Can the poor think?

Malcolm Bull: ‘Nervous States’, 4 July 2019

Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World 
by William Davies.
Cape, 272 pp., £16.99, September 2018, 978 1 78733 010 8
Show More
Show More
... lower the voting age to offset the growing electoral predominance of the decrepit and the pained. David Runciman recently floated the idea that six-year-olds might be given the vote, and it is easy to see how such arguments could be developed. Modern democracy likes to present itself as a superior form of risk management, but some people have a lot more risk ...

Icicles by Cynthia

Michael Wood: Ghosts, 2 January 2020

Romantic Shades and Shadows 
by Susan J. Wolfson.
Johns Hopkins, 272 pp., £50, August 2018, 978 1 4214 2554 2
Show More
Show More
... from stylistic analysis. There is also the method of ‘too close reading’ wittily practised by David Miller, especially in his book Hidden Hitchcock (2016).Wolfson’s work is not unrelated to this last example – both writers are concerned with seeing apparitions and being glad to see them – but she tends to think that patient, uncensored curiosity ...

The Importance of Being Ernie

Ferdinand Mount, 5 November 2020

Ernest Bevin: Labour’s Churchill 
by Andrew Adonis.
Biteback, 352 pp., £20, July, 978 1 78590 598 8
Show More
Show More
... turned it into an unrivalled instrument of British policy and won their lasting adoration (which David Owen sourly put down to ‘inverted snobbery’). As minister of labour between 1940 and 1945, Bevin achieved with remarkably little agony the greatest mobilisation and demobilisation in British history. Churchill deserves every credit for seeing that this ...

What’s a majority for?

James Butler, 18 July 2024

... a revitalised Border Command. He has been reticent about immigration targets, which helped undo David Cameron. For liberal politicians, migration is a zugzwang: a state in which action is unavoidable, but any action makes the situation worse. Aggressive migration policies imperil the cheap labour on which Britain depends (especially in its health and care ...

Collect your divvies

Ferdinand Mount: Safe as the Bank of England, 15 June 2023

Virtuous Bankers: A Day in the Life of the 18th-Century Bank of England 
by Anne Murphy.
Princeton, 275 pp., £30, May, 978 0 691 19474 5
Show More
Show More
... shall stand/With its unshaken head, till time’s last sand.’ This last phrase was borrowed by David Kynaston for the title of his captivating history of the bank.* The exit of the deputy governor remained unequalled for drama until the resignation of another deputy governor during the Barings crash three centuries later, after a Sunday tabloid reported ...

Scattering Gaggle

Jessie Childs: Armada on the Rocks, 4 May 2023

Armada: The Spanish Enterprise and England’s Deliverance in 1588 
by Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker.
Yale, 718 pp., £30, December 2022, 978 0 300 25986 5
Show More
Show More
... When the borders of the realm were again threatened in 1940, Churchill invoked it. It is David and Goliath, island v. empire, a ‘weak and feeble woman’ against a king with a God complex. Philip’s failure to heed the warnings and alter his course made him the architect of his own downfall. His confident hope of a miracle left bodies on the ...

Short Cuts

James Meek: Voter ID, 4 May 2023

... the Birmingham Trojan Horse hoax.)In response to the Tower Hamlets case, the then prime minister, David Cameron, asked his ‘anti-corruption champion’, Eric Pickles, to look into electoral fraud. The subsequent report acknowledged its debt to Mawrey – ‘the judgment of Richard Mawrey QC was one of the reference points for this review,’ Pickles ...

‘The A-10 saved my ass’

Andrew Cockburn: Precision Warfare, 21 March 2024

The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers 
by Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr.
Yale, 549 pp., £35, May 2023, 978 0 300 23409 1
Show More
Show More
... defeat. An honest review of the record casts the British naval leadership in a very poor light. As David Lloyd George explained in his memoirs, ‘before the War, the Board of Admiralty had concentrated so much on big and still bigger ships that they neglected essential weapons like mines, armour-piercing shells and torpedoes – all of which were inferior to ...

