“... I managed to make an appointment with a urologist in Dublin and flew home one morning in late June. As soon as he examined me, the Dublin urologist seemed concerned, though he said nothing. He arranged some blood tests and an ultrasound, telling me that, unlike with kidneys and livers, a biopsy on a ball is rarely a great idea. The ultrasound was done by ...”

In the Anti-World

Nicholas Jenkins: Raymond Roussel, 6 September 2001

Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams 
by Mark Ford.
Faber, 312 pp., £25, November 2000, 0 571 17409 4
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“... 1.15 by an extensive lunch, succeeded promptly by an early but immodest dinner. Each day Roussel rose from this mighty repast at about 5.30 p.m. with – on account of his eating difficulties – the board still groaning as it had been five hours earlier. Such pathos-filled extravagance was possible only because Roussel was easily the wealthiest serious ...”

Honey, I forgot to duck

Jackson Lears: Reagan’s Make-Believe, 23 January 2025

Reagan: His Life and Legend 
by Max Boot.
Liveright, 836 pp., £35, October 2024, 978 0 87140 944 7
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“... moment in this narrative was Reagan’s challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, issued in Berlin in June 1987: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ One could hardly imagine a tale more flattering to Americans’ nationalist narcissism, or more fitting to the unipolar moment when Madeleine Albright anointed the United States as ‘the indispensable ...”

The Shoah after Gaza

Pankaj Mishra, 21 March 2024

“... much younger and more secularised Jewish writers than Singer seemed too submerged in what Gillian Rose in her scathing essay on Schindler’s List called ‘Holocaust Piety’. In a review in the LRB (23 June 2005) of The History of Love, a novel by Nicole Krauss set in Israel, Europe and the US, James Wood pointed out ...”
“... past my father’s office ran down to Lake Dian just south of the city, from whose western shore rose the steep escarpment of the Hsi Shan: temples and shrines on the mountainside, sampans and islands in the water below. Such was the setting in which my brother was born. The family lived in a villa owned by Lung Yun, formerly the German consulate, next door ...”

The Suitcase

Frances Stonor Saunders, 30 July 2020

“... at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919, safely delivered as the fifth largest country in Europe, June 1920. The second is Donald Robin Slomnicki, in a small town near Bucharest on 3 February 1931. Father, Joseph Slomnicki, of Polish-Russian Jewish parentage, naturalised British; mother, Elena Slomnicki, née Hotz, Austrian-German-Swiss, not ...”

On Some Days of the Week

Colm Tóibín: Mrs Oscar Wilde, 10 May 2012

Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde 
by Franny Moyle.
John Murray, 374 pp., £9.99, February 2012, 978 1 84854 164 1
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The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition 
by Oscar Wilde, edited by Nicholas Frankel.
Harvard, 295 pp., £25.95, April 2011, 978 0 674 05792 0
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“... when Wilde entered the Hogarth Club ‘an old member of the club, ostentatiously staring at Wilde, rose from his chair and made for the door. One or two other members also got up. Everyone felt uncomfortable.’ In January 1891, six months after the magazine publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and three months before it came out in book form, Constance ...”

Mise-en-Scène for a Parricide

Angela Carter, 3 September 1981

“... will escape the slaughter. Few of their social class stay in Fall River in the sweating months of June, July and August but, then, few of their social class live on Second Street, in the low part of town where heat gathers like fog. Lizzie was invited away, too, to a summer house by the sea to join a merry band of girls but, as if on purpose to mortify her ...”

In the Hyacinth Garden

Richard Poirier: ‘But oh – Vivienne!’, 3 April 2003

Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot 
by Carole Seymour-Jones.
Constable, 702 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 1 84119 636 3
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“... At the end of June 1915, T.S. Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood, both 27 years old, were married in a London register office. They had been introduced less than three months earlier by mutual friends in Oxford, where Eliot had been spending the year reading in the Bodleian and working on his Harvard doctoral dissertation in philosophy ...”

Biblio-voodoo

Iain Sinclair: Prynne’s People, 22 October 2026

Waymarking a Life. Test Centre Books Catalogue 20: J.H. Prynne (1936-2026) 
by Will Shutes.
Test Centre Books, 76 pp., £15, August
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“... publication as conversation, publication as gift. Prynne’s Day Light Songs was written on 15 June 1968 and published, ‘stab-stapled’ by John James, in July. One-month delivery was part of the proposition, placing word-news into rapid if limited circulation. The copy in the Test Centre catalogue, ‘heavily rust-marked’, with staples recently ...”

Depicting Europe

Perry Anderson, 20 September 2007

“... actually fell – a staggering feat: real wages declined for seven straight years – while they rose some 15 per cent in France and Britain, and between 25 and 35 per cent in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece. With devaluation now barred, the Mediterranean countries are suffering a drastic loss of competitiveness that augurs ill for the whole southern tier ...”

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

“... with normal, non-police defendants – a trial could be expected within six to nine months. In June 1991, however, lawyers for the detectives made an abuse of process application, arguing that the case be dismissed on the grounds that their clients could not expect a fair trial after the adverse publicity and after such a lapse of time; and further ...”

Kemalism

Perry Anderson: After the Ottomans, 11 September 2008

“... should the capital fall to the Entente. In this emergency, the CUP wasted no time. By early June, centrally directed and co-ordinated destruction of the Armenian population was in full swing. As the leading comparative authority on modern ethnic cleansing, Michael Mann, writes, ‘the escalation from the first incidents to genocide occurred within three ...”

Courage, mon amie

Terry Castle: Disquiet on the Western Front, 4 April 2002

“... that he managed to survive three years before getting killed during the final German retreat in June 1918. My mother, born eight years after his death, claims to have heard as a child that he was shot accidentally – ‘by his own guns’. But my uncle Neil, her only brother, can’t believe ‘they would have told the family that.’ Newton was said to be ...”

After the Revolution

Neal Ascherson: In Georgia, 4 March 2004

“... the parliament doors in November he was wearing a flak jacket under his coat, but it was a red rose, not an AK-47, that he flourished in front of him. Shevardnadze, tired and cynical but still wise, could have used gunmen to stop him but chose not to. All the same, the danger from Saakashvili’s other enemies is very far from over. He is going after the ...”