Rudy Then and Rudy Now

James Wolcott, 16 February 2023

Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor 
by Andrew Kirtzman.
Simon and Schuster, 458 pp., £20, September 2022, 978 1 9821 5329 8
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... make-up were there from the outset. Time and temptation have a way of widening character flaws. A war baby born in 1944, raised Catholic back when that carried a permanent stamp, Giuliani needed ‘a good amount of moral jujitsu just to get through childhood. He was educated by teachers preaching godliness, while his family members were a motley crew that ...

Unwelcome Remnant

Conor Gearty: Erasing the Human Rights Act, 9 October 2025

... to civil servants or elected representatives) should be doing. In a case in 2004 arising from the war on terror, A (FC) and Others (FC) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department, Lord Bingham, the senior judge on the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords (the forerunner to today’s Supreme Court), wrote that judges’ actions should be guided by the ...

Stay Classy

Andrew O’Hagan: Mummy’s Favourite, 19 March 2026

Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York 
by Andrew Lownie.
Collins, 456 pp., £22, August 2025, 978 0 00 877545 2
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Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice 
by Virginia Roberts Giuffre.
Doubleday, 367 pp., £25, October 2025, 978 1 5299 8524 5
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... leg of the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race in Montevideo, demanding £38,000 worth of first-class air tickets to get there. While other poor buggers in the family were opening jumble sales in Inverness, Andy and Fergie were sniffing out freebies in the dodgiest corners of the world, as confirmed in Lownie’s remarkable catalogue of half-hidden ...

Mise-en-Scène for a Parricide

Angela Carter, 3 September 1981

... a few days, to catch the ocean breeze, and so she 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 ...

Tolerant Repression

Blair Worden, 10 May 1990

Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal 
by Tom Mayer.
Cambridge, 326 pp., £32.50, April 1989, 0 521 36104 4
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Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII 
by Alistair Fox.
Blackwell, 317 pp., £35, September 1989, 0 631 13566 9
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The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Portraits at the Court of Henry VIII 
by Retha Warnicke.
Cambridge, 326 pp., £14.95, November 1989, 0 521 37000 0
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English Travellers Abroad 1604-1667 
by John Stoye.
Yale, 448 pp., £12.95, January 1990, 0 300 04180 2
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... literary protest within the court as a harmless outlet for the resentment of a newly-tamed ruling class? To answer those questions we would need the answer to another. If the conventions governing permissible expression are unclear to us, were they any clearer to contemporaries? Sometimes we can watch writers approaching what they sense to be the ...

Reading as a woman

Christopher Norris, 4 April 1985

Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy 
by Mary Daly.
Women’s Press, 407 pp., £14.95, January 1985, 9780704328471
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Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction 
by K.K. Ruthven.
Cambridge, 162 pp., £16.50, December 1984, 0 521 26454 5
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Women: The Longest Revolution 
by Juliet Mitchell.
Virago, 334 pp., £5.95, April 1984, 0 86068 399 0
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Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine 
by Verena Andermatt Conley.
Nebraska, 181 pp., £20.35, March 1985, 0 8032 1424 3
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Women who do and women who don’t 
by Robyn Rowland.
Routledge, 242 pp., £5.95, May 1984, 0 7102 0296 2
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The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 
by Joel Schwartz.
Chicago, 196 pp., £14.45, June 1984, 0 226 74223 7
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... others, those thinkers in the Marxist tradition who pin their faith to a generalised theory of class, ideology and social formation. Hence also their hostility toward any male critic, like Culler, who claims to arrive at a feminist position by deploying theory beyond and against its usual (phallocentric) order of assumptions. To this way of thinking it is ...

Controversy abating and credulity curbed?

