Old Gravy

Mark Ford, 7 September 1995

Robert Graves: Life on the Edge 
by Miranda Seymour.
Doubleday, 524 pp., £20, July 1995, 0 385 40423 9
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Robert Graves and the White Goddess 
by Richard Perceval Graves.
Weidenfeld, 618 pp., £25, July 1995, 0 297 81534 2
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Robert Graves: His Life and Work 
by Martin Seymour-Smith.
Bloomsbury, 600 pp., £25, June 1995, 0 7475 2205 7
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Robert Graves: Collected Writings on Poetry 
edited by Paul O’Prey.
Carcanet, 560 pp., £35, June 1995, 1 85754 172 3
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Robert Graves: The Centenary Selected Poems 
edited by Patrick Quinn.
Carcanet, 160 pp., £15.95, April 1995, 9781857541267
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“... years younger than himself whom he calls ‘Dick’ in Goodbye to All That – his real name was George Harcourt Johnstone. Graves always claimed their relationship was ‘chaste and sentimental’ and responded with fury when reprimanded for ogling Johnstone during chapel. In the trenches Johnstone’s weekly letters came to symbolise the ideal of pure ...”

Lucky’s Dip

James Fox, 12 November 1987

Trail of Havoc: In the Steps of Lord Lucan 
by Patrick Marnham.
Viking, 204 pp., £10.95, October 1987, 0 670 81391 5
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Lucan: Not Guilty 
by Sally Moore.
Sidgwick, 271 pp., £12.95, October 1987, 9780283995361
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“... V has demonstrated her hatred for me in the past and would do anything to see me accused. For George + Frances to go through life knowing their father had stood in the dock for attempted murder would be too much. When they are old enough to understand explain to them the dream of paranoia, and look after them. So Lucan is signing off. There was another ...”

Dedicated to Democracy

Corey Robin: How the US did for Guatemala, 18 November 2004

The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War 
by Greg Grandin.
Chicago, 311 pp., £40, October 2004, 0 226 30571 6
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“... ammunition and explosives. The CIA also brought together the military and the police in sleek urban command centres, where intelligence could be quickly analysed, distributed, acted on and archived for later use. After these efforts achieved their most spectacular results, with the 1966 disappearance of Guatemala’s last generation of peaceful ...”

Hooyah!!

James Meek: The Rise of the Private Army, 2 August 2007

Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army 
by Jeremy Scahill.
Serpent’s Tail, 452 pp., £12.99, August 2007, 978 1 84668 630 6
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“... Jeremy Scahill. It was like out of a Dr No movie … It’s a gigantic facility with a military urban terrain. It’s a mock city where you can train with real-life ammunition or paintball, with vehicles, with helicopters. Gosh, impressive, very impressive … I saw people from all over the world training there – civilians, military personnel … Wow, it ...”

Imagined Territories

Yonatan Mendel: Designing the Occupation, 2 August 2007

Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation 
by Eyal Weizman.
Verso, 318 pp., £19.99, June 2007, 978 1 84467 125 0
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“... issue was how to give depth to the coastal plain … The answer was to build a [network] of urban, industrial settlements.’ Likud had just won the election and as a result of Israel’s failure to predict the imminence of the 1973 war, the settlements were designated ‘good for security’, though the truth is that the army spent the first days of ...”

Enemies For Ever

James Wolcott: ‘Making It’, 18 May 2017

Making It 
by Norman Podhoretz.
NYRB, 368 pp., £13.98, May 2017, 978 1 68137 080 4
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“... period, the 1967 edition Podhoretz is ‘in with the in-crowd’ (Jackie Kennedy, Lillian Hellman, George Plimpton); he goes where the in-crowd goes, knows what the in-crowd knows. Podhoretz was even invited to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball of 1966, the party of the century. There could have been no greater confirmation of his having ‘arrived’. In ...”

Ten Typical Days in Trump’s America

Eliot Weinberger, 25 October 2018

“... proud.’ (Gosar, a former dentist, is notable for his belief that neo-Nazi groups are funded by George Soros, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, and that Soros personally helped organise their rally in Charlottesville to discredit the anti-immigration movement. In the latest poll, Gosar is far ahead of Brill.)*Senator Ted Cruz warns Texans that if his rival, the ...”

