The Ground Hostess

Francis Wyndham, 1 April 1983

“... switched on the overhead strip-lighting. At the same moment, the youth tuned in to a radio. Frank Sinatra and his daughter were singing an old number: ‘And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like – I love you.’ I bought a Bloody Mary and took it over to a corner. A limp evening paper had been left behind by one of the morning ...”

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

“... fundamental shift in perceptions must be underway. Other commentators were even more outspoken. Peter Jenkins in the Independent described the law as ‘an enemy of justice’. He went on: Plainly, after what has happened, radical changes are required in the whole system of police interrogation and in the law relating to confessions. But not only that, the ...”
“... against Britain, and Irish independence.More recently, historians have offered other narratives. Peter Hart, for example, has called the Rebellion ‘a unique example of insurrectionary abstract art’:The surprise, the proclamation, the tricolour, the seized buildings and barricades were all there, but the targets seem almost purely symbolic or even ...”

The Breakaway

Perry Anderson: Goodbye Europe, 21 January 2021

“... the Spectator: Ferdinand Mount, former aide to Thatcher, whose The New Few had appeared in 2012; Peter Oborne, whose Triumph of the Political Class was published five years earlier; and Geoffrey Wheatcroft, whose Yo, Blair! came out in 2007. The first looked at the structure of wealth that had emerged in the new century, the second at the character of its ...”

My Heroin Christmas

Terry Castle: Art Pepper and Me, 18 December 2003

“... front of our apartment, I was always jumping all over them in a passion.In Straight Life Pepper is frank – and hilarious – on the subject of his looks. Detailing his stay in an expensive detox sanitorium in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, he recalls prinking about in the nude after getting some huge shots of morphine to mitigate the symptoms of heroin ...”

The Satoshi Affair

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 June 2016

“... somewhere. ‘The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in,’ Frank Herbert wrote in Dune, Wright’s favourite novel as a teenager. ‘Dune was really about people,’ Wright told me. ‘It was about the idea that we don’t want to leave things to machines and [should instead] develop as humans. But I see things a little ...”