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You Have A Mother Don’t You?

Andrew O’Hagan: Cowboy Simplicities, 11 September 2003

Searching for John Ford: A Life 
by Joseph McBride.
Faber, 838 pp., £25, May 2003, 0 571 20075 3
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... with the ferocity of Ford’s detractors (they seem to close their eyes to watch his films), but David Thomson makes a mighty-seeming case against him in his Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. From the 1975 edition: Ford’s male chauvinism believes in uniforms, drunken candour, fresh-faced little women (though never sexuality), a gallery of supporting ...

Necessity or Ideology?

Frederick Wilmot-Smith: Legal Aid, 6 November 2014

... who was lord chancellor at the time, sought to reduce the length of sentences for serious crimes; David Cameron publicly overruled him. So, despite representing less than half the legal aid budget, civil claims – which are usually claims individuals make to remedy breaches of their rights – bore the brunt of the cuts. The strategy was to remove various ...

Mumpsimus, Sumpsimus

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Common Prayer, 24 May 2012

Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559 and 1662 
edited by Brian Cummings.
Oxford, 830 pp., £16.99, September 2011, 978 0 19 920717 6
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... spheres. English and Welsh Protestantism remained divided between church and chapel, with the vital consequence that religious and then political pluralism became embedded in national identity. All this was the fault of the Prayer Book’s return in 1662. Yet even when, in the 18th century, an increasingly powerful ‘new dissent’ appeared in the form ...

Heathrow to Canary Wharf

Nick Richardson: Crossrail, 11 October 2012

... unburrowed and Abercrombie moved east to rebuild Hong Kong. The name ‘Crossrail’ was coined by David Barran, a monocle-wearing, snuff-snorting industrialist, in a 1974 report drawn up at the request of the Department of the Environment. Barran, like Abercrombie, proposed two tunnels, one from London Bridge to Victoria, the other from Paddington to ...

Time of the Red-Man

Mark Ford: James Fenimore Cooper, 25 September 2008

James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years 
by Wayne Franklin.
Yale, 708 pp., £25, July 2008, 978 0 300 10805 7
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... that the Leatherstocking series (the five novels that feature Natty Bumppo) were the first vital embodiment of the new consciousness underpinning American culture. In Natty, Lawrence writes, one finds ‘the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential ...

No Intention of Retreating

Lorna Scott Fox: Martha Gellhorn’s Wars, 2 September 2004

Martha Gellhorn: A Life 
by Caroline Moorehead.
Vintage, 550 pp., £8.99, June 2004, 0 09 928401 4
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... Hemingway marathon, to the fling with James Gavin (hero of the 82nd Airborne), to the affair with David Gurewitsch in Cuernavaca, even the marriage to Tom Matthews in 1954 that made her so ‘plain silly happy’ at first: You see, I have chalked it up too well, and see where and how I am caught – and how tightly. Through ignorance, carelessness, pride and ...

After Arafat

Rashid Khalidi: Palestine’s options, 3 February 2005

... to the alienation of public opinion, as well as harming investment and offending donors. Vital social services languished (or were provided by Hamas or NGOs), while the PA lavished money on cars, apartments and travel for its senior cadres. Equally serious was the failure of the Palestinian Legislative Council, elected in January 1996 at the same ...

Didn’t we agree to share?

Sheila Heti: ‘The First Wife’, 13 July 2017

The First Wife 
by Paulina Chiziane, translated by David Brookshaw.
Archipelago, 250 pp., £14.99, August 2016, 978 0 914671 48 0
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... doesn’t claim the term) or something else doesn’t matter. Rami gains something vital from witnessing their economic independence, which she helped cultivate. She gets a new sort of pride, to compensate for the loss of the ancestral pride she felt as the only wife – and a chaste one. But losing traditional rewards is never easy. In one ...

Writing and Publishing

Alan Sillitoe, 1 April 1982

... opponent was saying exhibited the profound conviction of his own beliefs. Did not the poet King David say: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt’? Individualism, bordering on eccentricity, even to the extent of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’, has ...

Cheerfully Chopping up the World

Michael Wood: Film theory, 2 July 1998

The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium 
by Gilberto Perez.
Johns Hopkins, 466 pp., £25, April 1998, 0 8018 5673 6
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On the History of Film Style 
by David Bordwell.
Harvard, 322 pp., £39.95, February 1998, 0 674 63428 4
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Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine 
by D.N. Rodowick.
Duke, 260 pp., £46.95, October 1997, 0 8223 1962 4
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The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema 
by Jean Mitry, translated by Christopher King.
Athlone, 405 pp., £45, February 1998, 0 485 30084 2
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Signs and Meaning in the Cinema 
by Peter Wollen.
BFI, 188 pp., £40, May 1998, 0 85170 646 0
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... same thing, but not sketchily, and across a very wide range of films; and the central argument of David Bordwell’s book is similar. Perez is interested in ‘the properties and possibilities of the medium’, but thinks that what distinguishes them is their variousness. ‘Most theorists have attempted to define the nature of film as something ...

Fat Man

Steven Shapin: Churchill’s Bomb, 26 September 2013

Churchill’s Bomb: A Hidden History of Science, War and Politics 
by Graham Farmelo.
Faber, 554 pp., £25, October 2013, 978 0 571 24978 7
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... ahead with the massive project on the basis of the reports of the MAUD Committee and secured the vital collaboration of the Canadians in uranium isotope separation using the gaseous diffusion method. He had directed British scientists not to tell the Americans about calculations done in Birmingham early in 1940 by the émigré physicists Otto Frisch and ...

In His Pink Negligée

Colm Tóibín: The Ruthless Truman Capote, 21 April 2005

The Complete Stories 
by Truman Capote.
Random House, 400 pp., $24.95, September 2004, 0 679 64310 9
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Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote 
edited by Gerald Clarke.
Random House, 487 pp., $27.95, September 2004, 0 375 50133 9
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... written and of a balls-aching boredom.’ In 1960 he found something he did like. He announced to David Selznick that ‘a delightful book’ called To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was ‘going to be a great success’. He himself, he wrote, was the model for the character Dill, being a childhood friend of the author’s. The first letter in Too Brief a ...

Praeludium of a Grunt

Tom Crewe: Charles Lamb’s Lives, 19 October 2023

Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb 
by Eric G. Wilson.
Yale, 521 pp., £25, January 2022, 978 0 300 23080 2
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... energy in Wordsworth and Lloyd, too. His closest friends felt as if he were, during their most vital moments, inside them.’Wilson gives us no reason to trust his critical judgments, either. It is possible that if you have no sympathy for Lamb, or for people who eat meat, you might find something sinister in his pirouetting around the subject of the ...

Salt Spray

Ferdinand Mount: When Britannia Ruled the Waves, 5 December 2024

The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain 1815-1945 
by N.A.M. Rodger.
Allen Lane, 934 pp., £40, October 2024, 978 0 7139 9412 4
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... Palmerston in the notorious case of Don Pacifico, which Rodger only mentions in passing. David Pacifico was a merchant of Portuguese-Jewish descent, who enjoyed British citizenship by virtue of being born in Gibraltar. He had various dodgy claims against the Greek government, which Pam decided to uphold by instructing Parker (again) to blockade ...

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