Our Island Story

Stefan Collini: The New DNB, 20 January 2005

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 
edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison.
Oxford, sixty volumes, £7,500, September 2004, 9780198614111
Show More
Show More
... contributions, it should be said, were meagre). One cannot help wondering about the combination of self-restraint and sly wit which led Sir Keith Thomas, chairman of the dictionary’s supervisory committee from inception to completion and one of the most celebrated historians of his generation, to confine himself to a single entry, that on the figure known ...

Ten Bullets to One, Twenty to Another

Thomas Meaney: Sri Lanka, 2 February 2017

Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World 
by Steven Kemper.
Chicago, 480 pp., £31.50, January 2015, 978 0 226 19907 8
Show More
Tamil: A Biography 
by David Shulman.
Harvard, 416 pp., £25, September 2016, 978 0 674 05992 4
Show More
The Seasons of Trouble: Life amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War 
by Rohini Mohan.
Verso, 368 pp., £16.99, October 2015, 978 1 78168 883 0
Show More
Show More
... with near universal international support. Beijing wanted nothing to do with Wijeweera’s Maoist self-fashioning: Zhou Enlai offered Bandaranaike weapons with which to stamp out the JVP. With Wijeweera in prison, the remaining JVP hardliners went underground – they would reappear in the 1980s – but the concerns they had raised did not go unheeded by the ...

Red Pill, Blue Pill

James Meek, 22 October 2020

... hyper-partisan broadcasters, Trump-era populism and conspiracy theory were already creating a self-contained alternative political thought space conducive to the cross-fertilisation of conspiracist ideas. Covid-19 and government efforts to control it – an extreme event, accompanied by what can seem baffling and intrusive restrictions – appear, in the ...

Not Even a Might-Have Been

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Chips’s Adventures, 19 January 2023

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1024 pp., £35, March 2021, 978 1 78633 181 6
Show More
Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1938-43 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1120 pp., £35, September 2021, 978 1 78633 182 3
Show More
Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1943-57 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1168 pp., £35, September 2022, 978 1 5291 5172 5
Show More
Show More
... volumes has been a striking contrast to the earlier edition. Nicolson today seems conventional, self-satisfied and smug, while Channon, for all his misjudgments, ingratiating behaviour and bigotry, is revealing about public and private life, society and sexuality, and honest about himself to a degree that makes these Diaries a weird kind of masterpiece. He ...

The Shoah after Gaza

Pankaj Mishra, 21 March 2024

... presenting tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinians as collateral damage, in a war of self-defence forced on the world’s most moral army, as the IDF claims to be?The answers for many people around the world cannot but be tainted by a long-simmering racial bitterness. Palestine, as George Orwell pointed out in 1945, is a ‘colour issue’, and ...

Last Exit

Murray Sayle, 27 November 1997

The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong 
by Jonathan Dimbleby.
Little, Brown, 461 pp., £22.50, July 1997, 0 316 64018 2
Show More
In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major 
by Percy Cradock.
Murray, 228 pp., £18.99, September 1997, 0 7195 5464 0
Show More
Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule: The Economic and Political Implications of Reversion 
edited by Warren Cohen and Li Zhao.
Cambridge, 255 pp., £45, August 1997, 0 521 62158 5
Show More
The Hong Kong Advantage 
by Michael Enright, Edith Scott and David Dodwell.
Oxford, 369 pp., £20, July 1997, 0 19 590322 6
Show More
Show More
... of one ratepayer (literate in English or Chinese), one vote, as part of the leisurely run-up to self-rule that was normal in all British colonies. His plan got little local support. Few Chinese businessmen saw any need to share even municipal government with rickshaw-pullers. Hong Kong’s British (mostly Scottish) tycoons have never lost their ...

Literary Friction

Jenny Turner: Kathy Acker’s Ashes, 19 October 2017

After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography 
by Chris Kraus.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 1 63590 006 4
Show More
Show More
... easily findable on YouTube. ‘What we want to look at is the hard edge of a tough, fashionable, self-conscious group, now at the top of the New York avant-garde art world,’ Melvyn Bragg explains, blunt brown sideburns toning nicely with his blunt brown tie. A bit later he addresses Acker directly. ‘You talk in your books about doing away with ...

The Best Stuff

Ian Jack: David Astor, 2 June 2016

David Astor: A Life in Print 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 400 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 0 224 09090 2
Show More
Show More
... mental not physical damage. Only many years of psychoanalysis, he believed, had saved him from self-destruction through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s ...

