Mexxed Missages

Elaine Showalter: A road trip through Middle America, 4 November 2004

... for the Steelers.’ The city is home to the Andy Warhol Museum on Sandusky Street, where Andrew Warhola was born in 1928. As the director John Waters has said, every kid needs someone really bad to look up to, and the Warhol legacy carries on that counter-cultural role for a new generation. The museum recently organised an exhibition of the prison ...

Diary

Tariq Ali: The Future of Cricket, 12 March 2009

... and you shouldn’t either. We’re only trying to inject a bit of fun into the game and get the young more interested’ – though this has never been a problem in South Asia or Australia. There is, of course, lots of money to be made. Most cricketers are underpaid, and I’m in favour of their being paid more, not least because it would reduce the ...

The Other Thomas

Charles Nicholl, 8 November 2012

... church on Indian soil. He converted the Chera king of the region and baptised him with the name Andrew. (This could make sense of the otherwise mysterious ‘Andrapolis’, which the Greek version of Acts names as Thomas’s port of arrival in India: ‘Andrapolis’, or City of Andrew, may reflect the Greek author’s ...

You Have Never Written Better

Benjamin Markovits: Byron’s Editor, 20 March 2008

The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron 
edited by Andrew Nicholson.
Liverpool, 576 pp., £25, June 2007, 978 1 84631 069 0
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... unreliable both as a witness and as an agent. The story has ‘scarcely a word of truth’ in it, Andrew Nicholson says in his appendix to The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron. Letters from Dallas to Byron in the Murray archive make clear that he had not read Hints from Horace when he offered Childe Harold to Murray. Byron ‘gave’ Childe Harold to ...

A Lethal Fall

Barbara Everett: Larkin and Chandler, 11 May 2006

... as typical – ‘he’s fucking her and she’s/Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm’. The young people’s pre-Aids freedom from moral constraints, assessed with brutality but also an angry humour, sets them down in ‘paradise’ – at least in the envious eyes of ‘everyone old’ watching ‘everyone ...

Jailed, Failed, Forgotten

Dani Garavelli: Deaths in Custody, 20 February 2025

... November 2018 when I got a message telling me that a 16-year-old boy had killed himself in Polmont Young Offender Institution, which lies between Glasgow and Edinburgh. My contact had seen a newspaper column I’d written about the suicide a few months earlier of another prisoner at Polmont, a young woman called Katie ...

Hoarder of Malt

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare, 7 January 1999

Shakespeare: A Life 
by Park Honan.
Oxford, 479 pp., £25, October 1998, 0 19 811792 2
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Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ 
by E.A.J. Honigmann.
Manchester, 172 pp., £11.99, December 1998, 0 7190 5425 7
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... to have had a touch of Robin Hood about him, Honan does not dismiss the venerable legend that the young Shakespeare used to poach deer on the estates of local aristocrats. But for the most part Shakespeare: A Life is colourful only where the record strictly warrants it. Colouring in the record is what this book does best. Honan’s particular flair is for the ...

Is it Art?

John Lanchester: Video games, 1 January 2009

... so that he can get on with his geniusness, is popular with a broad spectrum of alienated semi-young men tapping away at computer screens and dreaming of world domination. Complicating the picture is the fact that she was also the main intellectual influence on her close friend and protégé Alan Greenspan, author of the recent monetary boom we were all ...

Wrecking Ball

Adam Shatz: Trump’s Racism, 7 September 2017

... swastikas, medieval-looking wooden shields, torches and, of course, guns. They came to fight. One young woman in the counter-demonstration was murdered by a man who rammed his car into her, weaponising his vehicle just as jihadists have done in London and Nice and Barcelona. A helicopter surveilling the event crashed, killing the two officers inside. Dozens ...

