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After the May Day Flood

Seumas Milne, 5 June 1997

... in half, the letters TU would be found written all the way through him, as in a stick of Brighton rock. Could all this add up to a vindication for those who thought that Tony Blair would become the first Labour leader in the Party’s history to move to the left once in power? Did Blair not promise in the last week of the election campaign that he would ‘be ...

Jews’ Harps

Gabriel Josipovici, 4 February 1982

Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse 
by T. Carmi.
Penguin, 608 pp., £6.95, September 1981, 0 14 042197 1
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... Israeli poet), Yehuda Amichai, Leah Goldberg, Moshe Dor, Shlomo Viner, Dahlia Ravikovitch and David Vogel; Oxford have published Amichai and Carcanet Pagis; Tony Rudolf and Howard Schwarz have recently edited an enormous volume of modern Jewish poetry, which includes a 300-page section on Hebrew poetry.* All these, of course, are in English only. But some ...

Darling Clem

Paul Addison, 17 April 1986

Clement Attlee 
by Trevor Burridge.
Cape, 401 pp., £20, January 1986, 0 224 02318 7
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The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton 1940-1945 
edited by Ben Pimlott.
Cape in association with the London School of Economics, 913 pp., £40, February 1986, 9780224020657
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Loyalists and Loners 
by Michael Foot.
Collins, 315 pp., £15, March 1986, 0 00 217583 5
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... wisdom in this country. In recent years Attlee’s reputation in Britain has risen from near rock bottom to dizzy heights. As leader of the Labour Party for twenty years, Churchill’s deputy during the Second World War, and Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951, Attlee had many claims to fame. But in his lifetime he was written off by the Westminster mafia ...

Fire and Water

Rosalind Mitchison, 17 October 1985

Water Power in Scotland: 1550-1870 
by John Shaw.
John Donald, 606 pp., £25, April 1984, 0 85976 072 3
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The History of the British Coal Industry. Vol. II: 1700-1830, The Industrial Revolution 
by Michael Flinn and David Stoker.
Oxford, 491 pp., £35, March 1984, 0 19 828283 4
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Industry and Ethos: Scotland 1832-1914 
by Sydney Checkland and Olive Checkland.
Arnold, 218 pp., £5.95, March 1984, 0 7131 6317 8
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The Jacobite Clans of the Great Glen: 1650-1784 
by Bruce Lenman.
Methuen, 246 pp., £14.95, November 1984, 0 413 48690 7
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The Prince and the Pretender: A Study in the Writing of History 
by A.J. Youngson.
Croom Helm, 270 pp., £16.95, April 1985, 0 7099 2908 0
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Canna: The Story of a Hebridean Island 
by J.L. Campbell.
Oxford, 323 pp., £25, December 1984, 0 19 920137 4
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... knowledge of the material they were extracting and also pick up the warnings of danger that the rock could give. Mostly they had to work in near darkness, relying on touch and hearing rather than sight. Pits were increasingly dangerous places until in 1815 the Davy lamp enabled miners to have light without the risk of causing an explosion, and even then ...

Mary, Mary

Christopher Hitchens, 8 April 1993

Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover 
by Anthony Summers.
Gollancz, 576 pp., £18.99, March 1993, 0 575 04236 2
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... Summers’s vastly enjoyable and revealing book, we find J. Edgar Hoover’s lovely home in Rock Creek Park being done up at taxpayers’ expense, complete with ‘hand-crafted fruit bowl’ and ‘a heated toilet seat, invented in the FBI laboratory. When he decided it was either a quarter of an inch too high or too low, it had to be redone.’ One ...

I want to be the baby

Kasia Boddy: Barthelme’s High Jinks, 18 August 2022

Collected Stories 
by Donald Barthelme, edited by Charles McGrath.
Library of America, 1004 pp., £40, July 2021, 978 1 59853 684 3
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... the object’s ‘function in a given human environment’ that mattered. A story was ‘like a rock or a refrigerator’, Barthelme said, because he could imagine a reader approaching it, ‘tapping it, shaking it, holding it to his ear to hear the roaring within’; in other words, ‘reconstituting’ it ‘by his active participation’. Many of his ...

Knights of the Road

Tom Clark: The Beat generation, 6 July 2000

This is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris 
by James Campbell.
Vintage, 320 pp., £7.99, May 2000, 0 09 928269 0
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... a Promethean stealer of automotive fire, chained to his own inarticulate drives as one bound to a rock; a winged messenger-god in a Mercury; a naked Eros. In Campbell’s account of the legend, the last of these figures is rampant. Cassady appears here under the double aspect of danger and desire. The importance of his role, allowing the spectator Kerouac to ...

