Frognal Days

Zachary Leader: Files on the Fifties, 4 June 1998

Previous Convictions: A Journey Through the Fifties 
by Nora Sayre.
Rutgers, 464 pp., £27.95, April 1997, 0 8135 2231 5
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“... the Marshall Plan (on specific instructions from the Comintern); the opposition to Helen Gahagan Douglas in the 1950 Senate race against Nixon (because of her support for the Korean War, though in all other respects, according to Nixon, she was ‘pink to her very underwear’). When Khrushchev’s 1956 report to the Twentieth Congress was released to party ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: Selling my hair on eBay, 6 January 2022

“... The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had ...”

Nixon’s Greatest Moments

R.W. Johnson, 13 May 1993

Nixon: A Life 
by Jonathan Aitken.
Weidenfeld, 633 pp., £25, January 1993, 0 297 81259 9
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“... down. Nixon’s praise of her is touchingly unauthentic: she never indulged in the present-day custom, which I find nauseating, of hugging and kissing her children or others for whom she had great affection ... Only one of those rather pathetic Freudian psychiatrists would suggest that her love of privacy made her private even from her sons. She could ...”

Who was David Peterley?

Michael Holroyd, 15 November 1984

“... in 1937 Graham Greene was chosen to edit an English imitation of the New Yorker called Night and Day, and it is a percipient comment, in view of the coming success of Horizon and the brief existence of Night and Day, that Cyril Connolly’s talent might have better fitted him to be its editor. The bibliographical ...”

Ask Anyone in Canada

Neal Ascherson: Max Beaverbrook’s Mediations, 24 October 2019

Max Beaverbrook: Not Quite a Gentleman 
by Charles Williams.
Biteback, 566 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 1 84954 746 8
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“... Gladys (‘I hope the experiment will be successful,’ he wrote in his diary on their wedding day). There he was introduced to Andrew Bonar Law, another Scots-Canadian son of the manse with a New Brunswick background, who was a rising star in the Unionist (Conservative) Party. It was the beginning of a strange, enduring relationship: Bonar Law as ...”

Poor Cow

Tim Radford, 5 September 1996

Lethal Legacy: BSE – The Search for Truth 
by Stephen Dealler.
Bloomsbury, 307 pp., £5.99, April 1996, 9780747529408
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BSE: The Facts 
by Brian Ford.
Corgi, 208 pp., £4.99, May 1996, 0 552 14530 0
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Agriculture and Health Committees. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD): Recent Developments 
HMSO, 149 pp., £17, May 1996, 0 10 237796 0Show More
Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture 
by Jeremy Rifkin.
Thorsons, 353 pp., £8.99, June 1996, 0 7225 2979 1
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“... might have been dining on infected tissue for years. The logic was there, and nobody on that day seemed prepared to challenge it. We might all be infected, we might all go mad and die. Scientists could say – and they do say it, over and over again – that they cannot demonstrate infectivity in the muscle or red meat of cattle, nor in their milk. But ...”

Diary

Fraser MacDonald: Balmorality, 16 November 2023

“... 15th that the 96-year-old queen had appointed in her 70-year reign.Truss packed a lot into her 44-day premiership: the catastrophic budget, the tanking markets, the ministerial resignations and the unwilting lettuce. But it’s the moment of formal installation that sticks in my memory. Photos by Jane Barlow of the Press Association show a frail but smiling ...”

Bantu in the Bathroom

Jacqueline Rose, 19 November 2015

“... On 3 March​ 2014, the first day in the trial of Oscar Pistorius for the killing of Reeva Steenkamp, Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipa made her way across courtroom GD at North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria slowly and haltingly. She suffers from severe arthritis and for the duration of the trial she sat on an orthopaedic chair, much smaller than the vast leather seats of the two assessors on either side ...”

That Wild Mercury Sound

Charles Nicholl: Dylan’s Decade, 1 December 2016

The Bootleg Series, Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965-66 
by Bob Dylan.
Columbia, £60, November 2015
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“... singer and activist whose rich, deep gospel voice adorns Staple Singers numbers like ‘Uncloudy Day’. They had met in New York in the early 1960s and, in her words, ‘court[ed] awhile’. These pages are alive with mental movement, as poets’ drafts always are, and it occurs to me that these multiple studio takes – all these ...”

Conspire Slowly, Act Quickly

David Runciman: Thatcher Undone, 2 January 2020

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. III: Herself Alone 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 1072 pp., £35, October 2019, 978 0 241 32474 5
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“... the merits of membership in order to hold her government together, Thatcher refused to name the day, or even to indicate that a time would come when she could. Doing so, she felt, would be another open invitation for speculators to target the pound. Lawson and Howe were stymied by her intransigence but realised there was little they could do about ...”

Stalker & Co

Damian Grant, 20 November 1986

“... photographs of her prostrate form surrounded by policemen appeared in the press next day. The Daily Mail even provided a reassuring caption: ‘Police Aid Brittan Demo Girl.’ Her second ‘mistake’ was to appear as witness for Charles Alcock’s defence, on 29 April. (He was acquitted on a charge of threatening behaviour.) During the next few ...”

Subduing the jury

E.P. Thompson, 4 December 1986

“... I tell you, you deserve to be indicted more than any man that hath been brought to the bar this day ... Mr Justice May: Sirrah, you are an impudent fellow ... The Recorder: You are a factious fellow: I will set a mark on you ... The Mayor: I will cut his nose ... This did not sufficiently strengthen the jury, so they were hauled off to prison for the ...”

Does anyone have the right to sex?

Amia Srinivasan, 22 March 2018

“... to kill anyone. (Nikolas Cruz, who gunned down 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Valentine’s Day, vowed in a comment on a YouTube video that ‘Elliot Rodger will not be forgotten.’) Feminist commentators were quick to point out what should have been ...”

Make for the Boondocks

Tom Nairn: Hardt and Negri, 5 May 2005

Multitude 
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
Hamish Hamilton, 426 pp., £20, January 2005, 0 241 14240 7
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“... a Duke University elite in the US. In a survey of the trend in the journal Anthropoetics in 1997, Douglas Collins wrote that back in 1984 Julia Kristeva had noted that ‘we’re in the middle of a regression which is present in the form of a return to the religious … a rehabilitation of spiritualism.’ Spinozism was part of this: ‘the latest example of ...”

Among the Private Spies

Vadim Nikitin: Christopher Steele’s Assertions, 2 April 2026

Unredacted: Russia, Trump and the Fight for Democracy 
by Christopher Steele.
Mariner, 336 pp., £24, October 2024, 978 0 06 337343 3
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“... work. Nor has he read Unredacted in its entirety. ‘I have enough problems,’ he said. ‘One day I’ll write my own account and we’ll compare notes.’ I asked him whether he thinks he might have been unwittingly used by the Democrats to launder baseless assertions planted by Clinton insiders such as Dolan to make them look like the products of ...”