In the Knesset

Uri Avnery, 5 August 2010

... a grave threat to democracy. The man who personifies this phenomenon more than anyone else is MK Michael Ben-Ari of the National Union faction, a protégé of Meir Kahane, whose Kach party (‘Thus’) was outlawed many years ago. Kahane himself was elected to the Knesset only once. Whenever he rose to speak, most of the other MKs left the hall. By ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: Thomas Girtin, 22 August 2002

... It is topped with work by earlier painters – Edward Dayes, to whom he was apprenticed, Michael ‘Angelo’ Rooker and Paul Sandby among them – and tailed with pictures by those who were influenced by him: including Turner, de Wint, Cotman and Constable.For a sense of why Girtin matters it is best to start with his late watercolours, the views of ...

Diary

Peter Campbell: In the Park, 19 August 2004

... the concern of ornithologists about its threat to the racial purity of its Spanish relation, the white-fronted duck.The human population in the park changes, too. There is a rumour that the number of young Australians and South Africans in Southfields is in the tens of thousands. Whatever the figure, it has been enough to change the culture of the ...

What a carry-on

Seamus Perry: W.S. Graham, 18 July 2019

W.S. Graham: New Selected Poems 
edited by Matthew Francis.
Faber, 144 pp., £12.99, September 2018, 978 0 571 34844 2
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W.S. Graham 
edited by Michael Hofmann.
NYRB, 152 pp., £9.99, October 2018, 978 1 68137 276 1
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... in a girdered hive.(‘Let Me Measure My Prayer with Sleep’)Such lines exemplify something Michael Schmidt once identified in Graham’s voice as ‘a strange hostility towards the reader’. The influence of Dylan Thomas has often been noticed, and the effect of the densely packed verbalism is, as in Thomas, principally to imply the labour that has ...

Diary

Anne Enright: Boys’ Aliens and Girls’ Aliens, 21 September 1995

... programme affecting ‘up to two million’ carefully selected Americans. You have to be white to qualify. Just after the Secret Histories documentary, broadcast on Channel 4 on 28 August, which showed autopsy footage of aliens who crashed in New Mexico in 1947, Michael Moore’s TV Nation described the Jerusalem ...

Van Diemonians

Inga Clendinnen: Convict Culture in Tasmania, 4 December 2008

Van Diemen’s Land: A History 
by James Boyce.
Black, 388 pp., £20.75, February 2008, 978 1 86395 413 6
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... we can know, what we might yet find out and what we cannot know about the first fifty years of white settlement in this most southerly settlement of Australia. Now comes Boyce’s detailed study of Van Diemen’s Land, from its first convict settlements in 1803 until it became Tasmania in 1856, after a new wave of prosperous settlers tried to shrug off the ...

Wrecking Ball

Adam Shatz: Trump’s Racism, 7 September 2017

... Nor has it been confined to the South: the North has had its own, scarcely less virulent form of white supremacy. The struggle to achieve full enfranchisement for black people in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. And now ...

Injury Time

Robert Taubman, 2 July 1981

Gorky Park 
by Martin Cruz Smith.
Collins, 365 pp., £6.95, May 1981, 0 00 222278 7
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The Turn-Around 
by Vladimir Volkoff, translated by Alan Sheridan.
Bodley Head, 411 pp., £6.95, April 1981, 0 370 30323 7
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Thus was Adonis murdered 
by Sarah Caudwell.
Collins, 246 pp., £5.95, March 1981, 0 00 231854 7
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A Splash of Red 
by Antonia Fraser.
Weidenfeld, 229 pp., £5.95, May 1981, 0 297 77937 0
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... Park, Moscow and the sables let loose in the snow on Staten Island at the end – ‘black on white, black on white, and then gone’ – there are connections of cause and effect such as few crime novels have ever had to cope with. Gorky Park is a long novel because it tries to deal as fully with Moscow as Simenon’s ...