Wouldn’t you like to be normal?

Lucie Elven: Janet Frame’s Place, 8 May 2025

The Edge of the Alphabet 
by Janet Frame.
Fitzcarraldo, 296 pp., £12.99, August 2024, 978 1 80427 118 6
Show More
Show More
... found no dinner prepared? Besides, she had meant to phone the weekly order at the grocer’s, the Self Help, and it might be too late for the order-boy to deliver it … Our picnic was too soon over.Lottie died not long afterwards. Her self-effacement seems to have served as a caution to her daughter.Frame and Sargeson read ...

Its Rolling Furious Eyes

James Vincent: Automata, 22 February 2024

Miracles and Machines: A 16th-Century Automaton and Its Legend 
by Elizabeth King and W. David Todd.
Getty, 245 pp., £39.99, August 2023, 978 1 60606 839 7
Show More
Show More
... a class by themselves in the history of artificial life: the first solo free-walking self-propelled androids’. The other figures offer variations on the monk’s theme. One is a lay brother worrying a tiny beaded rosary; another a bearded saint crowned by a halo, with a six-note glockenspiel in its rump including miniature bells and ...

Impressions of Nietzsche

Keith Kyle, 27 July 1989

The Lives of Enoch Powell 
by Patrick Cosgrave.
Bodley Head, 518 pp., £16, April 1989, 0 370 30871 9
Show More
Show More
... all good Protestants against the malign influence of Enoch Powell. Powell was a great help to the self-effacing and well-nigh inarticulate leader of the Official Unionists, James Molyneaux, until South Down was lost to the Unionists in 1987. He was a personal advertisement for the complete integration of the Province with Britain for which he stood. He ...

Other People

Dinah Birch, 6 July 1989

The Middleman, and Other Stories 
by Bharati Mukherjee.
Virago, 197 pp., £11.95, June 1989, 1 85381 058 4
Show More
The Burning Boys 
by John Fuller.
Chatto, 128 pp., £10.95, June 1989, 9780701134648
Show More
Termination Rock 
by Gillian Freeman.
Pandora, 182 pp., £12.95, June 1989, 0 04 440352 6
Show More
Blackground 
by Joan Aiken.
Gollancz, 254 pp., £11.95, June 1989, 0 575 04502 7
Show More
Show More
... from alienation. Trapped in conflicts which are not of his making, the middleman arrives at a dour self-knowledge which is the keynote of the book. Mukherjee’s dislocated exiles learn tenacity with their disillusionment. Nevertheless, they are as likely to show compassion as anger or brutality. The emigrant Indian woman studying in New York in ‘A Wife’s ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: Andy Warhol at MoMA, 12 October 1989

... many other big bananas, Tinguely threw a switch and set the heap on course to clanging, twanging self-destruction. All three networks solemnly recorded the event, which for many people inaugurated the period of ‘non-judgmental’ art criticism. Marcel Duchamp, Warhol’s original Pop guru, commented approvingly that there was merit in the movement to ...

Uncle Kingsley

Patrick Parrinder, 22 March 1990

The folks that live on the hill 
by Kingsley Amis.
Hutchinson, 246 pp., £12.95, March 1990, 0 09 174137 8
Show More
Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist 
by John McDermott.
Macmillan, 270 pp., £27.50, January 1989, 9780333449691
Show More
In the Red Kitchen 
by Michèle Roberts.
Methuen, 148 pp., £11.99, March 1990, 9780413630209
Show More
See Under: Love 
by David Grossman, translated by Betsy Rosenberg.
Cape, 458 pp., £13.95, January 1990, 0 224 02640 2
Show More
Show More
... of Amis’s novels that the hero-as-shit, at large in a world of mutual animosity and obsessive self-interest, is one of their most characteristic figures. In The folks that live on the hill the hero-as-shit has given way to the hero-as-patriarch. Harry Caldecote, a retired librarian, heads an extended family of the weak, the lost and the habitually drunk ...

Homage to the Provinces

Peter Campbell, 22 March 1990

Wright of Derby 
by Judy Egerton.
Tate Gallery, 294 pp., £25, February 1990, 1 85437 038 3
Show More
Show More
... fashionable world. Following the portraits in sequence, one watches him gathering skills. A stiff self-portrait about the age of twenty shows him in a Cavalier lace collar and a cloak lined with red. Anne Bateman, painted a year or so later, is also board- (and perhaps bored-) stiff. Five years on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of ...