Diary

Nicholas Spice: In the Isolation Room, 4 June 2020

... sick with a cough and a temperature. By the end of the week, she has recovered, but we ask her to self-isolate for 14 days.5 March. The UK records its first death from Covid-19. In London, there have been four confirmed cases.7 March. I spend five hours in the middle of the day with the choir I run in Highbury in north London, rehearsing for a concert at the ...

Society as a Broadband Network

William Davies, 2 April 2020

... emerged in the behaviour of populations, and might eventually lead to a form of large-scale self-organisation. The best way of ensuring this happened was to build a communications infrastructure that would make it possible for millions of people to share information in real-time. In Hayek’s view, that infrastructure was the price system of a free ...

Skilled in the Tactics of 1870

N.A.M. Rodger: So many ships and fleets and armies, 6 February 2020

The War for the Seas: A Maritime History of World War Two 
by Evan Mawdsley.
Yale, 557 pp., £25, August 2019, 978 0 300 19019 9
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... written by submariners explain how US submarines ‘really’ won the war at sea. The American self-image is so much identified with technological mastery, it seems self-evident that superior weapons and equipment must have been the key to success then as now. The new US submarines introduced in 1941 were certainly well ...

Diary

Owen Bennett-Jones: Night Shifts at Bush House, 8 July 1993

... their radios on throughout the night. Nevertheless, if, for example, a Security Council ambassador self-destructs on Radio 4 or on television something of a fuss ensues. Bosses congratulate you on the interview; friends and colleagues mention that they heard it. Other media outlets carry the story. On the World Service you are broadcasting in a ...

Alphabetarchy

Lydia H. Liu: In the Kanjisphere, 7 April 2022

Kingdom of Characters: A Tale of Language, Obsession and Genius in Modern China 
by Jing Tsu.
Allen Lane, 314 pp., £20, January, 978 0 241 29585 4
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... modelled on the Manchu alphabet. Tsu has some entertaining stories about the adventures of the self-aggrandising Wang, as related in his multi-volume memoir. After being charged with treason in 1898 for opposing what he saw as the Qing dynasty’s capitulation to the Western world, Wang fled to Japan; two years later he returned in disguise as a Buddhist ...

The Thief and the Trousers

Owen Bennett-Jones: John Stonehouse disappears, 21 April 2022

Stonehouse: Cabinet Minister, Fraudster, Spy 
by Julian Hayes.
Robinson, 384 pp., £25, July 2021, 978 1 4721 4654 0
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John Stonehouse, My Father: The True Story of the Runaway MP 
by Julia Stonehouse.
Icon, 384 pp., £10.99, May, 978 1 78578 819 2
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... and people were on the lookout. So when a bank employee on his lunch break noticed a tall, self-assured Englishman going in and out of a number of different banks in central Melbourne, he called the police. They were told by the British authorities that two prominent Englishmen had gone missing and that there was a way of telling them apart: one had a ...

Perseverate My Doxa

Emily Witt: What's up, Maggie Nelson?, 16 December 2021

On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint 
by Maggie Nelson.
Jonathan Cape, 288 pp., £20, September 2021, 978 1 78733 269 0
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... be a world of panel discussions, graduate student workshops, grant applications, affect theory and self-help jargon. Late in the book she makes a parenthetical observation about academia, ‘a field known for articulating liberatory possibilities in language that often excites little to no felt sense of them’. The verb ‘perseverate’ keeps appearing, so ...

Hiss and Foam

Anne Diebel: Tana French, 26 September 2019

The Wych Elm 
by Tana French.
Penguin, 528 pp., £6.99, September 2019, 978 0 241 37953 0
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... interested in memory loss per se; she is interested in what it’s like to have one’s sense of self fundamentally change. Before his injury, Toby never had to scrutinise himself. He was effortlessly charming and persuasive. ‘I never thought much about my, my personality before,’ Toby tells Hugo. ‘But when I did, I took it for granted that it was ...

Bang, Bang, Smash, Smash

Rosemary Hill: Beatrix Potter, 22 February 2007

Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature 
by Linda Lear.
Allen Lane, 584 pp., £25, January 2007, 978 0 7139 9560 2
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... saw the similarities between humans and other species: the childlike bravado of rabbits, the self-interest of certain cats and the unmistakeable resemblance of a middle-aged woman in a panic to a duck in a bonnet and shawl. Her family, friends and the innumerable pets she kept all her life were the objects of her study and became, eventually, the ...

What’s it for?

Martin Loughlin: The Privy Council, 22 October 2015

By Royal Appointment: Tales from the Privy Council – the Unknown Arm of Government 
by David Rogers.
Biteback, 344 pp., £25, July 2015, 978 1 84954 856 4
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... base. And then, in 2013, in the aftermath of the hacking scandal and the failures of press self-regulation, the queen in council imposed a royal charter on self-regulation of the press. The Privy Council remains an important instrument of governmental business, though it is now essentially a mechanism by which ...

I’m here to be mad

Christopher Benfey: Robert Walser, 10 May 2018

Walks with Robert Walser 
by Carl Seelig, translated by Anne Posten.
New Directions, 127 pp., £11.99, May 2017, 978 0 8112 2139 9
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Girlfriends, Ghosts and Other Stories 
by Robert Walser, translated by Tom Whalen, Nicole Köngeter and Annette Wiesner.
NYRB, 181 pp., £9.99, October 2016, 978 1 68137 016 3
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... factors. One of Walser’s greatest stories, ‘Kleist in Thun’, is the lightly disguised self-portrait of a conflicted writer wrestling with his demons. ‘It is as if radiant red stupefying waves rise up in his head whenever he sits at his table and tries to write,’ Walser says of Kleist. ‘He curses his craft.’ At some point, the act of ...

On My Zafu

Lucie Elven: Emmanuel Carrère’s Yoga Project, 8 September 2022

Yoga 
by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by John Lambert.
Jonathan Cape, 320 pp., £16.99, June, 978 1 78733 321 5
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... smile’ when he asks for one of the better bedrooms at the retreat, and he is mindful of his self-absorption, talking of ‘my unwieldy, despotic ego’ or, in the third person, ‘his fearful, narcissistic little ego’ or, generalising, ‘the knot of obsession, megalomania and the noble desire to do a good job that constitutes a writer’s ego’.His ...

Diary

Susan McKay: In Portadown, 10 March 2022

... Ulster Unionist Party leader, Doug Beattie, to describe him as a ‘juvenile, pathetic, moronic, self-indulgent, narcissistic fool who jokes … as people die’. Wilson is one of the DUP’s longest serving politicians, close to Eurosceptic Tories in the European Research Group. He urged the British government to take the hardest possible stance during ...

Diary

Eve Blake: Friern Hospital, 8 May 2003

... ago,’ one man chortles. Quizzed about their reasons for choosing the Manor, some are remarkably self-revealing, one retired man describing the ‘mad’ world beyond its gates as too stressful for him, while a divorcee admits that she hopes such a self-contained development – with its leisure facilities, café and ...

Awkward Bow

Jeremy Noel-Tod: Geoffrey Hill, 6 March 2003

The Orchards of Syon 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Penguin, 72 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 0 14 100991 8
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... the 20th century. This is high confessional poetry: vulnerable, proud anger is, I find, a related self of covetousness. I came late to seeing that. Actually, I had to be shown it. What I saw was rough, and still pains me. Perhaps it should pain me more. The book begins with a Tennysonian heart attack, ‘the blown aorta/pelting out blood’. Hill’s ...