Into Africa

J.D.F. Jones, 19 April 1990

My Traitor’s Heart 
by Rian Malan.
Bodley Head, 349 pp., £14.95, April 1990, 0 370 31354 2
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... the good life. One is reminded of another distinguished Afrikaner liberal, this time a Liberal, Patrick van Rensburg, who more than a generation ago enraged his fellow South Africans by saying that in the first years of black rule the whites who remained would have to accept a life as disadvantaged as the lives their new rulers had for centuries suffered at ...

Something to Do

David Cannadine, 23 September 1993

Witness of a Century: The Life and Times of Prince Arthur of Connaught, 1850-1942 
by Noble Frankland.
Shepheard-Walwyn, 476 pp., £22.95, June 1993, 0 85683 136 0
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... but unconvincing effort at rehabilitation, His Royal Highness Prince Arthur William Patrick Albert, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, and Earl of Sussex, was the prototypical marginal royal. If the essential qualification for worldly fame and posthumous glory is the possession of a large number of close relatives with crowns, he had it in ...

Instant Depths

Michael Wood, 7 July 1994

The Cryptogram 
by David Mamet.
The Ambassador's Theatre
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A Whore’s Profession: Notes and Essays 
by David Mamet.
Faber, 412 pp., £12.99, June 1994, 0 571 17076 5
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... the stairs,’ which seems somehow different when a man quotes it. He tells the story of Mrs Patrick Campbell looking at a couple embracing, and turning to a streetwalker to say: ‘Another great profession ruined by Amateurs.’ The amateurs in film, according to Mamet, are the so-called professionals, the producers and writers and directors who ...

Diary

John Horgan: The Current Mood in Dublin, 19 December 1985

... should have come from another Catholic, Sir John Biggs-Davison, who observed that the snakes St Patrick is supposed to have banished from Ireland all went to the United States and became Irish-Americans. Perhaps he should be force-fed Emigrants and Exiles, * a powerful new study of the exodus to North America (both Catholic and Protestant). Kerby Miller’s ...

Beach Scenes

Gavin Millar, 1 August 1985

A Man with a Camera 
by Nestor Almendros, translated by Rachel Phillips Belash.
Faber, 306 pp., £9.95, June 1985, 0 571 13589 7
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Players of Shakespeare: Essays in Shakespearian Performance by 12 Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company 
edited by Philip Brockbank.
Cambridge, 179 pp., £12.50, June 1985, 0 521 24428 5
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Year of the King 
by Anthony Sher.
Chatto, 208 pp., £10.95, June 1985, 0 7011 2926 3
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... There are also Pennington’s Hamlet, Gemma Jones’s Hermione, Sinead Cusack’s Portia, Patrick Stewart’s Shylock, Tony Church’s Polonius. Anyone interested in Shakespeare, the theatre or acting couldn’t fail to find this slim volume absorbing. You would have to be a greenroom nut or a stage-door Johnny to follow Antony Sher through every day ...

The Rainbow

Lawrence Gowing, 17 March 1983

Rubens and the Poetics of Landscape 
by Lisa Vergara.
Yale, 228 pp., £29, November 1982, 0 03 000250 8
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James Ward’s Gordale Scar: An Essay in the Sublime 
by Edward Nygren.
Tate Gallery, 64 pp., £2.95, November 1982, 0 905005 93 7
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... cascade in the bottom left-hand corner. ‘It seemed such a marvellous place to have a rainbow!’ Patrick George, a considerable Rubenist, once said to me. But Lisa Vergara’s destination is the idyllic landscapes of the last years of his life – and they no longer show ‘phenomena’ in this sense. There are no catastrophes and no perils. Instead there is ...

Mistrial

Michael Davie, 6 June 1985

The Airman and the Carpenter: The Lindbergh Case and the Framing of Richard Hauptmann 
by Ludovic Kennedy.
Collins, 438 pp., £12.95, April 1985, 0 00 217060 4
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... he did not commit; A Presumption of Innocence (1976) brought the Queen into action again to pardon Patrick Meehan for a murder he did not commit; Wicked beyond Belief (1980) was followed by the release of David Cooper and Michael McMahon, also detained for a murder they did not commit. Few readers of Mr Kennedy’s latest book will finish it thinking he has ...

Dykes, Drongs, Sarns, Snickets

David Craig: Walking England, 20 December 2012

The English Lakes: A History 
by Ian Thompson.
Bloomsbury, 343 pp., £16.99, March 2012, 978 1 4088 0958 7
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The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot 
by Robert Macfarlane.
Hamish Hamilton, 432 pp., £20, June 2012, 978 0 241 14381 0
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... Borrow, who captivated Victorian readers with his tales of Spain and Wales. In our own time, Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to the Balkans in the 1930s and Rory Stewart (and dog) walked through Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Macfarlane is a member of this group of walkers, with the extra strand that he knows he is ...

