Quickening, or How to Plot an Abortion

Clair Wills: The Abortion Plot, 16 March 2023

... of unplanned pregnancies – Arthur Seaton, for instance, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or Michael Caine’s Alfie – while the women suffer, from their men as much as their abortions. The moral question faced by these men, who until now have been indiscriminately handing round their penises, is whether they will take responsibility for the sex that ...

The Suitcase

Frances Stonor Saunders, 30 July 2020

... 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 Jewish, naturalised British. Both are educated in war and the packing of suitcases and the sheer shiftiness of borders. Home ...

Iraq, 2 May 2005

Andrew O’Hagan: Two Soldiers, 6 March 2008

... an anniversary marked that week with 17 co-ordinated bombings in Baghdad. May 2nd is the date of Joseph McCarthy’s death and J. Edgar Hoover’s. It is the date of Tony Blair’s 1997 election victory and the day in 1982 on which a British navy submarine torpedoed the General Belgrano. Soon after colleagues at Camp Abu Naji woke up to news of Anthony ...

Different Speeds, Same Furies

Perry Anderson: Powell v. Proust, 19 July 2018

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time 
by Hilary Spurling.
Hamish Hamilton, 509 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 241 14383 4
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... with a publisher with authors like James, Strindberg, Ford and Belloc historically on its list. As Michael Barber, an earlier biographer of Powell, without access to his archives, remarked, it was a period where a little privilege went a long way. There is no reason to doubt that at least in his first year in the capital, Powell felt at sea in London, of ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... say he seemed numb. Two of the people on his floor mentioned to me by Hamid – Sheila, 84, and Joseph Daniels, an Indian air force veteran, 69 – didn’t make it to the stairs. Several people said they thought the firefighters had gone in to get them.Those coming from the 16th floor passed Sabah Abdullah, 72, and his wife, Khadija Khalloufi, who worked ...