Showman v. Shaman

David Edgar: Peter Brook, 12 November 1998

Threads of Time 
by Peter Brook.
Methuen, 241 pp., £17.99, May 1998, 0 413 69620 0
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... a no-nonsense, suck-it-and-see anti-intellectualism. For socialist playwrights like John Arden and Edward Bond, the consequence, in one case, is external and in the other a form of internal exile. But the most noted instance of the prophet rejecting his own country is the director Peter Brook who, having forged a glittering career in the British theatre, from ...

London Review of Crooks

Robert Marshall-Andrews, 15 July 1982

Rough Justice: The Extraordinary Truth about Charles Richardson and his Gang 
by Robert Parker.
Fontana, 352 pp., £1.95, October 1981, 0 00 636354 7
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Web of Corruption: The Story of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith 
by Raymond Fitzwalter and David Taylor.
Granada, 282 pp., £12.50, October 1981, 0 246 10915 7
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Inside Boss: South Africa’s Secret Police 
by Gordon Winter.
Penguin, 640 pp., £7.95, October 1981, 9780140057515
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Crime in Wartime: A Social History of Crime in World War II 
by Edward Smithies.
Allen and Unwin, 219 pp., £12.50, January 1982, 0 04 364020 6
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... African Government is complete and damning. The following questions are asked on the jacket of Dr Edward Smithies’s book. What did criminals do during the war? How did they meet the challenges of conscription, the black-out, rationing, austerity? How did the Police cope? Understaffed but overburdened with work? What happened to juvenile delinquency, that ...

Leave them weeping

Colin Grant: Frederick Douglass, 1 August 2019

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom 
by David Blight.
Simon and Schuster, 892 pp., £30, November 2018, 978 1 4165 9031 6
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... his grandmother, but not to any of his siblings, displaced as they were around the plantation.As a young boy he was stoical and resourceful. He had a habit of singing outside the window of Lucretia Auld, his owner’s daughter – a ploy she ‘very soon came to understand as a petition for a piece of bread’. He was exposed to countless acts of brutality: a ...

They reproduce, but they don’t eat, breathe or excrete

James Meek: The history of viruses, 22 March 2001

The Invisible Enemy: A Natural History of Viruses 
by Dorothy Crawford.
Oxford, 275 pp., £14.99, September 2000, 0 19 850332 6
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... Last September, the Royal Society organised a conference to discuss Edward Hooper’s book The River, which promoted the theory that HIV was accidentally spread to humans from chimpanzees through a polio vaccination programme in Africa in the 1950s. Coincidentally, or not, on the eve of the conference, a British TV channel screened the 1995 Hollywood thriller Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman as a maverick military virologist given hours to find a vaccine to halt the spread of a deadly African virus in California before the military obliterates the town where it has taken hold ...

Ooh the rubble

Rosemary Hill: Churchill’s Cook, 16 July 2020

Victory in the Kitchen: The Life of Churchill’s Cook 
by Annie Gray.
Profile, 390 pp., £16.99, February, 978 1 78816 044 5
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... a century. The story that unfolds against this background takes us from her birth, as Georgina Young, in a Hertfordshire village, through her late Victorian childhood to her appearance beside Churchill on VE day.Gray’s ability to draw on the broader context is fortunate, because there are considerable gaps in the detail. Landemare gave an interview to ...

Editor’s Story

Peter Campbell, 18 November 1982

Of This Our Time 
by Tom Hopkinson.
Hutchinson, 317 pp., £8.95, April 1982, 9780091478605
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... into the Weekly Illustrated, and went on to found a magazine of his own, Lilliput. He sold it to Edward Hulton, for whom he was to set up a new paper, a weekly illustrated magazine, which escaped being called Lo! and became Picture Post. Hopkinson joined Lorant when the magazine was being planned, and worked with him until Lorant went to America in ...

Consider the Swift

Katherine Rundell, 15 August 2019

... or four, and a few never stopping at all. We know that to prepare for their great flight, the young chicks in the nest strengthen their wings from a month old by doing feathery press-ups; lifting their bodies up off the nest by pressing down on their wings, until they can hold themselves there, suspended, for several seconds. Then they’re ready.We still ...

