... banal information she purveys, and Sandy would not have had such a finely calibrated ear if the young Humphries had not first embraced the culture of far-off Europe in its most refined, preferably decadent forms. When Humphries writes in propria persona his prose can scarcely contain its freight of cultivated allusions. He writes the most nutritiously ...

Social Arrangements

John Bayley, 30 December 1982

The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry 
edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion.
Penguin, 208 pp., £1.95, October 1982, 0 14 042283 8
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The Rattle Bag 
edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.
Faber, 498 pp., £10, October 1982, 0 571 11966 2
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... in her poetry: it is her craftsmanship that is paid the sincerest compliment in the words of the young poet today. The drama she made of herself goes into the museum of legend, the vivid fictions live on. Alvarez himself rightly forecast the ‘new areas of experience’ which would result from poetry exploring its own sorts of fiction in its own ways. But ...

Capitalism’s Capital

Jackson Lears: The Man Who Built New York, 17 March 2016

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York 
by Robert Caro.
Bodley Head, 1246 pp., £35, July 2015, 978 1 84792 364 6
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... married in 1915. Moses brought the same erotic energy to civil service reform. He was one of those young men whose pulse could be set racing by a new system of classifying government jobs. He embarked on a huge reclassification project, drawing up a detailed plan for making promotions on a grading system based on merit – a move calculated to outrage the ...

Zip it

Hal Foster: Barnett Newman’s Anarchism, 5 February 2026

Barnett Newman: Here 
by Amy Newman.
Princeton, 693 pp., £35, January, 978 0 691 24918 6
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... Vogue editor Alexander Liberman, and Hess and Rosenberg were soon to convert, to be followed by young critic-curators like Sam Hunter and Lawrence Alloway. Just as important, Newman finally had patrons such as Ben Heller. ‘Ultimately,’ Amy Newman writes, ‘he entered and navigated [the art world] with more success and finesse than any of his former ...

Akihito and the Sorrows of Japan

Richard Lloyd Parry: The Anxious Emperor, 19 March 2020

... later, ‘and I felt they needed broadening.’ The influence of this American pacifist on the young prince was regarded resentfully by right-wing intellectuals; one of them would later complain that Akihito had contracted a spiritual and intellectual ‘fungus’ from his tutor.His father, Hirohito, was never an active war commander or strategist, but ...

The Return of History

Raphael Samuel, 14 June 1990

... Labour’s Minister of Education, told the Association of Education Committees in 1968, ‘for young people to know the facts about Vietnam than it is to know all the details of the Wars of the Roses.’ These modernising tendencies were very much to the fore in CSE, the school-leaving examination introduced in 1964 with the aim of giving every ...

Christian v. Cannibal

Michael Rogin: Norman Mailer and American history, 1 April 1999

The American Century 
by Harold Evans.
Cape, 710 pp., £40, November 1998, 0 224 05217 9
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The Time of Our Time 
by Norman Mailer.
Little, Brown, 1286 pp., £25, September 1998, 0 316 64571 0
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... wake the American Left (a summons answered in the enthusiastic endorsements of, for example, John Kenneth Galbraith, the reporter Neil Sheehan and the historian Sean Wilentz). The antagonist he explicitly argues with most often is his fellow philo-American of British origins, Paul Johnson (once on the Left, then Thatcherite, now an admirer of Tony ...

Sheer Cloakery

Adam Mars-Jones: Joshua Cohen, 24 September 2015

Book of Numbers 
by Joshua Cohen.
Harvill Secker, 580 pp., £16.99, June 2015, 978 1 84655 865 8
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... in the language of advertising, her professional world: Imagine taking home this beautiful young pale-skinned blackhaired late-model Jewess. Into fitness, healthy living. Raised good in better Yonkers. Mother a Hebrew School teacher, which means for her a traditional education. Father a chief risk officer for an energy provider in the ...

