Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity

James Meek, 18 February 2016

... is Robin Hood, who defies the system, who stands up for the little people, who levels the playing field. He takes from the rich to give to the poor. It’s a plan. Taking from the rich to give to the poor has been, is and should be the way forward for an exploited majority against remote, unaccountable concentrations of extreme wealth and power. One word for ...

Whirligig

Barbara Everett: Thinking about Hamlet, 2 September 2004

... or any other playwright.”’ And a similarly recommendable though much briefer introduction, Frank Kermode’s to his Riverside edition, confines itself to an elegant review of the play’s problems, chronological, textual and critical. Kermode calls Hamlet ‘the first great tragedy Europe had produced for two thousand years’, but he declines the ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Bennett’s Dissection, 1 January 2009

... and expert on China, a man who fascinates Steiner and whom he wanted to write about in Frank Kermode’s Modern Masters series, published in the 1970s. Steiner had first seen Needham at a protest meeting against Anglo-American intervention in Korea in 1950, at which the distinguished scientist claimed to have incontrovertible proof of the use of ...

Book of Bad Ends

Paul Keegan: French Short Stories, 7 September 2023

The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol I 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 483 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46199 0
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The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol II 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 352 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46205 8
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... of what precedes or comes after it. Its heroine is a servant, Félicité, one of the excluded whom Frank O’Connor invoked in discussing the genre (‘the short story has never had a hero. What it has instead is a submerged population group’). Flaubert describes the arc of her life – a canvas as broad as a novel – with extreme concision. Large nuances ...

Kipling’s Lightning-Flash

Barbara Everett, 10 January 1991

... be ‘seen’. These disturbing aspects of existence elsewhere solidify in the tale’s deft and frank, though often ignored, insistence on social realities. We are here in a milieu quite coherently lower-middle-class, that of the ‘alf-bred beggars’ of life – although that social conditioning doesn’t by any means, to my feeling, limit the impact of ...

The Health Transformation Army

James Meek: What can the WHO do?, 2 July 2020

... the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, were to blame for the severity of the pandemic. ‘We must be frank about one of the primary reasons this outbreak spun out of control,’ Azar said.There was a failure by this organisation to obtain the information that the world needed, and that failure cost many lives … In an apparent attempt to conceal this ...

The European Coup

Perry Anderson, 17 December 2020

... In the last decade Europe has generated a set of thinkers about its integration who command the field, while the US, increasingly absorbed in itself, has largely vacated it. Among these, one stands out. By reason of both the reception and the quality of his work, the Dutch philosopher-historian Luuk van Middelaar can be termed, in Gramsci’s ...

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

... Jamie Byng, the publisher of Canongate. ‘Are you about?’ it said. ‘I have a somewhat left-field idea. It’s potentially very exciting. But I need to discuss urgently.’ Canongate had bought, for £600,000, a memoir by the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. The book had also been bought for a high sum by Sonny Mehta at Knopf in New York and Jamie had ...

The Ground Hostess

Francis Wyndham, 1 April 1983

... Time Out or What’s On and his many friends, puzzled as to how he found time to cover so wide a field, sometimes caught themselves wondering whether he might not employ a team of researchers ... But there was nothing split, let alone multiple, about his personality: having cast himself as an ideal audience, he had the serene integrity of a collective ...

The Arrestables

Jeremy Harding: Extinction Rebellion, 16 April 2020

... were more like secretive commandos. They drove nails into trees to slow up logging and published a field guide to ‘ecotage’ (environmentalist sabotage), also known as ‘monkey-wrenching’. In the words of one Earth First! figurehead, their derring-do actions were undertaken in the ‘self-defence of the wild’, an intriguing syllogism. There was no plan ...

I’m an intelligence

Joanna Biggs: Sylvia Plath at 86, 20 December 2018

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. I: 1940-56 
edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil.
Faber, 1388 pp., £35, September 2017, 978 0 571 32899 4
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The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. II: 1956-63 
edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil.
Faber, 1025 pp., £35, September 2018, 978 0 571 33920 4
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... want to talk to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.At 17, she had told her journal: ‘I think I would like to call myself “The girl who wanted to be God”.’ And she would retain this intensity across her whole career. When I first read Plath at 17, though I ...

Festival of Punishment

Thomas Laqueur: On Death Row, 5 October 2000

Proximity to Death 
by William McFeely.
Norton, 206 pp., £17.95, January 2000, 0 393 04819 5
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Death Row: The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment 
edited by Bonnie Bobit.
Bobit, 311 pp., $24.95, September 1999, 0 9624857 6 4
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... since 1879 with the ‘stars and bars’: the blue and white cross of St Andrew on an in-your-face field of bright red. Its Civil War service done, this banner had rallied the Ku Klux Klan as it helped re-establish white power in the South during a half-century reign of terror. When, in 1993, the then Georgia Governor asked the legislature to remove this none ...

The Price

Dan Jacobson: The concluding part of Dan Jacobson’s interview with Ian Hamilton, 21 February 2002

... CIA involvement in its finances, another idea came up. Some of those figures like Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode and Stuart Hampshire wanted to start a counter-magazine.I don’t think ‘Encounter’ had folded by then.No, it hadn’t but Spender had left. Spender was a big figure in the CIA controversy. So the projected magazine would be a counter-Encounter ...

Bloody Sunday Report

Murray Sayle: Back to Bloody Sunday, 11 July 2002

... out, we believe, by Lieutenant-Colonel Derek Wilford on lines of thinking propounded by Brigadier Frank Kitson, British Army counter-insurgency expert – was based on the military principle that the way to bring your enemy to battle is to attack something that, for prestige reasons, he will have to defend: the Germans attacking Verdun in the First World War ...

Germs: A Memoir

Richard Wollheim, 15 April 2004

... where my fingers were straying. Here were the memoirs of a few dandies of the turn of the century, Frank Harris and Boni de Castellane, and a copy of the commonplace book of the mysterious Comtesse Diane, but it was the books on the left-hand side of the shelf to which destiny was leading me. Slowly I crossed my right hand over my left hand, and, after the ...