On V.R. Lang

Mark Ford, 4 July 2024

... copy of V.R. Lang: Poems & Plays, with a Memoir by Alison Lurie. The cover sports a black and white photograph of Lang looking soulful in a harlequin costume – a picture presumably taken during one of her performances for the Poets’ Theatre of Cambridge.Lurie’s memoir recreates the fervent excitement around the activities of this avant-garde ...

Roadblocks

Jeremy Harding, 9 May 1991

Fishing in Africa: A Guide to War and Corruption 
by Andrew Buckoke.
Picador, 227 pp., £17.50, May 1991, 0 330 31895 0
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Africa: Dispatches From a Fragile Continent 
by Blaine Harden.
HarperCollins, 333 pp., £16.99, April 1991, 0 00 215889 2
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The Soccer War 
by Ryszard Kapuściński, translated by William Brand.
Granta, 234 pp., £2.99, November 1990, 0 14 014209 6
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... learned to talk straight from the shoulder, although Buckoke’s is slightly hunched under the white man’s burden and Kapuściński’s is often set to the wheel of invention, which makes much of his plain speaking deceptive. Only Blaine Harden keeps a respectable posture throughout and can even be quite sanguine in adversity – mostly other ...

Big Fish

Frank Kermode, 9 September 1993

Tell Them I’m on my Way 
by Arnold Goodman.
Chapmans, 464 pp., £20, August 1993, 1 85592 636 9
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Not an Englishman: Conversations with Lord Goodman 
by David Selbourne.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 237 pp., £17.99, August 1993, 1 85619 365 9
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... was surprised to come upon a sustained and in my view immoderate onslaught on the late Eric Walter White, who, during Goodman’s chairmanship, was Literature Director at the Arts Council and its much admired organiser of festivals. I worked with White for some years, and he was certainly a strange and almost risibly ...

In the Graveyard of Verse

William Wootten: Vernon Watkins, 9 August 2001

The Collected Poems of Vernon Watkins 
Golgonooza, 495 pp., £16.95, October 2000, 0 903880 73 3Show More
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... of a novel strangeness. ‘Elegy on the Heroine of Childhood’ is written in memory of Pearl White. The death of the queen of the cliffhanger and star of silent masterpieces such as The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine, a woman famed for defying death on ageless celluloid, is, on the face of it, a perfect vehicle for Watkins’s concern with ...

It hurts, but it’s holy

Neal Ascherson: Consequences of Empire, 23 May 2024

Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe 
by Sathnam Sanghera.
Viking, 449 pp., £20, January, 978 0 241 60041 2
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... As the hearing concluded, the judge walked across to the prosecuting counsel (they were both white men). ‘How much would you like me to give him? Six months? Big fine?’ The prosecutor shook his head. ‘No, Jim, he couldn’t pay. We’d be OK with a couple of months and confiscating his printing press like we did last time.’ The judge did what he ...

Imperial Narcotic

Neal Ascherson, 18 November 2021

We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire 
by Ian Sanjay Patel.
Verso, 344 pp., £20, April 2021, 978 1 78873 767 8
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... their ends: riots and strikes often put down by gunfire, guerrilla uprisings, the murder of white settlers, the deportation and resettlement of whole populations, atrocities committed by colonial police forces.Patel’s point is that visions of the British Empire, insofar as they became coherent in the 19th century, were as ...

How to Get Screwed

David Runciman, 6 June 2019

The Mueller Report: Presented With Related Materials by the ‘Washington Post’ 
Simon and Schuster, 736 pp., £12.99, May 2019, 978 1 4711 8617 2Show More
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... was going on in Trumpworld than the people they were investigating had. As the former Trump aide Michael Caputo said on CNN after emerging from his interview with Mueller’s team, ‘I think they know more about the Trump campaign than anyone who ever worked there.’ Another irony is that some of the people who ended up getting indicted as a result of the ...