From a Novel in Progress

James Wood, 9 May 2002

... gabled Victorian house. From the high window you could see half of the policeman’s helmet of St Paul’s dome, and further on, a glimpse of Parliament’s spires, and its loyal river selflessly flowing between its crowded banks. At dusk, holding a drink by the window and waiting for Jane to return home, I loved to see the city streetlights arrive in amber ...

What We’re about to Receive

Jeremy Harding: Food Insecurity, 13 May 2010

... view is Tim Lang, who began his radical contemplation of food during the 1970s, when he worked a hill farm in Lancashire. He’s now professor of food policy at City University. It was Lang who showed me Woolton’s map, with its premonition of food miles, a concept he himself developed in the 1990s, and when we met, he took me back to the repeal of the Corn ...

Into the Underworld

Iain Sinclair: The Hackney Underworld, 22 January 2015

... railway age, in the opening of Bleak House, ‘waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’. Mere ‘foot passengers’ struggle through the rain to their places of employment, adding ‘new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud’. The timid prose of Crossrail copywriters perverts Dickens by remediating his visions through a health and safety ...

Veronese’s ‘Allegories of Love’

T.J. Clark: Veronese, 3 April 2014

... compared with what might be expressed in words. I felt this strongly as I stood before the Paul Veronese. I felt assured that more of Man, more of awful and inconceivable intellect, went into the making of that picture than of a thousand poems.John Ruskin’s diary, 8 September 1849Over the past half-century or so, when writers have turned their ...

What are we telling the nation?

David Edgar: Thoughts about the BBC, 7 July 2005

Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC 
by Georgina Born.
Vintage, 352 pp., £10.99, August 2005, 0 09 942893 8
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Building Public Value: Renewing the BBC for a Digital World 
BBC, 135 pp.Show More
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... Wife, Bleasdale’s GBH and Jimmy McGovern’s Hearts and Minds (as well as importing Hill St Blues, ER, Friends and Frasier), but the decision to concentrate on the 16-35 age group led the channel to spurn programmes about quilts in favour of The Girlie Show, a change of direction which was accelerated under Grade’s successor, Michael ...
... deny this … The bull made Pasiphac pregnant, deceived by a maple-wood cow. Epimenides and St Paul said that ‘Cretans always lie.’ But Ovid personifies Crete herself as the liar. Crete, open to unnatural sex, expert at covering up, like Pasiphae when she deceives the bull, is the paradigmatic deceptive female. From Hesiod’s Pandora this has been an ...

I am a knife

Jacqueline Rose: A Woman’s Agency, 22 February 2018

Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus 
by Vanessa Grigoriadis.
Houghton Mifflin, 332 pp., £20, September 2017, 978 0 544 70255 4
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Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus 
by Laura Kipnis.
HarperCollins, 245 pp., £20, April 2017, 978 0 06 265786 2
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Living a Feminist Life 
by Sara Ahmed.
Duke, 312 pp., £20.99, February 2017, 978 0 8223 6319 4
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Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body 
by Roxane Gay.
Corsair, 288 pp., £13.99, July 2017, 978 1 4721 5111 7
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Difficult Women 
by Roxane Gay.
Corsair, 272 pp., £13.99, January 2017, 978 1 4721 5277 0
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... US Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace, to be chaired by Anita Hill (who brought charges of harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991), is more effective. In the past few months, our understanding of what constitutes sexual harassment has been put under considerable strain. For all the remonstrations ...

Love in a Dark Time

Colm Tóibín: Oscar Wilde, 19 April 2001

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde 
edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Fourth Estate, 1270 pp., £35, November 2000, 1 85702 781 7
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... a disguise, a hunted life, all that is not for me, to whom you have been revealed on that high hill where beautiful things are transfigured. O sweetest of all boys, most loved of all loves, my soul clings to your soul, my life is your life, and in all the world of pain and pleasure you are my ideal of admiration and joy.’ Five days later, Wilde was ...

The Lady in the Van

Alan Bennett, 26 October 1989

... saw more action than the Mini and she would tootle off in it on a Sunday morning, park on Primrose Hill (‘The air is better’) and even got as far as Hounslow. More often than not, though, she was happy (and I think she was happy then) just to sit in the Reliant and rev the engine. However, since she generally chose to do this first thing on Sunday ...

West End Vice

Alan Hollinghurst: Queer London, 8 May 2025

Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1945-59 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 445 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 0 241 37060 5
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Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960-67 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 416 pp., £30, September 2024, 978 0 241 68370 5
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... versus the now spreading ‘gay’), and districts specified – ‘when I walk through Notting Hill Gate I feel I’m at a gigantic homosexual party.’Gaydar was yet to be defined but had always been employed: gays knew one another by their eyes (‘liquid’, ‘hunted’, ‘sharing’), by walk, voice, hairstyle, eyebrow inflection, the way they held a ...

Prejudice Rules

LRB Contributors: After Roe v. Wade, 21 July 2022

... Yale, go to law school, and become a judge. Ford, meanwhile, majored in psychology at UNC Chapel Hill. In her first year, she struggled both socially and academically. Was that because she hadn’t busted her butt? Was that why, unlike Kavanaugh, she hadn’t ended up on the US Court of Appeals for the DC circuit – why she hasn’t been asked to help ...