Freakazoid

Melissa Denes: ‘The Slap’, 19 August 2010

The Slap 
by Christos Tsiolkas.
Tuskar Rock, 485 pp., £12.99, May 2010, 978 1 84887 355 1
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... to ‘fuck my mouth.’ ‘The pornographic words excited him. “Fuck my mouth,” she urged and took his cock once more inside her. He … got onto his knees. He continued fucking his wife in the mouth.’ Connie tells Richie that Hector raped her, which isn’t true (the affair was unconsummated); her description of what didn’t happen is also ...

How bad are we?

Bernard Porter: Genocide in Tasmania, 31 July 2014

The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania 
by Tom Lawson.
Tauris, 263 pp., £25, January 2014, 978 1 78076 626 3
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... nation; a few years ago this provoked the almost comically reactionary Liberal prime minister John Howard to inveigh against what he called the ‘black armband’ view of his country’s history (as opposed to the proud Gallipoli view), which launched the popular debate that became known in Australia as the ‘history wars’. The main argument was over ...

Agh, Agh, Yah, Boo

David Wheatley: Ian Hamilton Finlay, 4 December 2014

Midway: Letters from Ian Hamilton Finlay to Stephen Bann, 1964-69 
edited by Stephen Bann.
Wilmington Square, 426 pp., £25, May 2014, 978 1 905524 34 1
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... much sought after today (a print of his poster poem Le circus!! will set you back £4000), but it took the publication of Alec Finlay’s Selections from his father’s work (2012) to bring his activities as a writer and artist into proper perspective. Selections begins with Finlay’s not exactly forthcoming ‘autobiographical sketch’, written in 1966. He ...

Already a Member

R.W. Johnson: Clement Attlee, 11 September 2014

Clement Attlee: The Inevitable Prime Minister 
by Michael Jago.
Biteback, 390 pp., £25, May 2014, 978 1 84954 683 6
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... and so on. ‘The old school tie counted even more in Labour than in Conservative circles,’ John Colville observed. Despite the book’s title, he was anything but ‘the inevitable prime minister’. It isn’t just a matter of his undoubted conservatism on the matters listed above. After Oxford he had started to train as a lawyer but got distracted by ...

Just Be Grateful

Jamie Martin: Unequal Britain, 23 April 2015

Breadline Britain: The Rise of Mass Poverty 
by Stewart Lansley and Joanna Mack.
Oneworld, 334 pp., £9.99, February 2015, 978 1 78074 544 2
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Inequality and the 1 Per Cent 
by Danny Dorling.
Verso, 234 pp., £12.99, September 2014, 978 1 78168 585 3
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... problem, so long as the poor are better off than they used to be. ‘However rich a society,’ as John Moore, secretary of state for social security under Thatcher, once put it, ‘it will drag the incubus of relative poverty with it up the income scale. The poverty lobby would in their definition find poverty in Paradise.’ As national income rises, the ...

Grieve not, but try again

N.A.M. Rodger: Submarines, 22 September 2016

The Silent Deep: The Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945 
by Peter Hennessy and James Jinks.
Allen Lane, 823 pp., £12.99, June 2016, 978 1 84614 580 3
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... to misunderstand its intentions. They knew how dangerous a weapon the U-boat had proved to be, and took it for granted that Germany would use it again. The Admiralty worked hard on anti-submarine weapons and tactics, and prepared to build a large class of anti-submarine vessels called ‘corvettes’. But there was a puzzling discrepancy between what they ...

Porringers and Pitkins

Keith Thomas: The Early Modern Household, 5 July 2018

A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500-1700 
by Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson.
Yale, 311 pp., £40, October 2017, 978 0 300 19501 9
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... architecture. It was completed after his death (in 1852) by another architectural historian, John Henry Parker, who also drew on it for Our English Home: Its Early History and Progress (1860). Despite this encouraging start, the emergence in the later 19th and early 20th centuries of modern history as a university subject did nothing to advance the study ...