Knobs, Dots and Grooves

Peter Campbell: Henry Moore, 8 August 2002

Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations 
edited by Alan Wilkinson.
Lund Humphries, 320 pp., £35, February 2002, 0 85331 847 6
Show More
The Penguin Modern Painters: A History 
by Carol Peaker.
Penguin Collectors’ Society, 124 pp., £15, August 2001, 0 9527401 4 1
Show More
Show More
... Victor Pasmore – there were more eccentric talents of various sizes, like Stanley Spencer and David Jones, who were very English (or very Welsh) and not international at all. In drawings of wrapped sculpture in landscape and moonstruck megaliths Moore and Paul Nash gave even Surrealism an English edge. You could find evidence of deep-rooted native ...

Sinnermen

Niela Orr, 26 June 2025

... to open a juke joint, and buy a derelict mill from the town’s closeted KKK leader, Hogwood (David Maldonado). The twins enlist their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), a sharecropper and precociously talented preacher’s boy who sings and plays the blues, and assemble a crew of old friends and lovers to do up the place, which they call Club Juke.Stack and ...

Scattered Alphabet

Ange Mlinko: On Susan Howe, 25 December 2025

Penitential Cries 
by Susan Howe.
Norton, 96 pp., £12.99, October 2025, 978 0 8112 3982 0
Show More
Show More
... books are dedicated to husbands who left her widowed: Pierce-Arrow (1999), for the sculptor David von Schlegell, and That This (2010), for the philosopher Peter H. Hare. Nothing in Howe’s work exceeds the sheer beauty of the sequence ‘Rückenfigur’ – an art history term for a figure seen from the back – in Pierce-Arrow. It begins: ‘Iseult ...

When the Messiah Comes

Jacqueline Rose: When I met Netanyahu, 25 December 2025

... history – a moment reached on 20 July 2019, when he recorded 4876 days (exceeding the record of David Ben-Gurion). Netanyahu began the interview by boasting about the extent of American popular support for Israel. Citizens accosted him on trips across the US, hardly any of whom, he insisted with pleasure, were Jews. The subtext was that anyone in their ...

A Grand and Disastrous Deceit

Philippe Sands: The Chilcot Report, 28 July 2016

The Report of the Iraq Inquiry 
by John Chilcot.
HMSO, 12 vols, 6275 pp., £767, 1 4741 3331 2
Show More
Show More
... of 31 January 2003, when Blair met Bush at the White House. According to the Chilcot Report, David Manning, the British ambassador in Washington, noted that the two men agreed that ‘the military campaign could begin “around 10 March”.’ As I wrote in my book Lawless World: Making and Breaking Global Rules (2006), the note actually states that 10 ...

A Piece of White Silk

Jacqueline Rose: Honour Killing, 5 November 2009

Murder in the Name of Honour 
by Rana Husseini.
Oneworld, 250 pp., £12.99, May 2009, 978 1 85168 524 0
Show More
In Honour of Fadime: Murder and Shame 
by Unni Wikan, translated by Anna Paterson.
Chicago, 305 pp., £12.50, June 2008, 978 0 226 89686 1
Show More
Honour Killing: Stories of Men Who Killed 
by Ayse Onal.
Saqi, 256 pp., £12.99, May 2008, 978 0 86356 617 2
Show More
Show More
... he acts, has already ceded his victim too much power. ‘Honour,’ Lama Abu-Odeh writes, citing David Gilmore, ‘is not only what women must keep intact to remain alive, but what men should defend fiercely so as not to be reduced to women.’ ‘We are men,’ the killers in Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers say, ‘but she reduced us to eunuch bystanders by ...

At least they paid their taxes

Linda Colley, 25 July 1991

Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorised Biography 
by Kitty Kelley.
Bantam, 532 pp., £16.99, April 1991, 0 593 02450 8
Show More
Show More
... with mink collars and cuffs; her 18-carat-gold belt was decorated with 50 carved emeralds from David Webb, one of the finest jewellers in America; her three-acre garden brimmed with the rarest orchids in Southern California, and her kitchen produced cuisine worthy of connoisseurs. In addition to a Los Angeles mansion in affluent Holmby Hills, the ...