Now to Stride into the Sunlight

Ian Jack: The Brexiters, 15 June 2017

What Next: How to Get the Best from Brexit 
by Daniel Hannan.
Head of Zeus, 298 pp., £9.99, November 2016, 978 1 78669 193 4
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The Bad Boys of Brexit: Tales of Mischief, Mayhem & Guerrilla Warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign 
by Arron Banks.
Biteback, 354 pp., £9.99, June 2017, 978 1 78590 205 5
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All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class 
by Tim Shipman.
William Collins, 688 pp., £9.99, June 2017, 978 0 00 821517 0
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... souverainisme is not nativist or protectionist,’ he writes, distancing Brexit’s victory from Donald Trump’s. ‘Where Trump railed at Chinese exporters, British Leavers called for a bilateral free-trade deal with China.’ A ‘frustration with the Establishment’ is all the two have in common. This description of the referendum, which Hannan ...

The Paranoid Sublime

Andrew O’Hagan, 26 May 1994

How late it was, how late 
by James Kelman.
Secker, 374 pp., £14.99, March 1994, 0 436 23292 8
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... time from a visit to the Scotia Bar in Stockwell Street, where the dissidents met now and then to read their work and shout down the official festival. The group adopted the name Workers’ City – which spelled out their opposition to that recently developed area around Blackfriars and Ingram Street known as Merchant City – and set about picketing some ...

Life and Work

Philip Horne, 8 May 1986

Falling apart 
by Nicholas Salaman.
Secker, 190 pp., £9.95, April 1986, 0 436 44087 3
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Memoirs of Many in One 
by Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray, edited by Patrick White.
Cape, 192 pp., £8.95, April 1986, 0 224 02371 3
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Free Agents 
by Max Apple.
Faber, 197 pp., £9.95, March 1986, 0 571 13852 7
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... she has her own mystical idea of the creative self, wanting at one point to ‘nip upstairs and read all I have written’ in order ‘to confirm that I am I. I.’ This is something like accepting her own divinity, even if it is only a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation. At any rate it anticipates Patrick White’s admission at ...

Diary

Tariq Ali: In Pyongyang, 26 January 2012

... coined to designate this xenophobia. When I asked the interpreter on my first trip whether he had read any Marx or Engels or Lenin, he looked puzzled. ‘No,’ he told me. ‘Everything is interpreted by Comrade Kim Il-sung.’ He wasn’t sure whether any of the classic texts were available in libraries. At one stage it appeared that the United States was ...

Set on Being Singular

Nick Richardson: Schoenberg, 20 October 2011

Arnold Schoenberg 
by Bojan Bujic.
Phaidon, 240 pp., £15, 0 7148 4614 7
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... particularly impressed by the density of Schoenberg’s writing, and told his wife after he’d read the score that it made him feel old. He wasn’t the only one to notice Schoenberg’s potential. The educational reformer Eugenie Schwarzwald invited him, on his return to Vienna, to hold composition classes at her school. By 1905, the school had become a ...

Dark Tom

Christopher Ricks, 1 December 1983

Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley 1933-1980 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Secker, 323 pp., £8.95, October 1983, 0 436 28852 4
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Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley 1896-1933 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Fontana, 274 pp., £2.50, October 1983, 0 00 636644 9
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... sum: you might think from the extensive praising reviews of this book that you needn’t actually read it, because it would seem to be the kind of book that reviews can sufficiently gut and précis and anthologise for you, but you would be wrong, since much of what gives the book its patient power – its balance and sustenance of alternate tones and of ...

Dev and Dan

Tom Dunne, 21 April 1988

The Hereditary Bondsman: Daniel O’Connell, 1775-1829 
by Oliver MacDonagh..
Weidenfeld, 328 pp., £16.95, January 1988, 0 297 79221 0
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Eamon de Valera 
by Owen Dudley Edwards.
University of Wales Press, 161 pp., £19.95, November 1987, 0 7083 0986 0
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Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland 
edited by C.H.E. Philpin.
Cambridge, 466 pp., £27.50, November 1987, 0 521 26816 8
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Northern Ireland: Soldiers talking, 1969 to Today 
by Max Arthur.
Sidgwick, 271 pp., £13.95, October 1987, 0 283 99375 8
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War as a Way of Life: A Belfast Diary 
by John Conroy.
Heinemann, 218 pp., £12.95, February 1988, 0 434 14217 4
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... of agrarian protest is continued in two new contributions to the lively debate on the Land League. Donald Jorden joins in a key issue of that debate – the nature and limitations of the class alliance involved in what is another local study (despite its title), of Mayo. His economic/demographic analysis of the county in core-periphery terms is impressive, as ...