Adipose Tumorous Growths and All

Kevin Kopelson, 18 May 2000

Franz Liszt. Vol. III: The Final Years, 1861-86 
by Alan Walker.
Faber, 594 pp., £45, February 1998, 0 571 19034 0
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The Romantic Generation 
by Charles Rosen.
HarperCollins, 720 pp., £14.99, March 1999, 0 00 255712 6
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Franz Liszt: Selected Letters 
edited by Adrian Williams.
Oxford, 1063 pp., £70, January 1999, 0 19 816688 5
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... an important but unreliable source.) ‘That is not played, but stabbed,’ the old man told one young woman. ‘If you have no ears to hear, then why are you playing the piano?’ Maybe Liszt couldn’t take the devotion. Or maybe it was the booze. What matters most for Walker is really very simple. Liszt was a musical hero. (‘No great composer has ever ...

The Manners of a Hog

Christopher Tayler: Buchan’s Banter, 20 February 2020

Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan 
by Ursula Buchan.
Bloomsbury, 479 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4088 7081 5
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... If you have dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von und zu Something, an elegant young man who talks Eton-and-Harrow English … If your business is big, you get behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the manners of a hog … But if you’re on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real ...

West End Boy

Adam Shatz: Breivik & Co, 20 November 2014

A Norwegian Tragedy: Anders Behring Breivik and the Massacre on Utøya 
by Aage Borchgrevink, translated by Guy Puzey.
Polity, 299 pp., £20, November 2013, 978 0 7456 7220 5
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Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia 
by Sindre Bangstad.
Zed, 286 pp., £16.99, June 2014, 978 1 78360 007 6
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... from counter-jihadist websites, 2083 was posted online on the day of the attacks under the name ‘Andrew Berwick’, one of Breivik’s several aliases. The signs of Europe’s creeping Islamisation were everywhere, he argued, from Bosnian independence to the spread of mosques in Oslo. Muslim men were having their way with European women, while declaring ...

Woof, woof

Rosemary Hill: Auberon Waugh, 7 November 2019

A Scribbler in Soho: A Celebration of Auberon Waugh 
edited by Naim Attallah.
Quartet, 341 pp., £20, January 2019, 978 0 7043 7457 7
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... and the libel laws to avoid prosecution, and Waugh felt the press had been craven. In 1977 Andrew Newton, the comically incompetent hit man who had missed Scott but killed his dog, Rinka, was released from prison and started hawking his story round the papers. Thorpe, as anxious to deny his homosexuality as the charge of attempted murder, set out to ...

Scoops and Leaks

Neal Ascherson: On Claud Cockburn, 24 October 2024

Believe Nothing until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism 
by Patrick Cockburn.
Verso, 293 pp., £25, October 2024, 978 1 80429 075 0
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... itself seeing eye to eye with the most notorious gangster in Chicago’.In America, he met the young journalist Hope Hale. Like all the women Cockburn was involved with, she was hotly radical and stubbornly self-reliant. They had to be: he moved with ease from job to job and woman to woman. According to Patrick Cockburn, Hale was fascinated ‘by Claud’s ...

Everything is good news

Seamus Perry: Dylan Thomas’s Moment, 20 November 2014

The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The New Centenary Edition 
edited by John Goodby.
Weidenfeld, 416 pp., £20, October 2014, 978 0 297 86569 8
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Under Milk Wood: The Definitive Edition 
edited by Walford Davies and Ralph Maud.
Phoenix, 208 pp., £7.99, May 2014, 978 1 78022 724 5
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Collected Stories 
by Dylan Thomas.
Phoenix, 384 pp., £8.99, May 2014, 978 1 78022 730 6
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A Dylan Thomas Treasury: Poems, Stories and Broadcasts 
Phoenix, 186 pp., £7.99, May 2014, 978 1 78022 726 9Show More
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... which was manifest not just in his life and letters but in his poems too. ‘Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs/About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green’: no modern poet has written with a more intent exuberance about what he called ‘the twice told fields of infancy’. The intoxication of this condition comes from ...