Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Didn’t Do in 2007, 3 January 2008

... an ex-Cluniac monastery that was among the properties (they included Kirkstall Abbey) granted to Thomas Cranmer on the death of Henry VIII. It wasn’t actually included in the royal will but was part of the general share-out that occurred then to fulfil the wishes supposedly expressed by Henry VIII on his deathbed. Not far away is Harewood House (where I do ...

Here was a plague

Tom Crewe, 27 September 2018

How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed Aids 
by David France.
Picador, 624 pp., £12.99, September 2017, 978 1 5098 3940 7
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Patient Zero and the Making of the Aids Epidemic 
by Richard A. McKay.
Chicago, 432 pp., £26.50, November 2017, 978 0 226 06395 9
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Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1989-90 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 314 pp., £9.99, May 2018, 978 1 78487 387 5
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Smiling in Slow Motion: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1991-94 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 388 pp., £9.99, August 2018, 978 1 78487 516 9
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The Ward 
by Gideon Mendel.
Trolley, 88 pp., £25, December 2017, 978 1 907112 56 0
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... to his body as a walking lab, pills slushing against potions in his insides. Ten years earlier, Martin Amis had reviewed one of the first British documentaries about Aids for the Observer. Aids, he wrote, ‘is a visitation that makes you believe in the Devil’: With Aids … it seems to be promiscuity itself that is the cause. After a few hundred ...

Ten-Foot Chopsticks

James Meek: The North-East Transition, 4 December 2025

... arrange a meeting for me with anyone in the building. On a video call I asked a senior executive, Thomas Wildsmith, if older townspeople were ever invited to see what they get up to. ‘It’s not easy just to open the doors to everyone,’ he said. ‘We’ve done that in the past. We hope to do it again in the future. I’ve been in and around Blyth for ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... It’s an old tactic and it is still in play around the Grenfell disaster. As soon as Martin Moore-Bick, the chair of the public inquiry, announced that he would be seeking answers rather than taking dictation from those with passionate feelings, he was dismissed as a ‘posh white man’. It was reported that the community felt he had ‘the ...