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Back to the Cold War?

Michael Byers: Missile Treaties, 22 June 2000

... has been marked by a belligerent stance towards opponents, whether at home or abroad – as Mary Robinson discovered when she dared to criticise his Government for human-rights violations in Chechnya. His brutal suppression of that independence movement and his renouncing of the no-first-strike principle of Russian nuclear strategy provided clear indications ...

Bard of Tropes

Jonathan Lamb: Thomas Chatterton, 20 September 2001

Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture 
by Nick Groom.
Palgrave, 300 pp., £55, September 1999, 0 333 72586 7
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... of beauty and genius. The autodidact poets discussed by Bridget Keegan – Ann Yearsley, Mary Robinson, Henry Headley and later John Clare – were all of one mind about this. Chatterton, they thought, had died by his own hand in poverty and despair, neglected by the metropolitan world. Michael Suarez’s account here ...

Diary

Tom Paulin: The Belfast agreement, 18 June 1998

... protect the mainland’. McCartney has campaigned vociferously with Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson against the Agreement – in April, at the launch of the United Unionist campaign, he gave the clenched fist salute – and though most people regard him as a provincial politician, his policy of trying to make Northern Ireland permanently part of the ...

Diary

Karl Miller: Balance at the BBC, 9 October 1986

... who resemble one another: the devout Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein/IRA and the devout Peter Robinson, a Loyalist leader who has gained in clout since the programme. There will be those who think that the new Robinson is partly due to the fact that, in the programme that was eventually transmitted, the public was ...

Who scored last?

Gavin Francis: Collision Sport, 5 October 2023

Concussed: Sport’s Uncomfortable Truth 
by Sam Peters.
Allen & Unwin, 448 pp., £20, August, 978 1 83895 577 9
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... were funny; he describes a ‘concussion forum’ at Twickenham in 2013 at which a doctor called Michael Turner played videos of jockeys falling on their heads, to laughs. One strand of the book follows the story of Jeff Astle, a former professional footballer who developed early-onset dementia and whose family have since campaigned for awareness of the link ...

Double-Time Seabird

Michael Hofmann: Halldór Laxness does both, 4 April 2024

The Islander: A Biography of Halldór Laxness 
by Halldór Guðmundsson, translated by Philip Roughton.
MacLehose, 486 pp., £25, September 2023, 978 1 5294 3373 9
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... look like a meliorist fabliau, the banal acquisition of knick-knacks, a kind of Norwegian Family Robinson, animated chiefly by its inveterate suspicion of women. Independent People by contrast is remarkably unconsoled and unconsoling, a book full of deaths and calamities and unhappy persistence, a book with real rain in it, and real cold and real turf ...

Europe or America?

Ian Gilmour, 7 November 2019

... apart from Roy Jenkins, the other heroes are the usually unsung civil servants: Lee, O’Neill, Robinson, Butler, Palliser etc, who shepherded us into the Community with a skill and persistence which almost made up for the visionless complacency of their predecessors of the 1930s and 1940s. Young is impressed by Heath’s ability at their crucial meeting in ...

Wilsonia

Paul Foot, 2 March 1989

The Wilson Plot: The Intelligence Services and the Discrediting of a Prime Minister 
by David Leigh.
Heinemann, 271 pp., £12.95, November 1988, 0 434 41340 2
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A Price too High 
by Peter Rawlinson.
Weidenfeld, 284 pp., £16, March 1989, 0 297 79431 0
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... of ‘likely’ journalists. Wright was, in the immortal words of his former colleague Neville Robinson, an ‘ignorant shit’. So it was perfectly possible for him and his colleagues to spread among gullible journalists the ‘fact’ that half the Cabinet were secret Communists, or that Healey and Benn had jointly written a pamphlet calling for more ...

Homage to the Provinces

Michael Wood, 28 May 1992

Barcelona 
by Robert Hughes.
Harvill, 575 pp., £20, May 1992, 0 00 272078 7
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Barcelonas 
by Manuel Vazquez Montalban, translated by Andrew Robinson.
Verso, 210 pp., £17.95, May 1992, 0 86091 353 8
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Cities of Spain 
by David Gilmour.
Murray, 214 pp., £17.95, March 1992, 0 7195 4833 0
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Red City, Blue Period: Social Movements in Picasso’s Barcelona 
by Temma Kaplan.
California, 266 pp., $30, April 1992, 0 520 07507 2
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... The funicular railway takes you to the top of the mountain with the strange name: a nonsense word, a child’s burble, Tibidabo. You see the city of Barcelona spread out beneath you; beyond it the Mediterranean. Très beau panorama, the Michelin guide says, as well it may, since the name is not the nonsense word it looks but the Devil’s Latin, part of the sentence in which he offered to Christ the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them: Haec omnia tibi dabo si cadens adoraveris me, ‘All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me ...

