English Changing

Frank Kermode, 7 February 1980

The State of the Language 
edited by Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks.
California, 609 pp., £14.95, January 1980, 0 520 03763 4
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... speak, a new loss of life, and so contribute to the renovation of the language. Another professor, David Lodge, says a good word for the English spoken in Marin County, California, as recorded by Cyra McFadden in The Serial. Marin, a ‘high-energy trip with … happening people’, is near San Francisco, ‘the consciousness-raising capital of the western ...

Allegedly

Michael Davie, 1 November 1984

Public Scandal, Odium and Contempt: An Investigation of Recent Libel Cases 
by David Hooper.
Secker, 230 pp., £12.95, September 1984, 0 436 20093 7
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... the case was over the legal costs would be reckoned at £750,000? The author of this book, Mr David Hooper (Eton and Balliol, the blurb tells us), practised at the bar before becoming a solicitor. He acts as an adviser to his present publishers, but, as the blurb also tells us, was not consulted about this particular book. This faintly ironic tone is ...

Getting it right

Tam Dalyell, 18 July 1985

The Ponting Affair 
by Richard Norton-Taylor.
Cecil Woolf, 144 pp., £5.95, June 1985, 0 900821 74 4
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Who Killed Hilda Murrell? 
by Judith Cook.
New English Library, 182 pp., £1.95, June 1985, 0 450 05885 9
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... Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could have carried on. Many a crusade has been smothered by the great big yawn of the British public. Norton-Taylor is not and never was Tam Dalyell’s or anyone else’s tame journalist. On the contrary, he started by being ...

It’s Been a Lot of Fun

David Runciman: Hitchens’s Hitchens, 24 June 2010

Hitch-22: A Memoir 
by Christopher Hitchens.
Atlantic, 435 pp., £20, June 2010, 978 1 84354 921 5
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... He has been, in his own words, ‘a consistent anti-totalitarian’, though he admits that this means ‘one might have to expose oneself to steadily mounting contradictions.’ He has had to adjust himself, intellectually and geographically, to his growing taste for the United States and his sense of its power to do good in the world. He moved to the US ...

Heathcliff Redounding

David Trotter: Emily Brontë’s Scenes, 9 May 2024

Emily Brontë: Selected Writings 
edited by Francis O’Gorman.
Oxford, 496 pp., £95, December 2023, 978 0 19 886816 3
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... in pursuit of the phantom, before exiting in a more orthodox fashion via the front door. Wyler means this iconic scene to transcend the mere business of narrative in much the same way that the enduring intensity of the passion once stirred between Heathcliff and Cathy will continue to beggar explanation, if not belief. The film’s trailer has after all ...

At the Met Breuer

Hal Foster: Thoughts made visible, 31 March 2016

... new spaces for modern and contemporary art back on Fifth Avenue, which are to be designed by David Chipperfield on a budget of $600 million (the rumour is that this amount will be reduced). Four years ago the Met’s current director, Thomas Campbell, hired Sheena Wagstaff, head of exhibitions at Tate Modern, to lead the curatorial charge, and she has ...

Short Cuts

Maya James: Climate Politics, 12 May 2022

... In January, the Mail on Sunday led with an interview with the former chief Brexit negotiator David Frost: ‘I think people have been sold a kind of view that the net zero transition can happen without much increase in costs or problems. That’s obviously not the case and people are now seeing that.’ The Daily Mail quoted Julian Knight, chair of the ...

Point of Principle

Michael Irwin, 2 April 1981

The Country 
by David Plante.
Gollancz, 159 pp., £6.95, March 1981, 0 575 02938 2
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The Radiant Future 
by Alexander Zinoviev, translated by Gordon Clough.
Bodley Head, 287 pp., £7.50, March 1981, 0 370 30219 2
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Farewell to Europe 
by Walter Laqueur.
Weidenfeld, 310 pp., £6.50, March 1981, 0 297 77870 6
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... had ceaselessly regulated his own wishes by ‘duty to the outside world’ He casts about for a means of achieving some glimpse of communion with the dead man. The story can fairly be summarised since its meaning and power are vested in the telling. It is David Plante’s manner that will attract or alienate readers. The ...

How Much Is Too Much?

Benjamin Kunkel: Marx’s Return, 3 February 2011

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism 
by David Harvey.
Profile, 296 pp., £14.99, April 2010, 978 1 84668 308 4
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A Companion to Marx’s ‘Capital’ 
by David Harvey.
Verso, 368 pp., £10.99, March 2010, 978 1 84467 359 9
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... the landmarks of Marxian economic thinking include Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1972), David Harvey’s Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi’s Long 20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual quakes of capitalist crisis. Yet little trace ...

Systemite Pop

Tabitha Lasley: The Children of God, 23 September 2021

Rebel: The Extraordinary Story of a Childhood in the ‘Children of God’ Cult 
by Faith Morgan.
Hodder, 368 pp., £16.99, June, 978 1 5293 4759 3
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... her adult life trying to evade. The Children of God was founded in America in 1968 by a man called David Berg. Former members include River and Joaquim Phoenix, Rose McGowan and the writer Lauren Hough, who described Berg as a ‘failed Pentecostal preacher and wildly successful alcoholic’. Ostensibly a Christian movement, it had its roots in the ...

Shining Pink

Tam Dalyell, 23 May 1985

Death of a Rose-Grower: Who killed Hilda Murrell? 
by Graham Smith.
Cecil Woolf, 96 pp., £5.95, April 1985, 0 900821 76 0
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... and callous murder’ of Hilda Murrell, to use the words of Chief Detective Superintendent David Cole, are complex. So complex that, I am told, the Police have taken some forty thousand or more records, of which over fourteen thousand have been computerised. The death of the 78-year-old Shrewsbury rose-grower is, I understand, the subject of the ...

Middle Way

Jon Whiteley, 2 April 1981

Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision 
by Albert Boime.
Yale, 683 pp., £35, June 1980, 0 300 02158 5
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... the art of the 19th century to the society that created it. Boime’s belief that painting between David and the Impressionists reflected the political and social problems of a century divided between liberty and constraint leads him to describe a large part of French art (and music, literature and philosophy) as the product of a juste-milieu, stuck like ...

Short Cuts

Christopher Prendergast: Student Loans, 6 January 2011

... A ‘progressive’ system means, broadly speaking, that some people pay more than others for the same benefit, on the grounds that they can afford to, just as some pay more taxes, both absolutely and proportionally, to fund government services. There can be no doubt that the Coalition policy on student debt is ‘progressive’ in the sense that some will pay (back) more than others depending on how much they earn after graduation ...

This is America, man

Michael Wood: ‘Treme’ and ‘The Wire’, 27 May 2010

The Wire 
created by David Simon.
HBO/2002-2008
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Treme 
created by Eric Overmyer and David Simon.
HBO/April
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... was) extremely unwise to stop him doing exactly what he wanted to do. ‘This is America’ means power is at the heart of every story, and understanding power is the way to stay alive. The drug lord keeps his men out of jail by threatening witnesses or having them murdered, and there is nothing the police can do about it. Indeed for most of the time ...

I’m being a singer

Andrew O’Hagan: Dandy Highwaymen, 8 October 2020

Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics 
by Dylan Jones.
Faber, 663 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 0 571 35343 9
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... Oakey, from Sheffield, was a hospital porter; he lived for alienation, the post-industrial, David Bowie, and having a show-stopping haircut. He was the singer in the Human League. His hair was long on one side, covering the entire right half of his face, and short on the other. He ‘had the perfect postmodernist haircut for the perfect postmodernist ...