Change at MoMA

Hal Foster, 7 November 2019

... so on.For the most part art-historical terms – Fauvism, Cubism and the rest – are avoided in wall texts in favour of general rubrics like ‘Abstraction and Utopia’ and ‘Design for Modern Life’, and inclusive settings like ‘Paris in the 1920s’ and ‘In and around Harlem’. Sometimes the galleries are punctuated by New York moments: an early ...

Picture in Little

Charles Nicholl: Hilliard’s Trajectory, 19 December 2019

Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist 
by Elizabeth Goldring.
Yale, 337 pp., £40, February 2019, 978 0 300 24142 6
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... of provincial artisan stock. He was born in Exeter around 1547, the eldest of eight children of Richard Hilliard, a goldsmith, and Laurence Wall, the daughter of Richard’s former master (her name recurs in later generations of the family in the more sophisticated form of ...

Cosy as a Scalpel

Dinah Birch: Murder Most Delicious, 5 June 2025

Cover Her Face 
by P.D. James.
Faber, 269 pp., £9.99, August 2024, 978 0 571 35077 3
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A Mind to Murder 
by P.D. James.
Faber, 277 pp., £9.99, August 2024, 978 0 571 35078 0
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Unnatural Causes 
by P.D. James.
Faber, 278 pp., £9.99, August 2024, 978 0 571 35079 7
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Shroud for a Nightingale 
by P.D. James.
Faber, 388 pp., £9.99, August 2024, 978 0 571 35080 3
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The Black Tower 
by P.D. James.
Faber, 374 pp., £9.99, August 2024, 978 0 571 35081 0
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Devices and Desires 
by P.D. James.
Faber, 594 pp., £9.99, November 2024, 978 0 571 34115 3
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... an antique fair. That’s just how we are I’m afraid.’ This is an arch piece of marketing from Richard Osman, promoting his detective novels to an American readership. There’s no reason to suppose that British people are better at hiding in plain sight than anyone else. However, they do like a murder story, and a thriving industry has grown up around ...

Guns, Money and Opium

Laleh Khalili, 19 February 2026

The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces 
by Seth Harp.
Viking, 357 pp., £22.50, August 2025, 978 0 593 65508 5
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... and I would say two or three groin shots, very harsh. A knee to the abdomen. Thrown against the wall and so forth.Some detainees were hosed down with cold water and then thrown into air-conditioned rooms. Some were waterboarded. One was forced to drink urine. According to military medics, others had burns on their bodies.In​ The Fort Bragg Cartel, Seth ...

Toxic Inner Critic

Leo Robson: On Nicola Barker, 2 April 2026

TonyInterruptor 
by Nicola Barker.
Granta, 208 pp., £16.99, August 2025, 978 1 80351 254 9
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... as a ‘Toxic Super-Ego’, a concept he has learned from the charismatic YouTube psychologist Richard Grannon. But Charles reckons there’s something about Grannon himself that ‘doesn’t entirely add up’. If he’s really a lost soul like Charles, how can he also be ‘a life-coach/therapist and teach high-level martial arts and do a series of other ...

The future was social

Stefan Collini: Karl Polanyi’s Predictions, 23 January 2025

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time 
by Karl Polanyi.
Penguin, 358 pp., £10.99, June 2024, 978 0 241 68555 6
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... the celebrated generation of radical WEA tutors in the immediate postwar years emerged, including Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.)Polanyi took these teaching duties very seriously, and when, after four years, he departed for temporary posts at colleges in the United States, he took with him the elaborate lecture notes he had prepared for ...

Arruginated

Colm Tóibín: James Joyce’s Errors, 7 September 2023

Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ 
by Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner.
Oxford, 1424 pp., £145, February 2022, 978 0 19 886458 5
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... in Ulysses is Leopold Bloom, and he performs the same manoeuvre: ‘Resting his feet on the dwarf wall, he climbed over the area railings, compressed his hat on his head, grasped two points at the lower union of rails and stiles, lowered his body gradually by its length of five feet nine inches and a half to within two feet ten inches of the area pavement and ...

