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Heir to Blair

Christopher Tayler: Among the New Tories, 26 April 2007

... Now, just as an indication of how the party’s changing, Wilfred got selected for Chippenham – white, middle-class, you know, deepest Wiltshire. And Wilfred tooled up to the selection meeting, wearing his jeans and an open-necked shirt, and just took them by storm. And they love him.’ ‘Do you want to meet Wilfred?’ the press officer ...
... that I would present myself in the hospital the following Sunday afternoon. The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh has a poem called ‘The Hospital’, which begins: ‘A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward/Of a chest hospital.’ This did not happen to me, but it was surprising how quickly the routines of the hospital became comforting and ...

Into the Underworld

Iain Sinclair: The Hackney Underworld, 22 January 2015

... scientist, Professor Challenger, who would now be seen a natural performer for the television age, Patrick Moore channelled by Brian Blessed, sinks a shaft in Sussex, going deeper than anyone has gone before, to prove that ‘the world upon which we live is itself a living organism, endowed … with a circulation, a respiration, and a nervous system of its ...

A Revision of Expectations

Richard Horton: Notes on the NHS, 2 July 1998

The National Health Service: A Political History 
by Charles Webster.
Oxford, 233 pp., £9.99, April 1998, 0 19 289296 7
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... A first attempt to create an NHS came in 1944, with the publication of a woolly and confusing White Paper. GPs, for example, were to be employed, probably on a salaried basis, by a Central Medical Board. The British Medical Association concluded that this was ‘the thin end of the wedge of a form of service to which it is overwhelmingly opposed – a ...

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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... at the Dorchester. ‘I quite liked him being the waiter; he was rather a good waiter. Dressed in white he was OK.’ Some years later, in France (‘I may have a sadistic streak, I think’), he encouraged Clement to take a ride on a helter-skelter: ‘I was down below watching him go round, roaring with laughter at his fear and anger; he couldn’t get off ...

America’s Non-Compliance

Gareth Peirce: The Case against Extradition, 13 May 2010

... had miscalculated the political fallout. Graham has been trying to reach a deal with the White House over the attorney general’s head, trading Republican support for the closing of Guantánamo in exchange for a military trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. At stake is not just whether the man known as KSM and his co-conspirators receive a civilian ...

Todd Almighty

Peter Medawar, 16 February 1984

A Time to Remember: The Autobiography of a Chemist 
by Alexander Todd.
Cambridge, 257 pp., £15, November 1983, 0 521 25593 7
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... is not a substitute. Alexander Robertus Todd, Baron Trumpington, was the son of a responsible white-collar employee of a railway company who later became managing director of a substantial department store in Glasgow. Todd describes him as an ambitious and hard-working man who went to work at the age of 13 and from then on was self-taught by attendance at ...

Plimsoll’s Story

Stephen Sedley, 28 April 2011

The Oxford History of the Laws of England 1820-1914: Vol. XI, English Legal System; Vol. XII, Private Law; Vol. XIII, Fields of Development 
edited by William Cornish et al.
Oxford, 3571 pp., £495, February 2010, 978 0 19 925883 3
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... Defying the advice of the King of Hearts to the White Rabbit, the Oxford History of the Laws of England began in the middle, with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R.H. Helmholz’s opening volume on early canon law ...

Downhill from Here

Ian Jack: The 1970s, 27 August 2009

When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies 
by Andy Beckett.
Faber, 576 pp., £20, May 2009, 978 0 571 22136 3
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... The 20th century lay stacked in broad layers of time: dark moorland where glistened an occasional white milestone marked with a year and an event. Sometimes the events were large and public. The General Strike happened in 1926 and Germany invaded Poland in 1939. But often they were small and private. In my own family, 1944 wasn’t remembered for D-Day but as ...

Trouble down there

Ferdinand Mount: Tea with Sassoon, 7 August 2003

Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet 1886-1918 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Duckworth, 600 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 0 7156 2894 1
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Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches 1918-67 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Duckworth, 526 pp., £30, April 2003, 0 7156 2971 9
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Sassoon: The Worlds of Philip and Sybil 
by Peter Stansky.
Yale, 295 pp., £25, April 2003, 0 300 09547 3
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... golfers such as P.G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming, and only a little inferior to Malcolm Lowry and Patrick Hamilton, who were golfers as well as drinkers of championship class. This devotion to sport went with a declared aversion to women and, at this stage, to sex in any form. He told Carpenter in 1911 that he was ‘still unspotted’, and so he seems to ...

Oh God, what have we done?

Jackson Lears: The Strange Career of Robert Oppenheimer, 20 December 2012

Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer 
by Ray Monk.
Cape, 818 pp., £30, November 2012, 978 0 224 06262 6
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... inclined. Aiming high, he applied to work with Ernest Rutherford. Rejected, he turned to Patrick Blackett, a glamorous experimenter whom contemporaries described as ‘a young Oedipus’. Oppenheimer was miserable, near collapse, bedevilled by sexual frustration and academic anxieties. He lacked the practical skills needed for experimental ...

Turning Wolfe Tone

John Kerrigan: A Third Way for Ireland, 20 October 2022

Belfast 
directed by Kenneth Branagh.
January
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Small World: Ireland 1798-2018 
by Seamus Deane.
Cambridge, 343 pp., £20, June 2021, 978 1 108 84086 6
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Irish Literature in Transition 
edited by Claire Connolly and Marjorie Howes.
Cambridge, six vols, £564, March 2020, 978 1 108 42750 0
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Ireland, Literature and the Coast: Seatangled 
by Nicholas Allen.
Oxford, 305 pp., £70, November 2020, 978 0 19 885787 7
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A History of Irish Literature and the Environment 
edited by Malcolm Sen.
Cambridge, 457 pp., £90, July, 978 1 108 49013 9
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... When the black slaves of Montserrat planned a rebellion in 1768, the date they chose was St Patrick’s Day, because they thought the plantation owners would be partying. Deane’s sympathy with Mitchel’s struggle against the British leads him to balance with care but not to obscure Mitchel’s role in ...

Do I like it?

Terry Castle: Outsider Art, 28 July 2011

... San Francisco artist Jimmy Miles, incline to a dry, coolly minimalist practice, in which white space is not only tolerated, but an essential, if seriously off-kilter aesthetic feature in its own right: I’m not sure what to call Miles’s austere and evacuated style. Some kind of Blakean radical simplicity? A borderline personality’s childlike ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: My 2006, 4 January 2007

... up the beck. Not a rare bird, the heron’s size is never less than spectacular, and grey and white though they are they still seem exotic. Bitterly cold with snow forecast later so we get off early up the M6 to Penrith and Brampton, hoping to have a look at the Written Rock, a quarry by the river at Brampton with an inscription carved by the legion that ...

Brooke’s Benefit

Anthony Powell, 16 April 1981

... when he entered King’s School, Canterbury (alma mater of Christopher Marlowe, Somerset Maugham, Patrick Leigh-Fermor), from which Brooke ran away in the first week. He was sent back. The second week he ran away again. The second withdrawal marked the termination of his residence there, which had lasted less than a fortnight. Brooke’s parents – whom he ...

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