Cronyism and Clientelism

Peter Geoghegan, 5 November 2020

... Technologies, the big data firm set up by the PayPal co-founder and Republican Party funder Peter Thiel, and Faculty, a small artificial intelligence company previously employed by Cummings’s Vote Leave campaign.During the summer, I was surprised to stumble across the name Public First in a spreadsheet of Cabinet Office spending data. Public First is ...

Making Media Great Again

Peter Geoghegan, 6 March 2025

... and a congregation that includes Geri Halliwell, Bear Grylls, the former John Lewis chair Sharon White and the multi-millionaire Conservative donor Ken Costa.HTB’s approach is rooted less in exegesis than in religious conviction. ‘Enthusiasm is a big part of it,’ according to the writer Andrew Graystone. ‘You believe that your brand of Christianity ...

Ismism

Evan Kindley: Modernist Magazines, 23 January 2014

The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I: Britain and Ireland 1880-1955 
edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker.
Oxford, 976 pp., £35, May 2013, 978 0 19 965429 1
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The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II: North America 1894-1960 
edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker.
Oxford, 1088 pp., £140, July 2012, 978 0 19 965429 1
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The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume III: Europe 1880-1940 
edited by Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker and Christian Weikop.
Oxford, 1471690 pp., £145, March 2013, 978 0 19 965958 6
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... to the second volume of their Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker point out that the nine-year run of the Dial alone amounts to ‘around 10,500 pages of text and 1200 pages of adverts, assuming an average of 300 words per page; this equals some 3.1 million words to read … about equivalent to ...

Under Rhodes

Amia Srinivasan: Rhodes Must Fall, 31 March 2016

... reform don’t draw public attention like the toppling of a statue, and the RMF leaders know this. Peter Scott in the Guardian called the removal of the statue the ‘easy option’ and a ‘displacement activity’ that distracts from the real issues. But it’s hard to imagine that anyone would be talking about Oxford’s colonial past, or racist present, if ...

Napoleon’s Near Miss

Linda Colley, 18 April 1985

Napoleon: The Myth of the Saviour 
by Jean Tulard, translated by Teresa Waugh.
Weidenfeld, 470 pp., £14.95, June 1984, 0 297 78439 0
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Alexis: Tsar of All the Russias 
by Philip Longworth.
Secker, 319 pp., £15, June 1984, 0 436 25688 6
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... German ones – in fêting and feasting on the legend. ‘I have beheld the Weltgeist upon a white horse’: thus Hegel. One may be able to take a white horse anywhere: how far Napoleon can still be taken – even in France – is less clear. Up to the First World War, the strength or weakness of Bonapartism was ...

At the Architects’

Alice Spawls: Whirling Automata, 4 July 2019

... agency didn’t like to admit it, by The Way Things Go (1987), a 30-minute film by the artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Their creation is an example of a Rube Goldberg machine (named after the cartoonist) in which an unlikely number of devices are linked together to create a domino effect – in its original sense the name refers to a machine ...

At Pallant House

Eleanor Birne: Pauline Boty, 6 February 2014

... She danced on Ready Steady Go!, modelled for David Bailey, introduced Bob Dylan to London, broke Peter Blake’s heart, was part-owner of a frock shop in Carnaby Street, married and gave birth to a daughter all before dying in 1966 at the age of 28. Her story was remembered but her pictures weren’t: most languished in her brother’s garage until a Pop Art ...

In the Shoebox

Ben Campbell: Peter’s Snapshots, 9 October 2025

... an illustration in her forthcoming biography of Brookner. The picture had been taken by my father, Peter Campbell, and I knew that the original, if it still existed, would be among thousands of other 35 mm black and white negatives, trimmed to six shots per strip, some of them in labelled envelopes but most forming a ...

Heat in a Mild Climate

James Wood: Baron Britain of Aldeburgh, 19 December 2013

Benjamin Britten: A Life in the 20th Century 
by Paul Kildea.
Allen Lane, 635 pp., £30, January 2013, 978 1 84614 232 1
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Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music 
by Neil Powell.
Hutchinson, 512 pp., £25, January 2013, 978 0 09 193123 0
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... anthems Hymn to St Cecilia (classy words by Auden, usefully decent treble solo)♪ and Hymn to St Peter (eerie plainsong effect, also with coveted treble solo opportunity).♪ In the cathedral, thrillingly at night, that enormous building dark and mysterious beyond our spotlit oasis, we thrashed our way through an evening performance of Noye’s ...

Consider the lions

Peter Campbell, 22 July 1993

The House of Gold 
by Richard Goy.
Cambridge, 304 pp., £60, January 1993, 0 521 40513 0
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The Palace of the Sun 
by Robert Berger.
Pennsylvania State, 232 pp., £55, April 1993, 0 271 00847 4
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... over twenty thousand sheets of gold leaf were applied to details of the façade, along with blue, white, black and red paint. This display, like embroidery on a peasant costume, enriched a conventional structure – a plan-type which Goy traced in Venetian Vernacular Architecture from its earliest appearance in Byzantine palaces through the Renaissance and ...

Humph

Peter Campbell, 4 July 1985

Degas: His Life, Times and Work 
by Roy McMullen.
Secker, 517 pp., £18.50, March 1985, 9780436276477
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Degas: The Dancers 
by George Shackelford.
Norton, 151 pp., £22.95, March 1985, 0 393 01975 6
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Degas Pastels, Oil Sketches, Drawings 
by Götz Adriani.
Thames and Hudson, 408 pp., £35, May 1985, 0 500 09168 4
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Bricabracomania: The Bourgeois and the Bibelot 
by Rémy de Saisselin.
Thames and Hudson, 189 pp., £12.50, February 1985, 0 500 23424 8
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... at the drawings (he said at one point that he would have devoted his life to work in black and white if he could have done so) or the sculptures made during his last years – figures in wax not much more than a hand’s span high – it is as though he had taken each work to the stage where the imaginative impulse behind it was realised, and then ...

The Antagoniser’s Agoniser

Peter Clarke: Keith Joseph, 19 July 2001

Keith Joseph 
by Andrew Denham and Mark Garnett.
Acumen, 488 pp., £28, March 2001, 9781902683034
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... and over-hyped Thatcherite narrative (and their refusal simply to turn it inside-out, so that white becomes black). In the process, it is made apparent that Joseph was a rather more consistent politician, if also a more inconsistent personality, than either he or his admirers subsequently liked to acknowledge. This reassessment has to take account of ...

Beloved Country

R.W. Johnson, 8 July 1993

... the most publicised recent killing was that of Chris Hani, the SACP (Communist) leader, by the white Right. The Azanian People’s Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress, carries out anti-white atrocities from time to time and, of course, Inkatha takes its vengeance on the ANC with fair ...

No Restraint

John Demos: Chief Much Business, 9 February 2006

White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America 
by Fintan O’Toole.
Faber, 402 pp., £20, August 2005, 0 571 21840 7
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... Nations of the famed Iroquois Confederacy were represented. The focus of their attentions was a white man living in their midst, whose father had died the previous winter far away in Ireland. They would arrive in groups at this man’s large and stately home, and would enact for him their ancient tribal ceremonies of ‘condolence’. They would adorn his ...

Short Cuts

Jeremy Harding: Basil Davidson, 5 August 2010

... aptitude for this life-and-death struggle in Occupied Europe was then transposed to Africa, where white supremacist doctrines that struck a familiar chord had to be known and described. So he was off again, on foot, only now instead of bearing arms, he took notebooks: journeying with nationalist guerrillas and keeping the record were modest expressions of ...