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Thomas Jones: Spies Wanted, 17 July 2008

... espionage is at hand in Devil May Care, the new James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks ‘writing as Ian Fleming’ (Penguin, £18.99). ‘Picking up where Fleming left off’ when he died in 1964, Faulks transports his readers back to a time when men were men (or at least Bond was), women could escape from prison by flashing their breasts at a jailer, SIS was ...

Hard Man

Ian Hamilton, 16 October 1980

Walk Don’t Walk The Camp From Scenes Like These 
by Gordon Williams.
Allison and Busby, 264 pp., £6.50, April 1980, 0 85031 309 0
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... it. They’d had their chance. He sank back in his chair, mouth twisted tight, and willed on a black depression. This is from the National Service novel, The Camp, in which the would-be Glasgow hard man encounters a barracks load of actual Glasgow hard men. Williams’s ambivalence here reminds me of what happened to my own patriotism on my first visit to ...

Vote for the Beast!

Ian Gilmour: The Tory Leadership, 20 October 2005

... with its proprietor’s economic interests and opinions, and the Telegraph, owned then by Conrad Black, a Canadian by birth, reflected Black’s far right American views. Both Murdoch and Black were and are extreme Europhobes. Major resigned on the morning of his defeat in 1997. His ...

Knights of the King and Keys

Ian Aitken, 7 March 1991

A Dubious Codicil: An Autobiography by 
by Michael Wharton.
Chatto, 261 pp., £15.99, December 1990, 0 7011 3064 4
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The House the Berrys built 
by Duff Hart-Davis.
Hodder, 299 pp., £16.95, April 1990, 3 405 92526 6
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Lords of Fleet Street: The Harmsworth Dynasty 
by Richard Bourne.
Unwin Hyman, 258 pp., £16.95, October 1990, 0 04 440450 6
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... Practitioners of the black arts of journalism will universally acknowledge that the most accurate as well as the funniest portrayal of their profession is Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop. No one who has ever worked for a paper with a baronial proprietor could fail to recognise Lord Copper and his bevvy of fawning executives ...

Diary

Ian Jack: Class 1H, 15 July 2021

... the English public school as a model. Pupils played cricket, rugby, hockey and tennis; its black school blazer carried a complicated heraldic crest – two lions rampant argent, a cross flory, four martlets or and two trefoils or – with the school’s motto, ‘Labor Omnia Vincit’, embroidered above and the less easily translated ‘Quidquid Agis ...

Miss Dior, Prodigally Applied

Ian Patterson: Jilly Cooper, 18 May 2017

Mount! 
by Jilly Cooper.
Corgi, 610 pp., £7.99, February 2017, 978 0 552 17028 4
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... various dashing and extant English aristocrats, including Andrew Parker Bowles. Rupert Campbell-Black, wealthy landowner, sometime world champion showjumper, sometime Tory MP and sports minister, exuder of brio, glamour and charisma, is an all-round amoral charmer and shit, immune to scandal and opinion, and the envy of lesser men. Tony ‘didn’t know ...

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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... Times and TV Times each week with a marker pen obliterating any programme listing that included black or Irish people, gays, lesbians or David Frost’. The relationship cooled when Ken junior joined the Labour Party and ceased completely when he became leader of the Greater London Council, but for a time they lived under the same roof in an intimate and ...

Bonded by the bottle

Michael Wood, 14 June 1990

Writers in Hollywood 
by Ian Hamilton.
Heinemann, 326 pp., £14.95, June 1990, 0 434 31332 7
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... in a wicker chair, checking a page in his typewriter. The picture appears on the covers both of Ian Hamilton’s Writers in Hollywood and of Tom Dardis’s Some Time in the Sun and instantly announces several elements of a familiar legend. Even in black and white the image is full of warm shadows, and the uncropped ...

Forget the Klingons

James Hamilton-Paterson: Is there anybody out there?, 6 March 2003

Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life 
by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart.
Ebury, 369 pp., £17.99, September 2002, 0 09 187927 2
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XTL: Extraterrestrial Life and How to Find It 
by Simon Goodwin and John Gribbin.
Weidenfeld, 191 pp., £12.99, August 2002, 1 84188 193 7
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... are combative on this point, and so united that they frequently refer to themselves as ‘Jack&Ian’. To this winsome dyad the notion of astrobiology is limiting in that it stands for astronomy as seen from Earth plus Earth-style biology, so that its thinking is governed by anthropic concerns such as the search for ‘habitable zones’ elsewhere in our ...

The Comic Strip

Ian Hamilton, 3 September 1981

... show is over that you register what hasn’t been treated with contempt. Women’s lib, gay pride, black power – indeed any cause likely to be favoured by the average ‘silly fucker’ from Islington or Hampstead. Such audiences don’t mind being mocked for their yoghurt and stripped pine – but it might have been a different story if The Comic Strip had ...

His Father The Engineer

Ian Hacking, 28 May 1992

Understanding the present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man 
by Bryan Appleyard.
Picador, 272 pp., £14.95, May 1992, 0 330 32012 2
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... to wax nostalgic. He is quite good on computers. He emphasises the way that in daily life they are black boxes. No one knows how they work. The value of technological innovation for its own human sake is too often overlooked, since no one understands it any more. Part of his message is that, at least in popular culture, no one cares about the hardware, which ...

Shareware

Ian Sansom: Dave Eggers, 16 November 2000

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 
by Dave Eggers.
Picador, 415 pp., £14.99, July 2000, 0 330 48454 0
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... quilts. Eggers maintains that this gimmickry is ‘simply a device, a defence, to obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole story’, and he may be right. What’s ultimately impressive about the book is not its half-assed PoMo comedy – which you can now find in virtually any novel of any genre, except possibly ...

Pull the Other One

Ian Hacking, 26 January 1995

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life 
by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray.
Free Press, 845 pp., £25, November 1994, 0 02 914673 9
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... by white Americans, and are constantly nudged towards thinking of IQ as being a cause. Move on. Black people on average have lower IQ than white ones. Therefore there are a lot of causal factors in their make-up which, collectively, they cannot escape. That is a bald way in which to describe the logic of the book. Yes, the authors constantly insert ...

Hauteur

Ian Gilmour: Britain and Europe, 10 December 1998

This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair 
by Hugo Young.
Macmillan, 558 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 333 57992 5
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... by what Michael Heseltine calls ‘our North American press’ – that is to say, the Murdoch and Black empires – against Britain forging closer ties in Europe. As Conrad Black has lived here for a dozen years, obviously cares about the country and does not own a British tabloid, it is a little unfair to bracket him with ...

Smartened Up

Ian Hamilton, 9 March 1995

Louis MacNeice: A Biography 
by Jon Stallworthy.
Faber, 538 pp., £25, February 1995, 0 571 16019 0
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... cut down on his drinking (which, during his BBC years, became something of a legend), to make his black moods more creatively purposeful, his love affairs more considered and considerate than perhaps they were. MacNeice’s twenty years of writing for radio are sometimes perceived as having wrecked his talent, directing him towards drawn-out, pretentious ...

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