Thatcher’s Artists

Peter Wollen, 30 October 1997

Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection 
by Norman Rosenthal.
Thames and Hudson, 222 pp., £29.95, September 1997, 0 500 23752 2
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... And then, to go on in a slighdy different vein, doesn’t Goldsmith’s = CalArts and doesn’t Michael Craig Martin = Michael Asher, and therefore isn’t it only to be expected that Sensation = Helter Skelter and/or Scene of the Crime, to cite the two definitive exhibitions of new Los Angeles art. This is not to say ...

‘What is your nation if I may ask?’

Colm Tóibín: Jews in Ireland, 30 September 1999

Jews in 20th-century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust 
by Dermot Keogh.
Cork, 336 pp., £45, March 1998, 9781859181492
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... to the newspapers attacked the influx of Jews, others also came to their defence, most notably Michael Davitt, the leader of the Land League. ‘The Jews have never to my knowledge done any injury to Ireland,’ he wrote in a letter to the Freeman’s Journal in 1893. ‘Like our own race, they have endured a persecution the records of which will for ever ...

One, Two, Three, Eyes on Me!

George Duoblys, 5 October 2017

... in 1995. Mossbourne’s first head, or ‘principal’ as they are often called in academies, was Michael Wilshaw, who subsequently became chief inspector at Ofsted.Both City and Mossbourne began with a single cohort of Year 7s (11 and 12-year-olds) before building up to a full school and sixth form after seven years, which gave their heads time to decide how ...

Falling in love with Lucian

Colm Tóibín: Lucian Freud’s Outer Being, 10 October 2019

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth, 1922-68 
by William Feaver.
Bloomsbury, 680 pp., £35, September 2019, 978 1 4088 5093 0
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... father to get money, his father would ask him to look in on his mother. ‘I’d say yes and go straight out. It was being forgiven I didn’t like. My mother always put nobler motives on my actions than those they were actually prompted by.’ When Sigmund Freud died in 1939 he left the proceeds from his copyrights to his grandchildren, which, since the ...

Yellow as Teeth

Nikil Saval: John Wray’s ‘Lowboy’, 11 June 2009

Lowboy 
by John Wray.
Canongate, 258 pp., £12.99, March 2009, 978 1 84767 151 6
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... When Will tries to explain that global warming is shaped like an upward curve, rather than a straight line, and that there’s no stopping it when it starts, she replies that it ‘sounds like a credit card’. Neither Heather nor the Sikh is particularly interesting; as Canaan’s Tongue suggested and Lowboy now proves, Wray has no gift for creating ...

Oh, the Irony

Thomas Jones: Ian McEwan, 25 March 2010

Solar 
by Ian McEwan.
Cape, 285 pp., £18.99, 0 224 09049 6
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... efforts to tackle climate change over the course of the first decade of the 21st century. Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his fifties. But it’s been thirty years since Richard Feynman hailed Beard’s research as ‘magic’ at the 1972 Solvay Conference, and the Beard-Einstein Conflation – the details of which are for obvious ...

Rapture in Southend

Stefan Collini: H.G. Wells’s​ Egotism, 27 January 2022

The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 256 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 0 241 23997 1
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... any description of his extra-marital relationships, but he clearly wanted to set the record straight in some way so he drafted an extended account of them with instructions that it was only to be published after his death. (His son seems, perhaps prudently, to have decided that it should come out only after the death in 1983 of his father’s most ...

A Mess of Their Own Making

David Runciman: Twelve Years of Tory Rule, 17 November 2022

... know his party better’. Other senior Tories whom she also despised, including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, were summoned back into the fold as cover for her inability to devise a winning Brexit strategy. But Osborne, never. He didn’t stand in the 2017 general election. The dilemma May faced was how to square the circle Brexit had conjured up: on the ...

Diary

Andrew O’Hagan: Have You Seen David?, 11 March 1993

... I think we thought of him as ‘our boy’. We bossed him. Occasionally, when he didn’t walk straight or carry our bags or speak when we wanted him to, we’d slap him or hit his hands with a ruler. We had to pass through fields to get to school, with diggers going and ‘workies’ taking little notice of us, though from time to time they’d bring over ...

