A Different Life

Thomas Laqueur: Can cellos remember?, 9 October 2025

Cello: A Journey through Silence to Sound 
by Kate Kennedy.
Apollo, 468 pp., £10.99, August, 978 1 80328 704 1
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... is classified ‘B’, meaning ‘no reason not to murder immediately’. Two weeks later, on 15 May 1944, he was one of 878 able-bodied men on Convoy 73, the only one of 79 convoys with no women or children, and the only one not headed for Auschwitz. It went to Kaunas in Lithuania. It is thought that the men were assigned to dig up and burn the bodies of ...

Outcasts and Desperados

Adam Shatz: Richard Wright’s Double Vision, 7 October 2021

The Man Who Lived Underground 
by Richard Wright.
Library of America, 250 pp., £19.99, April 2021, 978 1 59853 676 8
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... of white women.’Black feminists weren’t the only ones to take offence. In 1986 the novelist David Bradley confessed that the first time he read Native Son,I shed no tears for Bigger. I wanted him dead; by legal means if possible, by lynching if necessary … I did not see Bigger Thomas as a symbol of any kind of black man. To me he was a sociopath, pure ...

The Price

Dan Jacobson: The concluding part of Dan Jacobson’s interview with Ian Hamilton, 21 February 2002

... had enough younger people whom I admired, and still had my old chums from the Review, Colin, Hugo, David Harsent; they just carried over and became part of this larger thing.Did you get any help from the eminenti who’d tried to float a magazine?None at all. I didn’t really know them. And didn’t admire them, particularly. There was a whole social aspect ...

Market Forces and Malpractice

James Meek: The Housing Crisis, 4 July 2024

... Stockport and Rochdale – made the housing crisis central to his re-election campaign in May, when he won a third term by an overwhelming margin. He donates 15 per cent of his salary towards the effort to end rough sleeping. He says he’ll bear down on exploitative landlords who squeeze high rents out of tenants living in damp, chilly, crowded ...

Travels with My Mom

Terry Castle: In Santa Fe, 16 August 2007

... blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney. But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention and quiz Blakey under my breath: Do you think I look like a MAN? B. gives me an appraising glance but is non-committal. Then everything lands on our table in a ...

Every Field, Every Yard

James Meek: Return to Kyiv, 10 August 2023

... were eighty kilometres away. Life got back on its feet and adjusted to new circumstances.‘We may periodically forget the war,’ he went on, ‘but the war will, every so often, remind us of its existence.’What might seem a diversion from war often turns out to have war as its subject, or to intersect with war. I went to a concert at the Ukrainian ...

Nothing Fits

Nick Richardson: Amanda Knox, 24 October 2013

Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir 
by Amanda Knox.
Harper, 463 pp., £28.99, April 2013, 978 0 06 221720 2
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Meredith: Our Daughter’s Murder and the Heartbreaking Quest for the Truth 
by John Kercher.
Hodder, 291 pp., £8.99, April 2013, 978 1 4447 4278 7
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... who set herself up as a spokesperson for the Knox family. The Knoxes also hired a PR guru called David Marriott to prepare press releases for the American media. An American author called Douglas Preston, who had written a book about the serial killer known as the Monster of Florence – a case that had also been investigated by Justice Mignini, the chief ...

The Girl in the Shiny Boots

Richard Wollheim: Adolescence, 20 May 2004

... scarves from Schiaparelli, scarves from Patou, the girlfriend of my father’s closest friend, David A., but who came to the house with him only two times out of three. With the exception of Molly and Muriel, all these were women with long earrings and with what I learned to think of as tinkling voices, and I would have added to this list Lucienne ...

Two Pins and a Lollipop

Bee Wilson: Judy Garland’s Greatness, 25 December 2025

Judy Garland: The Voice of MGM 
by Scott Brogan.
Rowman & Littlefield, 404 pp., £50, August 2025, 978 1 4930 8654 2
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... it back to the studio bosses. When Garland became pregnant by her first husband, a musician called David Rose, the studio encouraged her to have an abortion: a baby would have ruined her image as a girlish ingénue.Garland felt the oppression of being an eternal teenager so keenly that she didn’t immediately welcome Meet Me in St Louis when discussions about ...

King of Cannibal Island

John Lanchester: Will the AI bubble burst?, 25 December 2025

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip 
by Stephen Witt.
Bodley Head, 248 pp., £25, April 2025, 978 1 84792 827 6
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The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant 
by Tae Kim.
Norton, 261 pp., £25, December 2024, 978 1 324 08671 0
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Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination 
by Karen Hao.
Allen Lane, 482 pp., £25, May 2025, 978 0 241 67892 3
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Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race that Will Change the World 
by Parmy Olson.
Pan Macmillan, 319 pp., £10.99, July 2025, 978 1 0350 3824 4
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... in my view, but that’s a topic for another day.)The head scientist at Nvidia was a man called David Kirk. As he told Witt,‘with parallel computing, it really took us a fair amount of convincing to talk Jensen into it … Same with CUDA. We really had to make the business case.’ But with AI, Huang experienced a Damascene epiphany. ‘He got it ...

Who holds the welding rod?

James Meek: Our Turbine Futures, 15 July 2021

... of Biscay, through the Channel and into the North Sea. It was bound for Hull. By lunchtime on 6 May, more than a month after setting out from Vietnam, it was steaming up the Humber.I wanted to confirm what was on board, so I looked on the internet and found a pub, the Humber Tavern, in the village of Paull, that seemed to have a good view of the water. I ...

Imitation Democracy

Perry Anderson: Post-Communist States, 27 August 2015

... along one social or cultural dimension can produce a given assessment, comparison along others may generate different judgments. None yields an all-purpose standard. The Baltic republics had enjoyed a number of past advantages under tsarism which in different ways had persisted after their reincorporation in the Soviet Union. Protestant and Catholic ...

The Sound of Voices Intoning Names

Thomas Laqueur, 5 June 1997

French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial 
by Serge Klarsfeld.
New York, 1881 pp., $95, November 1996, 0 8147 2662 3
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... one would expect from any collection of pictures, except for the jarring and very public Star of David which feels eerily as if it had invaded the private space of the pictures without its bearers having noticed. There were 1536 such pictures in the first, 1994 French edition; 1834 in the 1995 edition; another 497 in a January 1996 supplement; and a further ...

Where Life Is Seized

Adam Shatz: Frantz Fanon’s Revolution, 19 January 2017

Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté 
by Frantz Fanon, edited by Robert Young and Jean Khalfa.
La Découverte, 688 pp., £22, October 2015, 978 2 7071 8638 6
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... by psychiatric symptoms. Fanon’s most reliable biographers – Cherki and the British historian David Macey, whose book also appeared in 2000 – have tended to dismiss the dissertation, but Young and Khalfa make a strong case for its importance. In the very last line of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon wrote: ‘O my body, make of me always a man who always ...

After Martha

Paul Laity, 25 September 2025

... good intentions of the staff’. Writing in the British Medical Journal in 2018 the NHS consultant David Oliver argued that public (as opposed to expert) debate ‘is obsessed with the notion that, when things go wrong in healthcare, this must indicate failures by individuals. In such a narrative, systemic factors … are seen as convenient excuses for ...