Adulation or Eggs

Susan Eilenberg: At home with the Carlyles, 7 October 2004

Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Pimlico, 560 pp., £15, February 2003, 0 7126 6634 6
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... George Lewes (though Jane refused to have Mary Ann Evans in the house), Lady Harriet Baring and William Bingham Baring, Charles and Erasmus Darwin, Margaret Fuller, Ruskin, Ellen Twisleton, Margaret Oliphant, Froude: practically everybody, or at least practically everybody who either liked to talk or could bear, as Carlyle grew into stentorian middle ...

What does a snake know, or intend?

David Thomson: Where Joan Didion was from, 18 March 2004

Where I Was From 
by Joan Didion.
Flamingo, 240 pp., £14.99, March 2004, 0 00 717886 7
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... election of Arnold Schwarzenegger. California, in so many obvious ways, has run out of steam, cash and character. It’s a prime moment for Cassandra, if not the Terminator. But anyone who has been reading Didion for forty years will know that she was born with haunting doubts about her homeland and its legend. She was using Yeats to warn that the centre ...

Where are all the people?

Owen Hatherley: Jane Jacobs, 27 July 2017

Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs 
by Robert Kanigel.
Knopf, 512 pp., £34, September 2016, 978 0 307 96190 7
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Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs 
edited by Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring.
Random House, 544 pp., £16.99, October 2016, 978 0 399 58960 7
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... centre. There is a reason this place had to go, even before the interests of real estate and cash-poor councils were taken into consideration, and that reason is: Jane Jacobs says no. This injunction can be traced back to the epiphany Jacobs experienced as a freelance journalist in Philadelphia in the mid-1950s when she visited new housing estates and ...

The dogs in the street know that

Nick Laird: A Week in Mid-Ulster, 5 May 2005

... she was the youngest ever female MP when she was elected in 1969 at the age of 21. The Reverend William McCrea of the DUP was elected in 1983, seeing Sinn Féin off by just 78 votes. He was renowned for being one of Westminster’s most absent MPs: he spent his time in Nashville recording religious country and western songs. A minister of Ian Paisley’s ...
... predicted. The companies paid out generous dividends to shareholders and were still swimming in cash. Littlechild could have stepped in to lower prices, but he held back, fearful of intruding on managers’ RPI-X nirvana. When he did act, the stock market found the price cuts he ordered so laughably mild that the companies’ share prices shot up. In ...

The Contingency of Selfhood

Richard Rorty, 8 May 1986

... people do with their spouses and children, their fellow-workers, the tools of their trade, the cash accounts of their businesses, the possessions they accumulate in their homes, the music they listen to, the sports they play or watch, or the trees they pass on their way to work. Anything from the sound of a word to the colour of a leaf to the feel of a ...

Who does that for anyone?

Adam Shatz: Jean-Pierre Melville, 20 June 2019

Jean-Pierre Melville: Le Solitaire 
by Bertrand Teissier.
Fayard, 272 pp., €22, October 2017, 978 2 213 70573 6
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Jean-Pierre Melville, une vie 
by Antoine de Baecque.
Seuil, 244 pp., €32, October 2017, 978 2 02 137107 9
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... who had set out a few weeks before to cross the Pyrenees into Spain, carrying a large sum of cash for de Gaulle. He didn’t learn until the end of the war that Jacques never made it past the frontier. His passeur Lazare Cabrero, a Spanish republican, shot him in the head, took his money and buried his body. A decade later, the corpse was discovered and ...

In the Hyacinth Garden

Richard Poirier: ‘But oh – Vivienne!’, 3 April 2003

Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot 
by Carole Seymour-Jones.
Constable, 702 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 1 84119 636 3
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... out but for you – I believe we shall owe her life to you, even.’ Vivienne accepted gifts of cash, the occasional piece of family jewellery, dancing lessons and expensive clothing, including, according to Ottoline, silk underwear. Being a skilled typist, she helped in the preparation of several of Russell’s manuscripts, which provided further occasions ...

In Farageland

James Meek, 9 October 2014

... Tories said once before that Britain was becoming a foreign land,’ he wrote, referring to William Hague in 2001. ‘We told those who agreed that if they came with us we would give them back their country. As we found, there is no future in that kind of approach for a party that aspires to govern, or appeal beyond a disgruntled minority. We cannot ...

Barely under Control

Jenny Turner: Who’s in charge?, 7 May 2015

... Potter Trivia Evening; it had a Christmas card competition, and one girl was picked to meet Prince William. The school leadership is new, the trust that oversees the running of the school has a new name and the school itself will shortly get a new name too; the most recent monitoring visit from Ofsted showed definite progress. But schools know they are in ...

Last Exit

Murray Sayle, 27 November 1997

The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong 
by Jonathan Dimbleby.
Little, Brown, 461 pp., £22.50, July 1997, 0 316 64018 2
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In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major 
by Percy Cradock.
Murray, 228 pp., £18.99, September 1997, 0 7195 5464 0
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Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule: The Economic and Political Implications of Reversion 
edited by Warren Cohen and Li Zhao.
Cambridge, 255 pp., £45, August 1997, 0 521 62158 5
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The Hong Kong Advantage 
by Michael Enright, Edith Scott and David Dodwell.
Oxford, 369 pp., £20, July 1997, 0 19 590322 6
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... the rest of Hong Kong, ‘ceded in perpetuity’, back to mother China. That lion-hearted Liberal William Ewart Gladstone, who died while he was trying to solve the Irish Question, said of the First Opium War, which ended with Hong Kong under British rule: ‘a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with ...

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat

David Runciman: Thatcher’s Rise, 6 June 2013

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography. Vol. I: Not for Turning 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 859 pp., £30, April 2013, 978 0 7139 9282 3
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... only ones among her critics who got her remotely right. They included Chris Patten, John Patten, William Waldegrave and Tristan Garel-Jones, and were soon to be joined by John Major. In the pamphlet they used as an epigraph a line from Macmillan: ‘We have at least the most important thing of all at the head of our government, a prime minister of ...

The Ground Hostess

Francis Wyndham, 1 April 1983

... go on talking for hours but, alas, I’ve got to fly ... I’m meeting someone at the NFT – the William Wellman retrospective – it’s terribly late and I’ve got the tickets ... ’ Such interruptions as these continued to be a daily occurrence throughout a period of several weeks, during which I was indeed able to think about the memoir at regular ...

The Killing of Osama bin Laden

Seymour M. Hersh, 21 May 2015

... official’s words. The provision of 18 new F-16 fighter aircraft was delayed, and under-the-table cash payments to the senior leaders were suspended. In April 2011 Pasha met the CIA director, Leon Panetta, at agency headquarters. ‘Pasha got a commitment that the United States would turn the money back on, and we got a guarantee that there would be no ...

The Deaths Map

Jeremy Harding: At the Mexican Border, 20 October 2011

... outstrips what she might have paid in income tax, always assuming she was paid off the books, in cash (but millions of working ‘illegals’ pay tax and social security contributions). Her children will eventually become able-bodied adults, who can launder the clothes, tend the lawns and flip the burgers of their fellow Arizonans at competitive ...