Going Straight

Neal Ascherson, 17 March 1983

After Long Silence 
by Michael Straight.
Collins, 351 pp., £11.95, March 1983, 0 00 217001 9
Show More
A Matter of Trust: MI5 1945-72 
by Nigel West.
Weidenfeld, 196 pp., £8.95, December 1982, 0 297 78253 3
Show More
Show More
... The connection between the Apostles and Communism, in those years, was really the reluctance of a young revolutionary generation to admit any contradiction between their own ethic and the ‘bourgeois’ values of loyalty and truth which had first formed their minds. The Apostles seemed, reassuringly, to embody and guarantee a continuity between K. Marx and ...

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
Show More
Countdown: A History of Space Flight 
by T.A. Heppenheimer.
Wiley, 398 pp., £24.95, June 1997, 0 471 14439 8
Show More
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
Show More
Space and the American Imagination 
by Howard McCurdy.
Smithsonian, 294 pp., £19.95, November 1997, 1 56098 764 2
Show More
Show More
... hair, creased trousers and clean white shirts who carried slide rules and said things like ‘Roger, Capcom, we copy’. They did it on behalf of a generation which wore flared denims or kaftans and smoked joints and said things like ‘Cosmic!’ and when particularly impressed: ‘Far out!’ Think of Voyager now, out of the plane of the planets ...

Desperado as Commodity

Alex Harvey: Jean-Patrick Manchette, 26 May 2022

The N’Gustro Affair 
by Jean-Patrick Manchette, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
NYRB, 180 pp., £12, September 2021, 978 1 68137 512 0
Show More
No Room at the Morgue 
by Jean-Patrick Manchette, translated by Alyson Waters.
NYRB, 188 pp., £12, August 2020, 978 1 68137 418 5
Show More
Show More
... The Mad and the Bad, extended this sense of the world as a closed circle of violence and power. A young woman and a boy, Julie and Peter, attacked by mysterious assailants, have to run for their lives: a classic noir plot (a lover of jazz, Manchette likes to riff on the standards). He switches pace between scenes, speeding up the action until it’s a surreal ...

Diary

Marina Warner: Medea, 3 December 2015

... for reverie and conjecture, becoming the ‘shore of dreaming’ (‘l’orée du songe’), as Roger Caillois called his own collection of stones. Like dream stones, the myths are puzzles, and they keep inviting new thoughts. The story of Medea intersects with the myth of the voyage of the Argo; but it is the continuing electric power of her myth to ...

Who was the enemy?

Bernard Porter: Gallipoli, 21 May 2015

Gallipoli 
by Alan Moorehead.
Aurum, 384 pp., £25, April 2015, 978 1 78131 406 7
Show More
Gallipoli: A Soldier’s Story 
by Arthur Beecroft.
Robert Hale, 176 pp., £12.99, March 2015, 978 0 7198 1654 3
Show More
Gallipoli 1915 
by Joseph Murray.
Silvertail, 210 pp., £12.99, April 2015, 978 1 909269 11 8
Show More
Gallipoli: The Dardanelles Disaster in Soldiers’ Words and Photographs 
by Richard van Emden and Stephen Chambers.
Bloomsbury, 344 pp., £25, March 2015, 978 1 4088 5615 4
Show More
Show More
... provoked Kitchener to sack him summarily, with the observation that Gallipoli ought to be ‘a young man’s war’. All of them had ‘old Regular Army ideas’. The slightly younger Brigadier-General William Sitwell (b.1860) couldn’t even use a telephone: he repeatedly spoke into the wrong end. All of them – it’s almost superfluous to say – were ...

‘Just get us out’

Ferdinand Mount, 21 March 2019

... and alliances: these, too, are chilly calculations of convenience, which last only as long as young girls and roses, to quote de Gaulle. National interest comes first, last and always. We need, I think, to unpick the sovereignty argument a little, to get at the foundations of the overarching assertion about national interest. Suppose we take as a starting ...

A bas les chefs!

John Sturrock: Jules Vallès, 9 February 2006

The Child 
by Jules Vallès, translated by Douglas Parmée.
NYRB, 343 pp., £8.99, August 2005, 1 59017 117 9
Show More
Show More
... of this sort, perhaps he didn’t; either way, the visit to Matoussaint marks the point at which young Vingtras’s future is decided, and it won’t be the future his father has had in mind for him. He is lent books that aren’t at all the sort of thing he’d been encouraged or allowed to read up until now, books that the ‘jacobin’ journalist has been ...

