In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

Rebecca Solnit: Losing San Francisco, 8 February 2024

“... remaking society according to their lights.In 2022 the billionaires William Oberndorf and David Sacks, former COO of PayPal, pumped money into a successful recall campaign against Boudin, shortly after his election as district attorney. A total of $7 million was donated to the effort, 80 per cent of it in amounts of $50,000 or more, $600,000 from ...”

Diary

Daniella Shreir: What happens at Cannes, 10 July 2025

“... not good, it’s good.’ No one is immune to a degree of corniness when it comes to Cannes. David Lynch’s Cannes Diary, a ten-part series of short missives documenting his experience as jury president in 2002, is primarily a vehicle for him to indulge his love of café au lait, pain au chocolat, baguette avec fromage and vin rouge. He praises the ...”

Selective Luddism

Adam Mars-Jones: On Alan Garner, 10 July 2025

Powsels and Thrums: A Tapestry of a Creative Life 
by Alan Garner.
Fourth Estate, 229 pp., £14.99, October 2024, 978 0 00 872521 1
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“... as the youngest and Nicholas must be the oldest since their mother singles him out for scolding. David and Helen are in the middle, one way or the other – these are the only siblings in human history for whom birth order has no significance. If Garner, an only child himself, hadn’t learned about these cross-currents by observation he could have paid more ...”

V is for Vagina

T.J. Clark: De Kooning in Cuba, 7 May 2026

“... are the relevant passages – they’re famous, but I do not think we have got them right. To David Sylvester in 1960 (this is a few minutes on in the interview from ‘content is a glimpse’ and I think it takes up the same train of thought):Most of [my recent pictures] are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city – with the ...”
“... year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David Marquand, who was at Magdalen and who told me how he had been scared out of his wits one dark night in the cloisters when Bruce had swept past him in his Spanish cloak. I must have written to him and been told to come down to Magdalen, though I remember ...”

Tankishness

Peter Wollen: Tank by Patrick Wright, 16 November 2000

Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine 
by Patrick Wright.
Faber, 499 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 571 19259 9
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“... out, it is an image which can serve the purposes of publicity, instilling fear, or reminding us of David and Goliath as it seeks to intimidate a smaller, weaker foe with its huge bulk and fearsome armament. The classic example cited by Wright is the press photograph of the encounter of a Chinese tank with a single protester on the road into Tiananmen ...”

Paradise Syndrome

Sukhdev Sandhu: Hanif Kureishi, 18 May 2000

Midnight All Day 
by Hanif Kureishi.
Faber, 224 pp., £9.99, November 1999, 0 571 19456 7
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“... to exploit this insight. Since childhood he’s been a fan of another chameleon and shape-shifter, David Bowie, who was raised, like the author, in Bromley. Similarly, Kureishi’s next novel The Black Album was named after a bootleg LP by Prince to whom the main character, Shahid, is devoted. Prince plunders freely from various musical genres, from rock or ...”

Bravo l’artiste

John Lanchester: What is Murdoch after?, 5 February 2004

The Murdoch Archipelago 
by Bruce Page.
Simon and Schuster, 580 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 7432 3936 9
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Rupert Murdoch: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Media Wizard 
by Neil Chenoweth.
Crown Business, 416 pp., $27.50, December 2002, 0 609 61038 4
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Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed up Big Media 
by Michael Wolff.
Flamingo, 381 pp., £18.99, January 2004, 0 00 717881 6
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“... of the price war’s principal targets. (‘Don’t worry about the Telegraph,’ Murdoch told Sir David English of Associated Newspapers in 1993. ‘Leave them to me. I’ll put them out of business for you.’) Knowing that Black knew Murdoch socially, my friend asked him if he had ever brought up the subject of the price war. Black shook his head. He ...”

Do you think he didn’t know?

Stefan Collini: Kingsley Amis, 14 December 2006

The Life of Kingsley Amis 
by Zachary Leader.
Cape, 996 pp., £25, November 2006, 0 224 06227 1
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“... names,’ Amis confides at one point, ‘it’s amazing how it lowers . . . the tone’ (Lord David ‘Cess-hole’, for example). Getting the tone down to sewer-level became an end in itself, with much verbal japing along the way: ‘Fucky Nell’, ‘a bit of an R-scrawler’ and so on. Above all, the Amis-Larkin correspondence was an abattoir ...”

Unwritten Masterpiece

Barbara Everett: Dryden’s ‘Hamlet’, 4 January 2001

“... lambent dullness played around his face’) – satire as longing, as true poetry. David Nichol Smith said: ‘He could not have given us our greatest epic; but he is our greatest satirist.’ Pope, who offers some strong competition, must have learned from Dryden the interaction of these two ideas. The gift in the older poet that provokes this ...”

The Habit of War

Jeremy Harding: Eritrea, 20 July 2006

I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation 
by Michela Wrong.
Harper Perennial, 432 pp., £8.99, January 2005, 0 00 715095 4
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Unfinished Business: Ethiopia and Eritrea at War 
edited by Dominique Jacquin-Berdal and Martin Plaut.
Red Sea, 320 pp., $29.95, April 2005, 1 56902 217 8
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Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa 
edited by Robert Rotberg.
Brookings, 210 pp., £11.99, December 2005, 0 8157 7571 7
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“... parties remains activated in the present stand-off. Economic tensions, carefully explained by David Styan in Unfinished Business, have continued to simmer, while old ideological grievances between the Tigrayan and Eritrean movements, exacerbated by the TPLF’s constitution for a post-Cold War Ethiopia, have given way to something like hatred. One of the ...”

Poison is better

Kevin Okoth: Africa’s Cold War, 15 June 2023

White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa 
by Susan Williams.
Hurst, 651 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 1 78738 555 9
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Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-75 
by Natalia Telepneva.
North Carolina, 302 pp., £37.95, June, 978 1 4696 6586 3
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“... Ghanaians, Communist Party etc.’ There wasn’t much truth in these claims. ‘At its height,’ David Gibbs writes in The Political Economy of Third World Intervention (1991), ‘the communist intervention in the Congo comprised no more than 380 Soviets and Czechoslovaks – against 14,000 UN troops and many thousands of Belgian military ...”

Toots, they owned you

John Lahr: My Hollywood Fling, 15 June 2023

Hollywood: The Oral History 
edited by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson.
Faber, 739 pp., £25, November 2022, 978 0 571 36694 1
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“... of being tickled to death. The damage is the digitised version of the Hollywood experience, which David Mamet once characterised as ‘like the beginning of a love affair: full of surprises and you’re constantly getting ...”

Good New Idea

John Lanchester: Universal Basic Income, 18 July 2019

“... for a great range of thinkers, including Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism, Rutger Breman in Utopia for Realists, and Peter Barnes in With Liberty and Dividends for All. UBI is definitely having a moment.Guy Standing is a long-standing member of BIEN, the Basic Income Earth ...”

Moderation or Death

Christopher Hitchens: Isaiah Berlin, 26 November 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 386 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6325 9
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The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin 
by György Dalos.
Murray, 250 pp., £17.95, September 2002, 0 7195 5476 4
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“... a dizzying subplot, he also involved himself intimately in the quarrel between Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion over the project of a Jewish National Home, and in the attempts by both to play off the British against the Americans. And, though he showed himself able to take risks in leaking classified material that favoured the Zionist cause, he also found ...”