More Pain, Better Sentences

Adam Mars-Jones: Satire and St Aubyn, 8 May 2014

Lost for Words 
by Edward St Aubyn.
Picador, 261 pp., £12.99, May 2014, 978 0 330 45422 3
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Books 
by Charlie Hill.
Tindal Street, 192 pp., £6.99, November 2013, 978 1 78125 163 8
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... new book, The Grass Is Greener, causes a fatal synaptic meltdown in anyone who reads it, and only Richard Anger, maverick bookseller, and Lauren Furrows, emotionally timid neurologist, can stop the epidemic. Balancing the figure of Gary, for whom subject matter is everything (he admires the Monet on his wall because the ...

I just let him have his beer

Christopher Tayler: John Williams Made it Work, 19 December 2019

The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, ‘Stoner’ and the Writing Life 
by Charles Shields.
Texas, 305 pp., £23.99, October 2018, 978 1 4773 1736 5
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Nothing but the Night 
by John Williams.
NYRB, 144 pp., $14.95, February 2019, 978 1 68137 307 2
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... suddenly he would break into a big smile. He was gracious, but he said what he thought.’ Like Richard Yates, a near contemporary and friend who was also famous on the writing-school circuit for not being famous, Williams served in the war and had a few unsuccessful marriages, drank too much, promoted a writerly ideal of Flaubert-like strenuousness, and ...

Bloody Sunday Report

Murray Sayle: Back to Bloody Sunday, 11 July 2002

... a TV crew reassured us that we were still in the real world. The tall, London-based CNN presenter Richard Quest, in tailored trenchcoat, waited impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s ...

The Habit of War

Jeremy Harding: Eritrea, 20 July 2006

I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation 
by Michela Wrong.
Harper Perennial, 432 pp., £8.99, January 2005, 0 00 715095 4
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Unfinished Business: Ethiopia and Eritrea at War 
edited by Dominique Jacquin-Berdal and Martin Plaut.
Red Sea, 320 pp., $29.95, April 2005, 1 56902 217 8
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Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa 
edited by Robert Rotberg.
Brookings, 210 pp., £11.99, December 2005, 0 8157 7571 7
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... in 1945, which gives a providential glimpse of Ethiopia’s ambitions and the writing on the wall for the Eritreans – or some of the writing anyhow. At the time of the Congress, the British were still running Eritrea, the world war was over and decolonisation was the next great step for Europe and its subject peoples. The portrait of Kenyatta perfectly ...

Mann v. Mann

Colm Tóibín: The Brother Problem, 3 November 2011

House of Exile: War, Love and Literature, from Berlin to Los Angeles 
by Evelyn Juers.
Allen Lane, 400 pp., £25, May 2011, 978 1 84614 461 5
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... and open-plan living quarters. Once more, as in Princeton, Mann’s study was set apart, with a wall of books, and smaller windows. The corridor outside it had a separate staircase to the upper floor. In both his American houses, there was a sense of the study as a shadowy place, away from the opulent living quarters, mirroring the distinction between Mann ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

... the elementary school where my education began, stopping on occasion just over the playground wall.There were several variables in this stopping and the spectacle it sometimes provided. The cart had to halt at the top of Christ Church View where we could all see it and this had to happen during the morning or the dinner-time break when all the school ...

Warhol’s Respectability

Nicholas Penny, 19 March 1987

The Revenge of the Philistines 
by Hilton Kramer.
Secker, 445 pp., £12.50, July 1986, 0 436 23687 7
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Gilbert and George 
by Carter Ratcliff.
Thames and Hudson, 271 pp., £14.95, November 1986, 0 500 27443 6
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British Art in the 20th Century 
edited by Susan Compton.
Prestel-Verlag (Munich), 460 pp., £16.90, January 1987, 3 7913 0798 3
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... environment. The exhibition concludes with a mural consisting of large circular patterns which Richard Long has painted with his own fingers out of mud from the River Avon. Long belongs to the movement of the Sixties away from museums and galleries, and much of his work – footsteps and arrangements of stones or driftwood in various remote locations ...

In real sound stupidity the English are unrivalled

Stefan Collini: ‘Cosmo’ for Capitalists, 6 February 2020

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the ‘Economist’ 
by Alexander Zevin.
Verso, 538 pp., £25, November 2019, 978 1 78168 624 9
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... In the course of the agitation against the Corn Laws in the early 1840s, the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law ...