Diary

Norman Buchan: In Defence of the Word, 1 October 1987

... the press is free because it is free from government control. In parallel, the later Government Green Paper calls for a ‘lighter’ regulation in commercial radio. The Government simply cannot take on board that at the present time regulation is the means to secure diversity of opinion and diversity of programme. The truth is that the Peacock exemplar of ...

Monster Doss House

Iain Sinclair, 24 November 1988

The Grass Arena 
by John Healy.
Faber, 194 pp., £9.95, October 1988, 0 571 15170 1
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... down, physical sensations overwhelmed him. He had infiltrated the pages of Patrick Kavanagh’s Green Fool, but the lyricism was spattered with ancient brutalities, bedridden bachelors, mud-slow policemen, bicycles, stone fields – and, always, the drink. Attending him on the farm, as in the city, never further than the end of the bed, was his dark ...

Last Word

Michael Ignatieff, 3 February 1983

The Wolf-Man: Sixty Years Later 
by Karin Obholzer, translated by Michael Shaw.
Routledge, 250 pp., £12.50, November 1982, 0 7100 9354 3
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Ernest Jones: Freud’s Alter Ego 
by Vincent Brome.
Caliban, 250 pp., £12.50, January 1983, 0 904573 57 5
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... a mirror to his nose. She diagnosed paranoia. The Wolf-Man knew immediately what that meant: Uncle Peter. He had abandoned his mansion, set up a tent in a secluded field on his estate and had lived with his farm animals, believing everyone else lied to him. He eventually died of exposure and neglect and was found by his servants, semi-devoured by rats. That ...

At the Venice Biennale

Alice Spawls: All the World’s Futures, 18 June 2015

... Irina Nakhova, a founder of Moscow Conceptualism, has restored the 1914 building to its original green. The Austrian pavilion looks empty; Heimo Zobernig’s contribution is a black false ceiling. It doesn’t have much to say, unlike the Uruguayan pavilion by Marco Maggi, which also gives the impression of having nothing in it until one gets up close. The ...

Dome Laureate

Dennis O’Driscoll: Simon Armitage, 27 April 2000

Killing Time 
by Simon Armitage.
Faber, 52 pp., £6.99, December 1999, 0 571 20360 4
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Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems 
edited by Simon Armitage.
Faber, 112 pp., £4.99, October 1999, 9780571200016
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... lines distributed among ten stanzas – the sort of poetry mathematics of which Peter Reading, an admirer of Armitage’s work, is master), but altogether another to write 1000 lines to a year-end deadline, not least when attempting an essentially public poem which reflects on our times and recollects some recent headline-grabbing ...

Too Glorious for Words

Bernard Porter: Lawrence in Arabia, 3 April 2014

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East 
by Scott Anderson.
Atlantic, 592 pp., £25, March 2014, 978 1 78239 199 9
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... They lived sparely, healthily, openly. By contrast, modern England was ‘fat – obese’, and so green that no one there could appreciate greenery, unlike in the desert. The true Arabs had no cities – those sinks of iniquity in the West. Egypt had Cairo, which may have been one of the reasons he disliked it. Battles were conducted with a ‘chivalry and ...

Piperism

William Feaver: John and Myfanwy Piper, 17 December 2009

John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art 
by Frances Spalding.
Oxford, 598 pp., £25, September 2009, 978 0 19 956761 4
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... The elongated shards of smog grey, pea green and lemonade that, since 1968, have cast a wan light on pews reserved for the use of MPs in St Margaret’s, Westminster, are untypical of John Piper. Normally, his stained glass seethes, particularly in Coventry Cathedral, where a Piper sunburst behind the boulder that serves as a font irradiates a great wall of clunky fenestration ...

Who’d call dat livin’?

