TV Meets Fruit Machine

William Davies: Faragist TikTok, 26 June 2025

“... up the cost of everything, and diverts money from honest citizens, including the recipients of winter fuel payments, who go cold and hungry as a result. No doubt there are more extreme, exotic or intellectualised forms of ethno-nationalism on social media, built on grander conspiracy theories, but Reform doesn’t need them. A folk wisdom that gestures ...”

Plan A

Jamie Martin: Economic Warfare, 7 May 2026

Chokepoints: How the Global Economy Became a Weapon of War 
by Edward Fishman.
Elliott and Thompson, 538 pp., £10.99, January, 978 1 78396 893 0
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“... pushing energy prices so high that they would spark what one Treasury official called a ‘nuclear winter recession’. Despite opposition from the White House, two senators – Mark Kirk, a Republican, and Robert Menendez, a Democrat (currently serving a federal prison sentence on corruption charges) – demanded sanctions ...”

We were doing well when I left

Tom Stevenson: America’s Afghanistan Delusion, 21 May 2026

Choosing Defeat: The Twenty-Year Saga of How America Lost Afghanistan 
by Paul D. Miller.
Cambridge, 545 pp., £35, October 2025, 978 1 009 61437 5
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“... programme. Médecins sans Frontières warned that ‘the air strikes, lack of aid and onset of winter will only magnify this catastrophe.’ Mass starvation was avoided by the concerted action of relief agencies when the air campaign abated in December 2001. But in September, when the decision was taken to attack, it wasn’t clear that this would be ...”

Now for the Hills

Stephanie Burt: Les Murray, 16 March 2000

Collected Poems 
by Les Murray.
Carcanet, 476 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 1 85754 369 6
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Fredy Neptune 
by Les Murray.
Carcanet, 256 pp., £19.95, May 1999, 1 85754 433 1
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Conscious and Verbal 
by Les Murray.
Carcanet, 89 pp., £6.95, October 1999, 1 85754 453 6
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“... curve, migrating                     mouse-quivering water, mountain-driven winter water, in the high       tweed, stripping of fits mountains to run faster in its skin ... ‘Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman’ applies the same descriptive and mimetic skills to a bulldozer, an electric knife strop and ‘the space ...”

The Men from God Knows Where

Maurice Keen: The Hundred Years War, 27 April 2000

The Hundred Years War. Vol. II: Trial by Fire 
by Jonathan Sumption.
Faber, 680 pp., £30, August 1999, 0 571 13896 9
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“... In the autumn of 1358, another ‘Great Company’ of English and Breton routiers under Robert Knolles invaded the rich Loire provinces, moving on into the Nivernais and the Auxerrois. ‘They brought the whole of the region under their control, ordering every village great or small to ransom itself and buy back the bodies, goods and stores of every ...”

An Abiding Sense of the Demonic

Stefan Collini: Arnold, 20 January 2000

The Letters of Matthew Arnold. Vol. I: 1829-59 
edited by Cecil Lang.
Virginia, 549 pp., £47.50, November 1998, 0 8139 1651 8
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The Letters of Matthew Arnold. Vol. II: 1860-65 
edited by Cecil Lang.
Virginia, 505 pp., £47.95, November 1998, 0 8139 1706 9
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The Letters of Matthew Arnold. Vol. III: 1866-70 
edited by Cecil Lang.
Virginia, 483 pp., £47.95, November 1998, 0 8139 1765 4
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“... and emotionally immersed in the care and upbringing of his children. For example, in the winter of 1867 his eldest child, 15-year-old Tom, was ill yet again: ‘His coughing generally wakes me though he is in the next room, and if I hear him moaning I know that the pain in his side, which the cough brings on, is troublesome, and then I generally go ...”

I smell mink coats

Paul Keegan: Philip Guston goes rogue, 25 January 2024

Philip Guston 
Tate Modern, until 25 February 2024Show More
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“... removals were frequent, and they confirmed rather than caused a change of view.In Rome in the winter of 1948 he stopped painting altogether, consorted with Italian abstractionists, was perhaps encouraged to think this was where the European past had been leading all along, and in equal measure was put off by the embers of an image-ridden Fascism. At any ...”

The Reptile Oculist

John Barrell, 1 April 2004

“... There were fellow poets such as Felicia Hemans, Tom Moore, Samuel Rogers, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the ...”

