Driving through a Postcard

Christian Lorentzen: In New Hampshire, 3 March 2016

“... out in giant letters of grey bricks set into the brown grass. It was a Tuesday morning, and we were on the way to see Donald Trump address an arena full of New Hampshire residents at Great Bay Community College on the outskirts of Portsmouth. On the radio the former Colorado senator and disgraced 1984 presidential candidate Gary Hart was saying that ...”

Whoopers and Shouters

James Morone: William Jennings Bryan, 21 February 2008

A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan 
by Michael Kazin.
Anchor, 374 pp., $16.95, March 2007, 978 0 385 72056 4Show More
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“... voice reached every cranny of the great hall as his speech boomed into its grand finale. ‘We will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: you shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns.’ Bryan grabbed at his temples and buckled his knees under the agony of the imagined thorns and from this pained crouch ...”

The Dark Horse Intimacy

Daniel Soar: Helen Simpson, 16 November 2000

Hey Yeah Right Get a Life 
by Helen Simpson.
Cape, 179 pp., £14.99, October 2000, 0 224 06082 1Show More
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“... round the grape hyacinths as though they were on fire and squeezed his way along behind the lilac bush, past cobwebs and worms, until he burst out fiercely into the space behind the hedge. She was being forced to walk the plank. He leaped into the ocean and cantered sternly across the waves. This is a prelapsarian garden full of mantraps, with the smallest ...”

Sucking up to P

Greg Grandin: Henry Kissinger’s Vanity, 29 November 2007

Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power 
by Robert Dallek.
Allen Lane, 740 pp., £30, August 2007, 978 0 7139 9796 5Show More
Henry Kissinger and the American Century 
by Jeremi Suri.
Harvard, 368 pp., £18.95, July 2007, 978 0 674 02579 0Show More
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“... to withdrawal in Vietnam was meant to ‘neutralise’ supporters of the Southern Democrat George Wallace, who was trying to get the 1972 nomination. If Nixon pulled out too quickly, he warned, Wallace’s 13 per cent of the 1968 vote – he had run as an independent candidate on a segregationist ticket and split the right-wing vote – could balloon ...”

It’s only a paper moon

Patrick Parrinder, 13 June 1991

Wise Children 
by Angela Carter.
Chatto, 234 pp., £13.99, June 1991, 0 7011 3354 6Show More
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“... nor so devoted to Shakespeare as a legitimate prince, to judge by the current heir to the throne.) We have heard all too many earnest pronouncements, including a correspondence in the London Review, in recent months, as if these alone could determine the future place of Shakespeare in the educational and cultural life of the nation. What a relief then, to come ...”

A Sequence from ‘Camera Obscura’

Robin Robertson, 22 August 1996

“... own.     *Dead Centre, 1858Exactly halfway through his life, panning easton Princes Street, George Washington Wilson stoppedthe moving world into focus. After long exposure,ghosts returned to their bodies. Calton Hill roseat the top of the frame, the grave-slots of the cemeterya perfect memento. The first snapshot. Steady traffic.     *Atget Comes ...”

Radical Aliens

David Cole: The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair, 22 October 2009

The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial 
by Moshik Temkin.
Yale, 316 pp., £25, July 2009, 978 0 300 12484 2Show More
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“... reviewed the deportation orders resulting from the raids and reversed most of them; and Judge George Anderson, who declared the raids illegal in 1920, writing in his decision that ‘a mob is a mob, whether made up of government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals, loafers and the vicious classes.’ In ...”

You bet your life

Margaret Walters, 21 April 1988

Oscar and Lucinda 
by Peter Carey.
Faber, 512 pp., £10.95, March 1988, 0 571 14812 3Show More
The Fifth Child 
by Doris Lessing.
Cape, 131 pp., £9.95, April 1988, 0 224 02553 8Show More
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street 
by Hilary Mantel.
Viking, 299 pp., £11.95, April 1988, 0 670 82117 9Show More
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“... by the trickster hero of his last novel Illywhacker. For one thing, it’s a family history, and we’re all of us secretly stunned by the coincidences which have resulted, against the odds, in our existence. And the narrator’s account of his great-grandfather, the Reverend Oscar Hopkins, is, by any standards, a weird one. It begins in Devon, with a ...”

Cuba or the Base?

Piero Gleijeses: Guantánamo, 26 March 2009

Guantanamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution 
by Jana Lipman.
California, 325 pp., £17.95, December 2008, 978 0 520 25540 1Show More
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“... the intervention: it was ‘the most honourable single war in all history’, in the words of George Hoar, Republican senator from Massachusetts, ‘a war in which there does not enter the slightest thought or desire of foreign conquest, or of national gain, or advantage’. European diplomats and journalists were less impressed. ‘These high-minded ...”

Why Bull was killed

Victor Mallet, 15 August 1991

Arms and the Man: Dr Gerlad Bull, Iraq and the Supergun 
by William Lowther.
Macmillan, 298 pp., £15.99, July 1991, 0 333 56069 8Show More
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“... Iran-Iraq war in 1988 and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 The ninth child of George L. Toussaint Bull (‘a bibulous solicitor’), Gerald was three years old when his mother died. At school he built model aeroplanes and felt lonely. He was to become a temperamental mathematical and scientific genius and a sentimental lover of poetry, a ...”

Taxphobia

Edward Luttwak, 19 November 1992

The Culture of Contentment 
by J.K. Galbraith.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 195 pp., £14.95, April 1992, 1 85619 147 8Show More
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“... reflect very justifiable future fears), the American electorate rejected the zero-change candidate Bush only to vote for the minimum-change candidate Clinton. True, the radical-change candidate Perot was simply too bizarre to be widely acceptable. But during the earlier Democratic primaries the American public did have serious alternatives, who variously ...”

Wanting to Be Something Else

Adam Shatz: Orhan Pamuk, 7 January 2010

The Museum of Innocence 
by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely.
Faber, 720 pp., £18.99, December 2009, 978 0 571 23700 5Show More
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“... in a mirror together and the Italian realises: ‘The two of us were one person!’ By the end, we’re not sure the sailor ever existed, or whether he is an invention of the Turkish savant, who claims in the final chapter to have written the story. The dialectic of East and West appears as a constantly shifting dreamscape inhabited, and endlessly ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... Scotland​ has long been a nation. We shall soon find out whether its citizens now wish that nation to become a state. I hope they do. It will not only open up new opportunities for their own country but will break up the atrophied, decaying British state and reduce its efficacy as a US vassal. Hence the appeals from Obama and Hillary Clinton to vote ‘No’, a sentiment Blair fully shares but dare not admit to, fearing that his intervention might tip the balance in the opposite direction ...”

Who removed Aristide?

Paul Farmer, 15 April 2004

“... there was plenty they could do to undermine him. The most effective method, adopted by the first Bush administration, was to fund both the opposition – their poor showing at the polls was no reason, it appears, to cut off aid to them – and the military. Declassified records now make it clear that the CIA and other US groups helped to create and fund a ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: A Shameful Year, 8 January 2004

“... they call it heavenly love;And the other a spook or a birdOr possibly merely a Word.Rejoice! We are ruled thru’ infinityBy this highly dysfunctional Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of ...”
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