‘No, no,’ replied the fat man

Michael Davie, 3 December 1992

The Power of News: The History of Reuters 
by Donald Read.
Oxford, 330 pp., £20, October 1992, 0 19 821776 5
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... through a Reuters ticker. This Man Reuter, a popular wartime Hollywood film, starring Edward G. Robinson, boosted the company’s fame. Hitler learned that Himmler was suing for peace from the Reuters machine in his bunker, which told him the game was up. Nasser found the Reuters file admirably objective during the Suez crisis. President Kennedy first heard ...

I’m not an actress

Michael Newton: Ava Gardner, 7 September 2006

Ava Gardner 
by Lee Server.
Bloomsbury, 551 pp., £20, April 2006, 0 7475 6547 3
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... Williams’s The Night of the Iguana (1964). A couple of years later, she almost played Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, a perfect piece of casting sabotaged by Gardner’s self-doubt and reluctance to strip. She was in many bad or dull films, though she also made some good ones, notably Pandora, Mogambo (1953), The Barefoot Contessa, Bhowani Junction ...

Upright Ends

Vincent Newey, 1 October 1987

The Origins of the English Novel, 1660-1740 
by Michael McKeon.
Johns Hopkins, 530 pp., £21.25, April 1987, 0 8018 3291 8
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... Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel,* which Michael McKeon energetically bids to transcend, gave us, whatever else, the clear image and serviceable concept: ‘formal realism’, the growth of ‘the middle class’, secularised Protestant Man proudly bearing the standard of an aggressive ‘individualism’ – on Crusoe’s hard-won island as in the socioeconomic landscape of contemporary England ...

In Fiery Letters

Mark Ford: F.T. Prince, 8 February 2018

Reading F.T. Prince 
by Will May.
Liverpool, 256 pp., £75, December 2016, 978 1 78138 333 9
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... introduction to the poem, published for the first time in 2015 by the Perdika Press, Peter Robinson suggests that to issue such a piece in the homophobic 1950s might well have proved ‘controversial’. The homoerotic charge Ashbery detected in Prince’s early poems is often what makes their Yeatsian rhetoric suddenly catch fire, driving the poem ...

How to be Green

Mary Douglas, 13 September 1990

A Green Manifesto for the 1990s 
by Penny Kemp and Derek Wall.
Penguin, 212 pp., £4.99, July 1990, 0 14 013272 4
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Social Philosophy and Ecological Scarcity 
by Keekok Lee.
Routledge, 425 pp., £40, September 1989, 0 415 03220 2
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Mother Country 
by Marilynne Robinson.
Faber, 261 pp., £12.99, November 1989, 0 571 15453 0
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Blueprint for a Green Economy 
by David Pearce, Anil Markandya and Edward Barbier.
Earthscan, 192 pp., £6.95, September 1989, 1 85383 066 6
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The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon 
by Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn.
Verso, 366 pp., £16.95, November 1989, 0 86091 261 2
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Thinking Green: An Anthology of Essential Ecological Writing 
edited by Michael Allaby.
Barrie and Jenkins, 250 pp., £14.95, October 1989, 0 7126 3489 4
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... problem of free choice.The Green pulpit can descend to quite low levels of abuse, but Marilynne Robinson’s Mother Country is witty as well as vicious. It combines ghoulish glee over the horrors of plutonium manufactured in Sellafield and dispersed along the Cumbrian coast, with satire against the quaint insincerities of the British. Her comic touch is so ...

English Changing

Frank Kermode, 7 February 1980

The State of the Language 
edited by Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks.
California, 609 pp., £14.95, January 1980, 0 520 03763 4
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... social or cultural collapse, as Ben Jonson did, and this view is intemperately represented by Ian Robinson. He holds that the decline of the ceremonious style in the House of Commons is a clear indication of national decadence in this ‘century of the common man, of the “media”, and a “public opinion” definable by poll counts, the age of universal ...

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