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All This Love Business

Jean McNicol: Vanessa and Julian Bell, 24 January 2013

Julian Bell: From Bloomsbury to the Spanish Civil War 
by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams.
Stanford, 314 pp., £38.95, 0 8047 7413 7
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... in the afternoon Julian turned up with his ragged clothes torn to tatters, which flapped about his white thighs. He put on some clothes of mine and lay panting and sighing after the luxurious enjoyment of so much exercise.’His openness wasn’t typical of the rest of his family either. Julian’s younger sister, Angelica, wrote bitterly in her memoir ...

When the Floods Came

James Meek: England’s Water, 31 July 2008

... There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester United hooded top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He’s holding his right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of the wall, which comes up to his waist. The olive-coloured Avon ripples ...

Illuminating, horrible etc

Jenny Turner: David Foster Wallace, 14 April 2011

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace 
by David Lipsky.
Broadway, 320 pp., $16.99, 9780307592439
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The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel 
by David Foster Wallace.
Hamish Hamilton, 547 pp., £20, April 2011, 978 0 241 14480 0
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... publicity ‘toxic’ and mistrusted the incestuousness of New York literary circles: ‘great white sharks fighting over a bathtub, you know?’ He had other reasons for wanting to stay out west. A former ‘near great’ junior tennis player and adolescent ‘math-wienie’ – in the words of an essay written for Harper’s in 1991 – he loved the ...

Boys will be soldiers

Brian Harrison, 20 October 1983

Sure and Stedfast: A History of the Boys’ Brigade, 1883-1984 
edited by John Springhall.
Collins, 304 pp., £10, June 1983, 0 00 434280 1
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... days often included professional and business men, but later came to be drawn primarily from the white-collar and lower middle class. The Brigade gave them an unrivalled opportunity for inculcating their highly-prized virtues of personal discipline and self-improvement, and for offering the urban teenage boy something better than a life of street-corner ...

Lumpy, Semi-Dorky, Slouchy, Smarmy

John Lanchester, 23 August 2001

Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous 
by Don Foster.
Macmillan, 340 pp., £14.99, April 2001, 0 333 78170 8
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... was nothing like the one he tarted up for his memoirs. Brussel’s real advice was to search White Plains, New York for an egomaniacal German high-school graduate in his forties with a facial scar; an expert in bomb-making; a man who had ‘a classic textbook case of paranoia’, rather than a genuine beef. Whoops. The evidence which led to the capture ...

The New Cold War

Anatol Lieven: The New Cold War, 4 October 2001

... The latter danger has been greatly increased by the attacks. The terrorists have raised to white heat certain smouldering tendencies among the American Right, while simultaneously – as is usually the case at the start of wars – pushing American politics and most of its population in a sharply rightward direction; all of which has taken place under ...

Diary

James Meek: Bobos for Boris?, 26 April 2012

... would give him a superficial affinity to that line of elected reps, from Winston Churchill to Tony Benn, for whom, at times, eloquence and historical self-consciousness have seemed ends in themselves. Yet there is another less exalted political figure the mayor recalls: Alastair Campbell. A journalist like Johnson, Campbell tried to shorten the old PR ...

Everything and Nothing

Stephen Sedley: Who will speak for the judges?, 7 October 2004

... judge, Linda Dobbs QC, has just been appointed), the legal profession continues to be dominated by white men, frustrating efforts to diversify the bench. The proposal to change lawyers’ career patterns so as, for example, to allow them to combine part-time judicial sitting with child care, is valuable but nowhere near sufficient. One day government is going ...

Green, Serene

Sameer Rahim: Islamic Extremism, 19 July 2007

The Islamist 
by Ed Husain.
Penguin, 288 pp., £8.99, May 2007, 978 0 14 103043 2
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... from an Iranian flag descended between them. Mahmoud, the leader of the set, wore a black and white checked scarf; his beard was thick but neatly trimmed; he was 18 years old. I knew Mahmoud slightly and was keen to speak to him. ‘Islam is the complete solution to our problems,’ Mahmoud said, explaining that our brothers in Afghanistan and Palestine ...

Miss Dior, Prodigally Applied

Ian Patterson: Jilly Cooper, 18 May 2017

Mount! 
by Jilly Cooper.
Corgi, 610 pp., £7.99, February 2017, 978 0 552 17028 4
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... an all-round amoral charmer and shit, immune to scandal and opinion, and the envy of lesser men. Tony ‘didn’t know which he resented most – Rupert’s habitual contempt, his ability to sleep anywhere, his effortless acquisition of women …’ There’s also the capacity Rupert shares with a goodish number of other characters in these novels to swallow ...

Stainless Steel Banana Slicer

David Trotter, 18 March 2021

Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form 
by Sianne Ngai.
Harvard, 401 pp., £28.95, June 2020, 978 0 674 98454 7
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... gimmickry. To me, the decisive moment in his appearance outside a church across the road from the White House, not quite knowing which way up to hold a Bible, was the exposure of the gimmick as an object no longer able to perform its designated narrative or symbolic function. ‘Is that your Bible?’ a reporter asked Trump. ‘It’s a Bible.’ Ngai could ...

The Big Con

Pankaj Mishra, 4 May 2023

... Adani’s use of offshore shell companies; and his supporters took to the airwaves to allege that white people just couldn’t bear to see India make progress.In the weeks since then, Adani’s spectacular fall has continued: among other reverses, he had to cancel the $2.5 billion share sale, and no longer sits near the top of the list of the world’s ...

Rudy Then and Rudy Now

James Wolcott, 16 February 2023

Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor 
by Andrew Kirtzman.
Simon and Schuster, 458 pp., £20, September 2022, 978 1 9821 5329 8
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... father was JFK’s assassin. The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who fancied himself a Tony Soprano boss with a Bruce Springsteen soul, endured fat jokes on stage from Trump, hardly a ballerina himself. The activation of Lindsey Graham’s salivary glands whenever he rises up on his hind legs in defence of Trump and the MAGA agenda is a source of ...

Act One, Scene One

David Bromwich: Don’t Resist, Oppose, 16 February 2017

... after the election, Aaron Sorkin’s rant on the Vanity Fair website: ‘The Klan won last night. White nationalists. Sexists, racists and buffoons … misogynistic shitheads everywhere … If he does manage to be a douche nozzle without breaking the law for four years, we’ll make it through those four years.’ Or consider the message read out to Vice ...

Can’t Afford to Tell the Truth

Owen Bennett-Jones: Trouble at the BBC, 20 December 2018

... he looked down at the staff in the huge newsroom, clearly visible from the lobby. ‘They’re all white!’ he said. Someone suggested they could bung the Arabic Service down there to make it look more diverse. As the World Service was folded into the rest of the BBC, more managers were appointed to the World Service, to match the top-heavy ratio in other ...

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