Radical Democrats

Ross McKibbin, 7 March 1991

Conflicts of Interest: Diaries 1977-80 
by Tony Benn, edited by Ruth Winstone.
Hutchinson, 675 pp., £20, September 1990, 0 09 174321 4
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Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980-1990 
by Paul Foot.
Verso, 281 pp., £29.95, November 1990, 0 86091 310 4
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... to the jobbers, and, because it is being sold at a discount, £100 million has been written off straight away. It is an absolute scandal.’ A man who foresaw two of the essential elements of the Thatcherite political economy before most of his critics were even aware that there would be one has in an important sense established his credentials, They are ...

Citizens

David Marquand, 20 December 1990

Citizenship and Community: Civic Republicanism and the Modern World 
by Adrian Oldfield.
Routledge, 196 pp., £30, August 1990, 0 415 04875 3
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Community and the Economy: The Theory of Public Co-operation 
by Jonathan Boswell.
Routledge, 226 pp., £30, October 1990, 0 415 05556 3
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Encouraging citizenship: Report of the Commission on Citizenship 
HMSO, 129 pp., £8, September 1990, 0 11 701464 8Show More
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... will probably do the same, but its deeds are unlikely to match its words. As a backbencher, Michael Heseltine was groping for a German-style developmental corporatism. Ministers like Chris Patten and Malcolm Rifkind were visibly at odds with New Right doctrine even before the change of government. John Major himself is, of course, an unknown ...

Must poets write?

Stephanie Burt: Poetry Post-Language, 10 May 2012

Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century 
by Marjorie Perloff.
Chicago, 232 pp., £11.50, April 2012, 978 0 226 66061 5
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Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 
by Kenneth Goldsmith.
Columbia, 272 pp., £15.95, September 2011, 978 0 231 14991 4
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Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing 
edited by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith.
Northwestern, 593 pp., £40.50, December 2010, 978 0 8101 2711 1
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Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004, The Joy of Cooking: [Airport Novel Musical Poem Painting Film Photo Hallucination Landscape] 
by Tan Lin.
Wesleyan, 224 pp., £20.50, May 2010, 978 0 8195 6929 5
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... than boats borne back into the past. Goldsmith himself claims his books are ‘impossible to read straight through. In fact, every time I have to proofread them before sending them off to the publisher, I fall asleep repeatedly.’ He may or may not be pulling our leg. Such writing – so transparent (‘Watch for lanes being closed between exits 9 and ...

Colonels in Horsehair

Stephen Sedley: Human Rights and the Courts, 19 September 2002

Sceptical Essays on Human Rights 
edited by Tom Campbell and K.D. Ewing.
Oxford, 423 pp., £60, December 2001, 0 19 924668 8
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... It is Sandra Fredman, among all the essayists in this book, who at least gets the questions straight; and it is not a coincidence that she starts an incisive essay on labour law and human rights by asking whether we ought not to be sceptical about scepticism. If there is a single area in which there is good historical reason not to trust the judges, it ...

Millom

Alan Hollinghurst, 18 February 1982

Sea to the West 
by Norman Nicholson.
Faber, 64 pp., £3, June 1981, 0 571 11729 5
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Out for the Elements 
by Andrew Waterman.
Carcanet, 151 pp., £3.95, October 1981, 0 85635 377 9
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Between Here and Now 
by R.S. Thomas.
Macmillan, 110 pp., £5.95, November 1981, 0 333 32186 3
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Poetry Introduction Five 
Faber, 121 pp., £5.25, January 1982, 0 571 11793 7Show More
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... and writes villanelles, triolets and ballades: this may be in part a defensive strategy, as her ‘straight’ poems, including the sadly inevitable lines on an old photograph, are much less capable, and can be merely sentimental. Duncan Forbes also has some light and comical poems, ‘Fatso and Spotty’ and ‘Politics of Envy’ (about the ‘Jackdaw folder ...
... Dr Bennett’s essay was not merely a manifesto for Church conservatives: it also amounted to a straight allegation of a liberal conspiracy – a conspiracy, moreover, touching directly on the responsibilities of one of the commissioning editors (Mr Derek Pattinson). For the central point of Dr Bennett’s argument – predictably almost totally disregarded ...