Thanks to the Tea Party

Steve Fraser: 1970s America, 17 March 2011

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the 1970s 
by Judith Stein.
Yale, 367 pp., £25, May 2010, 978 0 300 11818 6
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Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class 
by Jefferson Cowie.
New Press, 464 pp., £19.99, September 2010, 978 1 56584 875 7
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... sick and tired of? How do you remain the party of business and a party of the majority when, as David Rockefeller complained, ‘people are blaming business and the enterprise system for all the problems of our society’? How to finesse the passage of regulatory legislation in the areas of occupational health and safety, the environment and consumer ...

Brandenburg’s Dream

Derek Walmsley: Digital Piracy, 7 January 2016

How Music Got Free 
by Stephen Witt.
Bodley Head, 280 pp., £20, June 2015, 978 1 84792 282 3
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... Bye Bye’ by NSYNC. When shortly afterwards a demo of a song by the vastly successful rock band Metallica turned up on Napster, the industry finally roused itself to action. Conglomerates such as Universal spent much of the decade engaged in legal pursuit of bedroom file-sharers, many of whom were allowed to walk free by sympathetic juries. One of ...

Diary

Clancy Sigal: Among the Draft-Dodgers, 9 October 2008

... Most of these kids turned out to be runaways from Middle America who had flipped on too many Sgt Rock and Fantastic Four comic books. My favourite was a 16-year-old from Tennessee who called himself ‘Kid Blue’. When I last heard from him he was phoning (he said) from the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, where the CIA had kidnapped and were torturing ...

Everything Must Go!

Andrew O’Hagan: American Beauties, 13 December 2001

The Corrections 
by Jonathan Franzen.
Fourth Estate, 568 pp., £17.99, November 2001, 1 84115 672 8
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Ghost World 
directed by Terry Zwigoff.
August 2001
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Storytelling 
directed by Todd Solondz.
November 2001
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... it, and pressure going out from it – of certain American independent film-makers and un-American rock acts than it has of Chekhov. The suburban ennui is familiar from Todd Solondz. In fact, Solondz’s new film, Storytelling, is cut from the same cloth as The Corrections, filled with the same sense of altered usage and the uncanny images which flood the ...

One’s Self-Washed Drawers

Rosemary Hill: Ida John, 29 June 2017

The Good Bohemian: The Letters of Ida John 
edited by Rebecca John and Michael Holroyd.
Bloomsbury, 352 pp., £25, May 2017, 978 1 4088 7362 5
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... the city lively and cosmopolitan. Ida painted, using ‘an old man model’ who sat ‘like a rock’. They made friends. By the autumn she was pregnant and adapting her wardrobe. Adaline was asked for a ‘loose black lace evening blouse … with long sleeves but not transparent – & a little low neck cut round – and perhaps streamers down the ...

Diary

Christopher Nicholson: Rare Birds, 22 November 2018

... And indeed, in his 1862 book The Illustrated Natural History – Birds, the Rev. J.G. Wood, the David Attenborough of his day, states that the cream-coloured courser ‘seems to live chiefly in Barbary or Abyssinia’. In the late 1860s, with the publication of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, the word ‘barbarian’ acquired a new resonance. Arnold ...

You’ve got it or you haven’t

Iain Sinclair, 25 February 1993

Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror 
by Tony Lambrianou and Carol Clerk.
Pan, 256 pp., £4.99, October 1992, 0 330 32284 2
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Gangland: London’s Underworld 
by James Morton.
Little, Brown, 349 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 356 20889 3
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Nipper: The Story of Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read 
by Leonard Read and James Morton.
Warner, 318 pp., £5.99, September 1992, 0 7515 0001 1
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Smash and Grab: Gangsters in the London Underworld 
by Robert Murphy.
Faber, 182 pp., £15.99, February 1993, 0 571 15442 5
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... slipped from public consciousness (if you exclude being one of the inspirations behind Brighton Rock) because he did not have the foresight to appoint his own biographer. The Krays, those upstanding venture capitalists, made no such error. They looked like businessmen, only more so. They thought like businessmen, a steady expansion from a secured ...

Like Colonel Sanders

Christopher Tayler: The Stan Lee Era, 2 December 2021

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee 
by Abraham Riesman.
Bantam, 320 pp., £20, February, 978 0 593 13571 6
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Stan Lee: A Life in Comics 
by Liel Leibovitz.
Yale, 192 pp., £16.99, June 2020, 978 0 300 23034 5
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... the greatest ideas.’ Rejecting one of them, a pitch for a Marvel project constructed around David Schwimmer from Friends, the executives reached a consensus that ‘David Schwimmer had no charisma and was a little bit derided.’ Then they high-fived one another over Lee’s head.Professional humiliations didn’t ...

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