Beatrix and Rosamond

Daniel Soar: Jonathan Coe, 18 October 2007

The Rain before It Falls 
by Jonathan Coe.
Viking, 274 pp., £17.99, September 2007, 978 0 670 91728 0
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“... ends: Paul turns out to be a pretty nice guy, and elicits sympathy by being wholly ignored by ‘Tony’. With a few like-minded friends he sets up a colloquium – a secret and ad hoc advisory group to the Treasury Select Committee which meets at Rules in Covent Garden – called The Closed Circle. This ought to be an opportunity to explain precisely which ...”

Waspish Civilities

Stephen Sedley: The Case for a Supreme Court, 21 May 2020

High Principle, Low Politics and the Emergence of the Supreme Court 
by Frederic Reynold.
Wildy, Simmonds and Hill, 154 pp., £14.95, September 2019, 978 0 85490 283 5
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“... birth’ was sufficient), but trouble was inevitable. In 1701, in the historic case of Ashby v. White, a writ was brought before the Queen’s Bench to nullify the election of the MP for Aylesbury because the town mayor had unlawfully kept a voter out of the polls. Chief Justice Holt’s fame among lawyers rests on his having reputedly threatened the ...”

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: Funding Reform, 8 October 2026

“... at Oswald’s, a private members’ club in Mayfair, where guests were treated to jeroboams of white burgundy and Tempo d’Angelus. Farage even sang ‘YMCA’. But Reform has had more success with a different constituency: more than half of the donations to the party, according to the New York Times, have come from people with homes in low-tax countries ...”

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 ...”

Zip it

Hal Foster: Barnett Newman’s Anarchism, 5 February 2026

Barnett Newman: Here 
by Amy Newman.
Princeton, 693 pp., £35, January, 978 0 691 24918 6
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“... sculptures Newman would go on to make. The first one, Here I (also 1950), was made up of two thin white verticals in wood, eight feet tall, one finished in rough plaster, the other in smooth paint, set on plaster mounds on top of a wooden milk crate.Where The Wild stretched painting to its vertical limit, Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1951) did the same with its ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

Diary

D.K. Renton: Bristol goes Green, 8 October 2026

“... reading ‘More Queer Joy’. One in three people in the ward recorded an ethnicity other than white in the 2021 census, compared to the national average of one in five. The proportion of graduates, at one in two, is high. Tillett is celebrated on a plaque on Bannerman Road (as ‘a tireless and determined defender of Workers’ Rights’) and in a mural ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”