How the sanity of poets can be edited away

Arnold Rattenbury: The Sanity of Ivor Gurney, 14 October 1999

‘Severn and Somme’ and ‘War’s Embers’ 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by R.K.R. Thornton.
Carcanet, 152 pp., £7.95, September 1997, 1 85754 348 3
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80 Poems or So 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by George Walter and R.K.R. Thornton.
Carcanet, 148 pp., £9.95, January 1997, 1 85754 344 0
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“... Time In’) In his 1996 Everyman selection, George Walter calls this squaddie quality of absorption in the ordinary ‘his fascination with people – his democracy’. But it is not always present: it seems to come and go like a mind moving in and out of focus across all his postwar poetry-writing from ...”

The Hard Zone

Andrew O’Hagan: At the Republican National Convention, 1 August 2024

“... be shot in the leg. At the time of the Black Lives Matter protests relating to the murder of George Floyd, he tweeted: ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts.’ In July 2017, he advised police officers not to be ‘too nice’ when handling suspects. He praised someone for body-slamming a reporter and encouraged supporters at a rally before the ...”

Anglo-Egyptian Attitudes

Marina Warner, 5 January 2017

“... from poverty and, in the early part of the century, became a great favourite of the establishment (George IV bought several of his pictures); but his relation with the ruling English did not give him peace of mind, however much it filled his pockets and gained him honours. He wanted to be true to his origins and remained uneasy with the client relationship of ...”

Unhappy Families

Angela Carter, 16 September 1982

The Beauties and Furies 
by Christina Stead.
Virago, 329 pp., £3.95, July 1982, 0 86068 175 0
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“... Even here, she has already established her characteristic milieu as that of the rootless urban intelligentsia, a milieu as international as it is peculiar to our century. Teresa Hawkins in For Love Alone is the only major Australian character in Stead’s later fiction, and Teresa is the most striking of these birds of passage, who sometimes become ...”

Putin’s Counter-Revolution

James Meek, 20 March 2014

“... people who say they were beaten by ‘Banderovtsy’ in Kiev for wearing the orange and black St George’s ribbon, the symbol of Soviet victory in the Second World War, and film of actual young Banderovtsy marching through the Ukrainian capital. When Putin spoke of ‘chaos’ in Kiev and Ukraine as a whole, in his press conference a few days after the ...”

Into the Underworld

Iain Sinclair: The Hackney Underworld, 22 January 2015

“... a set of dank studios; he offered one of the four chambers of this pharaonic tomb to an eccentric urban wanderer and dog fancier, who brought back each day’s plunder from his scavenging expeditions across the surface of things, and heaped them into a space that very soon became a single compacted block, an uncelebrated curation in the spirit of Joseph ...”

What I heard about Iraq in 2005

Eliot Weinberger: Iraq, 5 January 2006

“... the fight against the insurgents in most of the country by the end of 2005. I heard General George Casey, commander of the Multinational Forces in Iraq, say: ‘We should be able to take some fairly substantial reductions in the size of our forces.’ I heard that the insurgents had been driven out of the cities and into the desert and that they were ...”

Collected Works

Angus Calder, 5 January 1989

Men, Women and Work: Class, Gender and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910 
by Mary Blewett.
Illinois, 444 pp., $29.95, July 1988, 0 252 01484 7
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Men’s Lives 
by Peter Matthiessen.
Collins Harvill, 335 pp., £15, August 1988, 0 00 272519 3
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On Work: Historical, Comparative and Theoretical Approaches 
edited by R.E. Pahl.
Blackwell, 752 pp., £39.95, July 1988, 9780631157625
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Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour 
edited by Léonie Archer.
Routledge, 307 pp., £28, August 1988, 0 415 00203 6
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The Historical Meanings of Work 
edited by Patrick Joyce.
Cambridge, 320 pp., £27.50, September 1987, 0 521 30897 6
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Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century 1590-1710 
by David Stevenson.
Cambridge, 246 pp., £25, November 1988, 0 521 35326 2
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“... illness’ and quotes this entry: ‘went berrying, done some shoes, scot to breakfast and dinner George went away today but O dear what a life to live God help me to do my duty baked 5 pies drove cow.’ And could Carlyle have approved of the ocean-haul seine fishermen of Long Island whose way of life was being extinguished in the mid-1980s, just as Peter ...”