A Row of Shaws

Terry Eagleton: That Bastard Shaw, 21 June 2018

Judging Shaw 
by Fintan O’Toole.
Royal Irish Academy, 381 pp., £28, October 2017, 978 1 908997 15 9
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... passes from Burke and Sheridan to Henry Grattan. Like his compatriot Charles Stewart Parnell, he took this reformist rhetoric into the highways and byways, as a street-corner speaker. There was nothing of the armchair socialist about him: he spent six years as a district councillor, serving on a number of committees from electricity and public health to ...

Her Body or the Sea

Ian Patterson: Ann Quin, 21 June 2018

The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments 
by Ann Quin.
And Other Stories, 192 pp., £10, January 2018, 978 1 911508 14 4
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... say, would be my own interpretation, my own vision and be accepted by an unseen audience.’ She took a secretarial course and worked in a newspaper office until the editor hanged himself in a cupboard, after which she returned to Brighton for two years, started painting as well as writing, returned to London, worked for a publisher, rented a room in ...

Powers of Darkness

Michael Taylor: Made by Free Hands, 21 October 2021

Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition 
by Bronwen Everill.
Harvard, 318 pp., £31.95, September 2020, 978 0 674 24098 8
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... Stephen Lushington, the dashing cricketer-jurist who represented the black men Louis Lecesne and John Escoffery after their unlawful deportation from Jamaica, was identified as the son of an East India Company chairman. The planters of Mauritius, which Britain had seized from France in 1810, were also damned as agents of subversion.When Macaulay & Babington ...

Diary

Fraser MacDonald: Wild Beasts, 23 September 2021

... I recently discovered that Aigas House is now home to the nature writer and rewilding advocate Sir John Lister-Kaye, who has restored the building to its Scots baronial glory. Aigas is now a field centre, an ecotourism business and the site of two experimental programmes: a Beaver Demonstration Project and a captive Wildcat Conservation Breeding ...

Peachy

David Thomson: LA Rhapsody, 27 January 2022

Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis and Los Angeles, California 
by Matthew Specktor.
Tin House, 378 pp., $17.95, July 2021, 978 1 951142 62 9
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... peach.Specktor appreciates Rosenfeld – he sees how well she did with the far-fetched parable of John Cheever’s short story ‘The Swimmer’, with Burt Lancaster as a burned-out Wasp crawling his way across the backyard swimming pools of rural Connecticut (the athletic Burt could not swim) – but he is entranced by the elusive Carole Eastman, who is ...

Nudged

Jamie Martin: Nudge Theory, 27 July 2017

The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World 
by Michael Lewis.
Allen Lane, 362 pp., £25, December 2016, 978 0 241 25473 8
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... been the military governor of the West Bank city of Jericho. In the late 1970s, as their careers took off, both men left Israel for North America – Kahneman went to the University of British Columbia and Tversky to Stanford. Tversky was the first to become famous for the work they’d done together, and the tensions caused by this damaged their ...

We want our Mars Bars!

Will Frears: Arsène Who?, 7 January 2021

My Life in Red and White 
by Arsène Wenger, translated by Daniel Hahn and Andrea Reece.
Weidenfeld, 352 pp., £25, October 2020, 978 1 4746 1824 3
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... ending in time to run it off on Thursday morning. This is the world Wenger inherited when he took over as Arsenal manager. After the announcement in August 1996, the headline on the back page of the Daily Mirror ran: ‘Arsène Who?’ In his new autobiography, Wenger describes his first match as manager: ‘On 12 October 1996, I was no longer in the ...

Lancelot v. Galahad

Benjamin Markovits: Basketball Narratives, 21 July 2022

Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks 
by Chris Herring.
Atria, 368 pp., £23.95, January, 978 1 9821 3211 8
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... 1954) but on its ability to tell complex stories – its contributors included William Faulkner, John Updike, Jack Kerouac and Don DeLillo. In Blood in the Garden, Herring is firmly in narrative mode, and he wants to remind us what a good narrative sport basketball is.This is true for several reasons, some more interesting than others. First, the obvious ...