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Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

... his erstwhile fiancée, Ethne. All this gets pretty tedious and repetitive and rather Henry James-like in its moral ramifications. It’s gone through so often that one wonders whether the repetition is because the book came out originally in serial form. Each chapter certainly has a subheading: ‘Durrance hears news of Faversham’; ‘The House ...

Anti-Dad

Adam Mars-Jones: Amis Resigns, 21 June 2012

Lionel Asbo: State of England 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 288 pp., £18.99, June 2012, 978 0 224 09620 1
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... with a particular way of going about their trade, can shed their skins. The lapse of time between Henry Green’s Living (1929) and Nothing (1950) is shorter than between Money and The Pregnant Widow, but the transformation in the texture of the prose is total, from clotted to syncopated conversational flow. Green’s late style is thinned out but has its own ...

In Gratitude

Jenny Diski, 7 May 2015

... in the dead centre of some new version of the rake’s progress. In Tony Richardson’s movie Tom Jones, which came out in 1963, there were waifs galore, dependent on and resenting the goodwill of strangers. But what could I be resentful about? Being resentful was the wickedest thing I could imagine, though it sometimes felt like a get-out clause for my ...

Poison is better

Kevin Okoth: Africa’s Cold War, 15 June 2023

White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa 
by Susan Williams.
Hurst, 651 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 1 78738 555 9
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Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-75 
by Natalia Telepneva.
North Carolina, 302 pp., £37.95, June, 978 1 4696 6586 3
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... and Marthe Ouandié made sure some of their concerns were addressed. The conference was chaired by Tom Mboya, a Kenyan trade union activist who, it later transpired, was in close contact with the CIA. As Williams writes, ‘the US had, in fact, been well represented throughout the conference – in covert and unforeseen ways.’ Washington funded a number of ...

Air-Conditioned Unease

Andrew O’Hagan: Joan Didion on the Couch, 26 June 2025

Notes to John 
by Joan Didion.
Fourth Estate, 208 pp., £18.99, April, 978 0 00 876724 2
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Didion & Babitz 
by Lili Anolik.
Atlantic, 344 pp., £10.99, July, 978 1 80546 394 8
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The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir 
by Griffin Dunne.
Grove, 385 pp., £10.99, June 2024, 978 1 80471 057 9
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The Uptown Local: Joy, Death and Joan Didion 
by Cory Leadbeater.
Fleet, 213 pp., £12.99, June 2024, 978 0 349 12717 0
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... for things to burn. There is certain to be a great deal to feel shy about, but unless you’re Henry James, or somebody else fascinated by the idea of authorial control even after death, leavings are just leavings. You appoint literary executors in the hope that they will show good judgment. Notes to John exposes Didion and Dunne to the coarse explicitness ...

What was it that drove him?

David Runciman: Gordon Brown, 4 January 2018

My Life, Our Times 
by Gordon Brown.
Bodley Head, 512 pp., £25, November 2017, 978 1 84792 497 1
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... 2011 account of what it was like being Brown’s chancellor, on Tuesday, 7 October 2008, when Sir Tom McKillop, the chairman of RBS, called him to announce that his bank was about to go bust and to ask what the government planned to do about it. ‘It was going to be a bad day,’ Darling says with dry understatement. Brown adopts a different approach. His ...

