I ♥ Cthulhu

Paul Grimstad, 21 September 2017

The Night Ocean 
by Paul La Farge.
Penguin, 389 pp., £19.99, March 2017, 978 1 101 98108 5
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... adventure At the Mountains of Madness, is a studious appropriation of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.Lovecraft’s genteel prose coexisted with an intense racism, and reappraisals of his work have had to square the visionary intensity of the writing with the prejudices of the fearful, paranoid man who produced it. He is in this way (and maybe ...

Orwellspeak

Julian Symons, 9 November 1989

The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of ‘St George’ Orwell 
by John Rodden.
Oxford, 478 pp., £22.50, October 1989, 0 19 503954 8
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... who believes he would now be a strong Thatcherite, John Wain, who invokes Orwell as an opponent of Arthur Scargill, or in America Norman Podhoretz, who feels sure he would be taking his stand with the ‘neo-conservatives against the Left’. The New York Tribune, Rodden notes, went further and called Orwell the father of neo-conservatism. These intellectual ...

Class Traitor

Edward Pearce, 11 June 1992

Maverick: The Life of a Union Rebel 
by Eric Hammond.
Weidenfeld, 214 pp., £16.99, March 1992, 0 297 81200 9
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... rough man. The exasperating aspect of Eric Hammond is there – an occasional tendency, as with Arthur Scargill and latterly Mrs Thatcher, to speak of himself in the third person, a rather pleased way of saying: ‘Hammond wasn’t having any of that.’ So, more seriously, is his dedication to quarrelling. For better or worse, this union in its modern ...

The Real Johnny Hall

Penelope Fitzgerald, 3 October 1985

Our Three Selves: A Life of Radclyffe Hall 
by Michael Baker.
Hamish Hamilton, 386 pp., £13.95, June 1985, 0 241 11539 6
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... in a house in Bournemouth called Sunny Lawn. She was not a masculine-looking child; Sir Arthur Sullivan called her ‘Toddles’. But Toddles suffered deeply from the division between her rarely-seen father and her violent, hysterical mother. (The bewilderment of children growing up without love was what she was to do best in fiction.) In 1901, with ...

Dealing in futures

W.R. Mead, 21 March 1985

The 2024 Report: A Concise History of the Future 1974-2024 
by Norman Macrae.
Sidgwick, 198 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 283 99113 5
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The Resourceful Earth: A Response to ‘Global 2000’ 
edited by Julian Simon and Herman Kahn.
Blackwell, 585 pp., £14.95, September 1984, 0 631 13467 0
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... for economic growth. In any case, as William Brown asserts in a complementary chapter, ‘very little in the history of energy allows confidence to be placed in statements about long-term future developments’ and as yet unrecognised unconventional sources of energy may well emerge. Meanwhile, the case for nuclear power is put strongly, with the emphasis ...

Sharky Waters

Amia Srinivasan, 11 October 2018

International Shark Attack File 
University of Florida, www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/shark-attacksShow More
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... On 15 September​, 26-year-old Arthur Medici was killed by a great white shark off Newcomb Hollow Beach in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He was thirty yards from the shore, boogie boarding, when the shark attacked. A witness says that everything was calm until he saw ‘a giant eruption of water’ and then ‘a tail and a lot of thrashing ...

How to dislodge a leader who doesn’t want to go

Ross McKibbin: Where are the Backbenchers?, 8 July 2004

... who could not be ignored or overridden. They either had their own power bases in the party, like Arthur Henderson or Herbert Morrison, or in the unions, like Ernest Bevin, or had a political standing, like Aneurin Bevan or James Callaghan, that made them to some extent proof against their leader’s displeasure. With the exception of Gordon Brown, and ...

Woozy

Daniel Soar: The Photographic Novel, 20 April 2006

Patrick’s Alphabet 
by Michael Symmons Roberts.
Cape, 230 pp., £10.99, March 2006, 0 224 07596 9
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... Weegee, aka Arthur or Usher Fellig, invented a certain kind of photography. His pictures of New York street life – crime scenes, car wrecks, society girls, circus freaks, racegoers, rough sleepers, fire victims – were intimate and direct. He used a 4x5 Speed Graphic camera, preset for instant shooting to 1/200th of a second at f16 with a focal distance of ten feet ...
India’s Economic Reforms 1991-2001 
by Vijay Joshi and I.M.D. Little.
Oxford, 288 pp., £25, September 1996, 0 19 829078 0
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... Politically, they were socialist, though, as Bhagwati says, in Thomas Balogh’s sense, not Arthur Lewis’s. (‘Tommy,’ the distinguished St Lucian economist is reported to have said, ‘the difference between your socialism and mine is that when you think of socialism you think of yourself as behind the counter, whereas when I think of socialism, I ...

Lost Jokes

Alan Bennett, 2 August 1984

... of the Headmaster, whose retirement is the occasion for the presentation of ‘Speak for England, Arthur’, the play within the play. The memoirs of T.E. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf occur in the original script and the visit to the country house on the eve of the First War, but these are presented as the memories of Hugh and Moggie, the upper-class couple ...

A Great Wall to Batter Down

Adom Getachew, 21 May 2020

Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent 
by Priyamvada Gopal.
Verso, 607 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 1 78478 412 6
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... of his countrymen and the conditions of the problem in India make men like him, perforce, little better than sympathetic spectators.’ The self-assertive anticolonial politics he envisioned weren’t intended to appeal to the British public. At the same time, he worried that Hardie, MacDonald and Nevinson would face an indifferent if not hostile ...

Buy birthday present, go to morgue

Colm Tóibín: Diane Arbus, 2 March 2017

Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer 
by Arthur Lubow.
Cape, 734 pp., £35, October 2016, 978 0 224 09770 3
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Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov 
by Alexander Nemerov.
Fraenkel Gallery, 106 pp., $30, March 2015, 978 1 881337 41 6
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... it, all for the same reasons. Diane Arbus loved Freaks. She watched it ‘innumerable times’, Arthur Lubow writes in his biography, ‘often introducing people she knew to its pleasures’. ‘She said she had to see it every time it played,’ one of those friends recalled. As a photographer, Arbus liked taking pictures of those whom others believed to ...

Diary

Terry Castle: Moving House, 27 August 2009

... to ask yet again how they are doing. If only they could text me. Or maybe leave a little message on my Facebook Wall. Self-destructive thoughts when forced to admit they can’t. Like Susan Boyle, all one wants is to have one’s little life back. B., thank god, seems fine. Calls frequently from Cambridge on ...

If It Weren’t for Charlotte

Alice Spawls: The Brontës, 16 November 2017

... when we weren’t looking? They are ready for Woolf’s travesty of a biography, where ‘all the little figures – for they are rather under life size – will begin to move and speak, and we will arrange them in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant.’What is strange about such images isn’t just the extrapolation from fact to fiction, or ...

The Potter, the Priest and the Stick in the Mud

David A. Bell: Spain v. Napoleon, 6 November 2008

Napoleon’s Cursed War: Popular Resistance in the Spanish Peninsular War 
by Ronald Fraser.
Verso, 587 pp., £29.99, April 2008, 978 1 84467 082 6
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... the British client state of Portugal. But Napoleon, then at the height of his power, had little but scorn for a country he considered priest-ridden and decadent, and for its spectacularly dysfunctional ruling family (King Carlos IV was mentally unstable; real power lay with the royal favourite Manuel Godoy, Queen Maria Luisa’s lover; the heir to ...