Beijing Envy

Joshua Kurlantzick: China in Africa, 5 July 2007

China and Africa: Engagement and Compromise 
by Ian Taylor.
Routledge, 233 pp., £75, August 2006, 0 415 39740 5
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China and the Developing World: Beijing’s Strategy for the 21st Century 
edited by Joshua Eisenman, Eric Heginbotham and Derek Mitchell.
Sharpe, 232 pp., $29.95, April 2007, 978 0 7656 1713 2
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China’s African Policy 
Foreign Ministry of the People’s Republic of China, January 2006Show More
China’s Expanding Role in Africa: Implications for the United States 
by Bates Gill, Chin-hao Huang and J. Stephen Morrison.
Centre for Strategic and International Studies, February 2007
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Friends and Interests: China’s Distinctive Links with Africa 
by Barry Sautman.
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, April 2006
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African Perspectives on China in Africa 
edited by Firoze Manji and Stephen Marks.
Fahamu, 174 pp., £11.95, March 2007, 978 0 9545637 3 8
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Africa’s Silk Road: China and India’s New Economic Frontier 
by Harry Broadman.
World Bank, 391 pp., $20, November 2006, 0 8213 6835 4
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... zone in the country that would attract $800 million of investment. Zambia’s former president, Kenneth Kaunda, received him personally, and the Chinese president delivered his usual speech: ‘China is happy to have Zambia as a good friend, good partner, and a good brother.’ Two years earlier, around fifty Zambians were killed in an accident at an ...

Diary

Thomas Jones: The Last Days of eBay, 19 June 2008

... shut down as a hoax eight days later, with bidding at $5.7 million. In July 1999, bidding for a ‘young man’s virginity’ reached $10 million before it was pulled. Shipments of cocaine, votes and souls have also often been listed. In 2001, the artist Keith Obadike put his blackness up for sale (the description is reproduced in Everyday eBay): ‘This ...

Squillions

John Lanchester: Where’s all the cash?, 21 May 2026

Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won 
by Oliver Bullough.
Weidenfeld, 336 pp., £25, January, 978 1 3996 1809 0
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How to Launder Money: A Guide for Law Enforcement, Prosecutors and Policymakers 
by George Cottrell and Lawrence Burke Files.
Biteback, 400 pp., £25, February, 978 1 83736 040 6
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... was $759 billion. By 2015, it was $1.38 trillion. Last year, it hit $2.395 trillion. As Kenneth Rogoff put it in The Curse of Cash (2016), the dumbfounding thing is that ‘no one quite knows where exactly most of it lives or what it is used for.’ According to Oliver Bullough, in his alarming and unsettling book Everybody Loves Our Dollars, in ...

The Past’s Past

Thomas Laqueur, 19 September 1996

Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History 
by Jay Winter.
Cambridge, 310 pp., £12.95, September 1996, 0 521 49682 9
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... definition predicated on rupture. Against this orthodoxy several scholars – the art historians Kenneth Silver and Romi Golan, for example – have recently argued that, on the contrary, French art in the Twenties and Thirties was far more conservative than Modernist. Winter writes in this revisionist tradition but attacks on a broader front. He has devoted ...

Falling in love with Lucian

Colm Tóibín: Lucian Freud’s Outer Being, 10 October 2019

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth, 1922-68 
by William Feaver.
Bloomsbury, 680 pp., £35, September 2019, 978 1 4088 5093 0
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... getting the clap,’ he remembered. In descriptions by himself and others, he emerges as a feral young fellow who did not let much bother him. But there are interesting moments when he takes a moral position; for example, when Dylan Thomas, who annoyed him by making assumptions about his relationship with Spender, irritated him further by boasting how well ...

The Case of Agatha Christie

John Lanchester, 20 December 2018

... psychology of types – was an interest in form. The composer Michael Friedman, who died much too young last year, left a list of column topics which included the thought that ‘I seriously think Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the great modernist novel.’ It is possible to have an argument over the exact delineation of the term ‘modernist’ there, since ...

Wigging In

Matthew Bevis: On James Schuyler, 23 April 2026

A Day like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler 
by Nathan Kernan.
FSG, 503 pp., £30, September 2025, 978 0 374 28117 5
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... coming. Auden based a character in The Age of Anxiety, published in 1947, on Schuyler: Emble is a young man given to watching others with ‘a covert but passionate curiosity. What makes them tick? What would it feel like to be a success?’ Just over forty years later, Schuyler had an inkling. Having been introduced to the audience at the Dia Art Foundation ...