No One Leaves Her Place in Line

Jeremy Harding: Martha Gellhorn, 7 May 1998

... even though she reported, in the Eighties, with evident sympathy on the Greenham Common camp and the wives of ‘the enemy within’ during the miners’ strike. ‘I am a suffragette,’ she wrote in 1962 – on which she would expand, cautiously, by talking about her mother’s involvement in the American campaign for the women’s vote and her ...

The Hard Zone

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

... been local. They ‘would have known … this is King Park, this is a known area for homeless to camp out, folks with mental disabilities in here – tread carefully, de-escalate.’ The visiting police wouldn’t know King Park from Central Park.‘Make America Safe Once Again’ was in full swing at the convention. Nobody mentioned guns or police ...

This Singing Thing

Malin Hay: On Barbra Streisand, 12 September 2024

My Name Is Barbra 
by Barbra Streisand.
Century, 992 pp., £35, November 2023, 978 1 5291 3689 0
Show More
Show More
... jealous of her. When she was fifteen months old her father, Emanuel, died of a seizure at a summer camp in the Catskills, and Streisand, her mother and nine-year-old brother moved first to her maternal grandparents’ house in Bed-Stuy and later to a housing project in Flatbush with Diana’s second husband, Lou Kind.The loss of her father and the experience ...

A Short History of the Trump Family

Sidney Blumenthal: The First Family, 16 February 2017

... Also cited in the FHA investigation was Fred Trump’s partner, contractor and financier William ‘Willie’ Tomasello, who according to the federal Organised Crime Task Force was associated with elements of both the Gambino and Genovese families.Fred Trump appeared to be grooming Fred Jr to take over his business. But he was a harsh and exigent ...

My Year of Reading Lemmishly

Jonathan Lethem, 10 February 2022

... in Radiance, marries a Lemian satire of Cold War militaristic capitalism to the architecture of a William Gaddis novel, or how Ted Chiang’s brainy novellas crystallise Lemian themes of metacognition and first contact.Such encounters might have challenged Lem’s biases. They might also have pushed him to confront the limits of his experience, evident in his ...

How to play the piano

Nicholas Spice, 26 March 1992

Music Sounded Out 
by Alfred Brendel.
Robson, 258 pp., £16.95, September 1990, 0 86051 666 0
Show More
Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations 
by Otto Friedrich.
Lime Tree, 441 pp., £12.99, October 1990, 9780413452313
Show More
Show More
... justifies Thomas Bernhard’s choice of Brendel as a leading representative of the establishment camp which Glenn Gould stands against. For in Der Untergeher Bernhard did not just want to oppose Gould to any old virtuoso pianist, but to pianists thought by the establishment to be the best, to pianists, above all, highly regarded by the thoughtful for their ...

The Partisan

Jeremy Harding, 23 June 1994

The Search for Africa: A History in the Making 
by Basil Davidson.
Currey, 373 pp., £25, March 1994, 0 85255 719 1
Show More
Show More
... eluding any certifiable definition by journalists, historians, scholars, aid and lending experts, camp followers, demographers, catastrophists and optimists, or by individuals of very different persuasions who happen to inhabit it. In a long moment of desperation, Davidson’s remains the least peremptory evaluation on offer – and by far the most ...

Wobble in My Mind

Colm Tóibín: Lizzie, Cal and Caroline, 7 May 2020

The Dolphin Letters, 1970-79: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell and Their Circle 
edited by Saskia Hamilton.
Faber, 560 pp., £35, January, 978 0 571 35741 3
Show More
The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972-73 
by Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton.
Farrar, Straus, 224 pp., £11.99, December 2019, 978 0 374 53827 9
Show More
Show More
... probably should have done nothing, but sending the cable made my life sweeter,’ he told William Alfred. A week or so earlier Alfred had written to him saying ‘Frank has given me The Dolphin to read. It is beautifully made, every line won hard, and it is sad and comforting at one and the same time. But 1 and 2 on page 47’ – ‘Fox-Fur’ and ...

What’s It All About?

Tom Lubbock, 6 April 1995

Shark-Infested Waters: The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the Nineties 
by Sarah Kent.
Zwemmer, 270 pp., £19.95, November 1994, 0 302 00648 6
Show More
The Reviews that Caused the Rumpus, and Other Pieces 
by Brian Sewell.
Bloomsbury, 365 pp., £12.99, November 1994, 0 7475 1872 6
Show More
Show More
... influential in these areas, has acquired a quasi-public status. True, the ‘contemporary art’ camp can be extremely touchy too. There was outrage in 1991, when a student at the relatively conservative RCA was refused his degree for not doing anything his teachers considered proper work. His degree show was an empty studio with a simulacrum of a GLC Blue ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2004, 6 January 2005

... of joke the SS would have played on a prisoner lucky enough to be released from a concentration camp, presenting him at the gates with the bill. We ought to know the name of the official who dreamed up this little wheeze so as to watch out for him in a forthcoming Honours List. As it is we can only be grateful that Nelson Mandela wasn’t imprisoned in ...

Homer Inc

Edward Luttwak, 23 February 2012

The Iliad by Homer 
translated by Stephen Mitchell.
Weidenfeld, 463 pp., £25, October 2011, 978 0 297 85973 4
Show More
Show More
... and cannot even advance a weaker claim to connoisseurship because my favourite English Iliad is William Wyatt’s 1999 updating of his great-uncle A.T. Murray’s 1924 version, because of the Greek text on its facing pages, because of the handy Loeb format well suited to air travel (and to cheap replacement when left aboard), and for its literal yet stylish ...

You’re with your king

Jeremy Harding: Morocco’s Secret Prisons, 10 February 2022

Tazmamart: Eighteen Years in Morocco’s Secret Prison 
by Aziz BineBine, translated by Lulu Norman.
Haus, £9.99, March 2021, 978 1 913368 13 5
Show More
Show More
... of staff by his father, took part in military operations. Mohamed Oufkir, the king’s aide de camp, was chosen to chaperone the crown prince in the field.Oufkir was a key consigliere, a security fanatic and logistics expert who had helped to organise the new army and later rose to the rank of general. He was also a French war hero: after tours in Italy ...

‘I wouldn’t pay it either’

Simon Skinner: World Cup Wallcharts, 25 June 2026

The Power and the Glory: A New History of the World Cup 
by Jonathan Wilson.
Little Brown, 608 pp., £12.99, May, 978 0 349 14573 0
Show More
Show More
... son: ‘He’s the man who made all of Brazil cry.’ When the BBC tried to take him to the Brazil camp before the 1994 World Cup, he was turned away in case his misfortune proved contagious.In the other direction, West Germany’s triumph in Switzerland in 1954 (das Wunder von Bern), coming back from 0-2 down against a storied Hungary side, became a metaphor ...

The Contingency of Selfhood

Richard Rorty, 8 May 1986

... as dearly. He helps explain how someone can be both a tender mother and a merciless concentration-camp guard, or be a just and temperate magistrate and also a chilly, rejecting father. By associating conscientiousness with cleanliness, and by associating both not only with obsessional neurosis but also (as he does elsewhere) with the religious impulse and ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Allelujah!, 3 January 2019

... to ‘the English Literary Happy Family’, as I hope neither do I.21 March. Reading a book about William Morris and Kelmscott, I come across a reminiscence by Philip Webb, who remarked to W.R. Lethaby: ‘The best of those times was that there was no covetousness; all went into the common stock … and then we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my ...