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Who does that for anyone?

Adam Shatz: Jean-Pierre Melville, 20 June 2019

Jean-Pierre Melville: Le Solitaire 
by Bertrand Teissier.
Fayard, 272 pp., €22, October 2017, 978 2 213 70573 6
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Jean-Pierre Melville, une vie 
by Antoine de Baecque.
Seuil, 244 pp., €32, October 2017, 978 2 02 137107 9
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... Melville created an austere, sombre aesthetic: even his colour films appear to be in black and white. His protagonists, whether resistants, gangsters or priests, are solitary ‘men without women’, in the words of Volker Schlöndorff, who worked as his assistant in the early 1960s. Driven by duty, they move inexorably towards their fate, which is often ...

Diary

Ben Anderson: In Afghanistan, 3 January 2008

... twang. He was so stoned he just smiled, picked up the magazine and walked back inside. Captain Patrick Hennessey suggested dropping a bomb, which everyone said was far too reckless as the Taliban were so close. He insisted he’d done it before and it worked. Before long we could hear an F-16 and Major David said: ‘Thirty seconds until impact.’ The ...

The Excursions

Andrew O’Hagan, 16 June 2011

... supper. It turned out supper was something that happened in the glen before 6.30 p.m. A lady in a white lab coat emerged to remind us of the fact. The phrase ‘You’ll have hud yer tea, then?’ is not unknown in Scotland’s eastern quarter. I didn’t hear it much as a child, being from the other coast, but I knew of it and have always thought it a ...

Pipe down back there!

Terry Castle: The Willa Cather Wars, 14 December 2000

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism 
by Joan Acocella.
Nebraska, 127 pp., £13.50, August 2000, 0 8032 1046 9
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... in a prose that looked decidedly non-experimental – pure, classical, like something carved from white marble.’ Even so, a host of critics (mostly male) simply missed the point. Among other things, the decidedly odd and unsexy ‘Miss Cather’ was deemed to be insufficiently engaged with Big Social Issues. During the Depression she came under violent ...

A Ripple of the Polonaise

Perry Anderson: Work of the Nineties, 25 November 1999

History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the Nineties 
by Timothy Garton Ash.
Allen Lane, 441 pp., £20, June 1999, 0 7139 9323 5
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... time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for this kind of ...

When Ireland Became Divided

Garret FitzGerald: The Free State’s Fight for Recognition, 21 January 1999

Documents on Irish Foreign Policy. Vol. I: 1919-22 
edited by Ronan Fanning.
Royal Irish Academy and Department of Foreign Affairs, 548 pp., £30, October 1998, 1 874045 63 1
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... by the Russian representative in New York in June 1920. But according to the Sinn Féin envoy Patrick McCartan – writing to a Soviet official from neighbouring Estonia on his way back to Ireland from Russia in June 1921 – this had not been seriously considered by de Valera because of McCartan’s doubts about when ‘your representatives speak for ...

The Strange Death of Municipal England

Tom Crewe: Assault on Local Government, 15 December 2016

... million, with another £100 million in cuts planned for the next three years. ‘People went white … at the prospect of it,’ Nick Forbes,its leader, told the Guardian in 2011. ‘There was a sense of disbelief about what it all meant, and the scale of cuts we would have to make.’ ‘I think that once the first or second wave of councils has gone ...

The Atmosphere of the Clyde

Jean McNicol: Red Clydeside, 2 January 2020

When the Clyde Ran Red: A Social History of Red Clydeside 
by Maggie Craig.
Birlinn, 313 pp., £9.99, March 2018, 978 1 78027 506 2
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Glasgow 1919: The Rise of Red Clydeside 
by Kenny MacAskill.
Biteback, 310 pp., £20, January 2019, 978 1 78590 454 7
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John Maclean: Hero of Red Clydeside 
by Henry Bell.
Pluto, 242 pp., £14.99, October 2018, 978 0 7453 3838 5
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... where Lloyd George was to speak, and, as he arrived, she ‘was waving a great red flag’, ‘her white hair crowning a face alight with the flame of revolt’. Lloyd George saw her, raised his hat and gave her a bow. As he was spirited out of the city, Maclean’s wife received a telegram saying he was to be released. ‘I think the Russians secured ...

West End Vice

Alan Hollinghurst: Queer London, 8 May 2025

Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1945-59 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 445 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 0 241 37060 5
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Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960-67 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 416 pp., £30, September 2024, 978 0 241 68370 5
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... servant John Vassall as a Soviet agent and illustrated with a photo of him lying on his bed in white underpants, ‘a spy and homo – a gilt-edged specimen of his type’. This gay-basher’s guide to ‘THE CRAWLER’, ‘THE FUSSY DRESSER’ etc sums up and hopes to activate prejudice, but is perhaps less revealing than the Daily Herald’s ‘What I ...

Love that Bird

Francis Spufford: Supersonic, 6 June 2002

... costs for as long as the company chose to keep up the arrangement.But when Lamont and his boss, Patrick Jenkin, Secretary of State for Industry, together with a pair of supporting civil servants, arrived in the committee room on 9 December, things did not go as expected. A week before, the Committee had been sent a revised set of cost estimates, and as its ...

Erasures

Colm Tóibín: The Great Irish Famine, 30 July 1998

... floor of the chancel is set with encaustic tiles with designs in red, brown, pale green, white and rich Wedgwood blue.’ Mass was said in this sumptuous building in 1846 and work continued on the cathedral for the next few years.It seems incongruous now, barely possible that this wealth of detail was being incorporated into an Irish Catholic ...

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