Ronald Syme, 4 September 1980

... on stone about two centuries later. That is not the point. The document belongs to a recognisable class of patriotic fabrications already put to good employ by Athenian orators. Debates about authenticity and authorship have a perennial charm. Pseudepigrapha flourished in Antiquity, in compensation, perhaps, for the decadence of epic and the rudimentary ...
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 
by Brian Boyd.
Chatto, 783 pp., £25, January 1992, 0 7011 3701 0
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... a student of Nabokov: ‘in reading one should notice and fondle the details,’ he adjured his class at Cornell. As a writer, Nabokov is a fanatic for detail, his mimesis rivalling that of nature itself: ‘when a butterfly had to look like a leaf, not only were all the details of the leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-holes were ...

A Bloody Stupid Idea

James Butler: Landlord’s Paradise, 6 May 2021

Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London 
by Owen Hatherley.
Repeater, 264 pp., £10.99, November 2020, 978 1 913462 20 8
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... GLC’s politics are especially salient given the bigotry that today masquerades as the ‘war on woke’. Livingstone’s GLC was the subject of endless tabloid scare stories about the ‘loony left’. Its Ethnic Minorities Unit was bombed by fascists in 1985. Its policies prompted the Mail campaign that led to the introduction of Section ...

Anti-Dad

Adam Mars-Jones: Amis Resigns, 21 June 2012

Lionel Asbo: State of England 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 288 pp., £18.99, June 2012, 978 0 224 09620 1
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... prose. Many of these disaffected readers are likely to be female. When Amis insisted on a bidding war for The Information, the last volume of his loose West London trilogy, prospective publishers examined his sales figures, which were lower than his reputation would have suggested. Women, who tend to buy more books than men, were tending to buy relatively few ...

Central Bankism

Edward Luttwak, 14 November 1996

... and which in the Thirties brought about the Great Depression, political chaos, dictatorship and war. In the first instance it is the instrument of money that inflation hits, while deflation has an immediate impact on people, denying them the opportunity to work and earn, and to buy goods and services, which would allow others to work and earn. It is ...

A Nation of Collaborators

Adéwálé Májà-Pearce, 19 June 1997

... beyond the fact that Abacha, personally, wanted these men dead. There was going to be no dirty war, in other words, despite our initial fears that disaffected writers, journalists, lawyers and students were about to be rounded up and shot in batches in the nearest football stadium. How we flattered ourselves! Abacha was never worried about the ...

Child of Evangelism

James Wood, 3 October 1996

The Quest for God: A Personal Pilgrimage 
by Paul Johnson.
Weidenfeld, 216 pp., £14.99, March 1996, 0 297 81764 7
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Is There a God? 
by Richard Swinburne.
Oxford, 144 pp., £20, February 1996, 0 19 823544 5
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God in Us: A Case for Christian Humanism 
by Anthony Freeman.
SCM, 87 pp., £5.95, September 1993, 0 344 02538 1
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Robert Runcie: The Reluctant Archbishop 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Hodder, 401 pp., £20, October 1996, 0 340 57107 1
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... shows that only a tiny minority asks these questions. Most people react to the horrors of war by turning to God for protection, solace and comfort.’ Since most of the benighted masses do not ask such hard questions, such questions do not really exist: this is Johnson’s implication. His message is that religion has survived, in part, because the ...

Come hungry, leave edgy

Sukhdev Sandhu: Brick Lane, 9 October 2003

Brick Lane 
by Monica Ali.
Doubleday, 413 pp., £12.99, June 2003, 9780385604840
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... who tended the donkey engines; they greased the machinery and riddled the furnaces. During World War Two, when ships carrying tea and jute to the UK were torpedoed, they were the seamen least likely to survive. Thousands burned to death, trapped below deck. Yet their lives at sea were by no means awful. They went to many countries, in East Asia, the Middle ...

Diary

Rebecca Solnit: After the Oil Spill, 5 August 2010

... unemployment, bankruptcy, about British pension funds, the wake-up call to shareholders and the class action suit brought by the New Orleans chef Susan Spicer of the restaurant Bayona because contamination, scarcity or outright loss of the primary ingredients in the region’s cuisine – shrimp, crab, fish and crayfish – is one current and probably ...