The Gatekeeper

Adam Tooze: Krugman’s Conversion, 22 April 2021

Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics and the Fight for a Better Future 
by Paul Krugman.
Norton, 444 pp., £13.99, February, 978 0 393 54132 8
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... But when they do, it is consequential. By tracing Krugman’s itinerary, we can shed some light on how we arrived in our current situation, with three centrists – Biden, Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell – undertaking an experiment in economic policy of historic proportions.In the 1970s Krugman belonged to a generation of young lions at MIT, then the ...

Am I perhaps in Italy?

James Butler: Cultures of Homosexuality, 2 April 2026

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 
by Noel Malcolm.
Oxford, 594 pp., £14.99, June, 978 0 19 888636 5
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... is Evliya Çelebi’s celebration of slave boys proffered by their owner, ‘radiant as congealed light’. The Ottoman world was not a sodomite’s paradise, though. Malcolm emphasises that Çelebi’s radiant slaves were ‘vulnerable and powerless’. And desire between adult men was always a different matter: a normal man could desire a boy, and even ...

It’s already happened

James Meek: The NHS Goes Private, 22 September 2011

... its funeral rites when Labour came to power seven years later. Yet at the turn of the millennium, Alan Milburn replaced Dobson and Labour introduced a new, more radical version of that market. It was Labour that introduced foundation trusts, allowing hospital managers to borrow money and making it possible for state hospitals to go broke. It was Labour that ...
... they work for Warren Buffett; in Birmingham, Cardiff and Plymouth, the Pennsylvania Power and Light Company; in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool, Iberdrola; in Manchester, a consortium of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and a J.P. Morgan investment fund. More than anyone, you’d think, it would matter to the people who made these arrangements possible ...

High Jinks at the Plaza

Perry Anderson, 22 October 1992

The British Constitution Now 
by Ferdinand Mount.
Heinemann, 289 pp., £18.50, April 1992, 0 434 47994 2
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Constitutional Reform 
by Robert Brazier.
Oxford, 172 pp., £22.50, September 1991, 0 19 876257 7
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Anatomy of Thatcherism 
by Shirley Letwin.
Fontana, 364 pp., £6.99, October 1992, 0 00 686243 8
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... in the Times Literary Supplement often feature the talents of American neo-conservatism – Alan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, Joseph Epstein, Hilton Kramer, Charles Murray, Paul Craig Roberts, Irving Kristol, even such names for the connoisseur as Richard Cornuelle – they are among the fruits of a mutually beneficial association. For on the one ...

Do I like it?

Terry Castle: Outsider Art, 28 July 2011

... see through a door of the main gallery into the huge adjoining studio at the back – a massive light-filled warehouse-space, the size of a basketball court – filled with adults of all sizes, ages and ethnicities. A deafening cacophony emanates from the studio: squeals, laughter, brash cries, along with an ongoing burble and roar of voices – a ...

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
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... out to be one of the ‘most amusing’ of books. This remark may have to be interpreted in the light of the fact that Stephen’s own preferred form of ‘amusement’ involved hanging by his fingertips from a ledge on the Matterhorn in the middle of a blizzard, but it is true that an abundance of pleasure, of a certain kind, is to be had from the 60 ...

Things go kerflooey

Ruby Hamilton: David Lynch’s Gee-Wizardry, 11 September 2025

David Lynch’s American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema 
by Mike Miley.
Bloomsbury, 272 pp., £21.99, January, 979 8 7651 0289 3
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... close-up inserts. The most unusual aspect of the film is the musique concrète soundscape by Alan Splet (whom Lynch discovered making industrial films in Philadelphia), particularly the low rumbling noise that returns in nearly every Lynch project. Like the shrill wind soughing through Fellini’s films, overdubbed and not always aligned with the ...

Sisyphus at the Selectric

James Wolcott: Undoing Philip Roth, 20 May 2021

Philip Roth: The Biography 
by Blake Bailey.
Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021, 978 0 224 09817 5
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Philip Roth: A Counterlife 
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021, 978 0 19 984610 8
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Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth 
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020, 978 0 525 50524 2
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... portraits of Roth in his former lover Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies, his former protégé Alan Lelchuk’s Ziff: A Life? and his former protégée-lover Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry – it may feel at times as if we’ve made this expedition before, with Claire Bloom hovering overhead.But buoyancy carries the reader along even in the thick of ...

Who said Gaddafi had to go?

Hugh Roberts, 17 November 2011

... questions to toxic identity issues and may derail the country’s nascent democracy; in this light, the Islamist aspect of the Libyan rebellion should put us on our guard. It is among several reasons to ask whether what we have been witnessing is a revolution or a counter-revolution. The rebels’ name has changed several times in the Western media’s ...

On Some Days of the Week

Colm Tóibín: Mrs Oscar Wilde, 10 May 2012

Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde 
by Franny Moyle.
John Murray, 374 pp., £9.99, February 2012, 978 1 84854 164 1
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The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition 
by Oscar Wilde, edited by Nicholas Frankel.
Harvard, 295 pp., £25.95, April 2011, 978 0 674 05792 0
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... remembered, ‘Oscar had longish hair and wore an outfit that spoke of bohemian credentials: light-coloured trousers, a black frock coat, brightly coloured waistcoats with a white silk cravat held with an amethyst pin and always carrying lavender gloves.’ ‘It is at the Grosvenor Gallery,’ Wilde wrote in 1879, ‘that we are enabled to see the ...

The European Coup

Perry Anderson, 17 December 2020

... from England before its accession to the Common Market, in the pioneering reconstruction of Alan Milward.This has finally changed. 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 ...

The Suitcase: Part Three

Frances Stonor Saunders, 10 September 2020

... garden, cool in the shade of walls trained with creepers. Decades later, my father’s eyes would light up when speaking of it – the best ice cream in the world. At Groppi’s, perhaps, the feeling of living in the wrong place was fleetingly dispelled.The pyramids. Camels. Roller-skating at the Rialto rink. Open-air cinemas (Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and ...

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
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... playing games with each other, becoming one.‘The experiment works,’ Kraus says; it’s ‘a light-hearted act of Artaudian cruelty. Almost magically, the diary writings Acker had been trying so hard to lift into poetry are transformed into literary matériel … What’s remarkable about this early work is the intensity Acker arrives at: accessing ...

A Pound Here, a Pound There

David Runciman, 21 August 2014

... suffer from its consequences. The Rothschild Commission went out of its way to note that a bit of light gambling might actually be good for the morale of people ‘engaged in repetitive or otherwise uncongenial tasks’. They found little evidence of exploitation, reporting that contrary to the conventional wisdom, the betting industry did not generate ...