Customising Biography

Iain Sinclair, 22 February 1996

Blake 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 399 pp., £20, September 1995, 1 85619 278 4
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol I: Jerusalem 
editor David Bindman, edited by Morton D. Paley.
Tate Gallery, 304 pp., £48, August 1991, 1 85437 066 9
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. II: Songs of Innocence and Experience 
series editor David Bindman, edited by Andrew Lincoln.
Tate Gallery, 210 pp., £39.50, August 1991, 1 85437 068 5
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol III: The Early Illuminated Books 
series editor David Bindman, edited by Morris Eaves, Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi.
Tate Gallery, 288 pp., £48, August 1993, 1 85437 119 3
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. IV: The Continental Prophecies: America, Europe, The Song of Los 
editor David Bindman, edited by D.W. Dörbecker.
Tate Gallery, 368 pp., £50, May 1995, 1 85437 154 1
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. V: Milton, a Poem 
series editor David Bindman, edited by Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi.
Tate Gallery, 224 pp., £48, November 1993, 1 85437 121 5
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. VI: The Urizen Books 
 editor David Bindman, edited by David Worrall.
Tate Gallery, 232 pp., £39.50, May 1995, 9781854371553
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... been proposed as a device (as well as a tale worth the telling) to buy time for another poet, for Tom Pickard perhaps. Ackroyd, coming from a more catholic (and Catholic) camp, is less fierce, less implicated, in his treatment. His Blake is decently crafted fiction overwhelmed by an excess of tyrannical facts. Looking back over my notes, I wasn’t ...

A Rumbling of Things Unknown

Jacqueline Rose: Marilyn Monroe, 26 April 2012

... too is a struggle to break free of ‘typecasting’ – a refusal to accept the allotted Uncle Tom role. This is why a young black woman identified with Marilyn Monroe. James Baldwin identified with her too, as he told Weatherby when he was introduced to him by Tennessee Williams. Not that Weatherby was the only writer on Monroe to spot these moments of ...

Putting Religion in Its Place

Colm Tóibín: Marilynne Robinson, 23 October 2014

Lila 
by Marilynne Robinson.
Virago, 261 pp., £16.99, October 2014, 978 1 84408 880 5
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... conversion to Christianity: I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene ...

Erasures

Colm Tóibín: The Great Irish Famine, 30 July 1998

... Decade: Contemporary Accounts 1841-51, you find the following, dated 19 April 1848:The Rev. Mr Henry P.P. Bunenadden, county Sligo, in a memorial to the Lord Lieutenant, complained that the following persons met their deaths by hunger, owing to the neglect of the Guardians of the Boyle Union: KILSHALVEY ELECTORAL DIVISION – Mrs Kilkenny and child, after ...

The Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, 23 March 2006

... like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s ...

A Ripple of the Polonaise

Perry Anderson: Work of the Nineties, 25 November 1999

History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the Nineties 
by Timothy Garton Ash.
Allen Lane, 441 pp., £20, June 1999, 0 7139 9323 5
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... it. The example he gives is the abluted Croatia of tomorrow. This is an argument first made by Tom Nairn about Bosnia, in much the same tension of grief and realism. The extension of Garton Ash’s range to the Balkans thus involves more than a geographical move. It represents an intellectual and moral enlargement. But by the same stroke, it throws into ...

That was the year that was

Tariq Ali, 24 May 2018

... thing was just to read, non-stop, books that were never available in Pakistan: D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Isaac Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy, Trotsky himself, other Bolshevik leaders, many others. So for me Oxford was very liberating and on many fronts. When I came to Britain, it was obvious that the United States had taken over the function of the old ...

You Muddy Fools

Dan Jacobson: In the months before his death Ian Hamilton talked about himself to Dan Jacobson, 14 January 2002

... what might he have said about Melvyn Bragg’s sort of thing? There’s a famous bit in one of Henry James’s essays where he says that the trouble with periodical publication is that it’s like a train that has to leave the station every hour, according to the timetable, and if there are no genuine passengers then you have to put in dummies, so that the ...

Chasing Steel

Ian Jack: Scotland’s Ferry Fiasco, 22 September 2022

... the popular version of Scottish history that once flourished in pubs and school playgrounds, Henry Bell invented steam navigation when the Comet began its regular voyages between Glasgow, Greenock and Helensburgh in the summer of Napoleon’s advance on Moscow. In fact, Robert Fulton’s steamboat Clermont had started running on the Hudson in 1807, and ...

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