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His Galactic Centrifuge

Edmund Gordon: Ballard’s Enthusiasms, 23 May 2024

Selected Non-Fiction: 1962-2007 
by J.G. Ballard, edited by Mark Blacklock.
MIT, 386 pp., £30, October 2023, 978 0 262 04832 3
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... or anything composed in a language other than English, or by anyone who wasn’t a white man. He had as little time for science fiction that didn’t follow his own strict prescriptions as he did for ‘so-called mainstream fiction’ – a category that he seems to have defined in contrast to science fiction, on the one hand, and the work of ...

Places Never Explained

Colm Tóibín: Anthony Hecht, 8 August 2013

The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht 
edited by Jonathan Post.
Johns Hopkins, 365 pp., £18, November 2012, 978 1 4214 0730 2
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... the prettiest name’), but quickly the images darken. Mangrove roots, ‘when dead’, ‘strew white swamps with skeletons’, and turtles ‘die and leave their barnacled shells on the beaches,/and their large white skulls with round eye-sockets/twice the size of a man’s’. In the poem’s second half, there are ...

The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... into quiet conversation. Ice-cream kiss of almond blossom, bridal abundance of cherry: pink and white. Yellow pom-poms of japonica, horticultural cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ...

The Raging Peloton

Iain Sinclair: Boris Bikes, 20 January 2011

... made in 1965 in his student days at the Royal College of Art, and featuring his younger brother Tony schlepping around Hartlepool, was called Boy and Bicycle.) Every inch peddled, every tiptoeing carbon-footprint advance, is a political act. YouTube is blistered with competitive bicycle imagery: naked propaganda for anarcho-liberal bikes-for-all schemes ...

How Laws Discriminate

Stephen Sedley: The Law’s Inequalities, 29 April 1999

... And yet history argues differently. It shows us centuries of positive discrimination in favour of white men, of jobs and advantages going to incompetents and mediocrities whose faces happened to fit or who had the right connections. It helps to explain why forms of inequality remain embedded in our ways of thinking and operating. Women and members of ethnic ...

For Want of a Dinner Jacket

Christopher Tayler: Becoming O’Brian, 6 May 2021

Patrick O’Brian: A Very Private Life 
by Nikolai Tolstoy.
William Collins, 608 pp., £10.99, October 2020, 978 0 00 835062 8
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... a story in Irish Writing.Hill had moved on by the time O’Brian delivered, but his replacement, Tony Gibbs, was delighted with Master and Commander (1969). It ‘leapfrogged over Forester’, he later wrote: ‘O’Brian wasn’t writing about the early 19th century; he seemed to be writing from within it – and with a sense of humour entirely lacking in ...

Daisy packs her bags

Zachary Leader: The Road to West Egg, 21 September 2000

Trimalchio: An Early Version of ‘The Great Gatsby’ 
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by James L.W. West III.
Cambridge, 192 pp., £30, April 2000, 0 521 40237 9
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... standing as well as commercial success, was complicated. In 1922 Fitzgerald took himself off to White Bear Lake in Minnesota, near his home city of St Paul, and in June of that year, while correcting proofs for Tales of the Jazz Age, began work on ‘something new – something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned’. This work, a ...

Living with Monsters

Ferdinand Mount: PMs v. the Media, 22 April 2010

Where Power Lies: Prime Ministers v. the Media 
by Lance Price.
Simon & Schuster, 498 pp., £20, February 2010, 978 1 84737 253 6
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... Club once a week. He saw Harold Wilson every week too, with the other members of the ‘White Commonwealth’, as the handpicked political editors were then called. Yet he did not grow to love or respect these great men. On the contrary, in his book he portrays most of the prime ministers he was intimate with as ...

American Breakdown

David Bromwich, 2 August 2018

... The way to match the Trump pace is by tweeting; but that is to play his game – a gambit the White House press corps have found irresistible. Much of the damage to US politics over the last two years has been done by the anti-Trump media themselves, with their mood of perpetual panic and their lack of imagination. But the uncanny gift of Trump is an ...

What I Heard about Iraq

Eliot Weinberger: Watch and listen, 3 February 2005

... a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given’. I heard Tony Blair say: ‘We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd.’ I heard the president say: ‘We know that Iraq and al-Qaida have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. We’ve learned that ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... the reader through the public furores – the outcry over her 1966 pronouncement that ‘the white race is the cancer of human history,’ for example, used as a cudgel against her by conservative foes until their arms went numb – and developments in her personal life familiar from previous biographies, memoirs and profiles. While not stinting on ...

In Farageland

James Meek, 9 October 2014

... space, or time; here, it was the opposite. The Ellington and Hereson School is a set of shining white blocks built in 2007 as part of Labour’s PFI programme. As well as Farage, Charlie Leys, the sixth-former who had organised and was chairing the event, had managed to pull in South Thanet’s sitting Tory MP, Laura Sandys, a believer in EU membership who ...
The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen 
introduced by Angus Wilson.
Cape, 782 pp., £8.50, February 1981, 0 224 01838 8
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Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation 
by Hermione Lee.
Vision, 225 pp., £12.95, July 1981, 9780854783441
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... of Dust. He derides innocence as Bowen sighs maternally over it: but in the end poor, idealistic Tony Last’s Gothic castle collapses, teddy-bears and all, just as the heroine’s dream castle collapses in The Death of the Heart. E. Waugh is the satirical obverse of E. Bowen. Let us concentrate for a bit on the novel I have just mentioned: it shows her at ...

Stick to the Latin

R.W. Johnson, 23 January 1997

Enoch Powell 
by Robert Shepherd.
Hutchinson, 564 pp., £25, October 1996, 0 09 179208 8
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... Invariably those, like Hailsham, who challenged him head on found themselves worsted. When Tony Benn attempted to affix the ‘Dachau and Belsen’ label to Powell’s speeches on immigration in 1970, Powell snatched the microphone to point out that in 1939 he had sailed all the way from Australia in order to volunteer as a private to fight Hitler. And ...

Bad Dreams

Robert Crawford: Peter Porter, 6 October 2011

The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems 
by Peter Porter.
Picador, 421 pp., £12.99, May 2010, 978 0 330 52218 2
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... in Spain at the age of 24 for the metropolis of Rome. After Martial may have been overshadowed by Tony Harrison’s more recent US Martial, but it holds its own vividly, whether presenting an apprentice ‘knobbly, cataracted/with the expression of a frozen cod’, or just swaggering: ‘I’m all right,/I’m a big frog in Bilbilis.’ Porter hadn’t ...

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