Against Bare Bottoms

Simon Morrison: Prokofiev’s Diaries, 21 March 2013

Diaries 1924-33: Prodigal Son 
by Sergey Prokofiev, translated by Anthony Phillips.
Faber, 1125 pp., £30, November 2012, 978 0 571 23405 9
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... the power of mind over matter. He suffered from chronic headaches and, for all the pride he took in self-control, a bad temper. Self-healing, as preached by Eddy, seemed to offer the only cure for the exhausting mental strain he felt as he feverishly fashioned scores from sketchbooks in hotel rooms between recitals: he composed on transatlantic ...

Quiet Sinners

Bernard Porter: Imperial Spooks, 21 March 2013

Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire 
by Calder Walton.
Harper, 411 pp., £25, February 2013, 978 0 00 745796 0
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... earlier history). In the second role its problem, according to Walton, was that local governments took little notice of its advice until it was too late. Hence the atrocities in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and elsewhere. Walton even suggests that if MI5 had been given the lead intelligence role in Northern Ireland before the 1990s, as it wanted, the ...

Much of a Scramble

Francesca Wade: Ray Strachey, 23 January 2020

A Working Woman: The Remarkable Life of Ray Strachey 
by Jennifer Holmes.
Troubador, 392 pp., £20, February 2019, 978 1 78901 654 3
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... for the wider struggle; she writes approvingly of egalitarian marriages, such as that of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, but is less interested in – perhaps even a little suspicious of – women who were sexually free or who publicly challenged gender roles. She skates over the divisions in the movement, and rather than predict possible ...

Help Yourself

R.W. Johnson: The other crooked Reggie, 21 April 2005

Reggie: The Life of Reginald Maudling 
by Lewis Baston.
Sutton, 604 pp., £25, October 2004, 0 7509 2924 3
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... In the spring of 1974, as reports multiplied of his involvement with crooks such as John Poulson and T. Dan Smith, Reginald Maudling disappeared to Paris with his wife, Beryl. The Daily Mail’s Harry Longmuir had little difficulty locating him in the ‘Président’ suite of the George V. Checking in himself, Longmuir spent a whole Sunday morning with a confused, disorientated Maudling in his dressing-gown ...

Don’t forget your pith helmet

Mary Beard: The Tourist Trap, 18 August 2005

Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece 
by Patrick Leigh Fermor.
Murray, 248 pp., £8.99, July 2004, 0 7195 6692 4
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Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese 
by Patrick Leigh Fermor.
Murray, 336 pp., £8.99, July 2004, 0 7195 6691 6
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Words of Mercury 
by Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Artemis Cooper.
Murray, 274 pp., £7.99, July 2004, 9780719561061
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... vignettes of just such occasions are sprinkled: photos of the old man (with his donkey), who took the whole family off to his house and plied them with endless coffee, delicious local hooch and loads of fruit for the kids. It is easy to forget that the Greeks are not, and could not possibly be, on any objective calibration, more hospitable than any other ...

Short Cuts

Matt Foot: Corrupt Cops, 8 February 2024

... Court of Appeal. In 2011, the biggest corruption trial of police officers in British legal history took place over the convictions of the Cardiff Three, imprisoned in 1988 for the murder of Lynette White and released in 1992 (the real killer was imprisoned in 2003). Eight former police officers were due to be tried for ‘acting corruptly together’, but the ...

Euripides Unbound

Robert Cioffi, 26 September 2024

... mounted under glass, Gehad turned to his colleague Yvona Trnka-Amrhein and the Euripides expert John Gibert, both professors of classics at the University of Colorado Boulder, to decipher the text (it has just been published in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik). The papyrus was probably produced in the third century ce at the height of the ...

What Universities Owe

Vincent Brown, 24 July 2025

Yale and Slavery: A History 
by David W. Blight.
Yale, 432 pp., £14.99, April, 978 0 300 28184 2
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... out that Yale had named many of its colleges after slaveholders and pro-slavery leaders, including John C. Calhoun College in 1933 and Samuel F.B. Morse College in 1961, and noted that in 1831 Yale officials had helped to block the establishment of a college for Black Americans in New Haven. They called for Yale ‘to acknowledge how it has benefited from the ...

Angel Gabriel

Salman Rushdie, 16 September 1982

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 
by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa.
Cape, 122 pp., £5.95, September 1982, 0 224 01990 2
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... Spanish American literature, finally to reach the enormous audiences they deserve. Already, John Fowles in a Guardian essay has used the Chronicle to great effect as a prism through which to see the battle for the Malvinas. No doubt the Sun will shortly advise its readers to do the same. No doubt Sandy Woodward is a fan of the tale of Colonel Aureliano ...

No Sense of an Ending

Jane Eldridge Miller, 21 September 1995

Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson 
edited by Gloria Fromm.
Georgia, 696 pp., £58.50, February 1995, 0 8203 1659 8
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... had acquaintances in the literary world (her correspondents included H.G. Wells, Bryher, H.D. and John Cowper Powys), most of her life was lived in obscurity, and her friendships were mainly epistolary ones. Her aversion to having her picture taken and her reluctance to submit to interviews (she believed that readers should ‘keep their illusions’ about ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: Pearl’s Question, 19 October 1995

... that march, another handsome man in a leather coat came to the place where they were resting and took all the young children away. Pearl supposed the children were killed until a few months ago, when she saw a documentary on television about Raoul Wallenberg and recognised him as the man in the leather coat. ‘I screamed when I saw a picture of him. Those ...

The Real Founder of the Liberal Party

Jonathan Parry, 2 October 1997

Lord Melbourne 1779-1848 
by L.G. Mitchell.
Oxford, 349 pp., £25, May 1997, 0 19 820592 9
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... to kindle his innate intelligence. Shortly after becoming heir to the Melbourne title in 1805, he took the unstable Caroline Ponsonby as wife – or, more accurately, she took him as husband. From the beginning, he seemed henpecked: on the occasion of his first big Parliamentary speech in 1806, she visited the Commons ...

Sunshine

David Goldie: Morecambe and Wise, 15 April 1999

Morecambe and Wise 
by Graham McCann.
Fourth Estate, 416 pp., £16.99, October 1998, 1 85702 735 3
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... with the gloss of apparent spontaneity. Working on this material with them was their producer, John Ammonds, the man who persuaded Morecambe to trust the camera, to play to it with his asides and use it as a mirror for his idiot grin. The other member of the team, their new writer Eddie Braben, was only rarely present. While Hills and Green had entered ...

A life, surely?

Jenny Diski: To Portobello on Angel Dust, 18 February 1999

The Ossie Clark Diaries 
edited by Henrietta Rous.
Bloomsbury, 402 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7475 3901 4
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... a gaggle of ducks into the heated swimming-pool. In 1969 he and Celia holidayed in Marbella with John Aspinall’s half-sister, Jennifer ... In London he spent every night in clubs like the Aretusa, the Speakeasy, Tramps and Yours or Mine ... He holidayed in Marrakech with Paul Getty’s wife, Tahlita, Christopher Gibb (close friend and mentor of Mick Jagger ...

The Bloody Sixth

Joshua Brown: The Real Gangs of New York, 23 January 2003

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld 
by Herbert Asbury.
Arrow, 366 pp., £6.99, January 2003, 0 09 943674 4
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Gangs of New York 
directed by Martin Scorsese.
December 2002
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... to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and power structure of the mid-century city. As for Gangs of New York’s ...