Imagine Tintin

Michael Hofmann: Basil Bunting, 9 January 2014

A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting 
byRichard Burton.
Infinite Ideas, 618 pp., £30, September 2013, 978 1 908984 18 0
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... is living the life, I don’t know how sufficiently to praise him for it. But it can’t be very comfortable to exist that way. I feel uneasy not to be sending him his year’s rent and to be backing at the same time a book of my own poems.’ Imagine Tintin not as a supposed ...

A Thousand Sharp Edges

Adam Mars-Jones: Antonio Muñoz Molina, 18 June 2015

In the Night of Time 
byAntonio Muñoz Molina, translated byEdith Grossman.
Tuskar Rock, 641 pp., £16.99, April 2015, 978 1 78125 463 9
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... As seen​ by the English-speaking world, the Spanish Civil War was a screen on which certain images could be projected, images of harsh sunlight, moral clarity and sacrifice. It was an emblematic, almost allegorical war and a test case for conscience, a political crisis so thoroughly appropriated that the Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse hardly needed to point out that its contributors were overwhelmingly outsiders: it was the war that was Spanish, not the poetic response ...

Miracle on Fleet Street

Martin Hickman: Operation Elveden, 7 January 2016

... announced that all outstanding cases against Mirror Group journalists for phone hacking would be dropped, and that no corporate case would be brought against Rupert Murdoch’s News UK for hacking or perverting the course of justice. It was Christmas come early on Fleet Street, but that isn’t the way the papers chose ...

What kind of funny is he?

Rivka Galchen: Under Kafka’s Spell, 4 December 2014

Kafka: The Years of Insight 
byReiner Stach, translated byShelley Frisch.
Princeton, 682 pp., £24.95, June 2013, 978 0 691 14751 2
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Kafka: The Decisive Years 
byReiner Stach, translated byShelley Frisch.
Princeton, 552 pp., £16.25, June 2013, 978 0 691 14741 3
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... inevitably develops a few singular, unassimilable and slightly silly convictions. (The graph may be parabolic, with the highest incidence of convictions – and the legal resonance is invited – found among those who have spent the most time thinking and those who have spent next to no time thinking.) My own such amateur conviction is that the life of Franz ...

Post-its, push pins, pencils

Jenny Diski: In the Stationery Cupboard, 31 July 2014

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace 
byNikil Saval.
Doubleday, 288 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 0 385 53657 8
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... of a secret workplace’ would have been a more accurate subtitle. What happens there? People can be said to ‘work in an office’ and no further explanation is required, but there’s no real clue to what they do, unlike people who work in other places, who make things in a factory, mine in a mine, teach in a school, sell things in a shop. What are the ...

Let us breakfast in splendour

Charles Nicholl: Francis Barber, 16 July 2015

The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir 
byMichael Bundock.
Yale, 282 pp., £20, May 2015, 978 0 300 20710 1
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... after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Eccentric Pilgrims, 30 June 2016

... inspiration from their cousins across the Channel? Some historical re-enactment rump? It must be charity. Look at the cameras. There aren’t enough of them to bring out Boris Johnson, who never failed, in all the years of his mayoralty, to insert himself on the television ‘news where you are’ for London: in hardhat, bicycle helmet, scrumcap squashed ...

A Little Talk in Downing St

Bee Wilson, 17 November 2016

My Darling Mr Asquith: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Venetia Stanley 
byStefan Buczacki.
Cato and Clarke, 464 pp., £28.99, April 2016, 978 0 9934186 0 0
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... intrusively familiar? There is no common scale to draw on. You can make someone uncomfortable by sending them ‘xox’ in a work email when all they expected was a ‘cheers’. A late friend of mine always signed off ‘all good wishes’ – I felt that hit the right convivial-but-distant note. I started borrowing it, then ramped it up to ‘all best ...

Putin in Syria

Jonathan Steele, 21 April 2016

... Flanked​ by his ministers of defence and foreign affairs, Vladimir Putin looked characteristically stern as he went on television on 14 March to announce a significant reduction in Russia’s military presence in Syria. Putin rarely smiles in public but on this occasion he could have been forgiven some inner gloating ...

Eat Your Spinach

Tony Wood: Russia and the West, 2 March 2017

Return to Cold War 
byRobert Legvold.
Polity, 208 pp., £14.99, February 2016, 978 1 5095 0189 2
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Should We Fear Russia? 
byDmitri Trenin.
Polity, 144 pp., £9.99, November 2016, 978 1 5095 1091 7
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Who Lost Russia? How the World Entered a New Cold War 
byPeter Conradi.
Oneworld, 384 pp., £18.99, February 2017, 978 1 78607 041 8
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... came accusations of Russian meddling in the US electoral process, followed in January by the leak of a dossier claiming that the Russian authorities had accumulated (even more) compromising information on Trump. More recently there have been alarms over the Kremlin’s connections with and possible influence on the incoming secretary of state, Rex ...

The bullet mistakenly came out of the gun

Jack Shenker: The Age of Sisi, 30 November 2017

The Queue 
byBasma Abdel Aziz, translated byElisabeth Jaquette.
Melville House, 220 pp., £10.99, June 2016, 978 0 9934149 0 9
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... video as part of its $68 million partnership with the global advertising giant JWT. Accompanied by soaring violins and pounding drums, it whisks viewers past images of opulent swimming pools, quad-bike races in the desert, campfires presided over by smiling, crinkled Bedouins. No one speaks. ‘This is our story, our ...

‘I’m not racist, but …’

Daniel Trilling, 18 April 2019

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities 
byEric Kaufman.
Allen Lane, 617 pp., £25, October 2018, 978 0 241 31710 5
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National Populism: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy 
byRoger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin.
Pelican, 384 pp., £9.99, October 2018, 978 0 241 31200 1
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... The word​ ‘Caucasian’ was first used as a term for white people in the late 18th century, by men who believed they were making objective scientific judgments about the world. In 1795, the naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a professor at Göttingen University who owned a prodigious collection of human skulls, proposed the existence of five ‘varieties’ of human, based partly on measurements of the head ...

Some Sad Turtle

Alison Light: Spinsters and Clerics, 29 July 2021

The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym: A Biography 
byPaula Byrne.
William Collins, 686 pp., £25, April 2021, 978 0 00 832220 5
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... you imagine an old spinster,’ Pym wrote to friends, ‘frowning anxiously over her MS, trying to be more wicked?’Pym was 37 and still single when a much-revised version of her roman-à-clef was finally published in 1950 as Some Tame Gazelle (its earlier title, ‘Some Sad Turtle’, was too redolent of soup, Pym decided). It ends with both Belinda and ...

Keep him as a curiosity

Steven Shapin: Botanic Macaroni, 13 August 2020

The Multifarious Mr Banks: From Botany Bay to Kew, the Natural Historian Who Shaped the World 
byToby Musgrave.
Yale, 386 pp., £25, April 2020, 978 0 300 22383 5
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... Banks had a different idea. (‘Every blockhead does that,’ he said. ‘My grand tour shall be one round the whole globe.’) At Eton, he had discovered a love of botany (as one does). He followed Linnaeus’s new programme of systematic classification; and he looked for ways to spend a lot of time exploring and collecting plants. Around 1766, an ...

Diary

John Lanchester: Getting into Esports, 13 August 2020

... mental ledger of things I would miss. The idea was to try and anticipate difficulties so as not to be blindsided by them. My list was heartfelt but unoriginal and consisted mainly, now I look back at it, of various blessings of city life that I had come to take almost entirely for granted. Seeing friends. Going for a walk ...