The Price of Safety

Clair Wills: Constance Marten’s Defiance, 14 August 2025

... just raping to raping and murdering.’Ted Bundy was responsible for more than thirty murders; Christopher Wilder abducted twelve women and girls in 1984 and killed eight of them. The prosecution psychologist suggested not only that Gordon would do it again, but that there was no proof he hadn’t done it before. In her statement, the victim asked the ...

Different Speeds, Same Furies

Perry Anderson: Powell v. Proust, 19 July 2018

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time 
by Hilary Spurling.
Hamish Hamilton, 509 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 241 14383 4
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... to her relationship with the subject, a close friend whom for many years she knew and admired – Christopher Sykes on Waugh is the nearest parallel? In such cases, affection can shape the compass of a biography, personal knowledge lighting up but also limiting what can be said. Perhaps there are traces of that here; but, on the whole, in the warmth and grace ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... that day so they went there and met up with their friend Muna Ali. They all went to Falafel King afterwards to have lemonade. They just sat at the window watching the world go by, and they discussed Ramadan. Naseem promised to come to Grenfell Tower so they could break their fast together and make her famous cheese pie. ‘It had been such a big iftar ...

The Satoshi Affair

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 June 2016

... like that.’ ‘And how did that change?’ Ramona said a single word: ‘Rob.’ The days in St Christopher Place were almost languorous. We would bring coffee back to the flat and spread out, and I’d try to build a picture of how he did what he said he did. We put up whiteboards and he bamboozled me with maths. Sometimes he would write at the board for ...