Ian Glynn: Ageing, 3 January 2002

The Quest for Immortality: Science at the Frontiers of Ageing 
by S. Jay Olshansky and Bruce A. Carnes.
Norton, 254 pp., £19.95, August 2001, 0 393 04836 5
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... unfortunate and now long-dead woman, from whose name HeLa is derived.* So why do we age? In 1952, Peter Medawar pointed out that until the middle of the 18th century most of our ancestors would have died from infections or injuries long before they were old enough to experience the effects of ageing. Genes that produced harmful effects late in life would ...

A bird that isn’t there

Jeremy Noel-Tod: R.F. Langley, 8 February 2001

Collected Poems 
by R.F. Langley.
Carcanet, 72 pp., £6.95, January 2001, 9781857544480
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... was, until recently, a secondary school teacher). The nature of his writing has been described by Peter Riley, in A Poetry in Favour of the World (1997), as ‘non-persuasive’, avoiding ‘the rhetorical habits which are so dominant in Western poetry’. By this Riley seems to mean that Langley lets his experience tell its own story, without the ...

Never Knowingly Naked

David Wootton: 17th-century bodies, 15 April 2004

Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in 17th-Century England 
by Laura Gowing.
Yale, 260 pp., £25, September 2003, 0 300 10096 5
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... our understanding of power. At Berkeley he ran a seminar from which two other major books emerged: Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), which explored the theme of carnality and spirituality, and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), which offered a ...

Wholly Given Over to Thee

Anne Barton: Literary romance, 2 December 2004

The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare 
by Helen Cooper.
Oxford, 560 pp., £65, June 2004, 0 19 924886 9
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... at least as we understand it in Chrétien de Troyes, in Malory, or in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? Cooper’s most interesting and successful chapters are probably ‘Desirable Desire: I Am Wholly Given Over to Thee’ and ‘Women on Trial’. The first takes off from Germaine Greer’s suggestion that the idea of the ‘pure but ...

At the Whitechapel

Jeremy Harding: William Kentridge, Thick Time, 3 November 2016

... dressed with a flimsy backdrop of beige, brown, grey; here and there are torn swatches of yellow, green and maroon. At first we seem to see an austere Kurt Schwitters collage from the early 1920s. Close up, we discover unadorned cardboard, plain or coloured card. The wings of the stage are decorated with pages from a dictionary. Front of stage are two ...

West End Vice

Alan Hollinghurst: Queer London, 8 May 2025

Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1945-59 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 445 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 0 241 37060 5
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Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960-67 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 416 pp., £30, September 2024, 978 0 241 68370 5
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... the essential, the thrilling thing was to ‘smack the pansies down’. The period covered by Peter Parker’s astonishing two-volume compilation culminates in the pansies’ at least partial vindication, the long deferred passage of the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations into law in 1967. Together these books present for the first time an assemblage ...

The Cadaver Club

Iain Sinclair, 22 December 1994

Original Sin 
by P.D. James.
Faber, 426 pp., £14.99, October 1994, 0 571 17253 9
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Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 282 pp., £14.99, September 1994, 1 85619 507 4
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The Hidden Files: An Autobiography 
by Derek Raymond.
Warner, 342 pp., £5.99, December 1994, 0 7515 1184 6
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Not till the Red Fog Rises 
by Derek Raymond.
Little, Brown, 248 pp., £15.99, December 1994, 0 316 91014 7
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... watch it, will find himself taken up by the Modern Painters crowd, the disciples of the late Peter Fuller. As a high-profile poet with atrophied tastes, he can expect a commission to do something tasteful on Glynn Williams. The Commander has become the ashy residue of Neo-Romanticism, out there in the Fens, a John Piper with backbone, silhouetted against ...

Stop the Robot Apocalypse

Amia Srinivasan: The New Utilitarians, 24 September 2015

Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference 
by William MacAskill.
Guardian Faber, 325 pp., £14.99, August 2015, 978 1 78335 049 0
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... time as MacAskill and Ord started their work), The Life You Can Save (founded by the philosopher Peter Singer), Good Ventures (founded by the Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, who have pledged to give away most of their money), Animal Charity Evaluators (an 80,000 Hours spin-off) and the Open Philanthropy Project (a collaboration ...