Angering and Agitating

Christopher Turner: Freud’s fan club, 30 November 2006

Freud’s Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones 
by Brenda Maddox.
Murray, 354 pp., £25, September 2006, 0 7195 6792 0
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... ranks of Freud’s experimental practice. Perhaps, as Maddox proposes, he felt vindicated when he read Freud, who had abandoned his seduction theory in 1897 and now argued that most accusations of childhood sexual abuse were fantasies. Because few people believed in psychoanalysis, it could be conducted only in situations which left the analyst open to ...

Big Bucks, Big Bangs

Chalmers Johnson: US intelligence and the bomb, 20 July 2006

Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea 
by Jeffrey Richelson.
Norton, 702 pp., £22.99, April 2006, 0 393 05383 0
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... are highly classified CIA National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), which he has been able to read in censored form in the National Archives, or through successful requests using the Freedom of Information Act. He does not go into detail on how he achieved this or where these documents can be found by other researchers today, but thanks to the FOIA, he ...

What Europeans Talk about when They Talk about Brexit

LRB Contributors: On Brexit, 3 January 2019

... people who ask the right questions. The waiter replied, politely and in perfect English: ‘We can read your newspapers and watch your television; we hear what your politicians and your journalists say about us.’ That summed it up: all this time we Brits thought we were talking to ourselves, and we were, but everyone else was listening in. Belgians are not ...

In theory

Christopher Ricks, 16 April 1981

... not to theory but to principles that they decline to pursue things through volumes. The work of Donald Davie, for instance (the best critic of the post Eliot-Leavis-Empson world), neither practises nor advocates literary theory; its hard thinking is resolutely unelaborated beyond the exposition and application of principles. Hartman praises highly Purity of ...

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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... Carl Dennis, ‘World History’1 The cover of Multitude invites bookshop browsers not just to read it, but to ‘Join the many. Join the Empowered.’ The missionary tone is underlined by Naomi Klein’s blurb – ‘inspiring’ – and a frisson added by the book’s appearance: a brown paper wrapping like those used to discourage porn thieves and ...

Delete the workforce

Deborah Friedell: Musk’s Twitter Takeover, 3 April 2025

Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter 
by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac.
Cornerstone, 468 pp., £25, September 2024, 978 1 5299 1469 6
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Elon Musk 
by Walter Isaacson.
Simon and Schuster, 688 pp., £12.99, February, 978 1 3985 2753 9
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... more than 11,000 accounts for spreading Covid misinformation and had ‘permanently suspended’ Donald Trump’s account for violating the company’s ‘Glorification of Violence’ policy. With Isaacson tagging along, Musk went out to dinner with four of his oldest kids, all in their teens, who were ‘puzzled’ by the purchase: it didn’t make sense to ...

Il n’y a pas de Beckett

Christopher Prendergast, 14 November 1996

Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett 
by James Knowlson.
Bloomsbury, 872 pp., £25, September 1996, 0 7475 2719 9
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Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist 
by Anthony Cronin.
HarperCollins, 645 pp., £25, October 1996, 9780246137692
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The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett. Vol I: Waiting for Godot 
edited by Dougald McMillan and James Knowlson.
Faber, 472 pp., £75, March 1994, 0 571 14543 4
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The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett. Vol II: Endgame 
edited by S.E. Gontarski.
Faber, 276 pp., £50, November 1992, 0 571 14544 2
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The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett. Vol III: Krapp’s Last Tape 
edited by James Knowlson.
Faber, 286 pp., £50, May 1992, 0 571 14563 9
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Eleutheria 
by Samuel Beckett, translated by Barbara Wright.
Faber, 170 pp., £6.99, September 1996, 9780571178261
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... stated as heard in the present, already over. Knowlson, who quotes this passage from a letter to Donald Mc Whinnie, draws no lesson from it, other than the somewhat limp, and question-begging, suggestion that the world of How It Is is ‘related sometimes closely but rarely unambiguously to Beckett’s own life’. Certainly all possibility of a lesson ...

Birditis

Ian Penman: The Obsession with Charlie Parker, 23 January 2014

Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker 
by Gary Giddins.
Minnesota, revised edition, 195 pp., £15, October 2013, 978 0 8166 9041 1
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Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker 
by Stanley Crouch.
Harper, 365 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 06 200559 5
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Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker 
by Chuck Haddix.
Illinois, 188 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 252 03791 7
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... grew up in a stable middle-class home: his father was a hard-working dentist, a cultured and well-read man active in local politics; Miles attended Juilliard with a generous weekly allowance from Pops (enough, indeed, to help support an indigent Charlie Parker), and later hung out with writers and artists in postwar Paris. Consequently, some readers of ...