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Some Tips for the Long-Distance Traveller

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: How to Get to Germany, 8 October 2015

... the smugglers, and EU officials. Early​ one morning on the island of Lesbos, a short grey-haired man parked his motorbike under a pine tree and sat down on a pebbly beach littered with abandoned lifejackets – orange, red and blue. The carcases of rubber dinghies lay nearby. In the distance, on the other side of the channel, the Turkish mountains were ...

Sweeno’s Beano

Nigel Wheale: MacSweeney, Kinsella and Harrison, 1 October 1998

The Book of Demons 
by Barry MacSweeney.
Bloodaxe, 109 pp., £7.95, September 1997, 1 85224 414 3
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Poems 1980-94 
by John Kinsella.
Bloodaxe, 352 pp., £9.95, April 1999, 1 85224 453 4
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The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony 
by John Kinsella.
Arc, 108 pp., £7.95, January 1997, 1 900072 12 2
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The Kangaroo Farm 
by Martin Harrison.
Paper Bark, 79 pp., £8.95, May 1998, 0 9586482 4 7
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... childhood love. Alliteration surfaces from time to time, and his sixth poem, ‘Mony Ryal Ray’ quotes a line from the Middle English Perle; the poem’s epigraph, ‘For urthely herte myght not suffyse’, is from the same source – MacSweeney has often used a pastiche-medieval register for particular effects, in ‘Wolf Tongue’ (1978), for ...

Anti-Anti-Racism

Ann Dummett, 9 July 1987

Anti-Racism: An Assault on Education and Value 
edited by Frank Palmer.
Sherwood, 210 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 907671 26 8
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The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain 
by Ron Ramdin.
Gower, 626 pp., £35, January 1987, 0 566 00943 9
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... racism-awareness training. There was some bewilderment among white councillors. How could a black man be against the idea? In fact, many black people are bitterly opposed to it. The strongest critique there has been so far was written by A. Sivanandan, of the Institute of Race Relations. His reasons derive from his brand of Marxism, and are rather different ...

Vibrating to the Chord of Queer

Elaine Showalter: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 6 March 2003

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity 
by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Duke, 216 pp., £14.95, March 2003, 0 8223 3015 6
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Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory 
edited by Stephen Barber and David Clark.
Routledge, 285 pp., £55, September 2002, 0 415 92818 4
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... and fibre art were displayed on which Sedgwick had scanned computer images of her body, an X-ray and CAT-scan images of her spine. Interviewed by Stephen Barber and David Clark, the editors of Regarding Sedgwick, she said that she was finding it hard to ‘take pleasure in writing’, and was much more drawn to the visual than the verbal, to texture ...

Blowing Cigarette Smoke at Greenfly

E.S. Turner: The Beastliness of Saki, 24 August 2000

The Unrest-Cure and Other Beastly Tales 
by Saki.
Prion, 297 pp., £8.99, May 2000, 9781853753701
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... too rancid for inclusion, why did the compiler exclude ‘The Background’, a gem of purest ray serene, as free of malice as it is of ambiguous wolf-boys? Here we have Henri Deplis using a windfall to commission a famous Italian tattooist to portray the Fall of Icarus across his back. The result is a slight disappointment as the client had ‘supposed ...

Medes and Persians

Paul Foot: The Government’s Favourite Accountants, 2 November 2000

... Maxwell companies and pensioners by a string of accountants, including the receivers for the fat man’s bust businesses, Arthur Andersen. Most of these cases were ‘settled’ in deals whose terms became increasingly inaccessible as the accountancy firms swallowed each other up. Price Waterhouse swallowed Coopers and Lybrand, Touche Ross became Deloitte ...

Beetle bonkers in the beams

Michael Wood: Tony Harrison, 5 July 2007

Collected Film Poetry 
by Tony Harrison.
Faber, 414 pp., £20, April 2007, 978 0 571 23409 7
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Collected Poems 
by Tony Harrison.
Viking, 452 pp., £154, April 2007, 978 0 670 91591 0
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... More precisely, The Mirror, which explores the historical and personal memories of a dying man, awoke and answered an old concern, born when Harrison saw the newsreel footage of bodies being bulldozed into pits at Belsen. ‘I have never forgotten that introduction to the filming of real life or, in this case, real and terrifying death. Nor how jarring ...

Can’t you take a joke?

Jonathan Coe, 2 November 2023

Different Times: A History of British Comedy 
by David Stubbs.
Faber, 399 pp., £20, July, 978 0 571 35346 0
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... first broadcast in 1951; five years later, Hancock’s Half Hour introduced two brilliant writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who between them created a character whose sense of social and intellectual confinement puts The Lavender Hill Mob’s bullion robbers in the shade and eventually – after Hancock had morphed into Harold Steptoe – blossomed into ...

