Making It Up

Raphael Samuel, 4 July 1996

Raymond Williams 
by Fred Inglis.
Routledge, 333 pp., £19.99, October 1995, 0 415 08960 3
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... smiling, ironic’, the best-dressed of the party; Tariq Ali with ‘lustrous brown eyes’ but (Inglis claims) ‘a bit out of it all’. As a narrative device it is brilliant, setting the scene for what is to be a bleak story, introducing some of the leading characters, and insinuating that the author was eyewitness to an intimate ...

Real Busters

Tom Crewe: Sickert Grows Up, 18 August 2022

Walter Sickert 
Tate Britain, until 18 September 2022Show More
Walter Sickert: The Theatre of Life 
edited by Matthew Travers.
Piano Nobile, 184 pp., £60, October 2021, 978 1 901192 59 9
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Sickert: A Life in Art 
by Charlotte Keenan McDonald.
National Museums Liverpool, 104 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 1 902700 63 2
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... his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost circle of the school’. However, as Peter Campbell wrote in the LRB (3 February 2011), English painters ‘responded to Impressionism’s escape from the academic into the everyday, but made something tighter and darker of it. The French pleasure in picnics and river parties and weather wasn’t ...

Act One, Scene One

David Bromwich: Don’t Resist, Oppose, 16 February 2017

... but I am with you. After a routine summons to self-sacrifice – ‘whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots’ – he unleashed the maxim that will guide his policy: From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign ...

Blood for Oil?

Retort: The takeover of Iraq, 21 April 2005

... has estimated), promised bottomless state contracts for the likes of Bechtel, and Kellogg, Brown and Root. The US Overseas Private Investment Corporation delicately called it the ‘next Klondike’; in 2003, Halliburton’s Iraq contracts represented 22 per cent of its total revenues. Providing, of course, that a pliant and stable Iraq could be ...

How to Grow a Weetabix

James Meek: Farms and Farmers, 16 June 2016

... a patchwork of oblongs of open ground stretching to the horizon, blocks of single shades of green, brown and yellow, marked at the join by hedges and lines of trees and narrow lanes. Farmed fields, in other words. We perceive the countryside as if farmed fields were the default state, as if the two were synonymous. But why should this be true, when so much ...

I put a spell on you

John Burnside: Murder in Corby, 2 June 2011

... stand by and pretend that she didn’t care, not just for her own sake, but for mine. Her husband, Peter, was well liked by the hardnut, Rangers Club toughs and, if our affair was ever discovered, she knew exactly what would happen to us both – especially to me. Still, whatever the emotion was that I had seen in her face, it quickly melted away as she nodded ...

Free speech for Rupert Murdoch

Stephen Sedley, 19 December 1991

... Charter 88 and the Institute for Public Policy Research are promoting the two in harness, as Peter Pulzer explained in the last number of the London Review. Liberty (the NCCL) and polemicists such as Keith Ewing and Ronald Dworkin have confined their attention to a Bill of Rights alone. But the yoking of the two is not accidental. It reflects the cast of ...

Do you like him?

Ian Jack: Ken Livingstone, 10 May 2012

You Can’t Say That: Memoirs 
by Ken Livingstone.
Faber, 710 pp., £9.99, April 2012, 978 0 571 28041 4
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... McIntosh as Labour leader in the GLC. McIntosh and Livingstone liked each other about as much as Brown and Blair, but McIntosh knew of Livingstone’s problems and one day, in Livingstone’s words, he ‘kindly asked how I was coping, but as politics has to be a ruthless business and I was planning to replace him I didn’t want to get any closer to him and ...

The Stubbornness of Lorenzo Lotto

Colm Tóibín: Lorenzo Lotto, 8 April 2010

... in Venice in 1546 contained autobiographical material. These documents suggest a personality which Peter Humfrey in his 1997 study of Lotto described as ‘introspective, hypersensitive, often prickly and quick to take offence; but also generous in his affections, tender in his humanity and possessing a quirky sense of humour’. They also make it clear that ...

A Giant Still Sleeping

Lorna Scott Fox: Mike Davis, 4 April 2002

Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City 
by Mike Davis.
Verso, 202 pp., £10, November 2001, 9781859843284
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... by border militarisation itself) is being contained.’ The paradox of US-Mexico integration, as Peter Andreas has identified, is that ‘a barricaded border and a borderless economy are being constructed simultaneously.’ And he is eloquent on the ways that undocumented status is used to keep wages low and employees docile. The 1986 Immigration Reform Act ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: A Shameful Year, 8 January 2004

... Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening ...

Down the Rabbit Hole

David Runciman: Britain’s Europe Problem, 9 October 2025

Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution, 1945-2016 
by Tom McTague.
Pan Macmillan, 546 pp., £25, September, 978 1 5290 8309 5
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... were downright surreal. Before the 1997 general election, the Times – under the editorship of Peter Stothard and by this point driven almost mad by its antagonism towards Europe and its commensurate contempt for John Major – refused to endorse a party and instead chose to support whichever candidate was the most Eurosceptic in each constituency. The ...

Field of Bones

Charles Nicholl: The last journey of Thomas Coryate, the English fakir and legstretcher, 2 September 1999

... playing a kind of burlesque version of themselves. These are men like the braggadocio Peter Shakerly; the railer Charles Chester, who was the model for Carlo Buffone in Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour; Humfrey King, the poetic tobacconist; the barber-surgeons Tom Tooley and Richard Lichfield; the tavern joker John Stone. These loquacious ...
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 
by Brian Boyd.
Chatto, 783 pp., £25, January 1992, 0 7011 3701 0
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... study which produces an earlier variant on the plausible mismatches of nature’s palette? ‘Brown woolly smoke arched and dipped over the green shadow it cast on the aquamarine lake.’ White matters less than Joyce, about whom Nabokov, on occasion, could be unruefully generous. In one interview, he gave out this undeniable admission: ‘my English is ...

Good New Idea

John Lanchester: Universal Basic Income, 18 July 2019

... 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 Network, which, since its founding in 1986 in Louvain, has been the main body studying and advocating for ...