Short Cuts

Tom Crewe: Chicanery and Fantasy, 6 June 2019

... from the US and twice from Canada.) He continued to get married. He constructed what the historian Patrick Collinson admired as a ‘magnificent library’ out of books he hadn’t paid for. He regularly plagiarised. He wrote a bad book (one academic disbelieved the rumour that it had been written by Peters’s fourth wife because ‘it would, I think, be much ...

Blood Boiling

Paul Foot: Corporate takeover, 22 February 2001

Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain 
by George Monbiot.
Macmillan, 430 pp., £12.99, September 2000, 0 333 90164 9
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No Logo 
by Naomi Klein.
Flamingo, 501 pp., £8.99, January 2001, 0 00 653040 0
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... Tobacco to establish a Chair of International Relations named after BAT’s former chairman, Sir Patrick Sheehy. Though he is chiefly concerned with Britain, Monbiot sees what is happening here in a wider context, recognising that international ‘trade agreements have become the greatest threats to representative government.’ He describes how groups of ...

The Yellow and the Black

Tobias Jones: Fiction and reality in Italian noir, 20 May 2004

The Colombian Mule 
by Massimo Carlotto, translated by Christopher Woodall.
Orion, 156 pp., £9.99, December 2003, 0 7528 5733 9
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The Shape of Water 
by Andrea Camilleri, translated by Stephen Sartarelli.
Picador, 249 pp., £6.99, February 2004, 0 330 49286 1
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The Terracotta Dog 
by Andrea Camilleri, translated by Stephen Sartarelli.
Picador, 343 pp., £15.99, February 2004, 9780330492904
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Almost Blue 
by Carlo Lucarelli, translated by Oonagh Stransky.
Harvill, 169 pp., £9.99, August 2003, 9781843430865
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The Advocate: A Sardinian Mystery 
by Marcello Fois, translated by Patrick Creagh.
Vintage, 128 pp., £6.99, June 2004, 0 09 945374 6
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... In Padua, on 20 January 1976, a young girl called Margherita Magello was repeatedly stabbed and left for dead. She was discovered by Massimo Carlotto, a 19-year-old student radical and member of Lotta Continua, who tried to save her, and, in doing so, got covered in her blood. She died, he was arrested and, a pawn in the struggle between Lotta Continua and the police, was tried for her murder ...

Oh, My Pearl

Nicole Flattery: Candy Says, 23 January 2025

Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar 
by Cynthia Carr.
St Martin’s Press, 417 pp., £25.99, April 2024, 978 1 250 06635 0
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... that Darling seems most alive. ‘When Darling entered a room, men stood,’ the playwright Robert Patrick said. ‘They instinctively stood in the presence of the goddess. Before she opened her mouth and started the Candy craziness, she projected a real movie star effect. Aristocratic. Ladylike.’ It would be naive to think that a woman who spent time at the ...

At the British Museum

Thomas Jones: ‘Life in the Roman Army’, 23 May 2024

... army themselves. In January, a week before Legion opened, the head of the British army, General Patrick Sanders, made a widely reported speech at an armoured vehicles conference: ‘As the prewar generation we must … prepare,’ he said, ‘and that is a whole-of-nation undertaking … regular armies start wars; citizen armies win them.’ On a trip to ...

Roasted

Peter Robb, 6 March 1997

Oyster 
by Janette Turner Hospital.
Virago, 400 pp., £14.99, September 1996, 1 86049 123 5
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... book has been around ever since Australian writing started taking itself seriously, at least since Patrick White announced his intention to ‘people the great Australian emptiness’ with his works. The writer’s fear seems to be that in and for themselves these places and these people lack interest – that only an ungainly effort of the will can turn this ...

Tearing up the Race Card

Paul Foot, 30 November 1995

The New Untouchables: Immigration and the New World Worker 
by Nigel Harris.
Tauris, 256 pp., £25, October 1995, 1 85043 956 7
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The Cambridge Survey of World Migration 
edited by Robin Cohen.
Cambridge, 570 pp., £75, November 1995, 0 521 44405 5
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... performance in that election was the response of his main adversary, the sitting Labour MP, Patrick Gordon-Walker. Gordon-Walker had led Labour’s Parliamentary opposition to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 1962, the first ever legislative restriction on the right of entry into Britain of some 600 million citizens of the Commonwealth. He and his ...