Shakespeare the Novelist

John Sutherland, 28 September 1989

The Vision of Elena Silves 
by Nicholas Shakespeare.
Collins, 263 pp., £11.95, September 1989, 0 00 271031 5
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Billy Bathgate 
by E.L. Doctorow.
Macmillan, £11.95, September 1989, 0 333 51376 2
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Buffalo Afternoon 
by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.
Hamish Hamilton, 535 pp., £12.95, August 1989, 0 241 12634 7
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The Message to the Planet 
by Iris Murdoch.
Chatto, 563 pp., £13.95, October 1989, 0 7011 3479 8
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... and quite different from narco-terrorism in Columbia, CIA-Contra terrorism in Nicaragua, strong-man terrorism in Panama, or the urban guerrilla terrorism of the Tupamaros. Peru is under siege from a wholly anachronistic but apparently invincible Maoist revolutionary army, Sendero Luminoso – Shining Path. This purist faction sees itself in conflict with ...

Trollopiad

John Sutherland, 9 January 1992

The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope 
by R.H. Super.
Manchester, 528 pp., £29.95, July 1990, 0 472 10102 1
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Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in his World 
by Richard Mullen.
Duckworth, 767 pp., £25, July 1990, 0 7156 2293 5
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Trollope: A Biography 
by N. John Hall.
Oxford, 581 pp., £25, October 1991, 0 19 812627 1
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... I have found is in Mullen, who on page 642 states that ‘within a few days of completing An Old Man’s Love Trollope turned his hand to a new field, historical writing, and in the space of a few weeks produced a short book about Lord Palmerston.’ Trollope wrote Palmerston just before An Old Man’s Love, which was his ...

Cosmic!

Tim Radford: Yuri and the Astronauts, 5 March 1998

Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon 
by James Harford.
Wiley, 392 pp., £24.95, June 1997, 0 471 14853 9
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Countdown: A History of Space Flight 
by T.A. Heppenheimer.
Wiley, 398 pp., £24.95, June 1997, 0 471 14439 8
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Something New under the Sun: Satellites and the Beginning of the Space Age 
by Helen Gavaghan.
Copernicus, 300 pp., £15, December 1997, 0 387 94914 3
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Space and the American Imagination 
by Howard McCurdy.
Smithsonian, 294 pp., £19.95, November 1997, 1 56098 764 2
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... on its way to meet an asteroid called Eros. This is not to mention infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray and optical telescopes orbiting the planet, peering into the farthest reaches of the universe. The most important thing in our lives now and at any time is the Sun: there are satellites orbiting it, monitoring it, measuring its hot breath. Satellites study ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: London’s Lost Cinemas, 6 November 2014

... of the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre is not existential Brighton with Kylie Minogue and Ray Winstone onboard. For survivors of a century that witnessed the birth and death of both cinema and automobile cultures, the only reliable measure of time is the partial recall of films we have experienced. And it’s not where we were when we heard about the ...

Being Greek

Henry Day: Up Country with Xenophon, 2 November 2006

The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand 
by Robin Lane Fox.
Yale, 351 pp., £25, September 2004, 0 300 10403 0
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The Expedition of Cyrus 
by Xenophon, translated by Robin Waterfield.
Oxford, 231 pp., £8.99, September 2005, 0 19 282430 9
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Xenophon’s Retreat: Greece, Persia and the End of the Golden Age 
by Robin Waterfield.
Faber, 248 pp., £17.99, November 2006, 0 571 22383 4
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The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination 
by Tim Rood.
Duckworth, 272 pp., £12.99, August 2006, 0 7156 3571 9
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... Wearing a protective covering of something dark-coloured over the eyes as one marched stopped a man from losing his sight, and keeping one’s feet constantly in motion, never still, and taking one’s footwear off at night helped prevent frostbite; but whenever men slept with their shoes on, the straps sank into their flesh and their shoes froze onto their ...

The Only Alphabet

August Kleinzahler: Ashbery’s Early Life, 21 September 2017

The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life 
by Karin Roffman.
Farrar, Straus, 316 pp., £25.50, June 2017, 978 0 374 29384 0
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... with a photograph of the poet striding towards the camera. He is a tallish, handsome young man. The photograph was taken in the autumn of 1955 when he was 28, shortly after he arrived in Montpellier to begin his Fulbright Fellowship. He looks to have the world at his feet. Earlier that year Ashbery had been turned down by the Fulbright committee for ...

True Bromance

Philip Clark: Ravi Shankar’s Ragas, 15 July 2021

Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar 
by Oliver Craske.
Faber, 672 pp., £12.99, June, 978 0 571 35086 5
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... Oliver Craske​ begins his biography of Ravi Shankar by telling an Indian parable. A blind man, stroking an elephant’s trunk, thinks he is holding a snake. Another blind man, running his hands along the animal’s leg, assumes he is touching a tree trunk; a third mistakes its tail for a rope ...

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