At Hyde Park Corner

Jonathan Meades: The Bomber Command Memorial , 25 October 2012

... long been militating for such a memorial. The urbane Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede designed by Edward Maufe was evidently reckoned insufficiently specific. And the appetite for acknowledgment was hardly sated by the perennially defaced statue of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris outside St Clement Danes. The interesting peer of the realm Lord Ashcroft KCMG ...

In Bexhill

Peter Campbell: Unpopular Culture, 5 June 2008

... has been so well revived that if more of those whom I saw eating and sunning themselves had been young and bronzed, not old and white-haired, and if the pavilion was not still surrounded by the brick terraces you see in the earliest photographs, you would have guessed that the planner’s dream had been achieved. Overy quotes Earl De La Warr, the socialist ...

Diary

A.J.P. Taylor: Habits, 1 March 1984

... café next door. After about five years the two elderly ladies sold out to two rather casual young men who kept the name of Legrain and the No 5 coffee. This kept me going until the war, when the two young men first closed the café and then closed the shop. They found a home for the coffee in I. Camisa, who have been ...

Diary

Paul Foot: Windsor Girls School on 22 June, 4 July 1985

... sold; auditions held for poetry readings; invitations sent out. The result was a grand gathering. Edward de Souza read some of Shelley’s political poems with tremendous force. The winner of the audition to read ‘Men of England’ was a young black woman. Lesley Saunders, a Greenham Common campaigner and local Labour ...

Criminal Elastic

Susannah Clapp, 5 February 1987

Margaret Oliphant: A Critical Biography 
by Merryn Williams.
Macmillan, 217 pp., £27.50, October 1986, 0 333 37647 1
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Chronicles of Carlingford: The Perpetual Curate 
by Mrs Oliphant.
Virago, 540 pp., £4.50, February 1987, 0 86068 786 4
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Chronicles of Carlingford: Salem Chapel 
by Mrs Oliphant.
Virago, 461 pp., £3.95, August 1986, 0 86068 723 6
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Chronicles of Carlingford: The Rector 
by Mrs Oliphant.
Virago, 192 pp., £3.50, August 1986, 0 86068 728 7
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... the Scottish novelist. Mrs Oliphant was famous for her productivity. She published biographies of Edward Irving and the Comte de Montalembert, a literary history of England and more than sixty fat novels.* From the mid-1850s until her death in 1897 she contributed half a dozen essays a year to Blackwood’s Magazine, delivering on Bunsen, Savonarola, Queen ...

Capitalism without Capital

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 26 May 1994

The Endangered American Dream: How to Stop the United States from Becoming a Third World Country and Win the Geo-Economic Struggle for Industrial Supremacy 
by Edward Luttwak.
Simon and Schuster, 365 pp., $24, October 1993, 0 671 86963 9
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Japan’s Capitalism: Creative Defeat and Beyond 
by Shigeto Tsuru.
Cambridge, 277 pp., £24.95, June 1993, 0 521 36058 7
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... Even at the end of his new book, it’s not clear where Edward Luttwak is coming from, as they say in his country. He leaves no doubt, however, about where he dreads coming to. Instead of being smoothed through ‘the spotless elegance of Narita or Frankfurt or Amsterdam or Singapore’, the hapless international traveller who comes into New York’s Kennedy Airport will walk into one of the tatty terminals that near-bankrupt airlines no longer maintain, mildly surprised at the naked plywood and unfinished gypsum board ...

Cold-Shouldered

James Wood: John Carey, 8 March 2001

Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the 20th Century’s Most Enjoyable Books 
by John Carey.
Faber, 173 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 0 571 20448 1
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... as a paper to a Cambridge undergraduate society, and it reverberates with the mirth of upper-class young people contemplating the sordid lives of their social inferiors. One can almost hear the well-bred laughter as Woolf impersonates Arnold Bennett planning a fictional character.’ You might argue that Woolf originally wrote this essay for an American ...