Seagulls as Playmates

Colm Tóibín: Where the Islanders Went, 20 February 2025

Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World 
by Patrick Joyce.
Allen Lane, 384 pp., £10.99, February, 978 0 14 199873 2
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“... He writes about nights of singing and dancing in Donegal as described by the American writer Robert Bernen, who went to live there in the 1970s. ‘I am also moved by the image of those Donegal nights,’ Joyce writes, ‘because what I see is a life lived after dark, so that the senses and their place in remembering come into view again, literally so ...”

Customising Biography

Iain Sinclair, 22 February 1996

Blake 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 399 pp., £20, September 1995, 1 85619 278 4
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol I: Jerusalem 
editor David Bindman, edited by Morton D. Paley.
Tate Gallery, 304 pp., £48, August 1991, 1 85437 066 9
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. II: Songs of Innocence and Experience 
series editor David Bindman, edited by Andrew Lincoln.
Tate Gallery, 210 pp., £39.50, August 1991, 1 85437 068 5
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol III: The Early Illuminated Books 
series editor David Bindman, edited by Morris Eaves, Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi.
Tate Gallery, 288 pp., £48, August 1993, 1 85437 119 3
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. IV: The Continental Prophecies: America, Europe, The Song of Los 
editor David Bindman, edited by D.W. Dörbecker.
Tate Gallery, 368 pp., £50, May 1995, 1 85437 154 1
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. V: Milton, a Poem 
series editor David Bindman, edited by Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi.
Tate Gallery, 224 pp., £48, November 1993, 1 85437 121 5
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. VI: The Urizen Books 
 editor David Bindman, edited by David Worrall.
Tate Gallery, 232 pp., £39.50, May 1995, 9781854371553
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“... portrait for Literary Britain could manage no more than an unconvinced section of cottage wall. Winter roses, not notably sick, masked the heritage tag. Ackroyd’s yellow sands were not in evidence. A holiday camp to the right and a diminishing display of groynes to the left. A brown and curdling sea, backed by a line of deserted beach huts. I left the ...”

A Very Low Birth Rate in Kakania

Nicholas Spice, 16 October 1997

The Man without Qualities 
by Robert Musil, translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike.
Picador, 1774 pp., £40, November 1995, 0 330 34682 2
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The Man without Qualities 
by Robert Musil, translated by Sophie Wilkins.
Picador, 1130 pp., £15, October 1997, 0 330 34942 2
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“... and then stopped again. Here, outside the city, there was still some snow on the ground’? (It is winter not Walter that has returned to the city.) It is the beauty of Musil’s German, at once sensuous and intellectually intense, that gives weight to this novel about weightlessness. It’s in the words, in the extraordinary metaphoric richness of the ...”

‘A Being full of Witching’

Charles Nicholl: The ‘poor half-harlot’ of Hazlitt’s affections, 18 May 2000

“... Anthony. In the same year Sarah’s elder sister Martha married a well-to-do young solicitor, Robert Roscoe, who had been one of their first lodgers at Southampton Buildings. This was an excellent match from the Walkers’ point of view, one they were no doubt keen to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah ...”

Last Night Fever

David Cannadine: The Proms, 6 September 2007

“... what they have increasingly come to regard as an embarrassing anachronism. When the manager Robert Newman and the young Henry Wood inaugurated an eight-week season of Promenade Concerts in 1895, they were not doing anything very novel. Such ‘promenades’ had been a permanent yet ephemeral part of London cultural life for the best part of sixty ...”

What a Mother

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Marianne Moore and Her Mother, 3 December 2015

Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore 
by Linda Leavell.
Farrar, Straus, 455 pp., $18, September 2014, 978 0 374 53494 3
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“... were never more needed in your life and probably never will be more needed than you are just this winter by the Fawn,’ Norcross wrote to her in September 1910. She would live with her mother for a further 37 years, playing ‘the role’, as Leavell puts it, ‘of indulgent Uncle to her adorable Bunny’.‘The Paper Nautilus’, Marianne’s most nearly ...”

In the Body Bag

Adam Mars-Jones: Ian McEwan’s ‘Nutshell’, 6 October 2016

Nutshell 
by Ian McEwan.
Cape, 198 pp., £16.99, September 2016, 978 1 911214 33 5
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“... foreknowledge, fragmentary but direct, of events in the world before her birth, and the neonate Robert, in Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk, not only remembers being born (someone ‘clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side’) but the preceding state of bliss – ‘never the whole thing again, the whole warm thing all around ...”