Verie Sillie People

Keith Thomas: Bacon’s Lives, 7 February 2013

The Oxford Francis Bacon Vol. I: Early Writings 1584-96 
edited by Alan Stewart, with Harriet Knight.
Oxford, 1066 pp., £200, September 2012, 978 0 19 818313 6
Show More
Show More
... or a believing wife from an unbelieving husband. Age was superior to youth, and ‘self conceyted young men’ a constant menace. ‘The greatest number of Papists’ were ‘very yonge men’ and the most contentious Puritans were ‘for the most parte … men of yong yeeres & superficiall vnderstanding’. As for the common people, they were not entitled to ...

Bandini to Hackmuth

Christopher Tayler: John Fante, 21 September 2000

Ask the Dust 
by John Fante.
Rebel Inc, 198 pp., £6.99, September 1999, 0 86241 987 5
Show More
Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante 
by Stephen Cooper.
Rebel Inc, 406 pp., £16.99, May 2000, 9781841950228
Show More
Show More
... make good on at least some of the comparisons listed above. The narrator is Arturo Bandini, a young man from a poor Italian family who has moved to Los Angeles to become a writer. He had previously been seen as a boy in Wait until Spring, Bandini; he had also been the protagonist of the then unpublished The Road to Los Angeles, and was later to appear ...

Schadenfreude with Bite

Richard Seymour: Trolling, 15 December 2016

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture 
by Whitney Phillips.
MIT, 256 pp., £10, September 2016, 978 0 262 52987 7
Show More
Gendertrolling: How Misogyny Went Viral 
by Karla Mantilla.
Praeger, 280 pp., £32, August 2015, 978 1 4408 3317 5
Show More
Bad Clowns 
by Benjamin Radford.
New Mexico, 188 pp., £12, February 2016, 978 0 8263 5666 6
Show More
Trolls: An Unnatural History 
by John Lindow.
Reaktion, 60 pp., £9.99, August 2015, 978 1 78023 565 3
Show More
Show More
... bisexual, transgender and queer’ people, while trolling communities disproportionately comprise young white men in Anglophone or Nordic countries. Phillips describes the way they perform their whiteness and a particular type of masculinity – their racist trolling of Obama, for example, or their habitual use of the term ‘fag’. Masculinism is built into ...

The African University

Mahmood Mamdani, 19 July 2018

... conversation, from Achebe on ‘English and the African Writer’, through Terence Ranger on Roger Casement, to Paul Theroux on Tarzan, a send-up of expatriate attitudes and an early example of cultural studies in Africa.Shortly after Kwame Nkrumah was deposed in Ghana in 1966, Mazrui published ‘Nkrumah: The Leninist Czar’, which he followed up with ...

The Forty Years’ Peace

Keith Kyle, 21 October 1993

The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations and Provocations 
by John Lewis Gaddis.
Oxford, 301 pp., £19.50, July 1992, 0 19 505201 3
Show More
Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953-71 
by Douglas Brinkley.
Yale, 429 pp., £22, February 1993, 0 300 04773 8
Show More
The Quest for Stability: Problems of West European Security 1918-1957 
edited by Rolf Ahmann, A.M. Birke and Michael Howard.
Oxford, 546 pp., £50, June 1993, 0 19 920503 5
Show More
Show More
... of Dulles, as revealed by Gaddis’s careful analysis of his papers. Lord Sherfield, who as Sir Roger Makins was British Ambassador in Washington in the Fifties, once remarked that Dulles was a man who developed his thinking aloud from one meeting to the next. If, like the British Ambassador, you saw him frequently, the trend of his thought would be ...

Hard Beats and Spacey Bleeps

Dave Haslam, 23 September 1993

Will Pop Eat Itself? Pop Music in the Soundbite Era 
by Jeremy J. Beadle.
Faber, 269 pp., £7.99, June 1993, 9780571162413
Show More
Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture 
edited by Anthony DeCurtis.
Duke, 317 pp., £11.95, October 1992, 0 8223 1265 4
Show More
Show More
... happened despite open hostility from establishment figures in the music industry (musicians like Roger Daltrey and George Harrison, executives like BPI bigwig Maurice Oberstein). The revolution is all the more threatening to rock culture because music-makers operating in black and club music (notably hip-hop and house) have plugged into the new technology ...

Scholarship and its Affiliations

Wendy Steiner, 30 March 1989

... He was in attendance at the birth of English art history. It is not sufficiently well-known how young the discipline is in this country: that no courses in the field existed until 1931 when the Courtauld Institute was established, that before then one studied the subject, as Blunt himself did, by ‘reading’. Blunt began lecturing at the Courtauld in the ...

Women against Men

Anita Brookner, 2 September 1982

The Golden Notebook 
by Doris Lessing.
Joseph, 638 pp., £9.95, July 1982, 0 7181 0970 8
Show More
Show More
... concerns are so vast and so important that Richard’s exasperation and his preference for his young secretaries are almost forgivable. These women inherit, from their own intellectual formation, a busyness, a grappling with central issues, a determination to come to terms with the truth, however unpleasant this may be, and also a responsibility for their ...