20 November 2008

... days later, he relayed his grave misgivings about American policy to the US ambassador to London, David Bruce. If America continued in its escalation of the conflict, he warned, it could cause the biggest rupture in Anglo-American relations since the Suez crisis. But this threat was never carried through, and Wilson would continue to provide Lyndon Johnson ...

Unhoused

Terry Eagleton: Anonymity, 22 May 2008

Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature 
by John Mullan.
Faber, 374 pp., £17.99, January 2008, 978 0 571 19514 5
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... the consolations of an essential self. There never was such a thing, for Barthes any more than for David Hume, and we are doubtless all the better for it. What looks like a loss is actually a liberation. Unity is an illusion, and consistency is more a vice than a virtue. Postmodernism is full of personality cults, but they know themselves to be ...